TEEN: some rise by sin

[Flaze]

Not everyone is a nice as Bates Narr, sadly that is the truth. But hey at least we got to Violet in LESS THAN 10 CHAPTERS which is always a plus maybe you can keep up this pace for a little while. I really liked your description of Violet, it was a bit clunky but it stands out from the usual, plus the fact that you made the city be situated on top of a mountain actually has it make sense with Falkner's flying type theme (Bugsy livs in a town surrounded by forests and nothing says modern and urban like normal types so yeah) Plus you had some pretty good dialogue here between Ely and her Pokemon.

But yeah, that tower is fucking creepy man and that priest is creepy too. It feels more like a cult and I honestly wasn't expecting you to try and go for horror here o.o I mean it came really out of left field for me (and yes it still sounds like a premise for a porn movie too) so I'm kind of wondering what kind of horrible things Ely will have to go through before she can get out (hopefully not a torture chamber a la fifty shades)

Also I'm sorry if this review is too short >.<

 

[kintsugi]

omg hi friends
I'm alive
nara is too
maybe

Spoiler

JUDGING JUDGING JUDGING

[snipped for length but ilu you're fabulous and we already discussed a lot of this I think]

Ariana omg I fail tho.

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.

Hush it's only been two years.

mmmm surprise gaia used harden
gaia used string shot
gaia engaged kinky bondage scene
holy shit I could do some awful stuff with that

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.

I think I fixed; thanks.

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 ...

/pleased

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

legit hope I didn't disappoint here. I find that my style tends to drag a lot and turn more to "omg gonna die" when writing quiet-srbs chapters, but I'm trying to do some more... well, different things here. Also yeah, totes Voldy.

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chapter x. these violet delights​

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There were some days where I really just felt like throwing in the towel and quitting. I'd just gone through hell in the forest, what with losing my starter (both of them), having a froslass try to eat me (alive), getting lectured on death by an irate shopkeep who had undoubtedly saved my life (before I made him hate me), and, yeah, trapping myself in an apocalypse and marking myself out to be a horrible human being (several times). And now it appeared that there was no other option but to go further into the haunted tower, which was really something I didn't want to do, what with the dissolving people. I had a sentret who hated me and a metapod who couldn't even escape my arms, versus a haunted tower, and I couldn't help but think about how unfair everything was. If I just threw everything on the ground and quit, how bad would it really be?

An incessant, sarcastic voice in the back of my mind pointed out that if I threw Gaia on the ground, I would probably break her and she would die and I wouldn't like that.

For good measure, I tried the door behind me. It was securely locked, and the knockers refused to budge no matter how many times I pulled at them, significantly less calmly than I'd been when I'd tried to enter. I tried to focus. Facts. I liked those. Sprout Tower was apparently filled with creepy sages that could teleport and were probably possessed by ghosts who had taken a marked interest in my fate—ghosts that had been repeating the same incomprehensible advice since I'd started. And yes, there didn't seem to be much of a way out. What could possibly go wrong?

I should've stayed in the forest. I should've done so many things differently. But the only way out was through. I began taking purposeful steps toward the spiral staircase in the back corner of the room, unsure of precisely what I was trying to accomplish.

"Poddd."

"Yes, Gaia," I said with a sigh. "We're going to go poke around in the haunted tower."

I made my way to the middle of the room, drawn by the gently-pulsating light of the bellsprout. The Tower, while architecturally flawless, smelled like must and was caked in a fine layer of rattata shit. I scraped my foot along the floor experimentally. There was a lot of dust for such a prominent landmark, and all two of my steps were already creating visible prints in the ground. Iris's tracks skittered across the ground to her feet, occasionally criss-crossing a pair of similar tracks that I figured were rattata, but other than that, the dust was uninterrupted. How long had it been since anything higher than my knees had set foot here?

{Cap, I sense danger ahead.}

Iris's voice in my mind made me pull up short. I glanced up ahead at my sentret, who was chattering away at the ground, but even though I could hear the excited murmurings—"sent, sent, treetttt!"—I could still hear her voice resonating in the back of my mind. Telepathic field. We weren't alone.

A ghost or a psychic-type nearby. Haunted or Rockets. I wasn't sure which was worse. I spun around, searching the wooden rafters and dusty beams for some sort of clue, but the dimly-lit interior of the Tower yielded nothing. I gritted my teeth, and then, possibilities exhausted, I tried the frustratingly obvious: "Who's there!?"

A chuckle. {But please, do stop plagiarizing Hamlet by calling that out to ghosts in the dark.}

I didn't recognize the voice. Iris sank into a fighting stance, her tail bristling until it reached twice its original size and hung over her body like a shield, curled in an s-shape. {Leave us be,} the sentret growled, baring her two tiny fangs as her eyes darted around the room.

{Or what,} the voice—it was smooth and surprisingly mellifluous, with the consistency of melted butter, and that knowledge did nothing to mitigate my fears that I was conversing with a Bond villain—asked, {you'll scratch me to death? Surely, little sentret, you know better than that.}

"We don't mean to harm you," I said slowly, looking around the room as I tried to locate the source of the voice and failed. It wasn't like I could've hurt a ghost if I'd wanted to. "We were just taking refuge in the Tower, and now we'd like to go." Pause. I added in a quieter voice, "Please don't possess me."

{I get the feeling that would quite a ghastly feeling for both of us.}

That hadn't quite been the response I was expecting. "Sorry, what?"

A leering grin burst out of the nearby wall, solidifying into a dark blob of haze with a face. The blob whirled a little more, darkening and becoming more tangible, until I could recognize large, piercing eyes and fangs sprouting out of the purplish nebula.

I tightened my grip on Gaia and took a step backward, one eye casting toward the staircase, but I had a sinking feeling that we wouldn't make it before the ghost caught up to us. Add to that the fact that he could walk through walls and I couldn't, and I didn't see this ending well for any of us.

{I've been trying to tell you,} the ghost said lazily, revolving in midair before hovering directly in front of my eyes. His leer widened, but I was fascinated by those white, blank eyes. {I didn't possess anyone here. Possession is nasty business.}

Gaia spoke up for the first time. {Who did, then?}

The ghost cocked his head to one side in a motion that might've been a shrug, if he'd had arms. {I don't know, ma chérie. If his body does not remain where you saw it, I wouldn't call it possession in the first place, as we cannot possess a something that does not exist. An illusion, perhaps. If I were to hazard a guess, however, I would peg the perpetrator as the same ghost that haunts Falkner.}

"The same ghost that—" I began, but then cut myself off as a look of horror began to dawn on my face. "There are more of you here?"

{Imagine that, little human and her pokémon friends. There are dead in the world, and more than one.}

That hadn't been what I'd meant, but I couldn't help but remember Bates's words—ghosts were the remnants of slain pokémon. I wondered if this ghost remembered who he used to be, if the witty lines he quoted were actually remnants of his past.

When I thought of it like that, it became a hell of a lot harder to antagonize him.

{Leave us alone, and straighten your tongue,} Iris hissed back, the rest of the fur on her back bristling as well. The sentret, clearly, didn't share my sentiments. {Or I shall straighten it for you.} It was actually pretty interesting to hear her speaking in a language I could understand. I felt a little less dejected now that I could see that she seemed to growl angrily at everyone and most of her comments were death threats—but to everyone, at least, not just me.

{You're quite loud. I don't like you,} the ghost said to her after a moment, and then turned back to me. {There are many ghosts in Sprout Tower, some more malignant than others. Very few will be as welcoming as I, and I frankly couldn't care less about what you do here.}

Well. I didn't want to stay here any longer. Further up and further in. I took a step forward.

Iris shook herself and took a step forward.

The ghost took a step forward. Well, not a step, but a little bob in our direction.

I stopped taking steps forward. "Are you following me?"

{Perhaps.}

Things were a little convenient. A little too convenient, if you asked me, but I wasn't exactly complaining. If I needed a ghost-type to set up a telepathic field and I just so happened to be locked in a tower filled with ghost-types, then I would laugh and make lemonade, as the saying went. "Is that a yes or not?"

{I may stick around to see how the world ends,} the ghost said, sensing my unasked question. {I can sense much death on you, ma chérie.} He paused thoughtfully. {But I do not foresee myself leaving this tower. Now that I have awoken, I merely wish to see what disturbs the peak.}

Oh, yes, that was a far better option.

{If you do anything to hurt us, I'll—}

{For the love of gods, you'll what, little sentret?} the ghost asked, lazily drifting down to poke Iris with an incorporeal glob of energy. {Kill me? I'm dead already, and even so, I'd like to see you try.} The smile vanished for just a moment, just one, just enough time for his fangs to show cleanly beneath the threat.

I blinked and instantly began regretting every decision that had gotten me to this point. "I'm going upstairs," I said loudly, unsubtly moving my leg between the hissing sentret and the ghost. I started shuffling to the stairs, which was a lot harder when I was trying to keep Iris from flaying our guide.

I couldn't help but notice that the spiral staircase was also a work of art, as was everything in this tower—although it was becoming more difficult to notice, given the nagging ghosts that I could swear were behind me. Elegant and airy, it was a nice change from the wooden paneling, and kind of a homage to the brass of the door, all spirals and curls.

Iris vanished up the railing in a swirl of sable fur, ignoring my half-hearted cry for her to stop, that we should stick together.

"Sent," she called down distantly—out of range, I figured, by which point I had remembered that: first, she didn't particularly like me, and second, she was a scout.

That left me standing on the bottom floor of a haunted tower, clutching a metapod with a gastly orbiting my shoulders.

Gastly. I remembered now. Those were the ghosts in Ecruteak that enjoyed hiding in people's shadows and sucking out their souls.

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The second floor of Sprout Tower, we discovered, was Gaia's.

We wouldn't understand it at first, but I think I should've known from the very beginning.

{Do you know why snow falls so slowly?}

I ignored Gaia's non-sequitur at first, momentarily confused, and I looked around, because the entire floor seemed to be a non-sequitur. The central bellsprout pillar was the same, climbing from the floor and disappearing high into the ceiling while casting a sickly yellow glow on the room, but everything else was different. The floorboards were replaced with a wide expanse of shallow grass and a few saplings. The air smelled fresh and crisp. In fact, short of the giant bellsprout stalk in the center of the room, we could've been in an idyllic meadow.

I peered back down the stairs, where a guilty-looking gastly looked back up at me. The stairs looked perfectly normal. And, if I craned my neck out far enough, I could see the perfectly-normal wooden floorboards beneath us.

So then why in the world was I standing in a meadow?

