Tarahn had followed the others to town dutifully, annoyed at his lack of agility: normally he'd've been able to dart ahead or lag behind to investigate any bush or hollow that looked interesting and then catch up with the plodding main group as needed, but as a Toxel he was a plodder, too, and he watched Silver the Sneasel with envy.
In Frontier Town the others wandered off, leaving Tarahn unsupervised. He saw other pokemon from the initial gathering trotting from place to place, but no one seemed to be looking for him, and there still weren't any trainers around. He went exploring, drinking some water from the fountain, and scuttling through alleyways looking for forgotten and unattended items, or interesting spaces or crevices. Almost instantly he found a crawlspace under one building that was chock-full of bugs, so he had lunch and then napped for a couple of hours.
Tarahn went back to the fountain to wait, and really started to feel uneasy. There were
only pokemon around, all wearing this or that bit of clothing like they were
all in on the game, and not a single human. A lot of them moved like humans, too: poorly aware of their surroundings, only paying attention to what they saw in front of them. One time, a demon pokemon had put him and Moriko's other pokemon and her friends' pokemon to sleep, and stole their trainers. This was different, though, not having the awful, obvious energy field from the demon over everything, for one. They all knew something was wrong before the trainers got stolen and even the humans could feel it.
Tarahn felt the other pokemon's attention on him periodically as he people-watched, and one or two stares would've raised the fur on his back if he still had any. He pretended to groom himself each time, licking a paw nonchalantly, and the other pokemon moved off, bored, but he missed having the whole team around to eyeball somebody right back. Where
was everybody?
She called again, "Hey there, remember me...?"
The gray Meowth from before was trying to get his attention! He trotted over, tail raised. "Hey! I'm Tarahn! What's your name?"