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There's a computer in Celadon City that isn't there. Perfectly functional, perfectly ordinary: feel the keys where your eyes say there's empty air, read menus and e-mails as clear in your mind as they would be anywhere else, for all that you can't see them.
Do not use this computer. Not even if your friends dare you, no matter how your curiosity burns. There's a reason it's only spoken of by children and the mad. There is much in this world that is invisible, and the more eagerly you seek it, the more likely it is to notice you in turn.
Every child hears ghost stories, passed around on schoolyards and in sleepovers, learns the strange incantations needed to summon monsters. Perhaps the bravest try the first few steps of these, continuing until their vision flickers, until there comes some screeching cry, and then flee, thrilled and terrified at once. It's only natural to dabble. It's those who don't outgrow such fancy who are truly in danger.
There are creatures in this world who play the part of human well, and so every child learns, too, what makes a person real. Monsters can count limbs and eyeballs, don clothes and names until they could be any ordinary person. But they can't see what's beneath the skin, can only guess what's inside a human, so different from the dark black static at the core of them. These are what a child learns, then: thirty-three vertebrae and three bones for each ear, a brain in two lobes, two kidneys and a gallbladder, at least at the start. And one heart, to make the rest of it go.
Remember these. Remember what makes you human. On hidden paths and in monstrous company, it's all that will guide you home.
If you would go seeking what on reality's other side, be careful what you bring with you. Everything must be in its proper order, everything in its place. What comes next will not depend on desire, or on cunning, but only on the rules that govern other worlds and other minds. They are not for you to understand.
There's an old man in Viridian City, stooped and cranky and always in the way. But listen closely to what he says before you take your leave. Something in his words holds the key to seeing what truly lives on the coast of Cinnabar Island, the creatures swimmers avoid by instinct, without ever seeing. Is the old man a friend of monsters, then? One of their kind? It hardly matters. The rule is that you must speak with him, and it does no good to question it.
You'll find pokémon on Cinnabar's shores, real pokémon. Some of them ordinary, some of them not. But there are monsters, too, and these are the ones to whom you must speak. You'll know them by the way the air fractures to static around them, by how they wear their bones on the outside, and how there's nothing at all inside them, nothing between their bones but haze.
Present your offering and watch hunks of gold gush between skeleton jaws, patter gleaming to the sand. Or precious stones. Or brightly-colored candies, wrappers all the same. It doesn't matter what you bring. No thing is simpler than any other, nor any more desired.
You may go, then. The spirits ask for nothing, desire nothing in return. There is no price. There is no cost. But there is a consequence.
Computers begin to forget your name. They spit up confused symbols, make uncertain sounds. What you store in them won't return unchanged.
You could stop there. One venture into another world, or two, or three, won't end you, not if you're careful. That's enough to become rich, to become truly powerful, if you spend your wishes right. You'd gain no more than a bit of fuzziness, a penchant for seeing what you shouldn't, what can't possibly be there.
You could stop. You could always stop. Or: there are whole cities that wait invisible, unnamed and unknown and very real. There are what might be other travelers, or what might only be playing at human. Tread warily, but watch them. Learn. Learn where the edges of reality are, where common truth begins to come undone. Learn to tread where others can't. Learn to carry more than you can hold.
Spend too long on the far side of reality, and you'll become less real yourself. People will struggle to see you, perhaps. Computers will misunderstand. But these are benefits as well as curses. Now no walls can hold you; no one can bar your way.
Pokémon must have their own tales, their own ways of slipping from reality. You'll find enough of them in places they can't be, some of them strange and shimmering and wild. Learn from them, too. Follow them and see where they will not go, the paths that will lead you through the forest unopposed. Hear what growlithe know of lightning and onix of the water deep below the earth. None can know these things but those who wander outside reality. Cherish the knowledge. But remember, always, what makes you human. Remember bone and flesh and heart. There are deeper truths than these.
There's a clot of gold in the old Rocket hideout below Saffron, a treasure as abandoned as everything else there. Pick it up, then go and speak to the scientists on Cinnabar about their fossils, and when you return to look again, find gold lying there as before, and in your pocket still. Take it as many times as you like, for a price no greater than friendly conversation, or perhaps unnerving a few researchers who notice that your shadow doesn't fit quite right. Why would what happens on Cinnabar have anything to do with this one measly speck of gold? You've learned incantation, spells, and tricks. If you want to go deeper, plunge farther yet, you now need to learn the rules.
By the time you've understood, the desire to manufacture bits of gold will long have passed. You will have learned that what you choose to throw away is much more valuable than what you keep. When you understand how the world works, truly understand, you can create as much gold as you could ever desire. But who would desire gold when they could move mountains, rewrite history, reshape reality however they'd like?
Do you remember your bones and your brains? Do you remember your one heart?
Create new worlds. Create new creatures. No longer approach the spirits in wanting. It is no longer your time to learn the rules. Now: use them. Then forget them.
After so much learning, the last lesson is forgetting. Forget pain. Forget want. Forget price, and value, and cost. Forget what it feels to be seen. Forget what it means to be told "no." Forget forgetting, and its regret.
What good is a world that no longer recognizes you? What good is a human? What good are lessons for children?
There is no value in what can be had for free. And what can be had for free is: everything.
Forget
you.
You only ever had one heart.