The trainers started appearing then, drifting into view from behind the pillar. They kept their heads bowed so I couldn't see their faces, but more and more of them came, shuffling through the grass like little ants. One of them, a trainer with dark hair and a red vest, appeared beside me, a pokéball in his hand and a small, golden electric-type that I recognized as a pikachu perched on his shoulder.

"Hello?" I managed to ask tentatively, but none of them answered. Were they all like the sage? I turned to ask the gastly for some sort of clarification, but found myself staring instead into the blank face of the red-vested trainer. He had the same wide, expressionless eyes that the gastly had. The pupils were too vacant, the whites too reflective.

Startled, I reached out to touch him with one hand while keeping the other firmly wrapped around Gaia, but the boy vanished as soon as my fingers passed through him, and he dissolved into the same thick smoke that had masked the sage from my view downstairs. I bit back a scream as I stared at my hand in shock, looking at the fingers, but when I tried again, another trainer dissipated as well. Black smoke whirled around my hand from where the trainer had once stood, and, before my eyes, the haze reformed back into the image of the same trainer with his pikachu.

I was reminded of the way the gastly on the floor beneath us had formed.

I had to admit, I didn't consider myself the best subject for a haunted tower. Rather than reeling back in abject terror, some part of my mind was casually admiring what I was seeing and imagining how to best study this for science. I'd seen it before—when I'd first met Icarus, for example—where my rational brain didn't quite catch up to whatever else was going on around me, so I was instead left tilting my head to one side as I airily dissolved another trainer with a flick of my wrist. Why was this happening?

{It is merely an illusion,} said gastly said calmly, passing through four trainers at once and sending them all vanishing in spirals of black smoke. {I don't see why this is so hard for you to process.}

Gaia didn't hesitate. {Why this illusion, though?} There was a hard edge in her voice that I wasn't accustomed to, a kind of buried hurt that was slowly coming to the surface with each of the ghostly trainers that spawned around us.

The gastly didn't give a response for a long moment. {I do not know.}

{How can you not?} Iris shot back, barely visible from the haze of dissolved trainers languishing around her.

Unfazed by her outburst, the gastly calmly replied,{Some ghosts draw energy from the fears of others. Some resist their urges and find strength through other ways. Normally, the sages are able to keep the malignant spirits at bay. The balance has been disrupted for about a week, now.} He drifted through another trainer. {Personally, I find my companions who must actively inflict suffering to grow stronger to be lacking in imagination. There is already more than enough fear and pain in our world, if they only knew where to look. We all hide secrets.}

A trainer spawned next to me, staring with vacant eyes before making aimless circles around the bellsprout at the center again, and I ran through my options. We didn't seem to have any real leads, actually. The gastly was lying, or he wasn't. The Tower was a giant prank caused by a hungry ghost, or it wasn't. We were all going to die, or we weren't.

Another trainer.

"But why do you—or whatever ghost is causing this—think that a meadow full of non-aggressive people would cause massive fear? Am I supposed to be afraid of flowers?" I stared pointedly at the daisy at my feet before kicking it into a plume of smoke.

{I think this is mine.}

The smile faded from my face, and I slowly looked down at Gaia, who hadn't even moved to indicate the five world-shattering words she'd spoken.

{Yours?}

And for once, Iris sounded strangely sympathetic. We'd all stopped short: the gastly had stopped bobbing idly, I'd stopped crushing flowers, and even Iris was deflating a little.

{Mine.}

Another trainer. I didn't wipe it away into mist.

"Pardon me for asking, Gaia," I said quietly, glancing around as more trainers formed from the fog in the gastly's wake, "but why?"

{No,} she said, cringing away as the red-hatted trainer spawned next to us again. {The forest is full of bugs, and we all wish to be captured. Well,} she said, tilting her head to one side slightly as she considered it, {not all, but most, and I once dreamed of glory. On the first day that we met, you named me Gaia.}

I was really having a hard time seeing where this was going.

{I was captured many times before you, have lived under many names,} Gaia said, looking wistfully at the pokéball in the hands of the red-hatted boy beside us, whose hand had drifted up to stroke the pikachu's head idly. {These are all of my past trainers.}

"These are—these—you—" had this many past trainers? I almost asked, but cut myself off barely in time. There were at least two dozen trainers drifting around in here with varying numbers of gleaming badges pinned proudly to their lapels, the light not reflected in their unseeing eyes. She couldn't possibly—

{Sixteen, yes. Few people keep bug-typed pokémon on their main team. We have shorter lifespans compared to most pokémon, and, while we evolve quickly, we fall behind just as quickly as well.}

She'd still been a caterpie when we'd met. She'd had sixteen trainers before me and not a single one had even used her enough to get her to evolve.

{Often, trainers will release their bug-types back into the forest. It's quite common, so no one bothers to call them out on it, but we're mostly just glad to be on a team at all, no matter for how short. With you, I was able to grow strong enough to evolve. That is more than most of my kind ever get.}

I'd captured Gaia with no intention of having her on my main team after she became a butterfree. I'd planned to pawn her off as my starter, a flying-type, in the name of my survival, but battling with her had never been part of the plan. I knew that bug-typed pokémon were weak—perfect for children, they said—and I'd never imagined having to have one as a star battler. When the storage systems went back online, I might've even put her in the box if I ended up finding a stronger replacement.

And it seems like I hadn't been the only one to think this way.

The realization I'd had on my first night of training came back then: I was trusted with living, breathing lives. These were real pokémon with real feelings. Not like the figured I'd read about in my half-hearted attempt anatomy homework or in the history books. Somehow, we were supposed to work together and get through all of this. Even if Gaia was just a metapod. Even if I was fated for unfathomable darkness.

If this was a tower that revealed deep, dark secrets, maybe this floor was mine after all.

I remembered the words she'd said even when we'd first entered the floor. She'd known from the beginning. She'd known.

{I have high hopes that you are different.}

She was wrong, of course, and I couldn't say anything.

{Do you know why snow falls so slowly?}

I tried as hard as possible to swallow my guilt.

{Because it doesn't know where to go any more.}

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previous || next​

 

[Beth Pavell]

Well, this was rather fun. I do like illusions and dream sequences and locations that casually ignore common sense. I wouldn't have thought to use Sprout Tower as such a location, so I'm loving that. You did a pretty good job with the description overall. Trippiness is a lot harder to pull off in prose than visually. Pacing wise, keeping this relatively short and bringing the focus onto Gaia was a good move. You've kept TUPpy's verbose inner monologue in check as well, which helps.

The telepathic dialogue could have done with a bit more tagging. I didn't expect Gaia to have such a mature voice, for some reason ... but anyway, at times it wasn't immediately clear which pokémon was speaking. What else, what else ... ah, yes, I'm hoping for a understated Gaia backstory. Pokémon angsting are ten-a-penny, I'd be interested to see if you can pull off the emotion without turning the dial up to eleven.

Oh yes, and you stole my NEXT CHAPTER thing you thief

Oh yes, and I'm really rather looking forward to the next chapter

 

[Persephone]

Hi. So I just finished reading this, pointing out any errors I came across. Calmly, of course, but that should go without saying.

Some aspects of the story are fairly good. I never got bored or thought any scene was prolonged, and none seemed unnecessarily short. So pacing is good. Pokemon are memorable, even if they're cliches. But at least Gaia is taking steps towards development so that's good. But since they're a large part of your cast, I would try and develop them (or find some way to let most of them talk) soon.

Because, well, they are most of your cast. Having a protagonist, even a first person narrator, alone for large amounts of time is hard and risks becoming boring rather quickly. So unless you're about to add in a sidekick (which seems unlikely, and actually a poor decision from what the story's been set up like so far) Pokemon are what you've got. And if only one can talk and his ideas aren't that complex, that's bad. So that's the biggest problem I see for the story in the long term. Also I don't really mind the "four Pokemon before one badge" thing because of the cast dynamics.

Constant sarcasm has also been noted as a potential problem, and it sort of is when it bleeds in to pretty dramatic sequences. It mostly gets better then, but in the future resorting to a little less at various points might be good. Alternatively I'd believe it as a coping mechanism if it wasn't employed constantly, even before real danger existed. So... yeah. I didn't see as big of a problem with it as other people did, but it's worth keeping in mind if things ever get intense again. Which, of course, they probably won't.

And because I'm obliged to rip apart your politics, I'm finding it difficult to believe that Team Rocket wouldn't have a basic amount of protection for the kid of the region's dictator aside from a powerful starter and a knife. But since it would be hard to set up a rival storyline otherwise, I suppose it's OK.

So, yeah, I really liked the story and there were no glaring flaws. Just a few things you might want to keep in mind as it moves forward.

 

[Flaze]

I read this quite a while ago...I just forgot to review xD

To be honest I really loved this last chapter, granted Gaia is my favorite Pokemon in Lysy's team and the fact you actually gave her a chapter was great in my books. In general I like wha tyou're doing with Sprout Tower, a lot of people tend to kind of skim around it and it's not seen as a really memorable part of the games so the fact that you're trying to do a more horror based arc around it as well as focus on Lysy and her Pokemon and each of their traumas is good in regards to character developtment.

This chapter, like many others had no shortage of Lysy being sarcastic, but it also had no shortage of her doubting herself and feeling guilty for the things that happen to her and her Pokemon. She's certainly proven to have a lot of survivor's guilt on her shoulders as she tries to make sense of things. I think that she shouldn't worry abotu Gaia though, whatever her original reasons for getting her were Gaia is happy and she cares about her a lot more than she thought she would.

It's actually kind of funny cause in Leaf Green and the hoenn games I always had a Butterfree or some variant of Wurmple's final form either on my main team or as a sub member xD; I dont' know, people always left them behind or ddin't pay attention to them but I always had a soft spot for them.

Anyways bring on the next chapter and the next trial! I'm aching for it already.

 

[kintsugi]

Spoiler

Well, this was rather fun. I do like illusions and dream sequences and locations that casually ignore common sense. I wouldn't have thought to use Sprout Tower as such a location, so I'm loving that. You did a pretty good job with the description overall. Trippiness is a lot harder to pull off in prose than visually. Pacing wise, keeping this relatively short and bringing the focus onto Gaia was a good move. You've kept TUPpy's verbose inner monologue in check as well, which helps.

The telepathic dialogue could have done with a bit more tagging. I didn't expect Gaia to have such a mature voice, for some reason ... but anyway, at times it wasn't immediately clear which pokémon was speaking. What else, what else ... ah, yes, I'm hoping for a understated Gaia backstory. Pokémon angsting are ten-a-penny, I'd be interested to see if you can pull off the emotion without turning the dial up to eleven.

