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He was going to be the very best, like no one ever w- okay, that was a lie. Merope still felt a twinge of guilt every now and then as he remembered what he did. He had taken a liking to digging through the lost and found every now and then, laying claim to anything that looked interesting in it. That wasn’t the cause of his guilt; to him, finders were keepers.

He had considered himself lucky when he discovered a lost GameBoil. Sure, it was old and black and white, and there were a couple broken pixels on the screen. It didn’t matter. Hell, it even came with its cartridge of Frostbitten Blue Mini Masters, a game based on the Scarefari. It was much the same thing: run around, catch, train, then battle minis. Except it was portable.

The guilt came from the fact that Merope had overwritten somebody’s game. He probably should have waited for someone to claim their game before he dashed away their record of 73:49 clocked hours.

Unfortunately for whoever previously owned it, Merope was more concerned with Victory Road at the moment. So much so that he was walking around Amityville campus with his eyes locked on the screen, thumbs twitching as he engaged an opponent in a pixelated minibattle.

Pepin's haunting 8-bit song was barely registered as Merope commanded his mighty pixel creature to attack. It didn't matter that it just wiggled back and forth before the screen flashed. To him, the great creature was idly revving up its chainsaw while it waited, shifting from peg-legged foot to peg-legged foot in anticipation for the order. As soon as the order was given it lunged forward with a loud roar, chainsaw slashing in a downward motion to remove limb from torso as --

"Asjfdhsgjkhgsa!" Merope sputtered, jumping back and nearly dropping the gameboil in shock. "I! You! What! I!" His words were fragmented as he tried to get his thoughts and actions under control, not speaking until he had the gameboil firmly in his grasp. "Random encounter! Hi. Yes. Who are you?"

Pepin. Pepin, Pepin, Pepin. Merope continued to stare as she introduced herself, jumping back as... as... His mind was breaking, barely able to comprehend the glitch ghost. He wasn't even sure if he was seeing things correctly. Pepin appeared to be... pixeling? No, that wasn't it. He could see pixels, yes. But the way they moved, jumped and wavered brought to mind of the dreaded glitch.

He opened his mouth to reply to her, the squeak barely audible. He settled for nodding slowly instead, clutching the Gameboil tightly. A thought caught his attention as he continued to cling to his electronic device, the other hand patting his pocket. "Are... Are you going to duplicate the sixth item in my pocket?" He asked suspiciously.

His fins suddenly flared out as he jumped visibly. The tune she was singing! He was in an encounter! This wasn't Pepin. This was a pokegod. An elusive creature so rare, so hard to find that you had to go through a certain number of steps exactly to even think about encountering it. Or so the rumors said; he had yet to see one with his own eyes.

Until now.

Merope had no idea what he did to encounter this one. He began to dig into his pocket, praying that the pokegod wouldn't attack him while he tried messing with his inventory to figure out what his sixth item was.

"It's not a biscreamle," he replied quickly with a sigh of relief. Those would be heavy and ruin his pocket. On the other hand... "Lint!" He whispered, pulling out a wad of fabric fibers that seem to always migrate into the corner of a pocket. Of all the items in his pocket, the pokegod duplicated the most useless of them. Was there any way to reset the encounter? Merope looked around. Nope. He would feel silly to ask her to leave then reappear again anyway.

Merope ignored her attempts to get his attention. That was, until she floated upside down in front of him. He yelped in surprise, grabbing a Fear Capsule from his pocket and throwing it at her. "Go Fear capsule!"

Merope stared.

And stared.

And he continued to stare.

"I..." He trailed off, his eyes wide. "I did it! YEAH!" He whooped and laughed, pumping his fist in the air. He did it! He caught a pokegod! And he didn't need to glitch out the game to do it! Merope spun a circle, his fins flaring out briefly as a sort of victory dance.

Merope dropped to his knees, reaching out to snag the fear capsule. But... wait. He squinted. Why was the ground still glitching and pixelating? Curious, Merope reached out to poke where Pepin was last.

Pepin's shout drew an even louder one from Merope as he jumped in surprise, stumbling back. He flailed momentarily, trying in vain to regain his balance before falling over onto his back. In a moment he was scrambling up and onto his feet, his fins opening as wide as they could get in order to look bigger. Nevermind that there was a tremble along his large wing-like fins on his back.

His green eyes stared at her blankly, his mind struggling to make sense of it all. When he spoke next, his eyes lit with a half-confident glow. "You're... not a mini of any sort, are you?" Of course she isn't, he realized with a start, his fins snapping shut with an audible wet snap before they hung about him, drooping with embarrassment. "W-well, I was thinking about using strength against a carriage one hundred times in hopes of pushing it aside to reveal Myuun..."

Glitching in and out? Floating? Merope still had no idea what Pepin was exactly. Any ghost he had met before was only a brief encounter in passing, nothing more than a friendly nod or a glance at in class. Pepin was Merope's first ghost he had ever encountered and, just like the elusive Missingno that lurked in on the Sinnabar Island coast his perception of ghosts would forever be altered and unrecoverable.

"Er, then maybe I won't," he said quickly, shaking his head in dismissal. "I'm fine. Really, I think I can manage." To an extent. He still had the Elite Four and their Champion to defeat, too. And grinding. Lots and lots of grinding to complete before his team would be up to snuff.

Merope flicked a fin at Pepin's queston, shrugging. "Merope. And what does the minidex say about you, not-really-a-mini?"

In his defense, the elusive 151th minimon didn't really count. But for a true collector it did. It so did. Never mind that the game was old and its secrets were long pried free. To him, the game was a new and fascinating object that he gladly spent time playing. And avoiding spoilers were easier than he expected!

In any event, if Pepin weren't a ghost than his next answer could have quite possibly shocked her into dying. "There's more than one game?!" He gasped, looking surprised. Then embarrassed. "I- I didn't know. I kind of found this and claimed it for mine. I've never seen anything like it," he confessed, pulling the Gameboil out to stare at it. "Next you're going to tell me that these things come in color, too."