TEEN: some rise by sin

[kintsugi]

Replies!

Spoiler

The Long Walk. Screwball having to learn how to think (Clearly he hasn't got the hang of it yet. Or counting). And slice-of-life, don't think I missed that! Why an erudite Tangela who is apparently your avatar (And now your avatar should be a Tangela, no arguments), I don't know. Tangela dumping tea over himself was hilarious and I don't know why.

ALL OF THE JABS WERE OUT OF LOVE, I PROMISE

Oh dear, glurge alert. Anyway, this is Josh we're talking about. Make that "lukewarm and desperately reheated sex"

I believe what you meant to say is "this is you writing we're talking about. How the fuck did you become responsible for writing lemons oh right that's why it was so tepid" XD

The best part about this line is that we don't know which one of them turned into an alicorn princess. Was it Eve? Was it the Eevee? The world may never know

THIS WAS INDEED MY INTENTION <3

Do I seriously have to read all that?

I might as well write a late april fool's chapter for your story @AetherX; wanna see what I make of it?

Yeah, man, I fully expect you to support my artistic endeavors because this was entirely serious. You meanie.

"Rocks fall everyone dies boom boom murder FUCK NO I ACTUALLY LIKED HIM DAMMIT SHIT"

I was gonna write a lemon for SYR, @Flaze; but that was already canon. Ramen dick. heh.

Without further ado, an update! Egad!

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interlude ii. aftermath
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aftermath: icarus

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“You stay here, okay?” I said, knowing it was futile already.

My murkrow squawked and fluttered off of my shoulder and onto the branches of a low-hanging oak tree, cackling all the while. I could still smell the singe on his feathers, which made me worry a bit, but the way he still took the time to clip me on the head with one of his wings made me think he was fine, more or less. “Of course, boss,” he said insincerely, which I didn’t believe for two seconds.

I paused to fiddle with the straps on my backpack and sighed. I’d been thinking of these things during the hunt for Gaia, but I hadn’t found a way to say them eloquently. At all. And the issue with the froslass hadn’t made it any easier to think this through. “You know that what I said still stands, right?” I ended up saying. “You can leave any time you want.”

To his credit, the bird almost looked hurt. “Icarus no want to leave. Told you already. Icarus not change his mind like fickle-fickle humans.”

“I know, but—”

“Icarus no leave, Master.” He paused, and I waited for his familiar cackle, but he was shockingly serious. “Boss is boss. The murder follows.”

There was, of course, the disturbing thought that I’d managed to convince him I was Boss when all I’d done was point him toward things to kill, but maybe that was the point—the Boss provided the prey. “I don’t want to drag you guys anywhere. We’re running low on supplies, and we haven’t even started yet, so the going’s going to get rough. I want you to know what you’re getting into.”

“You get supplies yesterday, no? That why you leave me in trees in first place. Then Gaia get snatched, and hah!” He made it sound like the whole thing was his contribution to the field of stand-up comedy.

“I tried, Icarus,” I said patiently. “But we don’t have money.”

“Money?”

It’s funny how situations changed so quickly. A few hours ago, a ghost had marked me for death. Now, I was trying to explain economics to a bird. “Yeah, it’s the shiny stuff that we exchange for other things.”

“Also made of paper,” he told me matter-of-factly.

“Yes, Icarus.” I sighed. “Some of it’s also made of paper.”

He shuffled his talons on my backpack and got himself a better grip. “Trainer with nasty abra give you lots of paper after I beat him first time, no?”

Holy gods.

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aftermath: brigid

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{And you’re sure you didn’t rob a bank or something?} Brigid looked at me dubiously over the counter. Bates stood behind her, re-counting the creased bills in the dimmed firelight. {Honestly, we’d report you now, but the nearest bank is in Violet City and you don’t look like you made a thirty-mile hike last night, but there were a bunch of people sleeping in the pokécenter that were probably focused on other things than pickpockets, and…} She didn’t finish the sentence, but rather stared pointedly at me. Behind her, Bates stopped counting to look at me, arms folded and one eyebrow raised.

“I promise, I got into a fight with that Silver kid, and when we won, he just threw a wad of cash at me,” I protested, aware that my excuse was paper-thin. But for once, it was true. “I forgot about it until now.”

“You forgot about fifteen hundred dollars,” Bates repeated, as if hoping I’d realize how stupid I sounded.

Well, yes, between the moral dilemma and the knife and the urge to get away from New Bark Town as fast as possible and the fact that he’d almost killed me and all my pokémon, I hadn’t been in the mood to count my spoils, and I hadn’t expected it to even be money because I wasn’t used to the idea of having so much money you could literally throw it at people, but I had no idea how to explain that. “Yes?” I answered weakly.

He shrugged. “This more than covers what you want to buy,” he said. The bag from yesterday was still packed, filled with supplies and begging me to purchase it. “My register is broken, of course, but I can tell you—”

“Keep it,” I said. I probably should’ve been more frugal with the money, but I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to think about how Silver had gotten it or what his father had done to get it or anything about how it came into my hands in the first place. “No, don’t look at me like that. You helped me find my pokémon. I’m sending the other half to my mom—actually, if you could mail this to her when that gets back online, that would be great. Keep the rest.”

Bates, surprisingly, was unimpressed. “I don’t need your charity, you know.”

It was more money than I’d ever held in my entire life, and probably more than I would ever hold for a long time, but I needed to repay my debts. “This isn’t charity. This is thanks for covering me out there.”

I could see his hand tighten on the counter for a moment, and his gaze when he looked back up at me was as hard as steel. I understood what he was trying to say: if I knew what was best for me, I would never speak of what I’d seen there. About how I’d found him.

The moment passed. Bate shrugged and chuckled. “It’s your funeral, I guess. You can take whatever you else you need from the shelves.”

{We noticed last night that you do not carry a knife,} Brigid added, floating to a shelf and retrieving something from it.

My response was immediate. “I don’t want one.” I wasn’t going to act like a Rocket. No switchblades, no guns, no nothing. I had my pokémon, and those were violent enough.

Bates sighed. “It’s not just for stabbing people. You can’t honestly tell me that you’re going to go camping without a knife.”

“I don’t want one,” I repeated.

Brigid floated back to me. {Okay,} she said patiently. {You have rope in that backpack, right?}

I didn’t like where this was going. “Yes.”

{And say you want a smaller piece of that rope?}

“I’m not going to stab people,” I said, with as much cold in my voice as I could muster. A snide voice in the back of my head reminded me that dropping trees on people was hardly a safer alternative.

Brigid looked at me, single visible eye completely serious. {And I hope you never have to. But it would be a grievous error on my part to send you out into the wilderness without so much as a pair of scissors.}

“I…” I searched around for another excuse, but nothing came to mind. My fingers closed around the cool metal of the knife, and I found myself hooking the sheath to my belt unconsciously. “Okay. Fine. Thank you.”

“See, kid, we’ll have you surviving Magnarok no problem.” I could see the laughter lines in his forehead glinting slightly in Brigid’s light.

“Magnarok?” I frowned. “Like that thing in World of Warcra—”

“No, no, not that,” Bates said quickly. The smile faded a little and he laughed awkwardly. “You know, the magnetic apocalypse. Magnetic ragnarok.” He paused expectantly. “Magnarok. It just rolls off the tongue, see?”

{I told him to stop making Magnarok happen,} Brigid said serenely. {It’s not going to happen.}

I probably shouldn’t have expected any better from a guy whose idea of good customer service was a shotgun and threats of immolation. I was about comment further when something behind the counter caught my eye. “Say, is that hair dye?”

Bates turned behind him and examined the brightly colored boxes for a moment, squinting in the dull light of Brigid’s fire. “Yes.”

“I’ll take every color you have,” I said quickly, before he could ask me any silly questions such as why. “They’re light and I won’t be carrying them for long. Don’t look at me like that.”

Bates continued to look at me like I’d asked him to eat his jacket.

“Thank you,” I said. I turned to both of them, the tall and old and lonely man and his litwick, and I realized that I might never see them again after I left in the morning. I made a mental note to try to stop in Cherrygrove when all of this cleared up. “I, uh, don’t want to keep bringing it up, but thank you for everything.”

{You aren’t leaving until morning, right?} the litwick asked, hovering over to pull gently on my sleeve. {There are still several hours before dawn.}

The tiredness hadn’t sunk in yet, but I knew it would eventually. Even though I was still pumped up on adrenaline, I needed to rest, and I practically melted just thinking about the sleeping-bag Brigid had set up in the corner. But being alone, in the dark, promised a whole new slew of problems. “I know. I just didn’t want to forget.”

{I see.}

“Really. Thank you for everything.”

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aftermath: gaia

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“Gaia?” I asked, as I tucked her into the wad of blankets next to my sleeping-bag. Even though there was a thick door, a flaming ghost-candle, and a shotgun-wielding badass between the outside world and my metapod, I still felt a twinge of fear for her. She was so fragile. I’d held her carapace on the way back, inspecting it for any outward sign of damage from the entire ordeal. The shell was hard, although it’d lost its gloss in some places, but I didn’t think it was hard enough. She couldn’t run, she couldn’t fly, she couldn’t really do anything to defend herself.

She had to rely on me, and I hadn’t even intended to train her properly in the first place. That was the true burden that my foundation was making me carry, let alone that she reminded me not to be a monster who murdered people.

Let alone that we’d been saved by a person who murdered monsters.

{I’m fine, trainer.} She spoke each word as if it weighed heavily on her. {I was afraid, for a brief moment, that you had abandoned me.}

I looked at her, but her evolution had changed the shape of her body so I couldn’t see her eyes clearly. “What? Abandon you?” How could I abandon her, when I was literally using her as a ticket to my salvation? Did she know?

For a while, she was silent, until: {It’s nothing.}

It was interesting. Icarus never shut up, no matter how much I wanted him to, but Gaia never spoke, no matter how much I wanted her to.

I knew better than to try to push her too far for answers. If she wanted to tell me, she would do so eventually. In all fairness, I was keeping secrets from her, starting and ending with the fact that I was telling her she was my replacement starter when I knew for a fact that butterfree would never be good battlers, and—

Perhaps it was best if some things remained unsaid for the time being. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”

{In time, trainer. In time.}

In time, she would be a butterfree and the worst would be behind us. I could still hope.

“In time,” I said, and made it sound like a promise.

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aftermath: bates

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I felt my way into the semi-dark of the pokémart’s stockroom, where Bates and Brigid were cataloguing cans from boxes. “Can I help?”

“We’re just about done for the night,” Bates said with a sigh. In the candelight, when I could look at him directly, the purple fire cast harsh shadows on his face that made him like twenty years older.

I nodded and sat down by the sleeping bag he’d laid out for me in front of the counter, and Bates wearily lowered himself into the pull-out cot he’d had on the other side.

A minute passed.

“This may surprise you,” Bates said, “but you’re supposed to sleep in a sleeping bag, not sit next to it.”

I blinked. My mind had definitely been far, far away. “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

“You also don’t need to apologize for not using my stuff.”

“Right. Sorry.” It occurred to me a few seconds too late that apologizing for apologizing would be a little too obvious. “I have a question,” I said before I could back out. And then I paused anyway, even though it was too late to stop. I stared at my hands glumly, wringing them together for a moment and wondering how best to say it. “You’re probably one of the few people I’ll be able to talk openly with about these kinds of things.” I felt the clarity coming back at that point, but I paused again. Shoulders tensed. Sighed. “You know, with the dark-type and stuff.”

