Thirty years ago, at a little university nestled amongst the Iskitan mountain range in the bitter wind-chapped north of Unova, the boy who would come to call himself Tenshiro Kazakami formulated an idea.

  Deferred by both his region of birth and his region of choice, more and more often young Tenma would find himself alone in his dormitory room, poring over his textbooks or lying catatonic in his bed; and always, always, suppressing the cacophony of his peers infiltrating the thin walls of the common room. He stayed up into the small hours of the morning to write - academic papers, diary entries, letters to his mother he'd never dare send - and, most embarrassingly, short fiction, which he ensured without fail never saw anything but the bottom of his wastebasket.

  What troubled him most of all was his growing preoccupation with the morbid. Within a year of arriving in Unova he had filled an old shoebox with scraps of newspapers reporting on suicides and homicides, sourced from both the local papers and Japanese-language ones intended for expatriates. A second box, located under his bed at his childhood home for when he came home for the summers, had been necessary to relieve its overflow. Picking through them, sorting them, gripping the ripped edges between his thumb and forefinger - ever so gently, so not as to wrinkle them and disturb their perfect condition, satisfied him. As he had thoroughly contemplated both acts at some point in his life, he was quite familiar with the depths of both despair and loathing, and felt a (rudimentary) kinship with both victims and perpetrators. When he thought of them he thought of their final moments, and obsessed over them to the point sudden loud noises would send him into a flurry of panic, and he would not sit with his back to the door.

  And yet, paradoxically, he yearned for love.

  Romantic love, of course, but not solely. Platonic love less so, as he could not conceive of another seeing him as a true equal. As his mother had taught him, parental love was a shapeshifter, serene and violent, but failing whenever you needed it most. He required a more dependable love. An unconditional love.

  After many months of that impossible ache, he realized exactly what sort of love it was he desired: the love of a child.

  Yes. Under the watchful eye of a parent, a child's innate innocence could persevere for years after its birth. Like despair and loathing, innocence fascinated and mystified the young Tenma: both its preservation and its dissolution. Each suicide victim and each homicide perpetrator once had possessed it; where had theirs gone? Could one keep it alive forever?

  As Tenma was a mere twenty-two at the time of this discovery, and unlike some of his progeny , had no interest in procreating young, he sought a different method to satisfy his burgeoning lust for power and control.

  That last winter, of all those Tenma had suffered among the Iskitans, reminded him the most of his childhood in Kissaki City. As the northernmost city in Sinnoh, Kissaki lay under a perpetual blanket of snow. Its outside temperature never rose above a crisp five degrees Celsius, even in summer, and the dispositions of some of its residents were of a similar frigidity.

  Aside from its Gym, the location in Kissaki which drew the most outside attention was its temple honoring the sleeping giant. Its bronze was even colder than the air surrounding it, and a rumor had long persisted among the city's children: if one pressed their bare palm to it, and with all their heart and soul made a wish, the giant inside would make it a reality.

  Back when Tenma had a heart and soul to wish with, he'd trudge up the snow-capped hill to the temple every afternoon after school, slip off his mittens, and hold himself to it. At first, it really was only his palm: held for ten seconds, seconds burning as years on his tender skin as he counted them down. But as the months passed and desperation set in, he would take off his winter coat, his jacket underneath, his hat and his snow pants, baring more and more of his body, letting the bronze kiss him; and once he had nothing more to remove lest he broach the boundaries of what human law called decency, still he continued to embrace the wall until his skin turned red as wine and then white as bone.

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  The giant never listened. The other kids still threw rocks at him.

  That last winter in Unova, the winter the seventy-five-year-long comet passed over the earth, the followers of a tiny 'new-age religion' drank cyanide together, believing their souls would be spirited away onto a starship and taken to a heaven beyond.

  The following evening, Tenma cut the news story out of the Castelia Times and framed it above his bed.

  So, then, the last little vice he'd indulge in: the desire to father a nation. The desire to live in harmony forever with his offspring.

  Of course, this goal would require a 'coupling' - many 'couplings', in fact. The urge to 'couple' rarely came to Tenma outside of moments of extreme weakness, and he associated the act with an extreme outpouring of shame. Most men and boys were perverts, Mother said, and it was inevitable he'd end up the same. People never rose above their natures, unfortunately. No matter how one might manicure it, the sludge would always return to its vile essence.

  It really was too bad about Mother: the month after Tenma moved down south to Kotobuki City, she slipped and fell in her shower, shattered her hip, and, left with no one she was close to in her life to call for help, rotted away there alone. She had made her betrayal at Tenma's leaving very much known to him: the religion wasn't the sticking point, but that but she had loved him for so long, gave him food and shelter and all the affection a boy could ever require, and he wouldn't even thank her by never leaving her side.

  And it really was too bad about the unnamed as well. Apparently, she had greater ambitions than to birth his children: he wanted four at the very least; she had reservations about even one. As great as their dispute over this would be - and indeed it would be what would rend their marriage apart in the end - she did eventually give her assent, and their daughter was born in the summer of '97. Tenma, now fully 'Tenshiro', left her to care for her: by day he worked a lucrative if soul-sucking job as an actuary; by night, he plotted his unusual passion project.

  Now, although Tenma and his mother had grown up without religion, and Tenshiro had little familiarity with theology, his mother had shared more than enough opinions in common with a more fundamental religious person. This was where the unnamed came in - she had devoted her adult life to the study of mythology both in Sinnoh and worldwide, and with her guidance, Tenshiro was able to peer into the machinery underlying faith and belief. To study its clockwork, the ways its gears fit together, driving an individual to devote themselves to the most irrational of compulsions. His canon - their canon - was scattershot, piecemeal. Enough Western aspects to feel novel to Sinnohans; enough Eastern aspects to delight the yuppies in the UWF. They kept it vague in all the right places, leaving their followers to fill in the gaps themselves.

  And - this was what shocked Tenshiro most - their followers did fill in the gaps. At the blind spots that had escaped the couple's notice they made all manner of excuses and justifications Tenshiro never could have dreamed of. As if fortune had smiled upon them enough to close its eyes and allow them to sneak away from its consequences. Here was the clockwork, grinding away.

  The duo targeted those with little to lose, and promised them heaven, or nirvana, or whatever they wished to call it. A starship built into a comet was too fantastical for most, but the desire for it, the drive to attain paradise, was near universal. Even atheists did not truly want to explore the logical conclusion of their beliefs. Life knew only itself, and was not capable of comprehending anything outside of it.

  And, after all the nights they'd shared together, the day before Mizune's fourth birthday, the unnamed left them.

  Two weeks later, in the midst of Tenshiro's moment of extreme weakness, a new initiate came to one of the Children's early gatherings, nineteen and newly emancipated from a neglectful set of parents.

  Two months later, she and Tenshiro were married.

  Two years later, after an incident in neighboring Hoenn regarding a water-obsessed religious cult turned the tide of public opinion against 'new-age religions', the trio, along with their newborn daughter - the first one Tenshiro would find it in himself not to loathe - boarded a plane to paradise.