It had been two years since his brother disappeared, and Emmet was… managing. Not thriving-- not by a long shot-- but he liked to think he was functional. He didn’t spend entire days worked into a furor, and while he’d far from worked out all of the complicated emotions involved, he generally didn’t go from one extreme to another and back in an hour, anymore.

In a way, he was numb. He’d been numb since he’d come home to find six pokeballs laying innocently on Ingo’s bed and not a thing out of place. Was it a silent, cruel goodbye? A taunt from an unseen abductor? He’d never found any answers, and after so long, it was looking more and more likely like he never would.

The time he’d spent trying to work through his feelings led Emmet in circles: grief, then anger and back again, in a loop that could easily destroy everything it touched. Numbness was safer. Numbness made it easier to cope with the gaping wound of an amputation at his side. Inherently, it meant that he couldn’t feel the warning pains he brought down on himself, but it was a small price to pay to stay on the rails.

So what if he fell asleep in thei-- the office or forgot to take a lunch break? Everything was running on schedule. It was no one’s business but his own how he functioned in his personal time.

It was an otherwise innocuous afternoon when his Xtransceiver rang and, thoughtlessly, he answered it. No one responded, and it immediately clicked off. Fine. It was weird, but maybe someone panicked when they realized they had the wrong number. Anxiety did that to people.

Then it rang again. Thinking that maybe the call had just been dropped before, he hit answer without bothering to look at the number itself. The caller paused for just a moment and then hung up without a word.

When it rang for a third time, he muted it. He was at work, anyway; he didn’t have time for this.

Even on silent, though, he could feel the device on his wrist, buzzing to get his attention. It got so bad that he took it off, stuck it in a pocket for the rest of the day, and only remembered it late that night. His bedtime routine stalled when he moved to plug his Xtransceiver in and realized that it wasn’t where it belonged, thus beginning a meandering search through the apartment. Eventually, he remembered both where the device was and why he had put it there, and clicked it on to see what had become of his notifications.

He blinked, uncomprehending, at the information on the screen.

That wasn’t possible.

Emmet glanced to the call log’s far side, where an icon showed that there had been a voicemail left after the fact-- not just for the one he’d picked at random, but each of the missed calls. With unfeeling fingertips, he tapped it and let it take him to his inbox.

For the first time in two years, his brother’s voice filled the apartment.

“I have to afford it this much, it really is beautiful out here. You could never see the stars so clearly in the city, and the way everything is blanketed in a perfect layer of snow-- it would be a sight to behold under better circumstances. I tried to send a picture, but it’s no surprise that it never connected.

“Imagine if you could hear me, rattling on about nothing. Should I tell you about the Snorunt, just to be safe? I passed by an entire pack of them, hopping around to their hearts’ content. The amount of energy they have in such a harsh environment is enviable. They jump from snowdrift to snowdrift without the slightest difficulty, and here I am fighting for every step.”

He didn’t even process what was being said at first, and had to hit pause through blurry vision before it could keep playing. It hadn’t been a mistake? The call really had been from Ingo? But then--

Stopping cold, Emmet quickly navigated back, keeping the voicemail minimized so he could return to it without issue; the entire block of missed calls were labeled with the same number, the same contact. A heavy feeling in his stomach told him he knew exactly when this had started.

He eyed the first of the lot, and then let himself chew on his lip to think it over. Logically, the message he’d paused would still be there if he changed tracks to listen to the first, but… but what if it wasn’t? He’d been burning to hear his twin again, just one more time, for well over a year-- and he finally had that chance. He couldn’t risk wasting it, no matter how paranoid the thought.

Well, if this voicemail would still be there, so would that one. He went back to the original message and restarted it from the beginning, doing his utmost not to let himself get swept up in emotion again.

Taken out of context, Ingo’s words didn’t make any sense, but Emmet listened anyway, easing into the cadence of his brother’s voice as he spoke. He didn’t realize it in the moment, but his shoulders relaxed and he tilted his head in, as if the angle might let him hear more clearly.

“I recognize that standard procedure when one finds themselves lost is to remain in place, but I’m afraid it’s no longer an option. I’m unsure how long I spent semi-conscious, but clearly I wasn’t found in that time. As the snow continued to fall, it became impossible to stay where I woke. I hope I haven’t made a horrible mistake.”

What… what was he talking about? Snow and Snorunt and… getting lost? What had happened to him? Why was he only calling now? He had stated at one point that he wasn’t surprised at not getting through, but why? Even if Emmet hadn’t answered his Xtransceiver, his brother had still been able to leave a message for him.

It was a meandering, useless message, but he couldn’t bring himself to be upset about that. Maybe it would make sense once he listened to the rest of them.

“The cold air is beginning to become painful. I’ll try again once my throat has recovered.”

The call ended on that, and the pit in his stomach grew heavier.

He moved back to the first message, and heard silence. Click. The second was exactly the same, and the third little better. He heard footsteps? Maybe?

Everything changed from the fourth message on.

“I suppose it’s to be expected. The odds that service would extend so far into untouched wilderness…”

And then--

“This is ridiculous. If my call hasn’t gone through yet, it certainly won’t now. The only thing I’m doing is wasting this device’s charge.”