Oh yes, and you stole my NEXT CHAPTER thing you thief

Oh yes, and I'm really rather looking forward to the next chapter

Hi, I'm a noob and don't know how to do formatting on this forum any more, but key points:
Yay I have gotten better at description.
I ended up backtracking and fixing some of the dialogue tags in the last chapter (some of them were even wrong, so awk, seems like I went a touch too minimalist for my own good.
Emotion lol. Um.
And, yeah, totes stole the inspiration from you. Thank you senpai.

Hi. So I just finished reading this, pointing out any errors I came across. Calmly, of course, but that should go without saying.
[...]
And because I'm obliged to rip apart your politics, I'm finding it difficult to believe that Team Rocket wouldn't have a basic amount of protection for the kid of the region's dictator aside from a powerful starter and a knife. But since it would be hard to set up a rival storyline otherwise, I suppose it's OK

Calmly ahahahaha
tears
Honestly been trying to cut the sarcasm down as much as possible, and then I find that there's actually very little content in the early chapters. Heh. Working on that one.
Heh, the politics thing actually has an explanation! Besides plot! And it'll be explained in the chapter after this one!
!
Thanks <3

This chapter, like many others had no shortage of Lysy being sarcastic, but it also had no shortage of her doubting herself and feeling guilty for the things that happen to her and her Pokemon. She's certainly proven to have a lot of survivor's guilt on her shoulders as she tries to make sense of things. I think that she shouldn't worry abotu Gaia though, whatever her original reasons for getting her were Gaia is happy and she cares about her a lot more than she thought she would.

It's actually kind of funny cause in Leaf Green and the hoenn games I always had a Butterfree or some variant of Wurmple's final form either on my main team or as a sub member xD; I dont' know, people always left them behind or ddin't pay attention to them but I always had a soft spot for them.

Anyways bring on the next chapter and the next trial! I'm aching for it already.

who dafuq is Lysy
I do not stand for this

call me maybe

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chapter xi. the center cannot hold​

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You'd think, with the revelation that my fake-starter pokémon was tagging along because she believed I genuinely would help her grow stronger (rather than because I wanted to save my ass and she happened to be the first thing Icarus had thrown my way), that it would only go uphill from there.

You'd be wrong, naturally.

I finished climbing the spiral staircase and peering through the railing to see that the next floor was, quite literally, filled with sentret.

I couldn't help myself. I'd mostly been bracing for my floor, which I'd started to imagine would be filled with Rockets and machine guns and a huge amount of blood, so seeing another grassy field around the central Sprout was a little disconcerting.

"What the hell?" I asked, as I watched another brown and white blur rustle through the three-foot tall grass. "Iris?"

{We're leaving, now, Captain} Iris hissed, although she had bristled to what could've been twice her normal size and had propped herself up on her tail so she looked even taller.

{They aren't real pokémon,} the gastly said airily. I could've sworn he was laughing, but there was an edge to his voice, one that hadn't left him since we'd climbed the stairs. {They are merely illusions. Right, little sentret?}

"Hey, lay of her. Iris, why would we be frightened off by an army of sentret?" The little things were quite vicious, sure, but it was sort of like getting milled by a bunch of little furballs. And, I mean, Iris hated me, but that was just a special case. If all the sentret hated each other to the point that one's greatest fear was the arrival of the others, well. That would make for a pretty awful species.

Another hiss, this one followed by the distinct thunk of Iris-hitting-floor as she tumbled through another illusion, where she hit wooden floor in a puff of black smoke, told me otherwise. I took a step towards her, dissolving more grass in my wake, only to stop short. "Iris. Are you okay?"

{Just peachy, Captain,} Iris growled back tightly. {Leave me alone.}

"But why are you supposed to be afraid of sentret? Why is this your floor?" I repeated, more confused than ever.

No one answered me at first. Iris halted her attack and turned back to look at us, and I wondered how she saw me then: a naïve little girl, clutching a metapod and knee-deep in her worst nightmare, and yet trusted with her life.

Another sentret spawned beside her, only for Iris to slash it open with her claws once more. It spawned again, vacant and white eyes unfazed. Iris destroyed it.

It spawned again. Iris destroyed it.

It spawned again.

Panting heavily, Iris slouched back down on her tail, brown-furred head sinking beneath the grass as her ears wilted. She didn't even bother attacking the illusion this time, even as it stalked closer to her and moved its teeth soundlessly, chattering silent threats in a language that the telepathic field wouldn't translate. It stared her down with deathly-pale eyes.

I closed my mouth. I didn't know what to say. I'd never seen her defeated like this.

{I don't know how much you understood from Icarus's interpretation,} Gaia said quietly, observing the sentret face-off happening before us. {It was quite cryptic, but I was unable to offer any better, so I had to let it stand.}

"I don't—"

{He told you it was a life debt, Captain. I have no idea where he got that idea, but I don't owe you my life at all,} Iris snapped, her back ramrod straight as she refused to look at me, her tail still at attention. {Practically the opposite, actually.}

"Iris, I don't—"

{Shut up and listen for once, would you?}

I stood there, mouth wide open, and she continued: {There are strict rules in my clan. We defend the helpless and protect the weak from danger, but we never, never have anything to do with the humans. It is not our duty to intervene with the affairs of mankind. However your species chooses to destroy itself, the burden will rest on your shoulders. We, the sentret, are the forest's scouts, not your warriors. Any who leave our ranks do so knowing they abandon our ways forever.}

I didn't want her to steer the conversation down this path. I didn't want to let her. "That's, uh, really harsh. Your clan doesn't do a three-strike policy or something?"

{You have no right to insult the ways of the clan. They do what is right.} It took me a moment to tear myself away from the distractions—her upraised tail, her sharpened claws, her bristling fur—to look at her eyes. She wasn't staring at me. She was fixated on the sentret in front of her, which had reformed once again with its face almost pinned against her, all bared teeth and claws. {When I saw you, you were helpless and weak and in danger, and I thought that the laws of the clan would understand that. I did not think that this would be my time of choosing; I merely saw a child in need and was foolish enough to act with my heart instead of my head.}

She sheathed her claws. {I was told that I would receive no aid from the clan, nor from any of the forest. My Captain—} she gestured with her tail to the sentret before her, still chattering silent threats with blank eyes {—told me to find another, to leave and never return.}

"Oh."

{And now I'm stuck with you.}

"Oh," I said again. "Um. Hope I don't disappoint."

First, I'd ruined Gaia's life, and she didn't even know it yet. Luckily for me, I couldn't really ruin the gastly's life, seeing as it had ended before I'd met him, but I was probably on course to ruin his afterlife. And, well, it would seem that I'd done a good job of burning all of Iris's bridges on her behalf. What were the odds? In hindsight, it almost made sense that most of my pokémon were trying to kill me. I'd done a pretty good job of ruining them first.

{I'd hoped you would take the news in a different manner,} Iris replied evenly, slinking away from the sentret gathering around her so she could glare at me five paces from my feet.

I felt a sinking feeling gathering in the pit of my stomach, the same one I'd felt when Bates had finished his story, when Gaia had finished hers. "Iris, I'm sorry. I don't know what you want me to say."

She looked like I'd kicked her in the teeth. {It isn't what I want you to say; it's what you want to say,} she said in a small voice. {I've watched you. Since the moment I had to leave my clan, I watched you from the forest. I wondered if it was worth taking a gamble on you or if I'd be better off trying to live on my own. Maybe you don't get a floor on this tower. Maybe it only works on pokémon. But the thing about you that scares me the most? Everything's a calculation to you, Captain. Everything's a battle. You say what you think other people want to hear.}

I felt my temper flaring up at her, hot and ugly. Bates had caught me by surprise, but— "You people can't just unload sob story after sob story and then expect me to sit through your random, half-assed analysis of my deeper character, okay?" I knew this was wrong, I knew I was supposed to be the better person in this situation, the level-headed voice of reason, the trainer, but I didn't really give a shit. I didn't want to take this lying down. "Especially when you met me less than a week ago. That's not how it works. I'm sorry that I ruined your—no, I'm sorry that your life got incidentally ruined because I happened to show up and then—"

{You ruined everything! Everything I ever had, everything I ever worked for, everything I ever cared about!} Iris hissed back at me, her claws leaving long, real gouges in the floor that didn't dissolve into black smoke. {You stomp around like the rest of your kind, acting as if we're nothing, and you never once even think to notice that—}

"You aren't the only one who's been through tough shit, okay? So don't go around crying like—"

{You humans are all the same. No one else is important but what's happening right beneath your noses, but—}

"You don't know shit about me, okay? You don't know what I've been through. You aren't the only one who's had it rough. You have no right—"

{Stop it, both of you,} Gaia said from my arms. {This is exactly what they want.}

{I'm vaguely inclined to agree,} the gastly chimed in cheerfully. {And I really do dislike agreeing, so I'd take this as a—}

{"Shut up!"} Iris and I shouted at the same time.

I became vaguely aware of how I must've looked to them, and how different it was than how I was supposed to look. Trainers were supposed to be the core, holding everyone together, making the tactical decisions, being the heart of the team. And yet here I was, hands curled into fists, face contorted in anger, and so, so very afraid.

Tough on them. The xatu had given me a murkrow. Clearly I wasn't going to be what a trainer was supposed to be.

"If you don't like it here, then leave," I said, forcing my voice to sound as calm and collected as it ever would at this point. I could hear my words echoing in my ears, in the Tower, all around us. I looked to my right, where the gastly floated, staring with those vacant, vacant eyes that all of the other illusions had. If I passed my hand through him, would yet another voice of reason go up in clouds of smoke as well? "And that goes for any of you."

{Trainer,} Gaia began.

But I silenced her. "This is the package. This is what you get. I'm not going to grow up and become the Champion." I turned back to Iris, who still stood in the tall grass, half her face cast in sickly-green shadow by the light of the pillar. "I'm not going to be your level-headed, military-trained Captain." I turned back to the gastly. "And honestly, I have no idea what you even want from me, but there's a fair chance I can't deliver. Okay? This is it. This is all I have. If you came on board expecting a miracle from me, well. Tough. You're all free to leave this team whenever you want. I won't stop you."

There was one blissful moment where no one moved, and then a sharp fwoosh as Iris brushed past me in a brown blur, turning the yellowing grass behind her to ever-reforming smoke. I watched her run up the stairs, but I made no move to follow.

{Trainer…} Gaia began again.

"I know." I sighed. "I shouldn't have said that."

{On the contrary, ma chérie,} a quiet voice chimed in. The gastly bobbed back into my face, all wisps of purple haze and an ever-presents smile and unmatching blank eyes. {It should be said, however, that tact is most certainly not your strong suit.}

{You should go after her,} Gaia prodded. I waited for her to say anything more, but she fell silent.