“A lot of my team was dark, but that was a personal choice,” Bates said. “We didn’t have the xatu back when I started training.”

I figured he was waiting for me to actually say something. I had a moment longer to turn back, and then: “It doesn’t make me evil, does it?”

“No.” He said it so flippantly that he probably didn’t even think it was a question that merited a real answer. “A lot of that is propaganda. I can lecture you on how you forge your own destiny, how you aren’t defined by some preset notions of your character, how the xatu doesn’t really know who you are, but—”

“I did something yesterday that terrified me,” I said. It felt rude to cut him off, but I didn’t want to listen to him reassuring me against something that wasn’t even true. “And I don’t know how to deal with it. Gaia—my caterpie, well, metapod now—was completely against it, but I don’t really understand her, and I can’t talk to her about it properly even now that we’ve found her. And Icarus was completely on board with it, but his species is famous for ambushing city-dwellers and pecking their eyes out. And, well, I know it’s probably a bad sign if I agree with him when it comes to maiming someone, and I know that what I did was wrong, but it felt so out of character and weird for me, and I can’t imagine myself making the same choice now, and, and, and…”

The room was silent for a while after I trailed off. In the distance, through the walls, I could hear the soft lull of hoothoot.

“I can’t talk to anyone about this, you know. I don’t know anyone here enough to trust them, and I’m telling you anyway because, because I don’t know what else to do,” I said, suddenly filled with the need to fill the silence. “My pokémon can’t know that I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m afraid that Icarus will just kill me if he thinks that I’m weak, and Gaia only tagged along because she sees me as strong. And that’s what I have to be, you know? Strong.”

Bates sighed heavily. He stared at his hands as if they had become his entire world, and I watched him trace over the callouses and light scars on his palms. I’d seen his shoulders tense when I’d casually dropped the word ‘maiming’ into our conversation, and it looked like he was prepared for the worst. “What did you do?”

“Huh?”

“The thing that you mentioned. You said it terrified you.” His hands had stopped roving by then, which meant I would have to stop focusing on them and actually look him in the eyes.

I looked away instead. “I moved away from New Bark as fast as I could, but I ran into a Rocket within a few hours anyway. Codename Silver.” I was going to explain further, to somehow find the words that would delineate the terrifying fear I’d felt upon learning that the Rocket’s bastard had found me, but the sharp intake of breath to my left told me that I didn’t need to. “And, well, he challenged me to a battle. His starter versus mine. He wouldn’t let me leave, so I accepted.”

“What did you do.” Bates asked the question in such a low, dangerous voice that it wasn’t even a question.

“We muddled by, I mean. It wasn’t anything terrible.” Now he was starting to scare me. I didn’t know why he was suddenly on edge like this, knuckles white against clenched fists and shoulders rigid. “Icarus pulled out a win, and then he used a revive and tried to jump me and then Gaia tried to save us and then—” Here was the harder stuff. I faltered then, unable to keep the words just coming out like they had a mind of their own. “He pulled a knife on me, and then I got Gaia to drop a tree on his abra and I managed to get the knife from him, and—”

“You dropped a what.”

I hadn’t dropped anything on him, but I didn’t really have the heart to clarify that. “I. Um. It was a tree.”

“You dropped a tree on a Rocket’s abra? Are you fucking insane?!”

“I—”

I could almost feel the air heating up around us. “I don’t understand. You looked genuinely upset about the froslass. I thought you were good. I saw you packing up stuff for a long haul in the wilderness and I thought you were smart. You—”

I felt myself curling inward a little, trying to shelter beneath the poofy fabric of the sleeping bag to no avail. I had expected anger, yes, but I hadn’t even gotten to the worst part, the part where I’d seriously considered killing someone. If Bates was this mad about something I’d barely even noticed doing, what would he say next? “He said he going to kill us!”

“He was bluffing.” Bates’s voice dropped six octaves, into a register so low that I had to strain to hear him. “Look. I don’t care what he said to you; if you so much as looked at him or his pokémon funny the Rockets can have you executed on the spot. You have to get that. They don’t roll in the same league as we do. They don’t follow our rules.” Pause. “They don’t live in the same world as we do. That eye for an eye crap that we deal with doesn’t apply to them. In their world, in this world, they can take your eye any time they want.”

I looked away, suddenly sullen. Even though it felt terribly childish, I found myself folding my arms in front of my chest and muttering, “I hardly think that’s fair.”

And, even stupider, I found myself making an unspoken promise to set out to change that world.

“Tough,” he growled.

I didn’t answer.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Bates pressed, shaking my shoulder with one hand even as I refused to look at him. “Pokémon aren’t immortal. You saw the froslass. Okay? Do you get that?”

The hypocrisy stung like a slap. “The froslass? How can you—”

“No. You don’t get it. Pokémon aren’t immortal. People like to think they are, because pokémon take all kinds of crazy hits from other pokémon, but that’s different. Pokémon are evolutionarily built to tank attacks from other pokémon. They can do that. Get struck by lightning, bathed in flames, frozen in ice, yeah. They can do all that better than humans.” Bates paused, one hand reaching out for Brigid and coming back empty. “But they aren’t equipped for some things. Bullets? Trees? That’ll kill a pokémon just as fast as it’ll kill you or me.”

I paused, thinking about all of the fights I’d seen on television. Pokémon causing rock slides on one another, or braving an enemy’s earthquakes, and coming out unscathed. “That’s not true. What about—”

“Pokémon are careful when they attack each other. Even at the highest level of combat, they’ll normally never attack one another meaning to cause lethal harm outside of hunting. The intent to kill senselessly comes from humans.”

I thought about Icarus, the murderous glints in his eyes that overcame him from time to time, and shook my head. “That’s not all true.”

“How do you think I got Brigid? My starter?”

I frowned a little. It was hard, I knew, to train a ghost-type; they a little less-than-kind to being subservient to mere mortals. It hardly seemed like a task for a beginner trainer.

“When the government fell, Codename Blue collapsed a building on us. I think intentionally. I made it out alive. Brigid didn’t.”

“Bates, I didn’t—”

He kept speaking, either blind to me or uncaring. “Do you know where ghosts come from? Things like that froslass? Of course you don’t. They’re not like other pokémon, you know. They’re more violent. They have that killing intent that other pokémon don’t. They’ll burn you to a crisp if someone tells them to. They’ll burn you to a crisp even if someone doesn’t tell them to.”

I was filled with the overwhelming urge to say something, anything, to make him stop telling me these horrible truths. “Bates—”

“When ghosts are born, they don’t remember their pasts. They don’t remember who or what pokémon they used to be. They’re just vengeful spirits, doomed to drift, to wander, with only the memory that they died in terrible, terrible agony. If you tell them who they were, they might remember, or they might just look at you blankly and then continue attacking you until you have to fight back. And then you’ve lost that pokémon twice.”

I wasn’t a genius, but it didn’t take one to know what he was talking about.

I couldn’t help but imagine both the losses he must’ve felt—the first time, when she died, and the second time when he’d gotten that false hope that she’d returned only to find her cold and unresponsive and uncaring to him.

I released the corner of my sleeping bag from my fist, where I’d unintentionally been choking it for the past five minutes. The way he’d frozen up when he realized that the froslass had been looking for me. How he’d called it a ‘her,’ as if—“Bates, I didn’t know—”

“Yeah.” He cut me off without even pausing for breath. I opened my mouth, trying to say something, but there was a horrible, haunted look in his eyes that told me that nothing I had would be good enough. “You don’t know a lot of things. I get that. But you sure as hell better learn. Goodnight.”

I felt like something between us had broken. “Bates, I—”

“I said goodnight.” He muttered something to Brigid, and the litwick let her flame splutter out, leaving me staring at the ceiling and wondering just how long it would take me to lose myself in this dark.

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aftermath: cherrygrove

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{Bates has family out in Goldenrod. We’ll look for you there.}

“Brigid, I wanted to apologize about—”

{Don’t.}

“Okay.” Pause. “Will he—”

{He’s being rude by not seeing you off today, but he carries his hurts buried deep. Most people do. April was a good friend of ours, and now we have lost her twice. It would do you well to remember that.}

“I know now, but—”

{You meant well. I hope you can see that we meant well, too.}

“More than anything. Thank you again for—”

{It was nothing.}

“For me, it was a lot more than nothing.”

Pause.

“Your friend that you mentioned. The one that you said looked like me. Is she—”

{Yes.}

“But did she—”

{Yes.}

“Brigid, stop cutting me off. I just wanted to say that—”

{It’s in the past, now. No amount of crying will change it.}

“—I’m sorry.”

Long pause.

{Hopefully we’ll see you soon. Good luck out there.} Pause. {Be careful.}

“I’ll try.”

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previous || next​

 

[Flaze]

Well this chapter was a good...aftermath I guess. Ugh to be honest I shouldn't have read this now when my reviewing brain cells are sleeping >.< but anyways I think the chapter was actually a quiet but to the point one. It was obviously about creating a proper conclusion to all the events of the Cherrygrove arc and to kind of develop Ely and the rest of her team a little more. I like how you detailed that both Icarus and Gaia are really close to her as both were scared that she had abandoned them just like that. Her moments of reflection and doubt were also very well matched, I think they made a lot of sense plus you actually refrained from relying on jokes so much this time around which landed the seriousness of the transition a lot more (I do like your humor though but I can appreciate its lack of it in this one)

But what I enjoyed the most from this chapter probably has to be the character interaction between Ely and Bates (as well as Briget) I think the fact that we didn't quite put as much focus on her own narration this time helped in that regard. Their conversation escalated from normal to dramatic in a very nice pace but also suddenly enough for it to shock us just as it did Ely. Plus I can tell that you actually thought about what you were going to have them say for a bit and if what they said made sense too. Bates' sermon to Ely in itself can be a definition of some of the themes that have seeped out into this fic. Not everything that seems bad is. Dark types aren't necessarily evil and Team Rocket don't necissarily not give a shit about their Pokemon.

It's a good life lesson for Ely if she'll ever need one, it means she'll have to learn to value both herself and her enemies before deciding if her choices are meritable, as opposed to just become some straight up cold badass that doesn't care about the feelings of others. I do wonder what Bates' speech will eventually have to do with Icarus and the fact that he does seem like a murderous death ball unlike what Bates suggest.

One thing that I will find interesting if you go through with it though is seeing Ely dye her hair in different colors, it's avery clever way to pass by without being noticed, like I can also see her just cutting her hair and then dying it different colors as it grows and doing different hairstyles, it kind of brings home the point that she's a character without a clear face to us as well.

 

[Vivillon]

Obligatory Joke Chapter feedback!!!

Screwball has nine letters. Magnemite has nine letters. Magnet has six letters. Six is nine upside-down. 6-6-6. Magnemite has one eye. When evolved, Magnemites form a triangle. Screwball is Breloominati confirmed.

The crypt is shaped like a Star of David. The Star of David has one I. The all seeing eye. The crypt is an Illuminati crypt.

Joshua has six letters. Piracy has six letters. Spaghetti has nine letters. Six is nine upside-down. 6-6-6. Piracy has one i and one c: The all seeing eye. Josh has one consonant. The all-seeing eye is one eye. Everyone is Breloominati. But of course.

