Foreword:

  Within the pages of this book we wish to share a collection of true-to-source excerpts from the journals of V.J. Cowry. Taken directly from Cowry’s own public archive, entries are presented entirely unedited and with an aim towards neutral representation.

  For the benefit of convenience and reading enjoyment, this collection has been separated into distinct arcs. Each contains a collection of entries that chronicle a specific time and event.

  As a comprehensive collection would take numerous volumes to publish, arcs are variously days, months or sometimes years apart, they are chronologically consistent. Additionally, we at Vines of Knowledge have done our best to be objective and present a representative cross section of chosen stories.

  It is our dearest hope that these pages lead readers to draw true and nuanced opinions of Cowry as a human. It is our fond belief that for all that many of her choices have caused great division in communities across the globe, there is no single being that does not deserve to be known as they truly were.

  

  
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    Dr.C.Swellows, Head of Publishing at Vines of Knowledge Publishing House
  
    


  

  Day 1:

  Dear Diary… or should it be Journal, now?

  Today marks three days since I finished Ranger school and graduated to being a Junior Ranger.

  As today is the beginning of my first assignment, I was recommended to start journaling my experiences. Supposedly, most rangers at least try at the start, but given I have previously kept a diary for most of my life, I imagine I will do much better.

  I spent a little time thinking about where to start this first entry, and I thought… What better way than an introduction? That way, if anyone finds my journal, they’ll know who to return it to; and if I ever wanted to get it published, I wouldn’t need to write a preface!

  So, to begin, let’s start with “I am clearly the smartest, most great ranger to ever wear a skirt outside,” which is what my senior Ranger lead told me as a joke, when we met yesterday.

  One day, I hope I can actually feel that confident.

  My name is Vulpix Jane Cowry— and no, I am not a pokemon. It often surprises people when I say that I rather like my name. To me it feels appropriate, in a sense, given my mother’s Ninetales had such a big role in my childhood.

  (Edit: I have been told I should probably say that I do actually have a human dad!)

  This year I will turn 18, I have blonde hair (currently dyed pink!), green eyes and I’m about average in height, but I’d like to think I’m athletic-looking.

  I grew up in a fishing village near the Kanto Safari Zone, where my mother works as an ecology and pokemon ethics consultant.

  My father isn’t with us any more, but he had been a Pokemon Ranger himself, for a short time.

  I was a daddy’s girl through and through, prior to the accident. I loved him a great deal, and while I won’t fill this first entry with my feelings about him, I would be very surprised if anyone reading this didn’t know more about him than themselves, by the end.

  Suffice to say that he was my inspiration- though I will admit that my choice to become a ranger was never about him. I’m not doing this out of some fantastical desire to fulfil his wishes or anything.

  It’s evening now. I started writing at about 2pm after buying this journal.

  While I was writing, I was finally called with the details of which assignment I will be joining tomorrow- and told to immediately head out of the barracks and to gather the brief materials.

  I’ve just finished going over then and… I’m in two minds about what to feel.

  I was obviously not expecting my first real assignment to be anything special; after all, I’m only an aide and mostly I’ll be responsible for camp chores or playing sentret-fetch for the seniors. Yet, some part of me still hoped for more.

  Tomorrow we’re going into Fuschia city proper, where we’ll be tasked with identifying nests of vermin-class pokemon.

  We won’t even be catching any this time. It will be 90% walking and making notes.

  Suuuper fun, that.

  Maybe I can pet some local meowth, that will make me feel better.

  Day 2:

  I haven’t met my bunkmate yet, but she left me a nice welcome note and a square of chocolate, which was nice of her.

  The note wasn’t there when I went to sleep, so I guess she got in really early, then immediately left again.

  Most of the Rangers here don’t spend much time in the Barracks. They’re not required to live onsite unless otherwise instructed so. I wasn’t told exactly what would lead to that, but I can imagine it’s situational, or if someone is often late.

  Anyway, the usually quite small boarding numbers mean we have a handful of longer term boarding rooms onsite- as a new hire, I’m expected to live in those for at least a month while I’m under higher scrutiny.