For all the bridges I'd burned as of late, I didn't quite have the heart to let another one go. And besides. This brash sentret who had a penchant for speaking too loudly and rushing in too fast had struck a chord with me. After all, it wasn't really her fault that a strange thing had fallen from out of nowhere and basically marked her for grim isolation from the rest of society.

I suppose, to her, that made me the xatu. Which, well, was a little unfortunate. At least the xatu had pretended to understand how hard it was going to make my life before it dropped the bomb that changed everything. I'd sort of just showed up.

It wasn't like I really had a choice. The only way out was through, and I had a sinking hunch that the only way through was together. I could fracture my team and send everything to shit once we got out of the haunted Tower that was currently trying to kill us.

I tightened my grip on my metapod and started walking toward the stairs. Funny how she ended up being the heart of our team more frequently than I did. "I know, Gaia. Let's go."

___________________________________________________________________________​

{I called myself Rousseau,} the gastly said quietly as we looked around. I didn't ask him why he was telling me this now, and I didn't even have to—the answer revealed itself in time.

The fourth floor of Sprout Towever contained absolutely nothing. Short of the sickly central pillar, which still cast the entire room in green light, the entire floor was empty. The wooden panels on the walls and floors looked pristine and undisturbed.

I frowned. "Okay, fess up," I said, back to the gastly. "I'm pretty sure my floor is going to be covered in piles of blood telling me not to lose my way in the dark or something horribly cliché, so what's going on here? And where is Iris?" There was a moment's pause, and I half-expected a giant spectral monster to come tearing out of the clean, polished (was that mahogany?) floors that glimmered in the pulsating light of the pillar.

Nothing happened.

{I believe this is mine, ma chérie,} the ghost said at last, peering over my shoulder. {I'm flattered. I didn't think they would give me a whole floor.} There was an edge to his voice that sounded like he was trying to laugh, like he knew he was supposed to be laughing, and he was failing. {I called myself Rousseau,} he repeated, like a mantra.

"There's nothing here." I expertly stated the obvious.

He drifted into the corner of his room, small blobs of dark energy trailing after his spectral body as he bobbed above the worn floorboards, peering around the rafters. {Only fools are afraid of nothing,} he said, laughing, this time sending little wisps of his astral trail into the floor and waiting for a response that never came. {So I guess, little human, that this would make me a fool, would it not?}

"I'm, uh, really not following what you're saying here. Where's Iris?"

{I assume she did the wise thing and simply continued climbing the Tower,} Rousseau remarked. {After all, who would stop to be afraid of an empty room?}

I could sense more than a little negative sentiment from that one. "Rousseau, are you—"

{I am a young ghost, little human,} the gastly cut me off. {And yes,} he added quickly, seeing my open mouth, {there is such a thing. Time passes differently for us, but even now I can tell that I have spent far less time dead than I did alive. Does that answer whatever question you were about to interrupt me with?} He looked at me, suddenly expectant.

Slowly, I closed my mouth.

{Ghosts are different from other pokémon. We are born from death.} The gastly paused to let his words sink in. {I was born into this world without form or soul or memory,} Rousseau continued calmly. {Only fools fear nothing, as only fools are ignorant and devoid of all knowledge. I have not ventured out of this Tower since I was drawn here after my rebirth.}

I remembered Brigid's words. How the froslass had attacked us without any hesitation. So then—

{I do not know enough about myself or of the outside world to feel fear.} Pause. {When I coalesced, I pieced together what I knew of my existence, and I called myself Rousseau. I have the vaguest recollections of a past life. Now my tabula rasa. It is much easier to leave the slate blank, so I did. I do,} he lied.

There was a long silence.

We'd all been abandoned, in our own ways. I think, even now, that that was what had brought us together at first. The broken have a way of sensing their kin, no matter how many lies they tell. We could hide ourselves behind our respective walls—incessant sarcasm, unfeeling cocoon, bristling fur, coyish indifference—but the truth had a way of seeping out eventually.

"Rousseau, can I ask you something?"

{Fire away. We have no secrets here.}

Goldenrod didn't have many ghosts; most of them were drawn to Ecruteak. I'd grown up on folk stories and urban legends that pokémon who died in battle became ghosts, but then again, I'd also heard that dark-types were soulless killers, so there was that. And I'd grown up since I'd left Goldenrod. I'd met a certain shopkeeper who'd told me something that—"Do you remember anything?" I asked at last. "When you were… you know. Not a ghost."

A flash of fire, a candle in a dark room, and suddenly I realized what it must've felt like to be Bates, reaching out to a past that would never be remembered.

The gastly cringed, and I suddenly realized how vulnerable he was here in the Tower, just like the rest of us, even if his smile could never fade, even if it could only hide the fangs for a moment. {Pieces.} A pause. {I had a good trainer, I think. One of the best. But…}

But they let you die, I finished silently for him, because the gastly could not bring himself to say it. They let you come to this. "We shouldn't stay here," I said at last. That was all we could do at this point. At the top of the Tower, maybe, we could finally find some answers. And Iris.

Even as I approached the stairway leading to the next floor, I knew what was coming next. There was only one left. "The next floor is mine. Let's see what they've got." When I turned back, the gastly was still floating, looking for something he would never find.

They were anything but similar—how Iris lashed out at her illusions, how Rousseau sought them out eagerly, how Gaia had no choice but to sit and endure—but we were all the same. And I knew why.

Once you stood in a dark place like this, the kind with shadows that couldn't be cast out no matter how brightly the Tower's core glowed, there would always be a small part of you in there, fighting. You carried a piece of that fight with you wherever you went, because you had no choice. You carried a piece of that room with you until you won.

"Rousseau? C'mon. It's time to move on."

___________________________________________________________________________​

I had no better words for the mournful gastly who still drifted around the room, a leer fixed permanently to his face, trying to find proof in an empty room that he was still foolish enough to be alive.

The fifth floor didn't quite contain what I was expecting.

But I'd recognize that goddamn hair anywhere at this point.

"No. This is stupid."

At the base of the sprout's column, surrounded by a cloud of black smoke that contrasted wonderfully with his stupid white clothing, was Silver. His stupid abra floated beside him. And Iris wasn't anywhere in sight.

"No," I was saying aloud, already taking strides even as I finished taking the spiral staircase two steps at a time. The blood was boiling in my ears. "There is no way that you're allowed to be my greatest fear. That isn't fair. No. No."

He turned to face me, eyes narrowing in confusion, mouth opening for a response the illusion would never make sound for, but the image was too slow. My hand was already moving. I would turn the picture to dust and we would all move on. It was much easier to just punch him in the face and move on than to contemplate why in the world my greatest fear manifested itself as someone so random, especially since—

"I met you, like, a week ago? This is the stupidest thing I've—"

"What are you—"

Silver, too, must've looked as confused as I did, as my hand did not pass through his face like it was supposed to, and instead landed, quite solidly, on his cheek. He did not vanish in a puff of black smoke like I had been expecting. A simple, quite clever deduction told me this meant he was the real thing.

Ah. Well.

___________________________________________________________________________​

previous || next​

 

[Flaze]

Oh new chapter, this sure is a christmas surprise isn't it? :O

This chapter continued the character story from the last one in a pretty interesting way. Iris' backstory didn't really surprise me much though, in fact it was pretty much what I expected it to be (I think Survival Project did it in the same way too or kind of, it wasn't as emphasized) but the way you went about showing Ely's reaction to it and Iris' own reactions was really nice. I mean what happened was something that was bound to eventually considering the shaky ground that caused Iris to become part of Ely's team.

Ely herself seems to have had just about enough of all these things, she hasn't been able to really have a moment of wuite and tranquility since she started her journey and it just bubbles up. That being said I do think the moment was dramatized a little too much and while I enjoyed her own little detours in her mind which added a layer of humor to it, it did kind of crash with the overall tone of the scene, just a little bit.

Nietzche's was a bit more interesting, it worked to explain the concept of ghost Pokemon and how they work in this story more but also added some thing sto his character. He's a blank slate but he knows that he wasn't always one so I'm sure him getting bits and pieces of his old memories might be something to watch out for? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.

My favorite part of the chapter was the end of it though xD I had honestly forgotten Silver was fought at the top of Sprout Tower. That being said though, if Silver is there does that mean he had to go through his own trial? or did he just get the benefit of being allowed to go up. I'm curious to see which one it is...you know, after he recovers from being sucker punched.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Wahaha, call me senpai again! Quick review here, else it'll be weeks till I manage to do it

First things first – you have this odd habit of naming pokémon without actually doing it in the narrative. Nietzche is another one here. He's named briefly in the last chapter, and TUPpy refers to him by name here, but at no point does he actually give that name himself.

Anyway, this was a good one, so much so that there's really not a lot I can pick on as criticism. I will say that I'm on TUPpy's side in this one. It's a bit of a peeve of mine that pokémon in fanfic always seem to be inherently in the right, whatever their beef is with humans. Now, this is rather more nuanced than that, I hasten to say. Still, I do feel rather sorry for her. Iris is really taking it out on her – poor Unnamed had no idea it would happen and it was Iris' own choice that led to this. So I rather liked TUPpy's response there. Whatever she may think being a trainer is all about, she can't be held completely at the mercy of her own pokémon like so many trainers in fanfic, and to my mind that includes not being an emotional punching bag.

I wonder how this will develop. I'd quite like to see a proper two-way exchange with Iris being forced to admit some hard truths (i.e. it's her own damn fault she got exiled) rather than just TUPpy appeasing her.

 

[kintsugi]

Oh new chapter, this sure is a christmas surprise isn't it? :O

srbs: the gift that keeps on giving

This chapter continued the character story from the last one in a pretty interesting way. Iris' backstory didn't really surprise me much though, in fact it was pretty much what I expected it to be (I think Survival Project did it in the same way too or kind of, it wasn't as emphasized) but the way you went about showing Ely's reaction to it and Iris' own reactions was really nice. I mean what happened was something that was bound to eventually considering the shaky ground that caused Iris to become part of Ely's team.

Yeah, I started kicking myself when I read through Senori's backstory in SP, but playing with the idea of sentret's being scouts and people failing to fill the roles expected of them eventually became so pivotal to this story that I couldn't edit by the time I read SP. Oops. :/

Nietzche's was a bit more interesting, it worked to explain the concept of ghost Pokemon and how they work in this story more but also added some thing sto his character. He's a blank slate but he knows that he wasn't always one so I'm sure him getting bits and pieces of his old memories might be something to watch out for? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.

hi oops I'm an idiot and forgot I ret-conned his name
shhhh
shhhhhh
Rousseau lives on
long live Rousseau
also yeah your spitballing is on-point, as per usual

Wahaha, call me senpai again! Quick review here, else it'll be weeks till I manage to do it

Senpai noticed me!