“That’s right!” Screwball shouted. “Two! And eight minus two is six! And tangela has six letters, Josh!” Screwball was shouting, louder still, as he made another lurching loop toward Josh. “Don’t you see? Six! Six! Six!”

Somebody should tell Josh and Screwball that Tangela has seven letters, not six.

 

[Beth Pavell]

It's been a while. So long, in fact, that I almost forgot what the hell happened in the last chapter

I've always been a fan of the vignette style - short, to the point scenes without much to set them up or end them. A whole chapter of them is something I haven't seen before, but now that I look at it, I can't say that this checklist approach to the story was a bad idea

Some much-needed wrapping up here. You've been learning again - if you'd tried to write this chapter using the usual tricks of filling it out with black humour and long, disassembling narrative, I can guarantee you that it wouldn't have worked. At this point I'm wondering about your approach to the narrative - do you want the reader to make the interpretations you want, or do you want the reader to take away from it what they like?

The reason I bring this is up is because the Bates conversation is rather ambiguous. Personally I think he rather was being unfair - for a man who lived through a civil war he sure doesn't cut TUPpy any slack. He's very quick to dismiss the idea that you just don't have a choice sometimes (Which you could say is the real tragedy in battling pokémon for war). And very quick to unfairly pull the Brigid card, considering that TUPpy has to leave that be for the sake of compassion.

In any case, being honest works, and for that matter, being understated every now and again works as well. I hope you bear this in mind for the next emotional climax, frankly. I know you have a habit of pushing it just that little bit too far so the darkness becomes cartoonish

 

[kintsugi]

Responses:

Spoiler

I like how you detailed that both Icarus and Gaia are really close to her as both were scared that she had abandoned them just like that. Her moments of reflection and doubt were also very well matched, I think they made a lot of sense plus you actually refrained from relying on jokes so much this time around which landed the seriousness of the transition a lot more (I do like your humor though but I can appreciate its lack of it in this one)

Ha, I've definitely been trying to cut down on the sarcasm. My most recent edit-run of the previous chapters (done when I published this interlude set that you reviewed here) tried to cut that out a lot as well, and I'm glad that this is a more welcome turn.

But what I enjoyed the most from this chapter probably has to be the character interaction between Ely and Bates (as well as Briget) I think the fact that we didn't quite put as much focus on her own narration this time helped in that regard. Their conversation escalated from normal to dramatic in a very nice pace but also suddenly enough for it to shock us just as it did Ely. Plus I can tell that you actually thought about what you were going to have them say for a bit and if what they said made sense too. Bates' sermon to Ely in itself can be a definition of some of the themes that have seeped out into this fic. Not everything that seems bad is. Dark types aren't necessarily evil and Team Rocket don't necissarily not give a shit about their Pokemon.

It's a good life lesson for Ely if she'll ever need one, it means she'll have to learn to value both herself and her enemies before deciding if her choices are meritable, as opposed to just become some straight up cold badass that doesn't care about the feelings of others. I do wonder what Bates' speech will eventually have to do with Icarus and the fact that he does seem like a murderous death ball unlike what Bates suggest.

Yar, everyone has depths. Fifty shades of Flaze/Grey has taught me so much.

One thing that I will find interesting if you go through with it though is seeing Ely dye her hair in different colors, it's avery clever way to pass by without being noticed, like I can also see her just cutting her hair and then dying it different colors as it grows and doing different hairstyles, it kind of brings home the point that she's a character without a clear face to us as well.

hue.

Obligatory Joke Chapter feedback!!!

Screwball has nine letters. Magnemite has nine letters. Magnet has six letters. Six is nine upside-down. 6-6-6. Magnemite has one eye. When evolved, Magnemites form a triangle. Screwball is Breloominati confirmed.

THE ALL SEEING EYE OF SCREWBALL IS PLEASED WITH THIS STATEMENT

The crypt is shaped like a Star of David. The Star of David has one I. The all seeing eye. The crypt is an Illuminati crypt.

THIS TOO PLEASES SCREWBALL

Joshua has six letters. Piracy has six letters. Spaghetti has nine letters. Six is nine upside-down. 6-6-6. Piracy has one i and one c: The all seeing eye. Josh has one consonant. The all-seeing eye is one eye. Everyone is Breloominati. But of course.

THIS PLEASES SCREWBALL LESS. SCREWBALL IS THE ONLY TRUE ILLUMINATI, BUT HE WILL ACCEPT MINIONS IF THEY SO PLEASE

...MINION HAS SIX LETTERS

“That’s right!” Screwball shouted. “Two! And eight minus two is six! And tangela has six letters, Josh!” Screwball was shouting, louder still, as he made another lurching loop toward Josh. “Don’t you see? Six! Six! Six!”

Somebody should tell Josh and Screwball that Tangela has seven letters, not six.

This sounds like I'm bullshitting, but this was actually on purpose. Because the logic of this is nothing. In my defense, the last string of logic was "how many letters are in the first two letters of 'keen eye,'" so Screwball hardly has anything resembling actual writing going for it at this point.

I've always been a fan of the vignette style - short, to the point scenes without much to set them up or end them. A whole chapter of them is something I haven't seen before, but now that I look at it, I can't say that this checklist approach to the story was a bad idea

The main point of this interlude set was to close up things from everyone's perspective, which really felt hard to do strictly with Narra (YEAH I'M SETTLING ON THAT FOR REALSIES; IT'S THE FIRST HANDFUL OF LETTERS OF "NARRATOR" and sounds like "Inara," which is actually a pretty cool name, or "Nah-rah") talking, since she mostly talks about herself, selfish little shit. Originally, these were gonna be third-persn vignettes from the perspectives of the speakers, but I thought that would be too drastic of a departure of style, even for an interlude. I do, however, like the flexibility that this gave in terms of telling a story in a quicker manner, so I think I'll be keeping the snapshot thing for future interludes (barring interlude ii, at the bottom of this post, which is a remnant of the original interlude drafts that I got a little attached to lol)

ANYWAY TL;DR.

Some much-needed wrapping up here. You've been learning again - if you'd tried to write this chapter using the usual tricks of filling it out with black humour and long, disassembling narrative, I can guarantee you that it wouldn't have worked. At this point I'm wondering about your approach to the narrative - do you want the reader to make the interpretations you want, or do you want the reader to take away from it what they like?

I'm glad that you picked up on the decrease of sarcasm--I'm actively trying to tone that down since it starts bogging down the narration a bit. I'm definitely a bit more aggressive about what I say/how I want the reader to interpret, but this is most certainly a product of this story: Nara is telling this story in the end, and she certainly wants the reader to say things a certain way.

The reason I bring this is up is because the Bates conversation is rather ambiguous. Personally I think he rather was being unfair - for a man who lived through a civil war he sure doesn't cut TUPpy any slack. He's very quick to dismiss the idea that you just don't have a choice sometimes (Which you could say is the real tragedy in battling pokémon for war). And very quick to unfairly pull the Brigid card, considering that TUPpy has to leave that be for the sake of compassion.

There, uh, actually is some reasoning behind this that literally won't be revealed for at least sixty chapters, so I'll go ahead and say that this is an a-okay point to discuss. I did want Bates to come off as a little trigger-happy with this exchange--a bit of an extension of normal annoyance with young-uns, but hopefully enough to indicate intense past hurt. Kind of like how freshman can be super annoying because they don't understand how basic things, things that are so well-ingrained that they're basic, everyday operations to you, and this random kid just doesn't get it, except in this case her stupidity can actually get people killed (and it has with other people before).

Maybe a bit too much to convey in the small space I gave it.

In any case, being honest works, and for that matter, being understated every now and again works as well. I hope you bear this in mind for the next emotional climax, frankly. I know you have a habit of pushing it just that little bit too far so the darkness becomes cartoonish

I am, however, immensely glad that you enjoyed, and I'll keep it in mind for the next set of things that are coming.

Anyway, new chapter now! Go! Proof that I actually change the story according to reader feedback, commence!

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chapter viii. iris​

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"You think this stuff has been in for an hour yet?" I asked Gaia, looking up from the cardboard box and gritting my teeth to keep them from chattering. My hair was soaking wet, and I was freezing as the wind kept blowing in. If this was autumn, winter was going to be rough. For the fiftieth time that morning, I regretted not catching the houndour.

Cherrygrove had several lakes and ponds nearby, none of which were devoid of wild pokémon, and all of those didn't approve of my crashing their party and repeatedly dunking my head in their home. In fact, the closest body of water that wasn't occupied by irate poliwag, as I had discovered by prodigious trial-and-error, was at least three hours away on foot from the town. I'd filled up my water bottle in town and hadn't been drinking much on the way, so I approached the icy water, made sure it was decently clean, and then I'd proceeded to follow the instructions on the back of a cardboard box and try to drown myself.

Kidding. But I had a hard time explaining to Icarus how hair dye worked and that I wasn't doing anything outlandishly stupid, like, say, trying to drown myself. I squinted up at the sky, and then back at the box, as if one of them would give me some way of telling the time. Shit, this is why I wasn't supposed to leave my metapod in charge of the heavy literature.

When I looked up again, something furry launched itself at my face. Having surprisingly similar experience with this situation, I'd finally perfected a semi-decent response and managed to swat the flash of brown out of the way, knocking it back into the water. "Unnnnnghhh! Why!?"

My attacker surfaced and began swimming lazy circles in the pond as I spluttered and brushed strands of damp hair out of my face, dripping wet and hanging heavily in my face.

I didn't have to look for the scratches under the sentret's eyes to identify it as the one from the night before, but I did so anyways. "Icarus, please ask the nice sentret why it's following me."

"Seeennnn," she muttered dourly.

"Life debt." From my backpack, Icarus almost seemed to be laughing at me. He cackled wildly. "You save her life, she must save yours. I think."

I'd figured this was the one from the other night, but I hadn't been sure. "I'm fine," I said, waving my hands dismissively at the sentret, who still bobbing lazily in the water and using her tail as a flotation device. "And I didn't save your life."

"Trett."

"She thinks differently," Icarus translated, even though the vigorous shaking of the sentret's head told me the same. "Must accompany you on journey to repay life-debt. Mostly?"

On the one hand, having a horde of pokémon who came along on my merry journey by choice seemed like a strike of dumb luck that I'd be stupid to pass up.

On the other hand, it was called dumb luck for a reason. The sentret I'd met in the forest had been adamantly against the idea of my existence in general, let alone following my commands. Something was up.

I shook my head as well. I'd played with the idea of getting Atlas to come along because I'd needed a fire-type, but in all of the chaos that was last night, I'd forgotten. There was no point in trying to find him; it'd be about as useless as searching blindly for Gaia had been. But I didn't want to start lugging around a party of pokémon. Gaia and Icarus were heavy enough, and I didn't have the time, skill, or energy to train a full team of six. If I filled up half of my team before the first gym, I was probably doing something wrong. "No life debt," I said firmly. "Go back to your clan. And didn't you hate me, anyway?"

More rapid-fire chattering.

"She says does not want to return to clan." Icarus cackled madly. "We have new friend, Boss?"

"No," I repeated, pulling myself to my feet and backing away from the pond, where the sentret still paddled her arms in little circles. I adjusted the straps on my backpack and began walking away.

