The True Walking Wake

Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's 1.2.0 patch added event raids for two new Paradox Pokémon, Iron Leaves and Walking Wake, resembling mysterious sketches found in the Scarlet Book and Violet Book. But these Pokémon raise far more questions than they answer.

Simply compare the creature known as Walking Wake to the Scarlet Book illustration and you can already see the problem. Walking Wake is clearly a raptor Suicune or raptorcune, a theropod dinosaur grotesquely dressed up as a Suicune; you can even see the trouser legs of its costume torn apart by its vicious claws. However, instead, the Scarlet Book's illustration clearly depicts a Rainteicune, which is born when a cloned Raikou, Entei and Suicune all crash into each other with the power of a gigantic car crash and die, resulting in Raikou's final Thunder reviving them Frankenstein-style as a more powerful hybrid of all three.

What, then, happened to the Rainteicune depicted in the Scarlet Book? Why is it being impersonated by the devious raptorcune known as Walking Wake?

One possibility is simple confusion. After all, wise men say never to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance. Perhaps a lone theropod simply mishead the word "Rainteicune" and then did its confused best to fulfill this odd request. With its primitive brain, one can hardly blame it, and in fact some degree of commendation may be warranted, for managing to don the costume at all and not tearing it more than it appears to have - though clearly it got somewhat confused on the placement of the cape and appears to have stuck its head through the middle of it. Either way, not a terrible job, for a dinosaur. If so, then Rainteicune may still be out there, waiting to be discovered and researched scientifically, ideally by Ash Ketchum of Pallet Town.

The more sinister possibility, however, is that Walking Wake was not working alone. Witnessing the Rainteicune foretold in the Scarlet Book, a band of dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals may have set out to hunt down the Raikou, Entei and Suicune clones destined to become Rainteicune, in order to skin them, wear their hides and steal their identities, preventing Rainteicune's foretold birth from ever coming to fruition.

If this is true, we may expect to later encounter the killers of Raikou and Entei, similarly dressed in their skins, passing themselves off as Johto's noble legendary beasts. I have produced some concept sketches of what they may look like. The first is Foraging Flash, secretly a raiceratops:

The second is Marching Magma, which for all its fluffy looks hides a sinister enteiosaurus:

In order to bring about the prophecy and create the true Rainteicune, we the players must be ready and willing to capture these roving beasts and eventually fuse them together into their destined form, in what I expect to be the true plot of the Scarlet and Violet DLC, and therefore the true identity of the "Treasure of Area Zero". Does the capability to create Rainteicune perhaps still exist within the Zero Lab, along with the purported time machine? Will we travel through time only to find the AI professor prisoner to more devious dinosaurs? For now, only Game Freak knows, but I look forward to the epic conclusion and the true ultimate culmination of my prophetic childhood vision of a fused Raikou, Entei and Suicune.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from the inclusion of Rainteicune in Scarlet and Violet, of course, is that I really am secretly Satoshi Tajiri. I am still working through the implications of this and will get back to you all on that.

Page last modified April 1 2023 at 02:34 UTC

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