Far Longer Than Forever

You think there is one Earth, a precious shining blue green jewel dancing serinely through the cold depths of space with it's barren but majestic partner Luna? You're right.

In THIS universe.

However this is not the only universe, in fact the number of "echoes" which resonate with our own is effectively, if not quite actually, infinite.

Haven't you ever wondered how some people can invent people places and ideas out of nothing, while others can't put down a single believable sentence? Comand of language is part of it, a broad range of knowledge is another, but that elusive spark of INSPIRATION, that's something different than most people think. Truly inspired writing is not invented from nothing. The people who are able to do it have a psychic talent to tap into the collective subconscious mind of the people in other universes and from that draw forth echoes of people, places, and events that were or are important to that world somehow. They don't know that's how they do it. They would, in the main, be either derisive or incensed if you told them. However, that's the secret of what separates good authors from GREAT authors, as well as the luminaries of every other creative feild.

This is why all this started far longer ago than merely 'Forever': because, not only is this not the only universe, it is neither the first, nor the newest...

No one knows how the first universe began: it succumbed to heat so long ago that you would have to jump through billions of similarly burnt out universes to get there, and once a universe succumbs to heat leaving it once you enter is nigh impossible. Yet, for a certitude there WAS a first universe, because the only way to create a new universe is to suffuse an infinitesimally small piece of an existing universe with so much energy that space/time itself BOILS, and in that moment a new universe experiences the sudden creation of the infinitely dense point of matter which precedes the BIG BANG...

This has been going on for aeons uncountable, and with each new universe created the laws of physics warp a bit, or sometimes scramble to the point that people like you and I couldn't live there, or even understand what we were looking at well enough to comprehend that we were seeing an alternate universe at all. However, the universe known simply as Neo-Alpha has made it a hobby to boil space/time in order to create new universes. By and by this has led to trillions upon trillions of universes close enough to our own that we can easily tune in and draw inspirations from them. (And in many cases they from us...) Several thousand of these universes contain what Para-dimensional scientists call The Pokémon Worlds. These are worlds where the creatures from the Pokémon franchise, the games and TV shows, are real.

And now we come to something that has been hinted at, but not adressed directly. If one attains a sufficient level of refinement in one's Comand of the cosmic forces that underpin most universes, it becomes possible to move between certain universes which are relatively close to one another in trans-dimensional-harmony. The people of the modern day earth are nowhere near that level of sophistication, but some of the closer universes from which we have been drawing our inspiration ARE. Unscrupulous trans-universal traders visited one of our nearest echoes, and sold the government of Japan the equipment they needed to set up a one way portal to several other universes, and thus: our tale was set in motion...