The sentret followed at a distance, her head popping out of the grass along the road from time to time.

"Please stop," I called over my shoulder.

"Sen, senn!"

"I'm not kidding!"

"Sent, trett trett, sen sen, senn, sen sen? Trett! Tret trett!" She continued chattering for a long time, and I had no idea what she was saying. It was clear, however, that she was talking to me. I wasn't sure what tipped me off: the fact that she kept bobbing up on her striped tail to get into my face, or the excited hand gestures she made with her stubby brown paws, the pads well-worn with use.

"Icarus," I said with a groan, shifting my backpack on my shoulders and fiddling with the dark green straps idly. "What is she saying now?"

"Dunno."

He was kidding. He had to be kidding. "What?"

"Dunno," the murkrow repeated, cackling to himself and making a shrugging motion with his wings that was altogether un-pokémon-like. "This sentret dumb, but all sentret speak weird language. I not understand nuances well." When I slowly turned my head to glare at him, ready to knock some sense into that feathered head of his, he only looked earnestly back at me with crimson eyes. "Easier speaking to Gaia. Bug and bird live in trees together; similar dialect. Sentret live in holes in ground. Develop own language. Have different speaking. Humans too. Hard to speak human. Must translate twice. First from sentret to murkrow, then from murkrow to human."

If my party ever expanded, I would have to keep my limited understanding of pokémon communication in mind. "I don't know what you're trying to tell me." Apparently it was important, because she tried again. "Please leave."

"Trett!" A hiss followed.

"Why are you following me?"

The sentret stopped and gave me a meaningful glare, and I didn't need Icarus to translate the painfully obvious: I already told you that, stupid human.

But she hated people. She hated trainers. And above all, she hated me. I was all three. "You threatened to kill me if I tried to capture you the other day," I said, trying to reason through the logic myself. "Why the big rush to tag along now?"

"Trett."

Informative as ever. "Icarus?"

"Dunno."

"Poddd!" Gaia trilled from my arms, clearly more enthused about this situation than ever.

"No!" I whirled around and faced the sentret that I had been expecting to kill me and frowned. "Even if I didn't think you were on some mission by your clan to kill me in my sleep or something—" (funny, really, that this was the second out of my three pokémon that made me fear for my life; given that the other one was a metapod with zero intent to kill and was also essentially a large, green rock, this wasn't a good start) "—you aren't strong—" Most trainers ended up abandoning their sentret and furret in the underground at Goldenrod because the scouting pokémon couldn't keep up with stronger, more powerful pokémon that came along the way.

Obviously, I didn't cut myself off fast enough. "Sennnnt," the sentret growled, sinking into a crouch and hissing at me, clearly prepared to scratch my face off like she'd done last night. "Tret!" There was something terrifying in her enunciation with that one, a kind of cold anger that cut to the bone.

"This translation difficult, but doable," Icarus chimed in, cackling with the restrained kind of glee that made me downright nervous. "I think she say you are 'grackle-bellied tail-less tretlimb' in sentret language. In murkrow language, we say you have dull beak for scraping worms and deserve frow in heap of milderdew."

"And in human?"

Icarus paused for a moment longer, beady red eyes narrowing a bit in concentration. "I believe phrase is 'one with defecation-face who has mated with a mother' for insulting her strength without combat trial."

"Poood!" came the sharp reprimand from my arms.

Instinctively, I put the hand that wasn't holding Gaia in the air as I connected the dots behind the actual phrase. "Good, see? You actually don't like me. Don't follow me around."

"Poddd," said Gaia fairly, and I braced myself. I was not going to let her guilt me into helping a pokémon that could clearly help itself. Not killing Silver had been a good idea in the end, but there was absolutely no justification in letting this sentret come along.

"Treettttt." The sentret looked at me pleadingly, something in her brown eyes indicating that this particular 'tret', one that carried more heaviness than the uncountable number before it, was legitimately important.

"Icarus?"

Icarus made a shrugging motion with his dark wings. "She repeat sounds from before. Complicated. Dunno. Betrayal, I think? Something with honor. Life debt reason sound bullshit, but dunno."

All of that had somehow fit into a single 'tret.'

"Meta."

"Yes, I know, we should just have a rainbow troupe of happiness and prance around in awesomeness like the great people we are," I muttered at the metapod in my arms, growing frustrated. At least she was pretty light. If the sentret didn't insist on attaching to some part of my backpack or body, I'd be able to… I couldn't be trying to justify this. Could I?

"Not what she said." Icarus shuffled his feet, expertly stating the obvious.

"Podd."

"Fine," I snapped, not as excited with this compromise as I should have been. If it came to it, more pokémon would be better in a fight. Silver might have a scarily well-trained abra, but it couldn't take down three pokémon at once.

Of course nothing would end up going like I'd planned it to. Of course not. Otherwise, it clearly couldn't be my journey. "Fine," I repeated, frustrated. "You can come. Okay?"

"Trett."

"She afraid you abandon her," Icarus chimed in helpfully.

Well, yes, I could entirely see why she would feel that. "I still don't see why you want to come along, but whatever. You can tag if you want. See if I care."

"Trett!"

"She still afraid you abandon her."

I was trying to subtly ditch at least two-thirds of my team at this point, and I didn't even know how to justify the other third. I already started walking down the path, one hand supporting Gaia while the other absent-mindedly threaded through my too-orange hair. The dye streaked across my fingertips. Of course. "Do you have a name?"

"Sennnn."

"Not one you pronounce."

I sighed and sat down, feeling Icarus settling in to his familiar perch on his shoulder while the sentret trailed behind us, looking bewildered for reasons I had yet to understand. "Iris," I said at last, and I heard the gravel stop crunching as she pulled up short three feet behind me.

"En?"

Names were more than just words. That was what my mother had taught me, what my father had failed to teach. They were promises, promises for— "For the future. Iris. That is what you will be to me. Your name is Iris. Is that okay?" Goddess of the rainbow; scout that hated my guts. Close enough. "It is my promise that I won't abandon you."

"Tret?"

I shook my head ruefully and kept walking. "Sometimes I don't understand, either. I'm setting up camp now. Do whatever. I'll be here all night."

That was my strategy, really. I kind of just threw my pokémon to their own devices. It had been useful with Icarus and spared me from seeing the carcasses of whatever things he hunted in the night. He cawed in assent and took off from my shoulder, vanishing into the undergrowth. The sentret gave me a strange look and then followed after him, chattering.

Maybe they'd be able to talk easier without me there.

I sighed and folded my legs, glancing up at the darkening sky before propping Gaia up on a tree stump nearby. I'd made enough headway for today, I figured. I glanced at my compass, which was practically useless for reasons I probably should've considered a long time ago. I threw it into my backpack and sighed. Camping was hard. Training was hard. Everything about this journey was hard, harder than I had ever imagined that it would be. My pokémon weren't nearly what I wanted, I honestly didn't know why half of them were following me, and my bag, full of supplies I'd never even looked at, weighed about as much as a ton of rocks. I didn't mind that Bates was apparently trying to look out for me by packing my bag like it was my first day of kindergarten, and having extra food was useful—I guess I was getting the full value of the money I'd left him, after all—but there some markedly useless things shoved in various pockets.

Bates. Holy gods, Bates. I'd messed up with that one.

I didn't know how to handle that. I didn't. There were some things I hated stewing over, and some things I stewed over because they were easier. This was the hard kind, the stuff I didn't like to bring to mind because re-living my failures hurt.

He was right, though. I wasn't prepared, and I had no idea what I was doing. I'd run headlong into this mess, set Icarus on Ariana when I should've been avoiding being a threat, attacked Silver out of anger, run into the woods without a second glance. I'd even dyed my hair a bright orange color for no particular reason other than because it was the first box I'd found in my bag, with the knowledge that if I ever needed to change, I had seventeen more colors to choose from. And in the future, when there was no more safety net?

I hefted my now-orange locks in my hand, studying them. They dye job was pretty bad, honestly, and I probably hadn't reached all the way to the roots without a mirror, but it wasn't like I had a choice. I'd always liked having long hair back in Goldenrod. Of course, back in Goldenrod, there were things like running water and conditioner and beds. Also, there was no Silver to grab my braid and use it to restrain me before he threatened to slit my throat.

Impractical. Utterly impractical. I silently thanked Bates for the hundredth time as I slipped the knife out of its sheath from my belt and hacked away at the ponytail. Soon, my left hand held a knife, while my right hand held a skein of thick orange hair. What was left on my head barely reached my chin, and both of my fingertips ended up staining a sickly orange, like the spray tans I'd seen in the magazines.

In retrospect, it would've been much easier to cut it first and then dye it, but I wasn't really one for good forward thinking.

So I tossed the hair into the bushes, which yelped at me in alarm. "Trett!"

The sentret—no, Iris, I had to start thinking of her as my sentret now, too—had literally picked a spot as far away from me as possible without being out of my eyesight. She was a conundrum, one I wouldn't understand without actually getting a psychic or ghost to talk to her, and I would have to accept that I wouldn't properly understand her motivations until that happened.

But she'd been so dead-set against joining me—

I looked up to see that Icarus had returned as well, and had also taken the liberty of setting up camp for us, namely by nosing (beaking?) his way into opening the zipper of my backpack and eating the cereal bars I'd stashed on top. He had issues opening the wrapper properly, though, what with lacking opposable thumbs and all, so I tore one open and tossed him half before giving the other half to Gaia.

After a moment of thought, I opened a second one and threw half to the sentret—my sentret, I tried again, although I had a feeling that neither I nor she would really ever see it like that—and ate the second half myself.

"Tret." She glowered at me for a moment after the granola bar hit her on the white, target-like ring of fur splattered on her stomach (maybe my aim had improved a bit), and didn't touch it.

"It's not poison," I muttered sourly, aware that I'd thrown half of my potential dinner into a bed of dry leaves and a disgruntled ferret. "If you don't want it, I'm totally taking it back."

"Sen," she muttered, and didn't touch it. But when I looked away, I heard crunching, so I figured that was a good sign.

I sighed and glared at my overstuffed backpack again. If I was going to stop for the night, I could at least sort out my pack and try to see if there was anything useless. Maybe I'd actually make it to Goldenrod so I could thank the man who'd reminded me that people weren't all awful, or if they were, they usually had a good reason.

In the meantime, my backpack had some junk in it.

Namely, rocks.

Just one rock, actually, but I pulled out the fist-sized lump of shiny black material and scowled at it. "Icarus, do you have any idea what this is?"

His typical perch on my backpack had been disrupted, seeing as I'd pulled it off of my back and was rummaging through the dark-green, military-grade pockets, fuming all the while as packets of dried fruit and jerky appeared before my eyes with a speed that only breeding ratatta could rival. How Bates had managed to stuff my backpack with food when I wasn't looking was beyond me. When had he even had time for this?

Icarus gave a sound that might've been a hoity-toity sniff and pecked at the plastic wrapper of a bag of dried oran berries. "Rock."

Oh, yeah, I would've never guessed. "Anyone else want to tell me what this is?" I glanced over at the motley crew that made up my current team.

Iris, glared up at me from where she had been sharpening her claws on a nearby tree. Her tan fur still bore some of the scratches from her fight with the houndour and my murkrow a few days before, but she had mostly healed up. Her dark brown ears twitched a little at my question, but as she studied the lump of rock in my hand curiously, she wilted a little. "Sennn," she growled, shaking her head.