  The room is painfully drab, with walls that are covered in some form of corklike panelling, which gives it a strange texture under the paint.

  The paint itself is a mess after decades of trainees pinning posters and calendars and the like to the walls. Currently there is a single poster pinned across from our beds; it shows a Galarian gym leader in red . though I don’t know his name. It shows him and two pokemon standing rather imposingly in the doorway that leads to a sports arena.

  While the guy doesn’t really matter to me, the Arcanine that stands behind him is a glorious sight, standing pridefully alongside its insectile companion. The second pokemon is some sort of fire type millipede, but I don’t know its name. I’ll have to ask my bunkmate when I meet her, I suppose.

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  Other than that the room is… fine, I suppose?

  There’s a communal bathroom down the hall and this room has a small sink and kettle, but any snacks I want to make will have to be done in the prep room, which I was told is connected to the mess hall. It’s mostly for feeding pokemon, but apparently we can cook simple things there too.

  I still have an hour before the mess hall opens, but very little to do. Even after such a fitful, nervous sleep, it was quite impossible to stay in bed after sunrise, when I usually wake.

  I suppose I can spend that time to talk about the senior Ranger I met yesterday:

  He introduced himself as one Ranger Callum, though I hesitated to ask if that’s his first or last name at the time. According to the brief it’s his surname, but his first name was just shown as the initial S.

  Ranger Callum was the one who suggested I start a journal, after a short conversation in which he apparently found my enthusiasm absolutely hilarious; he was quite striking, didn’t seem unduly strict or condescending and I generally found him to be quite entertaining.

  The brief tells me that I will be meeting him at about seven AM and we - that is me and his two more experienced juniors - will be setting up in one of the local Pokemon Center’s office spaces, where we’ll be in a central position to survey the city over the next few days.

  This is roughly routine for rangers across the region, though apparently there’s been an uptick of pokemon-related property damage recently, which has me having fantasies of dramatic pokemon attacks, which is obviously ridiculous

  It’s not really anything to worry about, and usually it just means that there’s been some change in the local hierarchy. Just like with human leadership changes, the new clan leader will set about trying to improve their tribe’s lot in the area, meaning a short-lived surge of pokemon activity. Ninety nine percent of the time, that just means they push their territory boundaries for a week or two before being put in their place by their more experienced rivals.

  That isn’t the only possibility though, and that’s where my neurons are set aflame.

  Like, what if a rattata with the rare alpha gene was born? Then we could be dealing with a pokemon turned gigantic raticate warlord!

  Or maybe there’s poachers causing problems for the local pokemon? Rattata poaching is a thing, after all, even if it’s usually just a bunch of ignorant children with irresponsible parents.

  Territories getting unbalanced can have huge, far reaching consequences for the entire ecology of the area and we certainly don’t want an environmental cascade on our hands!

  I know it’s silly to dream of something that could be a disaster, and yet the clarion call of adventure has me on the edge of my seat! Just thinking about it now, I can’t help but giggle a little.

  Damn, no way I can sit still, now!

  I think I’ll head to the mess early and see if I can’t convince myself to try and make some friends.

  Today was not exciting. That said, for all it was uneventful and tedious, it was balanced by just how fascinating and enlightening it turned out to be.

  I learned a great deal more than I could have imagined about the diverse species found in the urban environments of Kanto. It’s incredible how much more there is to see when you look at things from the right perspective.

  For instance, there are soooo many more mundane animals than I could ever have imagined!

  With an environmental biologist as a mother, you would have thought I might already have a good understanding of how this stuff works, but I doubt I ever truly will. No matter how often I might be reminded of the scope of the animal and pokemon kingdoms, I am always blown away when I am led to really look closer.

  I remember as a girl, my classmates often asked questions of the teacher that made me laugh.

  “Why is pikachu a mouse pokemon? What’s a mouse?”

  “What’s the difference between a bug pokemon and a bug?”

  “What do cats eat? My little Rattata could beat a cat in its sleep”

  “If someone doesn’t eat pokemon, does that make them a vegetarian?”

