Pokémon: The Golden Apocalypse, First Interlude

We never stood a chance. After the systems crashed, our fates were sealed. We didn't have a protector. Giovanni was gone without a trace, as was his wont, and we lacked powerful pokémon. We weren't ready for battle. We were mostly students and townsfolk. Only the students had pokémon. Fresh from Pallet, they had come to learn from us. They were about to start their grand journeys. They never did.
After the crash, we weren't badly off at first. Someone had a pikachu that could power the pokémon center's PC. We maintained communications then, and people always traveled to us from Pallet and back. One brave student actually went to Celadon for a holiday. It was far, but he made it. He phoned in when he arrived. The store wasn't as grand as it had been, but he had still found a few items he liked. He had smiled then, and told us he'd be back in a few days. That was the last time we saw him.
The Forest didn't wait. Like a creeping rot, it spread down from the north. It kept back from the city, but it grew. They sprouted between us and Pallet. These new trees met up with the Old Forest along our Celadon border. No one returned from Celadon. No one returned from Pallet. As the trees reached inwards to us, so did the pokémon.
People began to disappear. That wasn't so bad. The horror came when we began to find them. Our friends - our family members - were found tied to trees by silky thread, bones picked clean of flesh. Often, the bones were cracked, many lying at the bottom of the tree, and the marrow was missing. Sucked dry. Like the body we found in the square when we got back from a burial. She was a little girl, maybe nine. She had complained of a stomach ache, so her mother had let her stay home on the provision that she wouldn't open any doors or windows. Judging by the marks in the dirt, the girl had feigned illness to draw rather than see another rushed funeral.
Her death must have been agonizing. The body was no more than a husk, sucked dry. Since the organs were gone and the only wounds were two small holes, a venom must have been injected to liquefy her innards. She had writhed. Writhed enough to make a small depression in the ground. Her voice must have been stopped by the venom too. But she still spoke to us. Even in death, she spoke. We listened to her silent, withered body there. She told us to go. No more, she said, no more.
We went. Nightfall found Viridian empty, but for a few stalwart old men who refused to leave. We went south. Alone. Just a band of terrified townsfolk and untested students with small pokémon against the horrors of the Forest.