"No?" I glanced back at it. "Well, I'm throwing it away unless anyone else wants it."

"Poddd."

Gaia had seemingly taken it upon herself to act as my moral compass, which was quite a daring goal, seeing as she had no means of communicating with me and lacked some useful features, such as arms and legs. Sometimes, though, she really wanted me to carry heavy burdens. Heavier than not maiming my peers, for example. As heavy as a rock.

"You carry it, then," I muttered darkly. Her shoulders didn't hurt from carrying food for all of us.

"Meta."

I didn't bother asking Icarus to translate. "Yes, I know you have no arms." I glared at the lime-green cocoon propped up against a tree, looking back at me mournfully, and scowled. It was like getting growlithe-puppy eyes, except from a metapod. And somehow, it worked.

"No legs, too!" Icarus squawked joyfully.

"Poddd."

I had no way of picking up body language from a pokémon that couldn't move her own body, but she seemed intent that I carry around the lump of black rock until my back broke. Which would be quite fast, given my lack of formal lifting training. "Here, I'm going to throw it. Gaia, if you bring it back, we'll keep it."

I was being unreasonable, yes, but it had been a long day. I threw the stupid rock into the tangled underbrush.

"Okay, Gaia. Your turn."

"Pod." I might've seen a slight glare in her eyes.

The bushes barked back and then exploded in a mass of roiling black, and then I was on the ground as a sixty-five pounds of pure muscle leapt out of the undergrowth and onto my chest.

Oh, boy.

There was a harsh thunk as the saliva-covered rock landed on my sternum, and then the thing began licking my face insistently, whimpering excitedly as if we had been parted for months rather than days.

Of course. Picking up one crazy pokémon just wouldn't be enough. "Hello, Atlas."

"Dour!" I could already imagine his words. I fetched it for you! Oh boy! Can you throw it again? I love fetching! I am very good at fetching! But all it really meant was—

I had a houndour now.

"Pod!"

…And I had to keep the stupid rock.

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previous || next​

 

[Beth Pavell]

no preamble 4 u

Technical Accuracy/Style
Finally caught you out, El. Enunciation rather than annunication ... although you could argue that "annunciation" is correct, if you specifically want to refer to Sentret's tone of voice, "enunciation" would be better

Story
Not a huge amount to say here, since this is really a breather chapter and, I presume, leading up to the events of the next arc. There isn't anything wrong with that - a lot has happened over the past arc, and TUPpy (I'm using it and you can't stop me) hasn't had a lot of time to really absorb it

Characters
So pokémon are distinctly different in personality, ok. Moving the focus away from Icarus is a decent move - we've seen any amount of Icarus but not a lot of Gaia, let alone Sentret. I am sort of wondering how long it'll take TUPpy to realise that she actually isn't doing any training. At this rate she'll be back in a battle again going "uh, gee, kill it?"

I see Bates has left his mark on her. She hasn't made the best decisions ever, but who can blame her? Her world hasn't been following the usual rules since Xatu presented her with Icarus. If anything the sensible thing to do would have been to be more violent with Silver, but she's a city girl who had intended to be a pretty dull trainer

Final Thoughts
Silly TUPpy, you're too old to instinctively use an alethiometer. At least, I think she is. Whichever way you frame it, the answer to that question is somewhat personal

 

[kintsugi]

no preamble 4 u

Technical Accuracy/Style
Finally caught you out, El. Enunciation rather than annunication ... although you could argue that "annunciation" is correct, if you specifically want to refer to Sentret's tone of voice, "enunciation" would be better

normally I wait until chapters are posted to reply to content so less clutter/self-posting, but ooooo I've been beat
*slinks away in shame*

 

[Arkadelphiak]

All I can say is:

ATLAS
YES GOOD

(And the chapter was nice. Its slower pace let Maximilien Robespierre mull over Bate's words without the chapter getting boringly introspective. Ding ding ding, that rock is important. But . . . Atlas.)

 

[Flaze]

All right, I actually finished this yestrday but I got pretty lazy and forgot to do a review xD

I will echo the fact that this works better as a transition chapter but at the same time I think it was a chapter that allowed us to relax. It's been a while since we've gotten to have Ely talk and experience things with her Pokemon, the fact that they've had developtment now also makes it more fun. Icarus is a real troll though but I like the way he translates with such fun xD and the explanation he gives as to why he can understand bugs better is...I don't know, I guess it works? at the same time I find it funnyt hat Icarus can translate anything related to feelings of anger and the like but not good thing (he translates how the sentret still holds kind of a grudge as well as her intent and the like but once she becomes a bit more vulnerable he's suddenly unable to keep translating)

I didn't expect to see the Sentret back actually, if anything I was sad because at first I thought we wouldn't get to see Atlas again :c not that Iris was a bad addition, even if you're totally copying Survival Project (nice reference there btw totally not obvious at all) and wel I guess her reasons for joining Ely will be interesting to explore. I mean she still holds a grudge for her that doesn't seem to be going away soon, which is different to Gaia's respect, Icarus'...I don't know, he likes her enough and Atlas' complete and utter devotion of her, so it's a new dynamic to add into the group.

Finally I love the last scene with the rock, I know it's going to be important obviously but just that last par with Gaia and Atlas:

I had a houndour now. Maybe?

“Pod!”

…And I had to keep the damn rock.

I can just imagine Gaia going like "Yay, we're keeping the rock!" but really it's a good way to show just how the dynamics in the group are being formed xD I wonder who Atlas and Iris will influence that.

 

[kintsugi]

Spoiler

All I can say is:

ATLAS
YES GOOD

(And the chapter was nice. Its slower pace let Maximilien Robespierre mull over Bate's words without the chapter getting boringly introspective. Ding ding ding, that rock is important. But . . . Atlas.)

Haha, no jokes, crossover battles is a 100% sponsor of Atlas's continued existence here.
rock what rock I was being so subtle about the rock

It's been a while since we've gotten to have Ely talk and experience things with her Pokemon, the fact that they've had developtment now also makes it more fun.

her name is Nara like narrator last time switching names I promise sounds like nah-rah

Icarus is a real troll though but I like the way he translates with such fun xD and the explanation he gives as to why he can understand bugs better is...I don't know, I guess it works? at the same time I find it funnyt hat Icarus can translate anything related to feelings of anger and the like but not good thing (he translates how the sentret still holds kind of a grudge as well as her intent and the like but once she becomes a bit more vulnerable he's suddenly unable to keep translating)

I actually have a decent explanation for this--in this universe, at least, murkrow are super-aggressive and their language primarily deals with murdering and mauling. So, like you said, he's got a good vocab and a nice ear for picking out phrases in other Pokemon dialects that pertain to murdering and mauling, while the concept of honor/life-debts is actually extremely foreign to him, to the point that he can't quite comprehend what's going on. But, yeah. I'm totally a linguistics expert.

I didn't expect to see the Sentret back actually, if anything I was sad because at first I thought we wouldn't get to see Atlas again :c not that Iris was a bad addition, even if you're totally copying Survival Project (nice reference there btw totally not obvious at all) and wel I guess her reasons for joining Ely will be interesting to explore. I mean she still holds a grudge for her that doesn't seem to be going away soon, which is different to Gaia's respect, Icarus'...I don't know, he likes her enough and Atlas' complete and utter devotion of her, so it's a new dynamic to add into the group.

atlas livvvesss

Our last interlude (it's mostly crack, heh), and then we dive full-on into the Violet Arc at last.

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interlude iii. silver​

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William Bates opened the door to his pokémart, shotgun in hand, to find some little kid with an abra glaring back at him. He sighed. He hated psychic-types; Brigid could handle them on good days, and it was only morning, but—

“Welcome to the Cherrygrove City pokémart,” he growled, shoving the muzzle of the gun in the kid’s face. “Your abra stays outside. Any other pokémon on you stay outside too, understand?”

The kid, unfortunately, didn’t seem at all intimidated by the twin barrels of the shotgun staring him in the face. He almost yawned, clearly trying to look as blasé about the situation as possible, but Bates could see that he was exhausted. And, for some reason, he wore a layer of shredded but sticky something? (Bates decided not to think on it too hard; he’d seen stranger things and he certainly didn’t want to make too much of this) over his rumpled and dirty clothing.

“I’ve been having a really shit couple of days, so don’t be upset if I don’t trip over myself listening to you,” the kid retorted, and there was a hard edge in his voice that almost made Bates think twice, except he’d seen worse than this kid and knew he would again. “Teleport us inside, would you, Dante?”

The piece of shit little kid was actually going to try it. “Brigid!” Bates shouted.

Bates’s litwick, floating behind him, seemed unperturbed, but she reacted with blinding speed. A puff of light marked her position before she vanished into the shadows. {On it.}

The abra’s brown paw reached out and snaked around the kid’s arm, and then the two of them vanished in a flash of blue light. Bates, teeth gritted, turned around, pulling back the barrel of his shotgun with a satisfying click-click as he did so, and leveled the weapon at an apparently empty spot behind him.

Half a second later, the spluttering boy appeared alone in front of him, his head materializing conveniently before the twin barrels of the shotgun. A few feet away, Brigid flickered into existence as well, holding a squirming abra by the ears between her small, white hands. Her smile was twisted into a frown, and her yellow eyes, or at least the one visible, gleamed dangerously in the light.

Bates breathed a silent sight of relief, although he tried to look as confident as possible. Brigid could hold her own against lower-powered psychics like this one, but when it came to resisting against more powerful ones, a litwick and a shotgun didn’t give much defense. And, as much as she hated to admit it, Brigid and he both knew that disrupting a teleport was risky business. He’d heard horror stories of how interceptions ended in a trail of scattered body parts; even though Brigid was clearly more skilled than the fledging psychics who had tried, he didn’t want to push her.

Still, in the meantime, he was doing quite well. “Welcome to the Cherrygrove City pokémart,” Bates repeated calmly, staring down the barrel of the shotgun to the surprised-looking kid on the other end who no longer had the courage to glare at him. “I would advise your abra to stay outside, but you two seem to have other plans.” He glanced over at Brigid, who was idly combatting the abra’s half-hearted splashes of blue energy with her own purple flames. “That’s fine. Brigid will watch him while you shop. If either of you try anything stupid, she’ll burn him to a crisp. And that includes the knife,” Bates added, glaring at the bulge in the kid’s front pocket that looked a little too much like a switchblade for his liking. He might’ve felt sorry for the kid, who looked hardly older than fifteen and rather beat up, but the kid had just tried to jump him, after all. “I take it you want to buy supplies?”

The kid managed to look decently unafraid even though his abra was struggling in Brigid’s grasp and there was a shotgun staring him in the face. “No.”

Bates raised an eyebrow. The question had been mostly rhetorical, given that they were standing together in a pokémart, but if the kid was a little addled in the head from whatever had covered him in white shit, Bates wouldn’t blame him. “I’m not a charity. The pokécenter is next door,” Bates grumbled. It was still hard to feel sorry for the kid, given what had happened a few moments before, but Bates was starting to feel guilt setting in.

“I’m fine,” the kid snapped back, cynicism beyond his years filling his voice. “I need information.”