First things first – you have this odd habit of naming pokémon without actually doing it in the narrative. Nietzche is another one here. He's named briefly in the last chapter, and TUPpy refers to him by name here, but at no point does he actually give that name himself.

Oh dear, this is all kinds of awkward.
As I'm working on the next chapter, yeah, I remembered that I actually named him Rousseau.
Which explains why he never properly introduces himself as Nietzsche, because that was his name from an older draft, and, well, oops.
Fixed...?

I wonder how this will develop. I'd quite like to see a proper two-way exchange with Iris being forced to admit some hard truths (i.e. it's her own damn fault she got exiled) rather than just TUPpy appeasing her.

Hurray! I was always afraid of writing this scene, and most of Iris's early scenes, and I'm glad it turned out okay.

 

[kintsugi]

___________________________________________________________________________​

chapter xii. the ceremony of innocence​

___________________________________________________________________________​

“So, if I may ask,” my unofficial rival said, eyes sliding sideways to look at my hand. “Why are you stroking my cheek.” It wasn’t really a question.

My hand was already flying back to my side and my brain was purging the relevant memories from existence. “I, um, thought you were a spectral projection of my worst nightmare caused by a bunch of vengeful spirits haunting the Tower?” It wasn’t really an answer, either.

My words seemed to rouse him back into action, though. He shot a sharp look at his abra, which began zooming around the room, vanishing the reforming illusion in the back corner into a puff of black smoke. “She was right, you actually would show up in the Tower. But we aren’t doing this here,” Silver snapped, jamming his hands into his pockets and turning toward the stairs. “Let’s move out of here. Where’s your murkrow?”

I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck slowly rising even as I could un-feel my toes going numb. “Hanging around the rafters somewhere,” I lied, trying to think of contingency plans to deal with his abra without Icarus. I stuck my hands into my jacket pockets as well; maybe he’d think I was reaching for a gun and would leave me alone. “He’ll mess up your shit if you try anything.”

He didn’t even bother looking up; instead, he just sighed as if this was the most arduous part of his day. “Did you send him away on purpose or have you lost control of him already?”

“Screw you.” Maybe I could just push past him and run up the Tower, leaving us both to the mercy of the ghosts higher up. “I can control him just fine.”

“Look. I don’t want to repeat last time.” Silver raised his empty hands over his head, as if he thought that would help. As if I didn’t know how quickly things had escalated before. “I won’t do anything dumb if you don’t; I just want some answers. Let’s talk at the top.”

We hadn’t exactly parted on good terms, and I doubted I could scrape another victory now. They’d probably find my corpse rotting here three months later with the rest of the ghosts. “You aren’t, uh, mad that I seriously debated killing you last week?”

Silver looked over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised, with a dubious expression that I interpreted as saying, ‘Are you really trying to shoot yourself in the foot that badly?’ “I think we can agree that was a mistake for both of us,” he said instead. “Now, let’s get moving.”

I frowned, piecing together the puzzle as quickly as I could. Apparently the heir to Team Rocket didn’t want me dead, which was a rather pleasant change of events from last time. However, the ghosts of this Tower did seem to have some malicious intent, so they were becoming the more pressing concern at this point. Another puzzle piece snapped into place. This Silver was real, and it wasn’t my floor, so—

“This is your floor, isn’t it?” I said aloud, stopping where I stood. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the abra appearing around the room in flashes of blue light, clouds of black smoke trailing in its wake as it passed through the illusions before they could solidify. Whatever Silver was hiding here, he really didn’t want me to see. I was curious against my will. Somehow, seeing him here, covering up his fears—it made him seem less like the jackass who had tried to kill me and my pokémon, and more like the frightened kid kneeling in the dirt while I threatened to slash his throat.

I couldn’t let myself forget that he was both, and it had taken him less than five seconds to disarm and threaten to kill me last time.

“My floor?”

“Rousseau can explain it better, but, um…” I trailed off, searching for words.

{The residents of the Tower are projecting illusions of our fears,} the gastly interjected smoothly, perhaps sensing that I was about to say something conjecture-based and factually- incorrect (not that I would ever do such a thing). {Each floor, the ghosts show us what they think will make one of us the most afraid.}

Silver did a little double-take, apparently noticing the gastly for the first time, and then raised his eyebrows and nodded to himself. “Okay. Well. Yeah, that actually fits in with the legends I’ve heard,” he said to himself, and then seemed to remember that he had an audience. “This is going to sound like a trap, but I don’t want to hurt you. I think we need to talk about some things.”

“I don’t want you to hurt me either,” I remarked brightly, but I was painfully aware of how vulnerable I was—my party had dwindled down considerably since our last encounter. Given that Rousseau probably wouldn’t fight for me, I really only had Gaia. And, well, there wasn’t a tree in sight. I’d also promised Bates I wouldn’t do that again. “Also, uh, Admiral Ackbar sends his regards,” I couldn’t help but add.

“Don’t start that. I just have to ask a few things about—”

He said the word ‘ask’ in such a manner that I thought he probably meant ‘arrest’ or ‘punch’ or ‘shank,’ and given that he literally still carried wounds from our last encounter, I didn’t quite blame him.

“—but not here. Next floor.”

This was probably the fifth time he tried to get us to leave this floor. I wondered again what he was so desperate to hide. “No way in hell are we going upstairs for casual conversation, if that’s even what’s going down.” The next floor was probably mine, and if we weren’t going to talk while his psychic rat hid his greatest fears from me, we definitely weren’t going to do it while my nightmares had a playdate all around us. It was going to be distracting enough encountering whatever was up there, even without having Silver trying to do whatever Silver-y things he was talking about.

Silver turned around, his face a mixture of sheer exasperation, anger, and a touch of shock. “I know you’re dense, but I’d hoped you wouldn’t be this stubborn when both of our lives are on the line.”

“Evidently you’ve forgotten that the last time we met, you tried to cut my throat, kill my pokémon, and swore that your organization would hunt me down as I ran away.”

“It was an empty threat, and if I recall correctly, you dropped a tree on Dante.” Silver’s voice was hard. Behind him, the abra stopped its work long enough to glare at me. Long enough for a hulking, dark figure to start rising up in one corner of the room before the abra blasted it back with a quick pulse of blue light.

I cringed. “That was after, though,” I said in a small voice. “And abra heal fast.”

“Yeah,” Silver muttered darkly. “Lucky, that. Given that the pokéballs are still down, I couldn’t have put him in stasis and he would’ve died if he couldn’t Recover.”

There was another unspoken threat in that one, too—that the abra probably wouldn’t have been the only one to die that night, had anything truly bad happened.

“Yeah. Um. Sorry about that.” As much as I wanted to antagonize his stupid face, I couldn’t help but notice the pressing facts: I didn’t have any battlers on hand. He had all the chips. And if he wasn’t going to force a conflict, well, it was best not to incite one on my end. The most pressing query of all, however: what answers was he possibly seeking from me?

{What was Dante’s fear?} Gaia asked suddenly.

Silver gave us a withering glare. “Getting a tree dropped on him by some random psycho and her caterpie.”

“Hey! I’m not random!” I cried out, more out of indignation than anything else, and then my eyes widened as I understood Gaia’s intention. Because, asshole or not, Rocket or not, I had a few questions for this Silver kid as well, and talking peacefully with him wouldn’t be the worst thing I’d done all day. “Oh. She’s right. We can talk downstairs. Depending on how the tower rolls, it should be either Dante’s fear or Rousseau’s—”

{I imagine a hundred philosophy lovers just rolled over in their graves at that one, ma chérie,} Rousseau commented dryly.

“—and, uh, Rousseau’s fear landscape is actually a decent place to talk,” I called over my shoulder as I began descending back down the Tower that wanted us to climb it. I mean, it was that, or the Tower would give a hearty ‘screw you’ toward my attempts at peaceful compromise, and the floor beneath us would still be mine.

“I have no idea what you just said.”

I ignored him. I was focused on getting down the stairs in one piece, and not finding my worst nightmare on the other side. Not like focusing would really help that, but—

We’d stepped back downstairs into an empty room. I exhaled out of relief. “Rousseau?”

{Still mine, I think,} the little gastly confirmed, glancing around the blank pillar again and encountering nothing.

“Okay,” I said, sighing and throwing my pack down so I could lean against the nearest wall and try to appear as comfortable as possible. I knew how to deal with situations like this. Show no fear. The Tower literally brought nightmares to light. Show no fear. Easier said than done. “How exactly is this going to work? We’re just going to sit here and trust each other?”

Silver sat down across from me, so that was at least step one. “Something like that. If you try anything dumb,” he said, looking at me warily, “Dante will—”

“—do something unsavory, okay, okay, I get it.” I honestly had to stop getting held up by people with super-powerful pokémon; it was getting quite distracting. But Silver hadn’t attacked me yet. This is the key mantra that had earned me Icarus’s trust, and I was going to fall back on it now. Whether or not it was because he thought I had some ‘answers,’ which I probably didn’t, was a question for a different time. I sighed and slid down the wall so I was sitting across from him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I muttered.

One of his eyebrows quirked again. “That’s a lie.” His voice was calm and brokered no room for argument.

I scowled. “Fine. I’m not going to hurt you if you don’t hurt me first,” I said, and waited for him to challenge that. He didn’t. “What do you want from me?”

Silver exhaled slowly, one hand drifting to his abra even as his eyes drifted around to study the empty room around us. “I’m not sure,” he said at last. “I know that our first encounter was—”

“The scariest goddamn moment in my life?”

“—less than ideal, yeah.” Distractedly, he ran a hand through his hair. The next most logical thought, of course, involved some jealousy at wherever he was able to take frequent showers, and some admiration for his preferred brand of conditioner.

I shrugged. “Sorry. I was having a rough day.”

Both the abra and its trainer turned to look at us simultaneously. “You were having a rough day?” Silver asked, sounding dubious to the point of disbelief. Almost comedically, the abra and trainer looked back at each other, and then back at us. “And you don’t even think you’re lying about that.”

I blinked, unsure of which part of my statement was so confusing.

{You were having a rough day?} the abra repeated on its trainer’s behalf.

I snorted. “Uh, yeah,” I said, looking back to Gaia for some sort of reassurance. Unfortunately, seeing as she was quite immobile, I couldn’t replicate their look-at-your-starter-then-back-at-me performance very well. “My bus was late, I didn’t have proper change for my fare, and—and, oh, I got myself a starter that wanted to kill me, said starter basically prevented me from ever being a normal trainer, and then I became a public enemy of Team Rocket, which probably means I’ll never see my mother or anyone else I ever cared about again,” I said, counting off the events on my fingers before trailing off. “That was before I almost got gutted by my starter and had a knife put to my throat. It was a bit of a rough day.”