Until--

“This doesn’t seem to be doing any harm, so I suppose I can allow the indulgence. It’s just… so quiet here. I’ll take a series of failed calls over the silence. And, perhaps, if I keep trying…”

He heard his brother’s voice shake as he tried to swallow his fear. The next message was the first Emmet had listened to, and he played it back, scouring the words for anything he could put into place now. It made a little more sense, at least. Wherever Ingo was, the situation had to be... very bad if his voice was cracking like that, though he had implied that the cold played a hand in it.

Thoughtlessly, he hit play on the next message, and his understanding completely changed.

“Please tell me the Pokemon stayed behind. I-- I know that you reasonably can’t, you can’t even hear me right now, but if they’re not with me, I can only hope that they’re home instead of lost wherever this is. They don’t deserve that.”

...these weren’t new, were they? Ingo hadn’t seen their Pokemon in two years, and had no reason to say that today, but if he’d been frantically calling after his own disappearance, it all made much more sense. He hadn’t breathed a word about what had displaced him, but being lost somewhere far from home, unable to connect to a network… it fit. Of course Ingo had tried to get in touch-- Emmet had said from the very beginning that his twin wouldn’t leave the way people had suggested, and this was proof of it. He’d been right. He should have been vindicated, but instead, he just felt ashamed for the fact that he’d ever gone back on his belief.

His brother hadn’t walked out. Something had been done to him, and as a result, he’d been lost out in the cold.

A related chill swept through Emmet at that.

These were old messages, and the situation Ingo had described wasn’t good. He’d regained his composure well, but that didn’t change that it had splintered. He had been out there, alone, stranded and scared, in temperatures so low that he could barely breathe without hiding beneath his coat.

With a new apprehension, he played the next few messages, holding onto the idea that maybe it was just a quick fright and everything turned out for the better, after all.

“My visibility is beginning to wane as the-- the storm grows stronger.”

“I’m alright. There must have been something hidden beneath the snow. My derailment was only temporary. I’m going to increase my pace for a moment, to try to warm my engine.”

“My track is so obstructed that I really do believe a Roggenrola could outpace me right now. The only other option is to find a terminal to wait the storm out, but if I stop here…”

“I’m going to press on, whatever good that might do.”

His cautious optimism was in vain. Things only got worse and worse, and it was clear that Ingo knew exactly how bad his circumstance really was; the fear in his voice steadily built as the messages continued-- when it wasn’t being drowned out by how hard he was shivering, that was.

Emmet spared a thought for their coats-- perfectly suited to withstanding the region’s coldest substations-- and he felt his heart race, even though nothing was happening and he was safe at home, dressed for bed.

His thumb idled over the last play button as he stared, unseeing, at the screen.

Eventually, he forced himself to press it.

It was silent for a very long time, the only confirmation that the recording actually was playing the roaring wind of whatever hellscape Ingo had found himself traversing. Under normal circumstances, Emmet’s patience for the delay would have worn thin, but tonight he held stock-still and listened until he heard the ghost of a voice.

It was almost enough to make him regret waiting.

“I think I’m going to die here.”

“I’m sorry.”

He waited, but nothing followed it. When his nerves began to get the better of him, he thought to look at the call’s full duration, and found that it stretched well past the hour mark, even though Ingo hadn’t said anything in minutes. He hadn’t known messages could be that long.

Belatedly, it occurred to him that he might be listening to the last few hours of his brother’s life, and he frantically hit pause, trying to distance himself from the thought.

Looking for any thread of hope, he navigated back to double-check the timestamps. What he found was that, while his Xtransceiver had given him the alert for each message barely a minute apart, that only signified when he’d received them. The calls themselves hadn’t been placed today, or any time recently.

They hadn’t even been made two years ago.

According to the pages-long log detailing every call he and Ingo placed to one another, those messages had been sent hundreds of years prior.

He opened his mouth, as if to protest the impossibility of it, but barely parted his lips before giving up.

Without any input or active apps, his Xtransceiver flickered off, and his mind continued to churn uselessly, unable to make anything of the information he’d been given.

He… he needed to rethink this. Something wasn’t right here, and until he had it figured out, he wasn’t trusting anything he’d just seen or heard. Emmet didn’t know how a series of messages like that could be fabricated, but the thought was almost better than taking them at face value. Maybe there was something to be read into the metadata? He wasn’t the best at that sort of thing, but a peek couldn’t hurt-- and, he decided, he wanted to back everything up, just in case.

The alerts about the new voicemails were gone when he turned his Xtransceiver back on, and a new notification had taken their place:

▲: I shouldn’t make assumptions like that. For all I know, someone there will be able to point me in the right direction.

All thoughts of investigating halted in their tracks. Emmet hit the notice, squinted at what had once been a one-sided chat between himself and the phantasm of his twin, and scrolled up, up, up. In between their last actual conversation and his frantic pleas for Ingo to let him know that he was alright, there was a photograph he’d never seen before: an impossibly clear night’s sky shining out over a snowy cliff.

...what had Ingo said in that first voicemail, again? There had been something about a picture that wouldn’t send, hadn’t there?

I’m alright, Said a message several lines down, If somewhat sick. It seems a Pokemon rescued and brought me to safety, but that’s all I’ve been able to glean.

Emmet still didn’t know if he thought it was legitimate, but the update soothed something in him. Suddenly, the messages being fake wasn’t a best case scenario, but just a possibility-- and, like all the other leads he’d chased in the past two years, he could do no less than see it through to its terminal.

What was one more sleepless night if it might get him that much closer to an answer?