Bates’s eyebrows retreated a little further into his hairline, and he looked at the kid with renewed interest. No one asked shopkeepers for ‘information.’ Instincts that had been dormant for years stirred up in the back of his mind once more. “About what?”

“There was a girl who came through here earlier. My age, give or take. She’s on the run, and I’d like to know where she’s going. Average delinquent, really.”

Unbidden, Bates’s thoughts leapt to the brash teenage girl who’d come barreling into his shop two days before. He stifled them as quickly as possible with a quick glance to the abra, but the yellow and brown psychic pokémon seemed a little distracted by its current predicament to read his thoughts.

Then, Bates realized something worse. The girl had mentioned fighting—

Holy shit. Red hair. He’d only seen the pictures and read the papers, but Bates was pretty sure that he was holding Silver, Giovanni’s fucking son, Silver, at gunpoint while his litwick attacked the kid’s abra.

Yeah, this was probably the fastest way to earn himself a one-way ticket to the gallows at Ecruteak.

He had to remain calm. Bates let the shotgun fall a fraction of an inch, so it was no longer pointing at the kid’s head. In another time, in another place, Bates might’ve felt bad about aiming a shotgun at an innocent kid, but he had other problems now, namely that he was aiming a shotgun at a mostly-innocent kid whose daddy could get Bates killed, and he was trying to find a clean way out of it (although the pressing threat of apocalypse was a close, albeit long-term concern). “There are a lot of girls your age.”

“She has a caterpie, stronger than it looks.”

The girl had never mentioned that her caterpie had been the one to take out Silver’s abra. That would explain the silk, at least. “No idea. There are a lot of girls your age with caterpie. Look around you, kid. This is the edge of the forest. There are a thousand caterpie north of here, and practically everyone who goes through here picks up a couple.” Bates winced. He’d paused too long before answering, and the kid had noticed.

“Do you know who I am?” the son of the most powerful organization in Johto asked coolly.

Yes. “No.”

“I’m the heir to Team Rocket, Codename Silver,” the boy growled, a fire blazing to life in his brown eyes as he glared up at Bates despite the shotgun, a sort of weary rage keeping him upright. “And I suggest you tell me what I want to know.”

Bates weighed his options. On one hand, he’d been on the wrong side of the Rockets before, and almost all of his pokémon had ended up dead. On the other hand, dipshit though she was, he liked the girl who had come through a few days ago, and he had no intentions of ratting her out to the Rockets. He sighed. “I said it before. No need to get antsy. There are a lot of kids with caterpie,” he said, choosing the middle ground for the time being. “I’ve seen at least twenty in the past week.”

“She had a murkrow with her,” Silver said, still sounding as irate as before. “A murkrow,” he added in a voice that was more suited for teaching five year-olds the alphabet, “is a small, black bird, feathers like a top hat, blood-red eyes—”

“I know what a murkrow is,” Bates snapped back. A shame, that. “I saw a girl like that a few days ago.”

“Did she get anything from you?” Silver glanced at his abra. Bates prepared to lie, and then thought better of it, just as Silver added, “Oh, and I can tell if you’re lying, by the way. I won’t like it.”

Bates shut his mouth quickly. “Your Gift? Really?” This was getting bad.

“If you want to test it, be my guest,” Silver retorted. “Did she get anything from you?”

Of course he would by a lie-detector. Of course. Nothing would be easy. The kid could be bluffing, but Bates didn’t want to try anything stupid. Not yet. “Yes.”

“What did she pick out? Specifics, please.”

Bates paused for a moment, pretending to try to remember. In reality, he was searching for loopholes. He’d dealt with psychics enough before to know that lie-detectors had flaws. “She got some survival stuff,” he said slowly, still frowning like he was thinking hard to remember a mundane purchase five days back. Well, he was thinking hard, but he knew exactly what the girl had picked out and what he had… oh. “Antiseptic, rubbing alcohol, bandages, a map. Blanket and compass, maybe.” He felt no need to mention things that the girl hadn’t picked out, nor her plans, nor anything else that had happened while she’d been here. If Silver was going to be stupid with his word choice, then he would pay for it. Because the girl had been given that stuff, and hadn’t picked it out, and as long as Bates believed the wordplay strongly enough in his mind, the kid wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, Gift or not.

And this was why you didn’t sent a kid to do a Rocket’s work.

“Anything else?”

Bates shrugged. “Her potion rations, I guess. She couldn’t afford to pay for anything more that night.” Which was also true; she’d brought in her windfall the next morning. With any luck, they’d try to head her off at the next pokémart, when she’d actually be well-stocked and wouldn’t need to visit town for a while.

“Anything more?” To his credit, Silver seemed to register this information as worthless as well.

The kid seemed to know that he was holding back on something, and Bates remembered the last item that the girl had explicitly picked out for herself and not had shoved into her arms by Bates or Brigid. “Hair dye,” he said grudgingly.

Silver’s eyes narrowed, but Bates could sense his excitement. “What color?”

Here, in the darkened shop that was only lit by the faint purple flames from Brigid’s head, Bates had to actively suppress his smile. Instead, he shrugged a little and gestured lazily to the display case behind his counter that proudly showed eighteen different colors of hair coloring. “Um. All of them.”

___________________________________________________________________________​

Silver let one of his feet dangle off the docks outside of Cherrygrove’s pokémart. The sunset on the gently lapping waves was actually quite beautiful at this time of year, even if the entire sky was still stained with touches of the borealis. The dying sunlight made the entire ocean sparkle like a pile of, well, silver, for lack of a better word, and there was a sort of beauty in that.

He’d always loved the ocean views from the beaches in Goldenrod, so much so that he’d been willing to change his codename to reflect them. Something about tumbling in one place, flashing brilliantly for a moment before being pulled under, had seemed so melodramatically fitting to his current state of affairs that he’d only considered his codename for an instant before settling.

That had been a different time. A better time, too. No need to get held up by a kid or act humble around a shopkeep who really seemed too emotionally conflicted to be serious about holding him up. Dante might’ve been able to stop the bullets in time, but Silver hadn’t wanted to take that risk. Not today. Not when there was still beauty like this left in the world.

Staring out to sea like this made him miss Locke for the thousandth time in the past few days. He could’ve used a bit more logic in his life right now.

He sat there as the ocean subsided to a dull murmur in his ears, all the while weighing his options and idly peeling hardened caterpie silk from his sleeves. He could report back that he had indeed found the girl with the murkrow, and she was about his height, had dark eyes, and he’d quite cleverly narrowed down her hair color to eighteen or nineteen possible choices. Or, he could withhold his knowledge from his superiors, possibly threatening their mission here because he didn’t have the heart to look stupid in front of them.

Whatever he did, he couldn’t fail. That was out of the question. That was always out of the question.

But there had been something so off about the girl, about the way she’d snapped from terrified and trembling to icy-cold and rigid in the blink of an eye. One moment, she’d been quaking, and the next, she’d been threatening to cut him up. He’d thought it was a mistake until he’d looked into her eyes, impossibly hard and impossibly dark, as she stood in front of him and threatened to shred him if he interfered any further. But he’d seen it painted in her eyes, something he’d seen too much before, something that didn’t belong in the heart of a kid like her, in a kid like him.

Intent to kill.

But there was no mistaking it. There was something wrong with her.

He hadn’t quite decided if that meant he should pity her or fear her even more.

“What do you think, Dante?”

For once, the all-knowing abra did not know all.

They sat there until the silver of the ocean faded away, and then sat there for quite a while longer.

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previous || next​

 

[Flaze]

I wasn't expecting an Interlude, curse you for making me have to read!

Either way I didn't expect to see Silver again, plus the scene with him and Bates was fairly well done, you can really get the feeling of anxiety and nervousness that Bates has at being faced with Silver.

Tbh right now I'm really tired and maybe that's why I don't have much to say xD I think that the main thing I'm looking forward to now is what will happen once Silver and Ely meet each other once more (also I like Ely more than Nara so fuck you )

 

[Beth Pavell]

It's taking me too long to get round to these, these days

Technical Accuracy/Style
I'm afraid I've caught you gain:

He knew that the information he was diverging

"divulging". You're slipping! All that engineering nonsense has clearly gone to your head

Story
For a moment there I wondered if you were going to have Silver kill Bates. In fact I was quite sure that something nasty was going to happen to him. It's a decent time to catch up on what Silver has been up to - I noticed you cunning recapped the timeline in there as well. I'm not sure how much I like the "failure is not an option" cliché in there, but what the hell, it doesn't hurt for there to be stakes for Silver as well

Characters
You kept Silver fairly grounded as a twerpy trainer there, heir to Team Rocket or not. Just as well, I never liked the idea of being raised to the role solving all potential problems. It doesn't look like his status counts for a huge amount within the body politic of Team Rocket itself, which is unusual

Final Thoughts
Being really picky and possibly contradicting personal experience here, but late afternoon might be a better time to set the effect on the sea. I forget what season this is supposed to be - autumn? Anyway, when the sun gets too low towards sunset I've noticed the sea becomes blue, rather than shining like silver. Bonus points though, in that Silver is looking in the right direction for the sun to be setting over the sea

 

[AceTrainer14]

Caught up on the last few chapters so reviewing for the game

While the plot did not massively move along this time, I am at least pleased she has left Cherrygrove and is on her way to Violet City. The addition of two new Pokemon certainly helps, especially as they are so delightful. I am disappointed I did not read this before the nomination period, otherwise Bates, Iris and Atlas all would have earned nominations from me. The four Pokemon TUP has so far are all equally diverse and still have managed to show their personalities off individually. I am actually incredibly jealous of your ability with writing Pokemon, and I must learn from you oh wise master.

While uneventful, your writing is as perfect as ever and it got to shine in the two interludes. Bates is a fully shaped character and I hope we see him again, and Brigid was wonderful as well. Having the moment with Silver was insightful and a wise move to keep him in the picture, and makes it clear he will be a threat throughout the story rather than some one-off villain. TUP having a little crisis over attacking him was good and added some layers to her personality. I just wish there was more to read. Most of my complaints from last time don't seem very relevant here: less rambling, less depression, it was all very neatly done and made for a great binge-read.

Just try and post a few chapters before the end of the year, k?

 

[Life]

I didn't realize I was so far behind with this story! Ah well, better late than never, I suppose? I'll focus on the latest chapter, but before I dive into that I have to point out some scenes from the first interlude and newest chapter.

“You get supplies yesterday, no? That why you leave me in trees in first place. Then Gaia get snatched, and hah!” He made it sound like the whole thing was his contribution to the field of stand-up comedy.

I don't normally laugh from stories (let alone fan-fiction), but this did it. Icarus' and the protagonist's dynamic is simply great.

My response was immediate. “I don’t want one.” I wasn’t going to act like a Rocket. No switchblades, no guns, no nothing. I had my pokémon, and those were violent enough.

I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but I think "those" was both a great and interesting word-choice instead of "they" as it shows what the protagonist thinks of her team. It gives off the feeling that they're just objects, items, or even tools to her, which is interesting.

Icarus paused for a moment longer, beady red eyes narrowing a bit in concentration. “I believe phrase is ‘one with defecation-face who has mated with a mother’ for insulting her strength without combat trial.”

oh. my. gosh. This is so great. Laughed even more than I did from the scene before.

Time for actual comments, woo!