I waited for his response for a lot longer than I’d expected.

The disbelief hadn’t fully faded from Silver’s face when he finally spoke. His breathing was a little uneasy. “My father’s organization was targeted by terrorists, which lead to the power grid exploding—which isn’t supposed to happen; we have precautions for it and they were all compromised—which lead to our Executives getting attacked by nightmares we haven’t seen for a decade, suggestions that malevolent ghosts have returned to Johto, and I also lost access to most of my team to defend myself in the aftermath. And that was just Tuesday.”

I raised my hands defensively. “Hey. Magnarok was my problem too.” Bates had a point; the name really did roll off the tongue if you didn’t think about it for too long.

Rousseau frowned. {Magnarok? Like the World of—no, wait, Johto’s crisis. I understand.}

I’d never been prouder of that gastly.

The look Silver gave the two of us was so pained I may as well have told him I believed the Breloominati were real. In fact, my stupidity was so massive that he completely forgot what he was saying in favor of: “You can’t possibly call the magnetic apocalypse ‘Magnarok.’ Do you realize how ridiculous—”

There was something more pressing than my penchant for borrowing terrible naming schemes, though, something that had just triggered in the back of my mind. “Magnarok was caused by terrorists?”

Silver closed his mouth while we both realized he’d said too much. He looked back to the abra, his brow furrowed, and I assumed some sort of communication passed between them, because the abra quickly said, {Team Rocket does not acknowledge any external threats that would cause any sort of magnetic apocalypse.} It was very careful to stress the last two words.

“Magnarok,” I corrected, just to get the point across, and they both glared at me. I desperately wanted to ask more about whoever had brought the power grid down—what kind of suicidal group of people would pick a fight against Team Rocket? The same idiots who were willing to sacrifice the entire grid, I supposed. The hard look on Silver’s face, however, told me that those answers weren’t coming out today.

{I think their point is that you’re preaching to the choir about having it rough,} Gaia offered.

I pretended not to hear her, though. It was a lot easier to act like I was the only one who had a rough day when everything went to shit, even though basically every interaction I’d had with a living being since then (Bates, Gaia, Iris, Rousseau, and now even Silver) had turned into some ploy for me to pity them. All that considered, though, Silver might’ve been one of the few people (besides Ariana. Oops) who’d had it worse this week than I had. All of his life’s work collapsing around him, getting beaten up by a caterpie, and even if— “Wait. What do you mean, you lost access to your team? Your abra’s right there.”

I would’ve had a more receptive and believing audience had I tried to explain that grass was blue. Silver sat for a moment, his mouth open with no words coming out, and I watched him struggle to think of the appropriate thing to say. “Are you dense? Dante isn’t my only pokémon,” he managed at last.

I mentally kicked myself, given that I was holding, sitting next to, chasing, and ditching pokémon in the woods that weren’t my starters. Granted, Rousseau wasn’t mine at all, and I figured it was pretty unnatural for trainers to have a team of four before their first gym badge, but—

“I’ve been officially licensed for over six years,” Silver said, having slowed his speech to the point that I’d seen slugma move faster. “And I’ve been around pokémon basically since birth thanks to my father, who happens to head the most powerful organization in Johto. You honestly thought I was just running around at my age doing work for Team Rocket with a newborn abra and a shitty knife?”

Now it was my turn to gape at him. “When we battled on the route to Cherrygrove—”

{I told you she was really this dense,} the abra muttered snidely.

“The pokéballs have been down,” Silver explained, trying to sound patient and clearly failing. “The other two on my team, including my long-distance teleporter, are stuck in stasis in their balls until I can get back to Goldenrod and get them out again. Dante can handle most of the things that come our way, so I have it better than most, but it’s been rough.”

In hindsight, this explained a lot, like how his abra was so good at fighting, or how it had already learned TM’s, or really how Silver had behaved like he was leagues better than me when— clearly, he was.

Huh. It seemed like I’d made a lot of poorly-informed decisions last week.

“What, and next you’re going to tell me that you’re not the heir to Team Rocket,” I muttered. “Don’t tell me I screwed that one up too.”

There was an awkward silence.

“What?” I asked, and then instantly wished I hadn’t.

{You told him not to tell you.} The abra looked about as amused as I was, which is to say, not very much.

Well, shit.

“The blatant favoritism in the old system—Elm giving out rare pokémon to his chosen few, gyms and Elite positions being passed down through families, and trainer licenses being affordable only to the wealthy—were some of the key principles that Team Rocket strove to destroy when we took over,” Silver said at last. I recognized that exact sentence from one of my history books, but I didn’t interrupt him. “We wanted to give Johto back to her people, so we tore down the old ways and rebuilt the system based on merit. We believe in survival of the fittest. If you prove yourself strong enough to be a Gym Leader, Elite, Champion, whatever, then we give you the position, no questions asked. Team Rocket’s leadership functions the exact same way. My father’s job will go to whomever has proven themselves most fit.”

“I’m sure Daddy gave you a head start, though,” I couldn’t help but add snidely.

Wrong move. I flinched as his hand curled into a tight fist around the handle of his backpack. “Daddy,” he said in a careful, controlled voice, “ensured that I was a rival to all of his Executives the minute I was born. I had no other career path than to follow in his shadow. Archer first tried to kill me when I was six, and when I told my father, he told me I should’ve expected it and that I needed to toughen the fuck up.”

Huh. I might’ve actually just met someone who had father issues that rivaled my own.

Silver rested his other hand, the one that wasn’t strangling his backpack, on his outstretched knees and looked up into the rafters. His expression was unreadable. “I’m not going to just walk into that office one day and take his chair without a fight. When I do, I will have to be the very best, like no one else.”

I fished around for a more cheerful topic that wouldn’t end with my face getting pummeled into the floor. For all the bad choices I’d made in this conversation so far, and my interactions with Silver in general, I probably couldn’t do worse than what I’d done already. “Six years, huh?” I glanced at the metapod in my arms, and then back at the trainer in front of me. “So your Gift manifested?”

“Not fully.” I had a feeling that, given our current vein of conversation, I wasn’t going to get elaborate answers.

Still, I was curious. They said that after living among the ghosts for so long, Ecruteak’s gym leader had developed the Gift to commune with them. Pryce had been reported to make it rain snow on his foes, although that had taken him decades to master. Daisy, the aptly-named girl in my Pokémon Anatomy class whom the xatu had given an oddish (who’d evolved into a vileplume by then) had been suspiciously good at growing plants when she’d visited home last year. “Then what has six years of training with your psychics given you?”

Another perk of living in a Rocket psychic-dictatorship, and a really tempting reason to wander the wilderness at the age of ten—the xatu could determine a starter that would literally give you minor superpowers if you spent enough time working together. We’d discovered something with our training system—it wasn’t just the pokémon that got stronger, although the growth of the trainer was a lot more subtle. A newborn oddish could already throw down seedlings at will, but it took Daisy four years of constant symbiotic training to get a quasi-green thumb. You could only do so much when humans weren’t designed to be conduits of indescribable power, after all. But some people hit the elemental jackpot. If you were linked to psychics—

“Lie detection,” Silver said evenly, eyes settling back on me. “In a world full of psychics, not the most useful of powers.”

Huh. Not useful in his eyes, but that did make things a lot more inconvenient for me. Unconsciously, I began mentally going through all of our conversations, wondering if he’d ever pretended to believe me on something. And then I considered a few other things, and a way to fact-check. “That’s a gateway into empathy or telepathy, though.”

Silver looked surprised. In his defense, it was probably the most intelligent-sounding thing he’d heard me say. Like, ever.

“My Childhood Aptitude Tests were pointing me toward a psychic, grass, or flying-affinity, so I ended up researching some of the things that could develop from that before I left,” I said, raising my hands in the air defensively. “And sometimes I actually know things.”

“The xatu gave you a murkrow after your CAT’s flipped psychic?” Silver asked.

My eyes narrowed. “You tell me.”

Pause.

His eyes narrowed. “Well-played.”

He didn’t seem terribly adverse to my fake-lie, and he’d seen through a lot of my real-lies pretty easily, which at least somewhat suggested that he could sense that I was telling the truth. Interesting. Ideally, I’d figure out a way to make it out of the Tower alive and would never see Silver again thereafter, but if our paths crossed again, I’d have to watch my tongue.

A second realization hit me. With only Gaia and maybe a gastly on my side, I didn’t stand a chance against whatever was trying to lure us to the top, let alone Silver. It would probably be beneficial for my short-term survival to keep Silver around, even if I was screwing myself over in the long-term. It wasn’t like planning was really my strong suit.

{Your Gift is already fairly impressive for such little time,} the abra remarked. Its tail flicked through the air.

My reply was on reflex. “It hasn’t manifested yet; I got my starter a week ago.”

The abra and its trainer exchanged a knowing look. Something significant had just happened, and I had no idea what.

I frowned. I didn’t have a Gift, as far as I knew.

Then again, my basic knowledge of telepathic principles told me that it only counted as a lie if the speaker believed it was true.

Was this a test? Had I failed?

“Well-played,” I muttered darkly. I could only be clever for so long.

Current theory: I had manifested a minor Gift, Silver knew about it, and I didn’t. But—

Gaia broke into my train of thought. {If you’ve been together so long that Silver has part of his Gift, if we were so outmatched, how did Icarus win against Dante?} Gaia asked.

The answer was immediate, too fast and too certain for a lie: {Because we wanted to lose,} the abra said as it floated calmly alongside its master, its voice betraying nothing. {Silver wanted to test a theory.}

“What,” I said flatly. And then: “Why?”

There was a long pause.

“I think,” Silver said at last, choosing his words carefully, “that there’s a lot they haven’t told you.”

I found myself holding on just a little tighter to Gaia. My foundation. “Um. Okay.”

The abra looked expectantly at its trainer, and I could sense a nonverbal conversation going on between them, one that quickly devolved. “You do it,” Silver hissed aloud.

{Not my job. This was your idea.}

“But—”

{Nope.}

“Fine.” Silver paused, fishing carefully for his words. “Before he died, the xatu spoke of an ancient darkness being unleashed upon Johto again, the kind that we haven’t seen for years.” Another pause. Silver took a deep breath and steeled himself. “There’s no way to prove it, but clearly you and the xatu have some sort of connection, and he knows a lot more about you than he let on. He claimed you were marked to him, which is why he broke a decade’s worth of tradition and was willing to die just to give you this starter, to mark you in return. And what he said after—” Looking like he would rather individually rip off his toenails than say this, he said, “We think you’ve, well—” he cleared his throat uneasily “—been possessed by a ghost. Possibly several.” He finished his sentence so quickly that I thought I hadn’t heard him correctly.

