Eri invited me to curl up against his mane while he recounted his story. Considering everything that's happened in the span of a couple hours, I figured I may as well. I took my place and felt a paw rest on my back. An alarmed jolt went through me, since the scar on my back is still sensitive after all these years. Or it's just an awkward feeling when it's touched, I haven't quite figured it out. He gently stroked my back and instinctively I tried to nip at the closest thing. It ended up being his mane, and all I ended up with was a mouthful of fur. "Yeah, I wouldn't do that again, that stuff can choke a Groudon. You'll be fine, keep having some chill." Eri didn't stop petting me until I fully relaxed myself, after that he just rested his paw on my back.

"So..." I trailed off.

"So...?" Eri echoed.

"Do I get my explanation now?"

"Oh, right. Sure" The Flareon didn't sound all too interested in telling me about it, despite just having offered to. I wasn't going to drop it if he did try to get out of it, though.

"So when I said that I'm you, it wasn't the whole of it. We're each other, but not in blood or anything like that. We're not from different worlds either. Just one, straight linear path in which you'll become me one day." Eri dancing around the topic constantly was starting to irritate me, we'd gotten this far, he might as well just come out and say it. "So basically what I'm getting at is, I'm a reincarnation of you." He paused, probably to get a feel for my reaction.

"Reincarnation? As in, rebirth after death?" It was a little late to be getting surprised at anything he said, so I just opted to confirm what he was talking about.

"Yeah. Some time after you died, you were reborn as me. There's actually more than just us two in our incarnation line. I've already visited quite a few of them."

"Just tell me everything straight through, I have a feeling I'll be stopping you every sentence for something you'll just explain right after anyways."

"Alright, " Eri began, "Get comfortable then." He shuffled himself a little, settling down for his story. "So in every incarnation line, you'll recall things about your past lives. You won't actually know they're your past lives, though. They'll be subtle things, like a feeling of familiarity, or an intense gravitation to something or someplace and you don't know why. They're all things you felt strongly about in a past life. You won't know about things in lives yet to come, however. That feeling is exclusive to Pokemon who were born like me. I was born with the marking under my eye, which is basically a marking telling me I'm very aware of my lives, but I was given the gear eye by a Celebi. Apparently they're in cahoots with Dialga, something about trying to better Pokemon through experiences in their past and future lives. Like, if I visit my past lives and learn from their mistakes, it can make me a better Pokemon to pass on to those around me now, and possibly my next life. I don't really get it myself, but I'm also not really interested in that kind of thing. The gear eye I was given allows me to time travel, and the only restriction is that I only have the ability to travel between my own lives. When you die, a reincarnation doesn't always happen right away. It can happen instantly, but it could take days, weeks, months, or years. I think the longest gap between one of our lives was a good 5000 years. As I said, I don't really care to better myself. I think I would rather have not been given this ability. I don't mind my birth mark though, it's kind of cool looking and that feeling of connection with all my lives is pretty neat. Well it was, once you got used to it. At first it was really overwhelming. I knew why I would feel drawn to something, or why I traveled to someplace and knew which life it was. Because there were so many past and future lives, it always felt awful, feeling like you needed to scratch an itch. In the case of regular Pokemon, they would just have to see a place to get that feeling. For me, I've had it from day one. I resorted to sleeping all the time to hide from that feeling. I've had the ability to time travel since I was a few years and I never did it. Finally, I did. I traveled to some random life of mine, to one of the places I was drawn to. For the first time I finally felt at peace. I started time traveling to visit wherever I was drawn, sleep for a while, then move on. I also spent time learning about my lives. I always knew what they were passionate about, but I never knew their history. It was kind of cool. I interacted with a few, and they usually took it surprisingly well. I think you were the one who acted the most extreme. In fact, I had to our encounter a couple times because you either ran away or tried to kill me. I researched your life many times so that I knew what set you off and how to make you see I wasn't a threat. Finally this time you seemed to recognise me enough that you couldn't attack me. As for your true name, I already knew that. It's just one of those things I knew from the moment I saw you. I gotta say, we had one hell of a life this time around. The others were pretty tame. Some traveled with a trainer, some were wild but worked alongside humans, a fair bit were wild, and very few lived in complete seclusion. And then here's you, orphaned, kidnapped, tested on, refugee, and now you've got a claim on this whole forest. It's pretty impressive, your will to survive, that is. Anyways, that's about the gist of it. I'm a time traveling Flareon given the ability by a Celebi under the orders of Dialga for some personal improvement project of theirs. I can travel between my lives and that's about it. I spend my time sleeping because I don't want to deal with how demanding my other lives can be, but every now and then I travel around anyways. Any questions?"

---

So um. Firstly, I made Eri bigger. Cos this is actually how big he's SUPPOSED to be. He's about Arcanine-sized but I did an awful job depicting that before and he just looked Luxray-sized. But yes there you have it, Eri can time travel and he's a reincarnation of Kaitii. I mean, it's not the weirdest thing that can happen out there, right?? Laughs nervously