There's nothing I found in the newest interlude that hasn't already been pointed out, but otherwise everything is great in the technical department. You have a broad vocabulary which is refreshing to see, since it allows you to get around some commonly used words and phrases (guilty of this since my vocabulary is horrible!).

Moving on to Violet City, huzzah! The protagonist may not be there yet, but I'm excited to see her arrive in a new spot, and more importantly, I'm excited to see her have a gym battle. Well, I hope she'll battle the gym, at least.

I enjoyed seeing Bate and Silver interact and I enjoyed his "oh shit" moment. It felt real, though there was a part of me hoping to see him act all bad-ass and not care about Silver's status. Given what he said in the last interlude that would have never happened, but I can hope. :n

Frankly, I did feel Silver was being a tad too arrogant with Bates. Yes, he is the heir to Team Rocket, but Bates still could have killed him if he wanted to and nobody would have rushed in to save him, so I would have thought he'd be more scared. But I guess knowing that your family will be there for the revenge kill is comforting? Either way, his "lie-detecting abilities" sound like a sham, but it'll be interesting to see whether he was telling the truth or not.

That said, I wonder how Silver got away with being able to travel without a bodyguard or something. I suppose ole' Giovanni wasn't expecting anything bad to happen?

Overall, I really enjoyed the past few chapters/interludes, and am excited for Violet City.

 

[kintsugi]

Spoiler

I had responses/thanks here, but something about the forum format when we went to the 2015 changeover made this chapter keep quoting itself because I fucked up the format somewhere. Oops.

___________________________________________________________________________​

chapter ix. the slopes of olympus​

___________________________________________________________________________​

"What do you mean, you don't sell to trainers without a gym badge?"

I really had to work on my politeness, but I figured my track record was pretty shitty. The last person I'd talked to had, in no particular order, pointed a gun at me, threatened to burn me alive, helped me find my pokémon when I couldn't, helped me obtain two new pokémon (kind of), given me some great advice, given me some shitty advice, and then basically threatened to burn me alive a second time. The second-to-last person I'd talked to had tried to kill me, and then I'd tried back, and I'd probably started a shitstorm with all that. This basically told me that I wasn't exactly the most personable bulb in the knife drawer (and also, trying to be polite didn't seem to help or harm my cause in any discernible pattern).

The Violet City pokémart was dimly lit by a sparking flaafy, which bleated angrily at my outburst. I waved my arms through the air in a sort of vague protest. "It's the apocalypse! I need supplies!" I continued, even as the sinking feeling that this wasn't going to work started in the pit of my stomach.

The thin, pasty woman in the white pokémart apron looked distinctly uncomfortable, but she said in a calm, mechanical voice, "We've had a rash of people claiming to be trainers coming in for their weekly potion rations who then go out and scalp their supplies out to real trainers for markedly higher prices."

"I got my ration at Cherrygrove last week," I protested, struggling to stay calm. There was no need to get angry with her. I rolled up the tattered sleeve of my jacket and showed her the indelible, green smeargle ink Bates had used to mark my wrist over a week ago.

Yeah, okay, so I wasn't the best at navigating routes either, and it'd taken me five days to cross between Cherrygrove and Violet, but I was learning. All the stupid trees looked the same to me, and horticulture really wasn't my strong suit. I'd grown up in a metropolis, not a forest.

The storekeeper shrugged. "Look, miss, I'm sorry. But with all of the trainer records down, and without a trainer card, functioning or otherwise, we have no way of proving that you're actually a trainer, and having a gym badge—any gym badge, mind you—is our best bet. That's procedure."

I fumed silently. "But I just started training last week, right before all of this happened." Maybe she would look at dirt-covered me and see that I wasn't trying to be a threat. Pity had worked okay with Bates, and—

"Then this is the perfect time to get a badge, isn't it?" she asked, smiling tightly. "I can direct you to the pokécenter, if you'd like. The staff can heal your pokémon practically overnight. And they have generators, in case you want to take a shower."

I wanted to retort, but I figured that this wasn't the best battle to pick right now.

And, yeah, I kind of did want to take a shower.

But I kind of didn't want to fight a gym. Really. Most of my intentions of becoming a pokémon master and fighting the champion had faded a little in the light of my becoming a fugitive and the magnetic apocalypse, and the idea that I'd actually use a badge for anything more than a nicely-carved paperweight had been a laughable possibility in the back of my mind.

For a brief moment, I imagined stepping into the gym to challenge Falkner, the flying-type expert, who would no doubt recognize Icarus's species on sight and then report me to his higher-ups in Team Rocket, who would teleport over and have me killed to death. I figured the entire process would take about fifteen seconds.

"Is the gym league even operational? I thought that we'd, you know, have plunged into chaos by now." It was a little difficult to keep my voice civil by this point.

The woman raised one eyebrow. "Ostensibly it is, or else I wouldn't be asking you to show me a gym badge." She appeared to have difficulties being civil as well. "Falkner's out right now, but one of his provisional trainers can stand in."

There was also the uncomfortable fact—one that even this supermarket owner could notice— that I probably couldn't win a gym battle. Icarus had no problems murdering everything he saw and I sort of aimed him at threats like my personal murder-cannon, but Gaia had the intent to kill of a soggy paper towel. In the past week, I'd gotten a vague handle on what Iris and Atlas could do; from what I could tell, Iris was determined but not necessarily all-powerful, while Atlas preferred to, uh, make friends. Battles were a war to her, and a game to him; it was mostly a matter of pitching the fights in the way that best appealed to them.

Well, I could go challenge the gym and get myself noticed and then killed by Rockets, or I could go out into the wilderness without potions and later get myself killed by Rockets, or starvation, or my sheer stupidity.

"Thank you for your time," I grumbled, and then hefted my backpack onto my shoulder and stepped back into the street, which was dimly lit by the midday sun. I scooped up Gaia in my arms, relieved that there were no missing pokémon awaiting me this time. Iris, following at a distance, slunk behind us.

"Podd?"

"No luck, Gaia," I told her. "You aren't feeling up to challenging a flying-type gym for our potion ration, are you?"

"Podd."

Probably a no.

"Iris?"

"Trett!"

Definitely a no. She'd refused to listen to my commands in practice about seventy percent of the time. If I'd been a normal trainer, I'd probably take this as a problem—however, given that none of my pokémon actually listened to me all the time, I wasn't terribly miffed. In fact, between Icarus's murder tendencies, Gaia's inability to move, and Atlas's refusal to battle until he'd sufficiently licked any newcomers, the thirty percent chance that Iris would listen to me was looking pretty good.

I sighed and glanced up at the sun. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and it was actually a beautiful day, although it hardly felt like that. I stomped angrily away from the pokémart and stopped in front of the gym, weighing my options.

I might've been able to waltz in and casually challenge a gym, but Falkner wasn't exactly a pushover. He was typically the first gym leader that trainers challenged, but he also boasted one of the best records in the region. Flyers were a versatile and powerful class of pokémon, and I couldn't abuse type-advantages to even attempt scraping a win. Not that that would've been much help—I'd heard that Falkner had invented some terrifying, anti-electric strategy after the first few times he'd been shocked by a half-trained mareep.

With some reflection, perhaps I didn't need potion rations that badly. I hadn't needed any of my items yet, but who knew? I wouldn't have minded stocking up.

Before me, the gym towered, imposing and threatening at the same time. The roof of the building, like every other municipal building in the city, was a dark purple, likely to match the whole "violet" theme. The other municipal buildings in the city, however, weren't seventy-five foot behemoths made of spotless glass that managed to shine even in the apocalyptic afternoon sun. I craned my head up to peer at the massive arch over my head, an elegant affair of flashing gold that peaked in an elaborate swirl and sported the words nihil supra in spindly, golden script with letters three feet high.

I didn't really know the dead languages well, but it vaguely resembled Violet's motto well enough that I could try to wrap my head around it. Nothing higher. A city in the clouds, higher than all save the outskirts of Blackthorn with some buildings trailing so far up the western slopes of Mount Silver that they disappeared into the clouds.

No, I definitely wasn't going to do a gym challenge, strange as it felt. Tucking my hands into my pockets, I turned away, aiming myself toward the eastern side of town to where I had left Icarus and Atlas. And all the while, thinking.

There was more to this sleepy town, the stuff that I couldn't learn in geography class in tenth grade, enough to dazzle me. Beneath the layers of buildings on the steppes and terra cotta roofs painted violently purple and adorned with crouching, winged statues, there was something that ran deeper. At the north of the city, just by the base of the mountain, the gleaming tiers of Sprout Tower poked into the sky, its topmost roof obscured by pearly wisps of cloud. Legend said that the heart of the Tower was not a wooden central support shaft, but the body of an enormous bellsprout. Its stalk was the oldest living thing we had discovered save for Johto's legends—the Wandering Beasts, the Birds Regent, and the Forest Queen.

And, well, it was prettier to pretend that the Lugia didn't exist sometimes. The idea of living under something that possessed enough raw power to wipe out a continent, that had most likely single-handedly screwed up the region enough to knock out the magnetic field, didn't really sit well with people when you phrased it like that.

The people of Violet City, however, had no faith in these myths. There were no shrines to the Wandering Beasts, and the gargoyles on their roofs were stylized representations not of the Birds Regent, but of the very birds they trained. They were a people who had founded themselves on the clouded slopes of a mountain rather than move to lower, easier-to-access ground. Their center of worship, if I could call it that, was living proof of an epoch come to earth. They were among the legends, not beneath them.

Nothing higher.

"Sent?" Iris asked.

It was at the foot of this tower that I found myself when I finally looked up from my wandering. I didn't really know how I'd ended up here, hands jammed deep into the pockets of my faded, green, partially-dying military jacket, idly scraping one foot against the dusty ground, brow twisted in concentration. Bates had given me the jacket, and it was surprisingly effective against the brisk winds that were picking up at the base of this mountain.

He was, of course, so very right about how little I thought about things. I'd been told that going to a gym would be pretty vital to my plans, so instead I ended up at a shrine. Of course. I'd never been one for worshipping the legends, although my mother had been a fan of the names in the myths. Icarus, Gaia, Iris, Atlas—perhaps, so had I. Battling with a team full of legends made for an easier time than a team full of ragtag misfits.

It appeared I wasn't the only one who preferred flashy things. The arch of the door was a work of art in itself, one I didn't feel worthy of observing. Ornate brass figures, intricate flocks of birds flying up the archway toward the gleaming sun above my head. Frozen in the first moments of flight, a million feathers all pointing upward. The rays of the sun reached out almost to embrace them, welcoming them as equals in the harsh, golden cast of the sky.

Nothing higher.

The door itself was a masterpiece as well, a large, dark slab of wood studded with round bits of metal, and at around shoulder level were two brass doorknockers shaped like bellsprout heads holding metal rings in their mouths. Feeling like I was polluting something precious, I reached out and touched one hesitantly. Colder than I'd expected. I dropped it, partially out of surprise, and the sound echoed in the narrow confines of the doorway. Like ringing a bell. I could feel the vibrations bouncing through my feet and up my bones.

No one answered. I vaguely wondered if it would be sacrilegious to enter this building—I hadn't showered properly since I'd left, I had this recurring issue where I ordered my dark-type starter to attack things, and my shoes were kind of muddy, but no one had tried to stop me yet. Gently, I tugged at one of the door knockers.

Nothing happened. The door, beautiful work of art that it was, didn't budge.