{He thinks,} Dante added quickly.

“Sorry, what?” I’d been expecting an absurd variety of responses, but that certainly hadn’t been up there. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Rousseau flinch. “Why the hell would you—”

{I told you she wouldn’t take it well.} The abra tilted its head to one side, studying me carefully.

“That’s completely unfounded bullshit,” I spluttered at last, remembering the hissing monk downstairs. “Here, you can lie detect me. I am not possessed by a ghost. Or several ghosts.”

Silver sighed and interlaced his fingers beneath his chin. “You wouldn’t be aware of possession, so you’d think you’re telling the truth regardless.”

I knew that. We both knew that. But I was panicking now, overlooking the obvious facts in favor of the easier answer. I thought of the sage downstairs. “Look. I don’t know much about ghosts, but side effects of possession include hissing maniacally, turning into smoke, being dead—”

“Being drawn to the Tower, sporadic fits of uncontrolled violence with no previous history, memory loss, and attracting fellow ghosts to you,” Silver said smoothly, with a pointed glare at Rousseau. He studied the gastly a moment longer before turning back to me. “Ghosts rarely show themselves to the living, unless it is to battle or to feed.”

“I didn’t know that ghosts could possess the living.” I didn’t know that ghosts could possess the dead, either; long-forgotten lessons from school were starting to come rushing back. Ghosts were honestly quite uncommon in Johto; outside of the Towers and the occasional type-specialist, they weren’t a frequent sight. Bates’s litwick had been the first ghost I’d seen in years.

“They rarely take a living host, but it’s not unheard of.” He met my eyes. “Ever felt like you were watching yourself hurt people and you couldn’t do anything about it? Your body would’ve seemed cold and distant, like it wasn’t even yours.”

‘No,’ I began indignantly, and then stopped. I knew that cold feeling he was talking about.

Escaping from New Bark by mauling Ariana. Calling Icarus off of her. Reacting to Silver’s abra taking down Icarus. Commanding Gaia to drop a tree on them. Cutting Silver’s face. And—

Silver reached into his pocket and pulled out his knife, flicking it open in a casual motion. Another moment, and the abra had teleported it half an inch in front of my face, right between my eyes.

Panic was setting in, quickly numbed by cold and calculation. Our truce was over, then. My eyes narrowed and I was already running through options. Abra had fast reaction times, so it’d have to be put off guard quickly before it pushed the blade through my skull. I tapped one finger on the ground, pointing it toward the abra. Gaia wouldn’t be able to do anything in time, but I could get Rousseau to—

Thankfully, the gastly understood and surged forward. My vision blurred as my head ducked sideways even as Rousseau began lobbing a tendril of darkness toward the abra, who had to relinquish control of the knife so it could defend itself. My hand grabbed the hilt out of the air, letting Gaia slip behind me as my feet surged forward, covering the distance between us in three smooth steps so the blade was pointing back at his face.

“We promised to keep this civil,” my voice growled, jabbing at him a little to get the point across better. “You want another scar to match the first?”

The abra blasted Rousseau back with a wave of blue light, pointed one paw at me, and teleported the knife out of my grasp and into Silver’s outstretched hand.

They were stronger than expected. Maybe we could—

“This is what I was talking about,” Silver said in a quiet, almost sad voice as he also stood up and began dusting himself off airily. He motioned with three fingers to his abra, which stopped trying to dissolve Rousseau in an instant. “How much of that were you actually aware of?”

I was shaking my head. The panic began to set in as the numbness wore off. I was aware that I was breathing heavily, and I took several staggering steps backward so I could lean against the wall next to Gaia. “What?”

Slowly, Silver snapped the knife back shut and put it back in his pocket. “Ghosts typically assert themselves when the host is too emotionally unstable to suppress them.”

“I’ve been angry without literally turning into a monster before,” I said, trying to sound calm and failing.

“You wouldn’t remember.” Silver didn’t let me finish my thoughts. “But that’s why Dante didn’t support my idea at first. He was focused on the murkrow when you two attacked Ariana, but I was looking at you. Your eyes changed.” Silver shook his head. “So later, when we tried to piss you off that entire fight and nothing happened, Dante almost convinced me you were just some idiot who’d panicked. I thought maybe almost losing would trigger it, or even winning, but that didn’t happen. You react like anyone else with an extremely short fuse and lack of intelligent planning—”

“Was that really necessary?”

“—but it’s when your life is threatened that you start to lose it, isn’t it?” he finished softly, raising one eyebrow as he studied me. “That’s when the gloves come off and you start ordering your caterpie to kill.”

One of the things on Silver’s list of nightmarish things that happened to him last Tuesday was the return of ghosts to Johto. One of the things on that list might’ve been me.

Silver bit his lip. The asshole almost sounded sad when he added, “And I’ve heard—from a source that I’m very inclined to believe—that if I entered here, today, I would find a possessed human trapped in the Tower.”

I bristled. “What source would tell you that?”

He glanced at his abra for advice before saying, “The Celebi.”

I couldn’t help it. “The Forest Queen?” I asked, in case there was another one and this was all a misunderstanding.

He nodded.

Holy shit.

Three weeks ago, after I’d already made up my mind that I would have to start my journey, I’d gotten a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It turned out it was Daisy’s mother, telling me that Daisy had been brutally injured in a training accident up in the Ice Path. She wasn’t conscious, but surely she would appreciate it if I visited her in the hospital before I left.

That whole time, as I’d picked nervously at the denim of my jeans until I thought I would chafe my fingers raw, I couldn’t think about Daisy. I felt bad about that, because she was the one with the collapsed lung, four broken ribs, and a coma. She couldn’t hear me anyway, which was a blessing, but I kept thinking about how, in a couple of weeks, I would be next. I knew that was the wrong focus, and that I should’ve been thinking about my injured classmate, but I couldn’t do it. The guilt, the denial, the sickening feeling that something was wrong with me, tasted like bile.

The toxic feeling of the revulsion forcing its way back up my throat returned to me now. One, the Forest Queen was on my long list of things I was a threat to, which was already quite lengthy. And two, there was a mounting pile of evidence that I was in way over my head.

I wanted to vomit.

No, what I really wanted was to find enough evidence to empirically shred his assertion. So I could, you know, prove that I was just an asshole who wanted to survive, not an idiot possessed by ghosts. Honestly, when you put it that way—

It still wasn’t better to be possessed, no. I’d take being an asshole any day, so long as my actions were my own.

I realized Silver was watching me. His gaze was almost sympathetic.

Without taking my eyes off of him, and through the nausea that threatened to overwhelm me, I leaned down to pick up Gaia. I had a feeling that the time for sitting and trusting each other was over. “Say you’re right and I’m possessed,” I began uncertainly. “Which I’m not, by the way, but if we’re just being hypothetical here.” I stopped and took a breath. I wasn’t going to believe this until there was literally no other options left. “Why me? And what now?”

Silver sighed and swung his backpack onto his shoulders. He studied me for a moment longer, and then turned his gaze upward, toward the rafters of the empty room that reflected Rousseau’s fears, toward the top of the Tower. “That’s what I wanted to find out.”

___________________________________________________________________________​

previous || next​

 

[Beth Pavell]

Senpai noticed me!

I knew college would turn you into a flirt

Technical Accuracy/Style

the clarifed repeated

Positive you didn't mean that

Story
Well. This was quite the game-changer, wasn't it. That matter-of-fact business in the earlier chapters wasn't entirely down to your limitations as an author. I mean, I stick by my assertion that it had a habit of slowing the narrative. I'm also sure that it would have been more effective if we'd seen more of TUPpy emoting outside of the calculating moments.

All that being said, I've consistently liked that you don't do the obvious. This doesn't turn out to be a battle at all and we actually get some more breadcrumbs regarding what kicked off the plot in the first place. Related to Character below, it's not a bad thing that Silver becomes more of a antagonist rather than flat-out villain … but it would be nice if his general lack of empathy wasn't forgotten.

Oh, and I smell a red herring. I have a suspicion that Silver can't read TUPpy at all.

Setting
That's a clever explanation regarding human psychics. The world continues to generally work – what I'm curious to see is the downside of the Rocket regime. So far it's boiled down to that kids can be executed, but I'll bet that any dictatorship will have its detractors, and probably for good reason.

Characters
Silver is ok as the antagonist in this chapter. I mean, I still maintain that he's rubbish at empathy, playing sorrow Olympics when he really is a major source of TUPpy's problems. Whatever else he's gone through, TUPpy's just been thrown into all this, as Silver is well aware.

Little more breadcrumbs on TUPpy herself, and I say more of that!

Final Thoughts
You're really getting a lot of mileage out of Sprout Tower, aren't you?

 

[AceTrainer14]

Review Game brought me back here, but I've meaning to do the old binge read for a while.

I am in two minds about your progress here. Firstly, things have kind of slowed down by having her in a tower for four chapters. I was kind of hoping to find a battle against Falkner closer by the end of this, so I'm a bit disappointed by that. However, the character development here is interesting and intriguing.

I still think you are one of the best writers of Pokemon on this site. The end of the Gaia chapter made me pause for a while and think about my own stories; a remarkable achievement. It felt a bit too early for the Iris/TUPy (I nearly called her Alaska; am I that vain or is that a fair mistake?) face-off and revelations, in my view, but it was interesting all the same. I think that perhaps things are getting a tad too philosophical: you are a talented writer and you do this all well, but it feels like reading a thesis sometimes where every chapter/discussion has to be a deep and meaningful discussion. I think you are talented enough to show development without having to have these long monologues.

The ghost revelation and drawbacks to the beginning are fascinating and it's interesting to see where we will go from here or what TUPpy's floor will reveal. I just hope that the pace of the story will pick up to match these revelations. Silver's retort about his cheek made me chuckle.

Overall, well written as always, your characters are great as always, the plot is thickening at least which is making me interested for the next chapters. Your pace just always worries me: I feel like the only way this story can carry on is if it ends at Goldenrod. I don't know if you are going to do a full eight gym thing, and I doubt this will be that kind of story, but the quality of writing does not help the fact things will languish a bit if we need four chapters just to get to one big reveal.

 

[Flaze]

Oh wow Silver can actually be a pretty rational guy :O I will agree with Pavell that he's not completely right in his treatment of Ely just cause he also had a tough time, it's not nearly as tough as hers was consideirng how sudden it was.

