TV show proposal.

The year: 2982. Survivors of The Last Great War emerged from their bunkers to discover that not everything has been wiped clean off of the Earth; hellish mutated beasts now roamed what remained of the great cities, devouring all that strayed into their path. The few towns that were formed were constantly battered by assaults from these mutants, as the radiation had given them vastly powerful capabilities, the likes of which had never been seen before.

After many years of attacks, the leader of one of the towns discovered a small cache of prewar technology. Among such items as quick-healing medical beds and teleportation arrays, the leader found something that would forever alter history: a device which converted physical matter into data. The leader set his smartest townspeople to work on a machine that would ensnare one of the demon beasts that plagued his village. When it was crafted, he gathered up a hunting party and went forth to subdue one of the larger mutants, the one they called the Blackened Lizard. After countless hours of battle, with many fine warriors lost, the beast was beaten to the point where the device could be used, and it was.

The hunting party came back victorious, and so the leader began work upon a continued battle plan against Nature. He sent forth messengers to the nine nearest villages to deliver two-way teleporters and instructions on how to build their own matter-converting devices. The teleporters, while lacking the ability to move anything bigger than a coconut, were useful in relaying orders and information. The first message distributed was a proclamation that all humans must gather up arms to defeat and capture the forces of Nature that oppose them.

After months and months of trial and error, a general school of method was formulated for the counterassault. Those that mastered this method went on to earn great reknown amongst the villages, and would sometimes congregate in specified areas and duel each other using their collections of mutants as pawns. In a final act of regained dominance, these wranglers dubbed their minions with the degrading moniker that haunts them to this day.

Thus the Dark Age of the Pokemon came to an end.