"Pod?" Gaia asked curiously.

Well, I suppose it would've been too easy to just walk in.

I tried to consider for a moment what to do next. I'd left Icarus to watch Atlas near one of the dark caves at the base of the mountain—one of them had the unfortunate habit of mauling people with his sharp and deadly beak, while the other had the unfortunate habit of mauling people with adorable showers of hugs and kisses. Plus, Icarus got a bit lonely being ditched from every city I went to, and they could do boy things together. Pee on trees or something. I shrugged and turned to leave. Perhaps this was a sign that I should go to the gym or jump off a cliff instead.

The door swung open.

Huh. Delayed response, but I'd take what I could get.

The first thing I noticed about the Tower was the light. Normally, I wouldn't be surprised to see a well-lit, prominent historical landmark, but, given the current, no-electricity situation, seeing a building that wasn't illuminated by a fire or electric-type was a bit strange.

No. Here, the illumination came from a glowing pillar in the center of the room, one that rose from the floor to the ceiling and disappeared in a round hole near the top of the room. The pillar seemed solid enough, but it shone with an eerie light from within that pulsed like a heartbeat that cast soft shadows on the intricately-carved wooden paneling around the walls. The bellsprout, undoubtedly.

"Welcome to Sprout Tower," a voice with a slight lisp said from behind me, and I visibly jumped.

There was a wizened, bald man standing in the corner, clad from head to toe in dark blue robes that obscured his hands—and, really, everything but the very tips of his sandaled feet. He filled the typical old-man-monk role fairly well, with a wrinkled but kind face and sprouts of white hair peppering his chin and even coming out of his ears.

He looked old and harmless, but he'd managed to sneak up on me. In wooden sandals. "Um, hi," I replied, tearing my gaze from the pulsating column in the center of the room and then having second thoughts. "Is this, uh, the legend?" I pointed back at the pillar.

The wizened man gave a weak sigh. "That," he murmured, "is the giant bellsprout that makes up the core of this sanctuary."

I'd never seen a giant bellsprout, or really one that was more than two feet or closer to two hundred, but I hadn't seen a lot of things. Military sentret, for instance, such as the one that was currently sniffing around the floor like it was covered in chocolate.

"It is dying," the man continued mournfully. And indeed, with each pulse of light, the room seemed a little dimmer than before.

Wait, what.

There was no possible way that could be good. The enormous bellsprout that had stood regent for centuries, maybe millennia, couldn't just get some root parasite and die. That didn't seem right. There was something deeper afoot, something more sinister, something no doubt linked to the dancing aurora just outside and the tumbling magnetic field below.

There was also something heartbreakingly sad in the idea that this old giant, one that seemed to pulse with the lifeblood of Violet City itself, could die. A legend come to Earth, rooting in the ground but reaching for the sky. Nothing higher.

"You are the savior who has come to help us."

"Pardon?"

"You were drawn to the Tower. Save Falkner, our leader, you are the first one outside of our order to enter these sacred halls since the day the power failed and the monster appeared." The monk's words were a low rasp in the silence of the Tower. I was reminded of an ekans slithering through piles of dry leaves.

"That's ridiculous. You have a building with light." I gestured around to the wooden paneling and the impassive bellsprout statues that stood guard in each of the four corners of the room, all bathed in gentle light. Okay, it was a little hard not to ogle over sweeping architecture; I enjoyed it a lot more than I did trees, but back on point: "And, well, a bunch of historical context and lovely architecture. Why wouldn't anyone—"

"The doors are locked."

This started to sound like the set-up to a really bad horror movie, or an even worse porn movie. I couldn't really tell which. I backed up a little, wondering if I could try to sneak out without his noticing me. I was a somewhat-fit teenager, of course, and he appeared to be an unarmed, harmless man. But when I hit the doors, which were solid enough to bury the head of the bellsprout-shaped doorknocker into the small of my back and refused to budge an inch, I began to feel afraid. "I wasn't drawn here," I deflected, even though I had a sinking feeling that he was actually right. "I was wandering around the town—"

"—because your sssstarter is different from the otherssss, and for that you have been casssst out," the man finished sagely, inclining his head slightly. I could still see his smile, which was filled with too many pointed teeth to be natural. Also, the man's lisp was transforming into a hiss. "You are the ssssavior who has come to help ussss."

I'd never bought the sage-mysticism myths, but unless Icarus had blabbed at some point instead of waiting outside of town with Atlas—I wouldn't put it past him, honestly—then the sage was hauntingly correct. "Who are you?"

The words hung in the air, which suddenly felt a thousand times thicker, for a long moment, tinged with a brass reverberation that sounded like the door knockers.

The monk looked at me, tilting his head in one direction and then the next, angling his head just a fraction of a degree too far to be normal. Then, his face began to dissolve. I bit back a scream, but the wizened old guy had disappeared into a puff of dark smoke, in which I could see the faintest outlines of a cackling face before the smoke, too, dissipated, leaving me alone.

For all of their talk about living alongside their gods, I'd never heard anything about living alongside their dead.

"Be careful that you do not lossse your way in the darksssssssss…"

Well. That escalated quickly.

___________________________________________________________________________​

previous || next​

 

[Arkadelphiak]

chapter xi. the slopes of olypmus

Precious Ely . . . as your unofficial spellchecker, I must inform you that this should be spelled "Olympus" . . . and I will read this tomorrow! And your Awards feedback will appear!

 

[kintsugi]

chapter xi. the slopes of olypmus

Precious Ely . . . as your unofficial spellchecker, I must inform you that this should be spelled "Olympus" . . . and I will read this tomorrow! And your Awards feedback will appear!

fml

In other news, six pages on BMG means I can finally have the ellipses on page numbers
Still can't spell
Yikes

 

[Arkadelphiak]

JUDGING JUDGING JUDGING

(I am under some unpleasant deadlines, so I will possibly rewrite this review, but have the copy-paste version!)


SOME RISE BY SIN


Plot

Now, while it will obviously descend into darkness, I can’t say we’ve truly hit dark material in here . . . we are mostly given grittiness and unfortunate events. That is not a bad thing. The plot is not moving exceptionally fast, but it is clearly progressing toward a journey through Johto. I do think it’s a little odd that the Gym Leaders will allow the Indigo League Challenge during a magnetospheric apocalypse, but hey.

Setting

We haven’t seen a lot of Johto’s cityscapes and whatnot, but she mostly makes up for this with the Team Rocket dictatorship (uuugh I love that). The description teeters near “generic dystopian government,” but not too much . . . at the cost of the physical setting. This can be easily remedied with a few edits.

Characterization

The Unnamed Protagonist – Prophecies! Indecipherable omens! The horror! She’s starting to feel the “dark side” that the Xatu foresaw, eh?

Icarus – As someone who wrote and reimagined a ton of his antics in Sai v. ???, I can safely say that he’s withholding a lot of murderous intent. This is a Murkrow who may have been given an agenda. Why does he like the protagonist? Why was he given to her? Although his talking can sound contrived at times . . . he has depth, people!

Silver – I like Silver in a “look at this potentially-redeemable asshole child” kind of way, although him being fifteen-or-so makes me less inclined to believe he’s as bloodthirsty as, say, an older Silver. I predict he’ll be the one to kill the protagonist in the end. Just look at their relationship. I now ship them.

Bates – Bates is the most interesting character as of late. The “mysteriously sad older man” works well in bringing up our protagonist's ethical issues with Silver.

Team Rocket – This is actually my favorite “character.” It is extremely pleasing to see the organization turn from its weak in-game incarnation into something truly formidable.

Style

The prose holds a slight cynicism that fits the piece; it has no need to be overly flowery. Its main problem is the many longwinded monologues. This mostly occurs in the beginning chapters (her thoughts, essentially), but it inadvertently tones down a lot of the action. We spend most of Chapter I and II with internal panic (that is understandable, as I would have started sobbing) . . . but all she does is travel to New Bark Town, meet the Xatu, look at the Murkrow, sic it on Ariana, then run into the heart of darkness. There is very little dialogue at first, but it remedies itself in the later chapters.

Technical

A few minor grammatical errors and whatnot, but nothing noteworthy. She completely misspelled Executive “Ariana” as Executive “Arianna.” That irked me, but that’s another story.

So . . . is she assuming that the Earth’s magnetic field is so weak that it’s essentially negligible? I can’t figure out exactly what caused the magnetic apocalypse. The destruction of our magnetosphere would only occur if the Earth’s core was somehow maimed [Groudon?]. kintsugi seems to be saying that the ejecta is responsible for this. A coronal mass ejection capable of that would be on some horrific order of magnitude (greater than or equal to the solar storms of 1959 and 2012), but would be unable to truly destroy the Earth’s internal magnetic properties. I think the non-mechanical destruction was glossed over (or she’s got an underlying plotline about everyone slowly dying of cancer, subsequently highlighting the dictatorship’s futility, which would be a fitting end!!!). Something this big would cause trillions of dollars in damage. But, if the legendary Dialga’s magnetic field is “the size of a small planet,” I’m willing to believe that Johto (south to Sinnoh) would receive some of the shielding . . . so the cancer plot hole could be resolved that way . . .

To summarize: there’s potential oozing everywhere. It’s one of my favorites.



THE UNNAMED PROTAGONIST | SOME RISE BY SIN



Depth

We’re getting there. So far, the real depth is brought out in the other characters. This is not an outright dismissal of her depth . . . we're just scratching the surface.

Originality

She’s an unwilling girl thrown into a conflict much larger than her. There is a dark future hanging over her, possibly a prophecy. She begins to show “darker,” more ruthless qualities when under life-or-death situations. The dystopian government is after her. I expect her “originality” to further develop in the upcoming chapters. We’ve seen that many, many times . . . though often done well!

Entertainment Value

Very, very sarcastic. It's great. Under most circumstances, her commentary highlights some of the genre’s canonical faults and lightens the mood. It does get layered on thickly at times, even when the mood/situation should be more serious. Her banter with Icarus is refreshing at times.

Contribution

She’s our ill-fated protagonist in a dark fic. That’s quite the contribution!


To summarize: a very entertaining character that earns your pity. First-person narrators are very difficult to pull off.

 

[Flaze]

This isn't my formal review or anything just a random comment I wanted to give out, well some random comments.

-FINALLYW E'RE AT VIOLET GOD, THAT TOOK TOO FUCKING LONG

-Holy crap we're having a haunted mansion type of arc now

-You know thsi could still turn out to be a pretty weird porn movie in the end.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Why haven't I read this chapter yet?

I'll have to dispense with the usual categories. I've got you again - you say "pokémart" when I'm sure you mean "pokécentre". And there's an "I" missed in one place. Anyway, there's a lot to like about this chapter. First of all, you can build a world when you put your mind to it. The apocalypse isn't brown, thank heavens - this is a pretty good version of Violet City. There's a lot to it which is familiar from HG/SS, with some more texture and a little history to give it a sense of place. Nothing Higher ... damn, why didn't I think of that as a Gym motto ...

Anyway, from a story perspective I like the change from what has been a lot of the same survive-survive-survive thing. Well, it may still be that, but it's not to do with Rockets or starvation so it amounts to much the same thing. Echoes of Nagini in the old monk, I think. Presumably he doesn't contain the soul-shard of a wizard who isn't as clever as he thinks he is, but you never know