EVERYONE: bric-à-brac [a flash fiction collection]

[silurica]

[noun] a miscellaneous collection of small articles commonly of ornamental or sentimental value

Hi! I like shorts. They're comfy and easy to wear. I may add more to this thread in the future if I write more miscellaneous stories of my pkmn characters under similar length.

"A Walk Through the Woods" / Sendoff Spring

Giratina rarely crosses over the boundary between their world and the material world, but when they do, they prefer it to be at dawn or dusk – a moment of liminality, neither day nor night. Now is one of such times: the woods are cold with mist and dew, and the sun has yet to wrap everything in its light. Carefully, they become one with the mist, floating away from the small lake connecting the two worlds.

They can hear the chirps of birds waking up, the rustling of leaves brushing against their wings as they take flight. A caterpillar crawls on the ground, tiny feet stepping on dead leaves with crunching sounds just as small. A snoring noise vibrates from somewhere, so relaxed this deep in the woods. In the distance, bells ring faintly alongside the gentle wind.

These sounds fill their mind; songs they don't have – refuse to have – in their world. After all, if they had these songs in their world, they are sure that they would hide under a rock soon enough. They can't even bear to stay in this world for more than a day.

Yet they still peek into this world every now and then, doing nothing but observing the sounds they hear beyond the mist. Perhaps that's just as well.

---

"PC Box" / Oreburgh City

"Error here, too. Yup, I guess that's it," mutters Luca under their breath. The trainer clicks on an icon on the screen, making the cylindrical machine next to the PC pop open. Inside it, a red-bordered white Poké Ball sits innocently.

After staring at the ball for a while, they press the button to minimize it and shove the thing into the depths of their backpack. Considering the strange happening at the Spear Pillar (that oddball is a god? Really? Really?), it's probably for the best that the system thought the Poké Ball was broken. Maybe it really is broken. If nothing else, they can act like it's broken and the capture never happened. (If it really did, it didn't feel like it, anyway.)

Yes, this will be their little secret. They, and the error log of their Pokémon storage account.

They reach for the internet browser and start looking up whether such error logs will be deleted from the system.

---

"City Lights Again" / Jubilife City

Perhaps he would have been less surprised if he didn't sleep through most of the centuries. When he decided to return to the "TV station" to look at the painting depicting his daughter again, when he looked outside the window by chance, he wasn't expecting himself to be captured by the sight of the city at night.

In his memory, the light that the mortals held at night was a modest glow, just enough to keep themselves safe. Now, however, it's as if they had taken a shard of the starry sky and made its brilliance their own to decorate the earth with. If he felt generous, he would compare it to the sight he had seen from his realm – the lights of many worlds and possibilities, swaying between the real and the imaginary.

How pompous. How adorable. Was it this that his beloved wished to see? If only he could know. Until the end of time, these thoughts will be for him alone.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

Heh. I must say that when I saw the words “flash fiction” and clicked on this, I wasn’t quite expecting that to be almost literal when the entirety of your first post nearly fit on my screen without scrolling, making my first glance at it indeed practically done in a flash, haha. I was tempted to write something just as short and succinct as a review — or at least a “joke” review before the real one — as a kind of cheeky ironic response to it all, but I’ll think I’ll refrain and just get right to it. These will probably end up being observations just as much as they’re actual “reviews”, but I’ll try to be as insightful as I can nonetheless.

Your first little story goes into slightly personal territory for me, in a good way. I’ve always found sunrise and sunset to be some of the most visually interesting and inspiring times of the day, and I often spend a lot of time taking in the beauty of both. It’s kind of weird to relate that kind of experience to that of what’s basically a god, let alone one as enigmatic as Giratina. That is, at least, Giratina as I’ve known them in certain continuities (primarily the anime, some fanfiction, and what relatively little the games give us), not necessarily yours. But it is weirdly charming to know that even a Pokémon who’s often compared to Satan (the accuracy of which I’m not even going to try to debate here), can enjoy something so simple and, well… human, perhaps, as talking a walk through the woods, if only kinda-sorta-but-not-really. I suspect that Giratina is maybe more than a little tsundere for the mortal world here, but with perhaps as much genuine hatred as there is genuine affection, no matter what even qualifies as the latter to a being like them? How weird. Indeed, relating to a god is difficult, haha. Even those in a world where you can basically keep one of them as your pet in your pocket if you wanted to.

Speaking of which, how am I not surprised that the age-old question of whether you can put the rough equivalent of God in a Poké Ball is apparently yes, yet the equally tantalizing question of whether you can put them in a PC is apparenly… no, just no? As weirdly lopsided as that is. Tiny ball made of trees? Sure. Machine that can transport them across regions and literally store them as data? Yeah… no. But then, with the caveat that I have no idea how PCs actually work in your universe, it’s been something of a headcanon of mine that Poké Balls are, well, a very special kind of technology, to the point where it’s not even really “technology” as most people would probably think when they hear the word, but rather almost like magic in how it works. Which could even be literal there, depending on what Pokémon are really made out of. Hence why such ridiculous power is apparently possible even hundreds of years ago in relatively ancient Sinnoh if sources like Legends: Arceus are to be believed, while something like the PC as it exists in at least in the real world — let alone those with the kind of capabilities shown in the Pokémon world — isn’t even a twinkle in anyone’s eye yet. What a weird universe Pokémon is, huh? And how funny it makes all of this here, with the sheer absurdity of it all.

The last little story is probably the hardest of the three for me to decipher, I think. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, though, given the subject of this one. Having found your writing style in at least these little stories here often never completely reveals what your characters are thinking all the time — especially those who are, let’s say, more than mortal — I can’t help but wonder what Arceus (presumably?) is indeed thinking as he sees those ever-so-bright lights in ever-so-great number. There’s certainly the cliché interpretation to consider: the classic story of man approaching or even surpassing God with the power of science and technology (or do they?). But perhaps the mere fact that — for all of the words spent on his thoughts about it all here — his mind appears to be really be elsewhere during his visit already explains enough.

And that’s about all I have, I think. It’s always funny how things so small can create feelings and reactions so great, huh? And how what I’ve written about them is probably as long as the stories themselves if not longer, haha. Anyways, these were fun, with some subtle food for thought about some very mysterious and even flat-out weird stuff about the Pokémon world. If you’re wondering whether you should do more, I certainly wouldn’t mind. So I’ll be on the lookout for more!

 

[silurica]

Thanks for visiting! :-D it's one of my favorite forms of fiction. I did write these under a time constraint (it was for an event elsewhere and I was traveling), which... probably was a factor in the below thing.

I had a specific context for PC Box: the Poke Ball at this moment didn't contain anything in it! It captured something but said something was taking a stroll outside. The Poke Ball didn't recognize what it captured, and the PC system didn't either as it turned out. This is all extra context that a reader probably would be able to infer if they've read the first two chapters of my main fic, but well, I completely missed that way of interpreting PC system function is probably kind of atypical.

tl;dr I kind of fucked up lol

I don't think I can fix it without what would amount to a significant rewrite for something of this length, so I'm gonna leave that be. I should go attach author's notes on AO3. Glad that it sparked some thoughts anyway though! Weird world, indeed.