With The Arcane Tournament releasing today and bringing together characters from almost all of my Pokémon stories I figured now was a good of a time as ever to acknowledge all the little ties I've put in place to hint at a more connected world before officially confirming it in this piece.

I'll also be explaining the timeline afterwards mostly because it's fun to see how it all plays out.

Initially, a few of my stories were always designed to take place in the same universe but the only ones that were explicit about this at the time were The Uprising and Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Beta Rises when Kut indirectly mentioned having met Red before.

From there it was further confirmed that the events of The Uprising took place, with Excala Bur making an extended cameo in Gamma Gate of Shadows.

Gamma Gate of Shadows was also when I confirmed more of my stories existed in a shared multiverse when one of the Shadows describes the exact events of Finding My Voice and the MissingNo Battle.

I did this because it also creates a narrative throughline about the Gods hastily creating realms to fill purposes and being filled with critical flaws that lead to the Pokémon trapped within them rebelling.

In the case of the Shadow Realm, Marshadow was forced to govern over evil spirits, but instead many innocent Pokémon were banished to the realm.

In MissingNo's case, the realm was filled with portals to an endless void and was incredibly unstable. Both had very weak borders between the realms they were meant to watch over and Shadows are later confirmed to be a Multiverse wide scourge because of this haste.

Other than that, my first major connection made was when Lillie appeared in Gold and referenced the events of Lunar Light to the characters.

I built on this further by having Silver make a cameo in Lunar Ascension and outright acknowledged the two universes being one in the same, I also threw in details about a Pokémon International Tournament which mentioned May as a Champion.

The title of the chapter is even a play on Finding My Voice which was mainly because it was initially supposed to take place shortly after Finding My Voice but the story became so delayed it ended up working better referencing Gold.

The Confidence Within is the only real story without any major ties to the other narratives and that's mainly because there was never any good time to really mention the characters in a way that would ID them as the ones in Confidence Within.

Shattering Adventures is tentatively connected through the trainer, Alex. The boy who travels to Ecruteak City is one and the same with the trainer who becomes Gold's rival later on in Gold. It's never brought up since the story isn't focused on Alex before he became a trainer and Andy has been mysteriously absent for many many years. His existence would also probably be akin to a fever dream for a child.

There's one last major connection in these stories and that's Lunar Ascension centering Shadows as antagonists. Necrozma's Light is a way of keeping Shadows from invading realms they don't belong in. However, once Necrozma lost the ability to provide light to the Multiverse the Shadows took over any realm that lost its Light as they were able to travel the Multiverse when stray portals opened.

Not only does this fully tie in that these two universes are in the same Multiverse, but I wanted to include Shadows as well as an explanation for why they were basically allowed to invade freely when the Gods should've been fully aware of the issues at this point and so Necrozma's story fit in with all of this very well.

It was also a nice way of including several elements from my fan fictions when at the time I didn't plan on making any more and wanted to focus on original stories (that turned out great.)

But it all leaves plenty of remaining questions and conflicts still present. And for those who have read the Shadow Saga, it isn't hard to imagine how that story intersects with The Arcane Tournament.

As for the timeline it goes a little like this.

Solus becomes the Champion 20 years before The Arcane Tournament takes place.

Shattering Adventures takes place three years later.

Finding My Voice takes place two years after that.

About eight and a half years later, Shadows of the Truth takes place.

Marshadow is overthrown and imprisoned a few months after Shadows of the Truth.

Almost ten years after Finding My Voice and just over a year after Shadows of the Truth, Lunar Light happens.

A few weeks after that, Gold takes place.

The Confidence Within happens within a year of Gold.

Beta Rises occurs three years after Shadows of the Truth and two years after Gold and Lunar Light.

Gamma Gate of Shadows happens one year after Beta Rises. Taking place three years after Gold and Lunar Light.

At around the same time, Lunar Ascenion takes place. Being three years after Lunar Light and Gold.

The Magma Depths takes place a year and a half after Gamma Gate of Shadows' main story but one year after the epilogue.

The Arcane Tournament occurs four years after Gold and one year after Lunar Ascension. It happens within a few weeks of The Magma Depths.

Makes sense? No? Here's a visualization.

Hope that helps! At the very least I hope this chapter was interesting since it showed just how long I've been hinting that these worlds are connected. Now they're finally together, so go check it out! New chapters release every Friday from here so enjoy!