  “If berries are fruit, why aren’t cheri berries a fruit?”

  Even years later, in Ranger school, I would often find myself baffled by questions asked by otherwise brilliant students.

  “Why do we call it evolution if it’s a type of metamorphosis?"

  “How is it that there’s simian pokemon but we’re not related to them if we evolved from apes?”

  This society we live in is so incredibly skewed towards fascination with Pokemon, that the simple plants and animals that underpin the ability for anything else to live often go completely ignored.

  It certainly doesn’t help how many of them have been entirely supplanted outside the ecosystems where they first evolved.

  My namesame, vulpix, for instance is a fox pokemon, however it’s not an actual fox. It evolved from mew, just like all pokemon. Once upon a time, the first fox pokemon was born in the image of a relative of the red fox.

  Or, more accurately, a female mew chose to take on the form of a fox and birthed the first fox pokemon- or at least, that’s the currently accepted theory.

  Given there’s generally accepted to be no mew left to study in the wild, it’s somewhat difficult to confirm the reality of how it works.

  That said, paleontologists and pokemon professors of relevant fields seem to agree that - at the very least - all pokemon share a genome that originates from the mew species.

  Where mews came from, however, is a rather more spicy topic of discussion.

  Actually, I’ll stop there. I should get back to the part that’s relevant to my day; the baffling scope of an urban food web!

  So, when most people think of vermin in a city like Fuschia, they’re undoubtedly gonna imagine the many rattata, feral meowth or the many grimer that sometimes venture into the city after a period of rains. What they’re not generally thinking of are the mundane rodents and insects that feed those pokemon.

  A rattata certainly benefits from human waste food, but its primary diet are the various mundane insects found in every crag and flowerbed across the city.

  In a similar vein, due to the comparatively large size of even the smallest rattata, mundane mice, voles and rats live in the same areas. For every rattata one might find in an urban area, there’s an order of magnitude more mundane rodents.

  Then there’s the animals that DON’T have a local pokemon equivalent, such as the foxes that live around Fuschia.

  You might wonder why they aren’t outcompeted by vulpix, which is a fox pokemon native to the region and that’s understandable, however you have to remember that pokemon are SMART; like, super smart, and they often live in communities that have communicable rules.

  Yes, I’m going to talk about vulpix again. I just love them, okay!

  Anyway, since the vulpix tribes in the forests that border Saffron (routes 7 and 8 included) have a grand Matriarch capable of reason, there exists a long-standing agreement the local Rangers

  I don’t know any of the specifics, but as I understand it— actually, let me look this up!

  So, according to the Ranger network documentation, the native population agreed to limit their controlled territory to those forests, in exchange for the right of evolution veto— by which I mean that, within the borders of Kanto, all vulpix trainers have to be vetted before they’re legally allowed to evolve their vulpix.

  The Matriarch apparently approached the precursor organisation to Rangers some three centuries ago, suggesting the territorial limitation herself. It was offered as an exchange for the right of veto, which was something she was incredibly insistent should be enacted immediately.

  While there’s shaky information on her reasons, most of it being hearsay, the agreement was set into law with the creation of the Rangers as a government institution.

  The going theory is that, at the time, there had been a rise in trainers acquiring newborn vulpix, then raising them without the cultural knowledge they would have in the wild. The result being that the vulpix would evolve young, only to be completely ignorant of the consequences.

  I can only imagine how the Matriarch must have felt; so many young ninetales had been committed to near immortality without the means to understand what that entailed.

  I dread to imagine how many were even told how long a ninetales can live.

  I should probably go to sleep now, so here’s a more positive fact: Every single region with an active Ranger presence signed the so-called Mount Pyre Agreement. As such, the Matriarch’s law, alongside a variety of similar agreements, has been the global norm for decades now.

  Enough with my rambling; tomorrow is another chance to learn!

  There are people shouting. I should be going to see what;s going on, but I need to calm down and this has always helped center me.

  I hope I can actually help.

  I think

  [Publisher note: This entry ends mid sentence, as per the public archive]