Still it was a really good chapter in the sense that it humanized him a lot more than a lot of stories tend to with the poor guy, granted the angle you decide to go with isn't one that's been unseen but it was still good the way you went about it. An dI was really glad that he and Ely could at least talk civilly.

The revelation at the end was really interesting and makes sense of a lot of the way Ely acts sometimes but I'm still not completely sold on it, I mean there wasn't really tha tbig of a hint that she was possessed just from her changing her attitude when she's in danger, I think that could still be explained with he rjust being secretly psychotic or something but the possession thing still makes sense of the way she acts at least.

Anyways I actually thought they had reached the end of the tower in the last chapter xD; so I was confused at the start of this one. But I'll wonder what we'll see on Ely's floor and just how Celebi is going to come into play in all of this.

 

[LightningTopaz]

Post awards feedback:

Plot: 8/10

This story explores what would have happened if the Rocket attack in GSC had succeeded--while not particularly new ground, it would have been nice to have just a little bet of set up so we, the audience, understood what was going on here. At the same time, dropping the audience in medias res allows them to see what the narrator sees, and watch the world being built first hand.

Setting: 8/10

Here we have something that isn't done too much--an apocalyptic Pokeworld. The little details the narrator gives (such as describing the Xatu as "damning" her, and the eerie silence as the power grid shuts off in Chapter 2 really lend a spooky feel and a sense of urgency to the scene without it coming across as heavy handed. (and for some reason I imagined the song "Skyfall" playing in my head as I read Chapter 2)

Characterization: 9/10

The narrator's film noir-like commentary really makes this story shine--that despite the reluctance to go on her quest (such as saying the Xatu has damned her, for example), she does in fact, care for her Pokemon (as we see when she panics over Gaia disappearing. We also see the toll the chaos around her takes on her as we see her jittery thoughts.

Style: 7.5/10

At the same time, however, the film noir-esque commentary and the quick and snappy thoughts of our heroine tends to lead to a lot of telling and not enough showing. It is one thing to say a character feels an emotion, but adding in details of that emotion (shaking and sweating palms for fear, for example) would really enhance what is already here--and lead to some interesting description

Technical: 9/10

A few minor inconsistencies here and there, but no major dealbreakers.

Final Score: 80/100

As it is, this is a hauntingly beautiful and at times entertaining look into a different side of an in game event. However, the quick and snappy style of writing is a double edged sword--while entertaining to read, a little more showing and a little more detail could really make the story shine.

 

[Beth Pavell]

First response from the Awards, and as usual I'm going to go for a different approach. Part of the judging wasn't taking into account the latest chapter, of course, which rather does cast the first few in a different light.

The first thing to mention is, despite in other respects your technical accuracy being spot on, you do have a habit of mentioning pokémon names out of place. I mean, this time round Icarus got referred to by name before TUPpy formally names him - in Chapter Three, so I think that was an editing error. You already know about the Nietzsche/Rousseau one.

Anyway, a few things I picked up on, chapter by chapter, since that's how I organised my notes anyway:

One: "Hanging when done properly breaks the neck. Just being pedantic." - ok, that really is pedantic because TUPpy might not know that, but if she's seen hanging executions she'd have cause to know different.

Two: Now is that reference to Whitney next door a coincidence, I wonder ...

Five: I apparently spotted a moment when you say Silver is wearing dark clothes where in his introduction in Chapter Four you explicitly state that they're white. Except I can't find the damn mistake now because I didn't note it down > >

Eight: Now this partly a reprise of things I've said before, but I just didn't believe in TUPpy's panic in this chapter. There was also rather a lot of cursing from her, for a girl who supposedly has a hard time bringing herself to swear. A possible mistake, I'm not sure

Ten: Further up and further in! I saw that Narnia reference.

So anyway, having re-read the whole thing, edited, it does flow better this time in the earlier chapters. When it comes to TUPpy's ... what's the word? Dissonant coldness? I think it's too much on the subtle side. At the moment it could easily be mistaken for you not being very good at emotion, so when it does come out in Thirteen, a first time would have to actively look back to find the clues, I think. Ideally you want to the immediate reaction to be "Oh yeah, so that's what that was about".

I suppose it will come as no surprise when I say that your style is still very much a double-edged sword. You've learned to balance things up better, no question. However, I'm finding that TUPpy tends to monologue rather than emote. We still don't really have a moment where the ordinary girl from Goldenrod really acts like it - yes, she has a reason to be suddenly violent and calculating when Ariana or Silver are immediate threats, but where is it when she's alone in the forest with no survival skills in a world that's been turned upside down? Where are her moments where she remembers what life was like?

The fact that you took Best Dark and Best Story says that fundamentally {some rise by sin} is a good story. What I found to criticise there is really the one or two things the story is missing

 

[AetherX]

Bear with me. It's been a while since I did a non-awards review, I think I might pull a muscle. I'm going to go for a bunch of quotes and then maybe have some wrap up thoughts at the end. Hope it works out.

“So, if I may ask,” my unofficial rival said, eyes sliding sideways to look at my hand. “Why are you stroking my cheek.” It wasn’t really a question.

BECAUSE THIS JUST TURNED INTO ANOTHER SHITTY AUTHOR-INSERT/EDGY RIVAL SLASH FIC UGGGHHH I KNEW IT.

“Also, uh, Admiral Ackbar sends his regards,” I couldn’t help but add.

“Don’t start that. I just have to ask a few things about—”

Silver can't repel snark of that magnitude.

“It was an empty threat, and if I recall correctly, you dropped a tree on Dante.”

This is still something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me and I'm not sure I ever talked about it? Maybe I did? Too lazy to go back and check. So... reiterating some points.

I don't understand how silk, that is made to attach a bug to a tree, can somehow cut through the trunk of a tree. Nevermind getting all sticky and slowed down, that string shot has the destructive power of a twelve gauge shotgun! When I first read that scene, I assumed it worked because the tree in question was pretty small. Yet somehow it knocked out Dante and it's been brought up multiple times as some huge asshole-y thing to have done. And I'm sitting here like "It's just some branches get the fuck over it" which is apparently not the reaction you were going for. So I'm assuming the tree was actually sizable. I know we all make fun of Pav for his tree descriptions, but in this case it would have been nice. Or at least a description of the explosive power of those string shots.

Anyway, I know this happened many chapters ago, but the point I'm trying to make is that description is important mkay. Even in action scenes. And especially in action scenes that are going to get referenced later.

There was another unspoken threat in that one, too—that the abra probably wouldn’t have been the only one to die that night, had anything truly bad happened.

Except if the abra had died then Silver would have been in no position to make threats. Bob Ross here and her quirky band of unlikely badass animal friends would have torn him a new asshole.

I mean, it was that, or the Tower would give a hearty ‘screw you’ toward my attempts at peaceful compromise, and the floor beneath us would still be mine.

inb4 Melinda Gates's worst fear is actually a calm discussion with Silver anyway.

“You were having a rough day?” Silver asked, sounding dubious to the point of disbelief.

He says, despite being totally aware of the fact that she was pretty much exiled from average society and now has a price on her head from the most powerful organization in the region. What a dick.

Magnarok

This is why you won Best Story. I need to go back and reread to see the introduction of this Holy Grail of a term.

I mentally kicked himself, given that I was holding, sitting next to, chasing, and ditching pokémon in the woods that weren’t my starters.

Jarring typo is jarring.

You honestly thought I was just running around at my age doing work for Team Rocket with a newborn abra and a shitty knife?”

You honestly think that's not kinda par for the course? You and I both know that there are some wildly incapable Rocket grunts that are going to get their asses kicked by a teenage girl in the near future.

When I do, I will have to be the very best, like no one else.”

So close and yet so far.

“So your Gift manifested?”

And the entire following conversation.

This is a really cool idea, and one that adds another layer of originality to an already very original story. My main concern is that surely this would have come up earlier? I suppose that's a side-effect of taking the non-stop action route of plot structure rather than taking time to set up the world and characters before nonchalantly kicking them off the cliff that is the first turning point. In light of that, I guess this is the best place to put this kind of exposition, though I think a couple casual, unexplained references to "Gifts" would have been nice before this (unless there were and I missed them).

And then I considered a few other things, and a way to fact-check.

As a fellow first-person writer, I can appreciate the delicacy of handling keeping things a secret from the reader. It can be hard to write stuff like this in a way that isn't super confusing, but you do a pretty good job here. That said, a word of warning: few things piss me off more than an unhelpful first-person narrator.

Childhood Aptitude Tests

Again, this feels like something that should have been at least mentioned before, if not explained.

{Your Gift is already fairly impressive for such little time,} the abra remarked. Its tail flicked through the air.

Is her Gift being a fucking insane murderer?

The abra looked expectantly at its trainer, and I could sense a nonverbal conversation going on between them, one that quickly devolved. “You do it,” Silver hissed aloud.

{Not my job. This was your idea.}

“But—”

{Nope.}

“Fine.” Silver paused, fishing carefully for his words.

*whip crack*

memory loss

Sounds to me like Jay Gatsby needs to get a watch ASAP. Gotta keep track of those sudden time skips.

More on ghost possession later.

He glanced at his abra for advice before saying, “The Celebi.”

Wait, what?

I feel like this is supposed to be some kind of revelation, but it's not really. Frederic Chopin seems surprised and has a reaction that makes no sense whatsoever because we don't know anything about this "Forest Queen" outside of meta-knowledge of Pokemon. The general tactic for dealing with a revelation that hasn't been foreshadowed or had its impact explained earlier in the story is to immediately turn around and explain what's going on. Instead we get a little anecdote about Daisy, which is nice but has no apparent connection to what's going on now. The implied connection is the feeling of "something is wrong with me," but that feeling doesn't make sense in this situation. Minerva McGonagall instead feels like she's in way over her head. That's fair, but I don't see the connection to the little anecdote.

And then we just move on past Celebi with no explanation of anything (most importantly, why Dahlia Sin'felle thinks she's a threat to Celebi). I know this is a dark fic and there's supposed to be a lot of vagueness and mystery, but see my warning above about narrators. I guess it's a subjective, artistic choice, but it's not one I'm a huge fan of.

Anyway, ghosts. At first I was about to go off about the importance of foreshadowing again, but you clearly point out in the story that you did foreshadow it more than a little, even if there was no conceivable way for anyone to guess what was going on. So I guess my main surprise with that revelation is the fact that it seems like a bit of a departure from the tone of the rest of the fic up to this point. I imagined this as being more of a gritty, "realistic" (or as realistic as this kind of thing can get) take on the Pokemon world. Ghost possession is quite far outside of what I expected. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The story's still pretty new and finding its footing. I look forward to see where this twist takes things.

Also, I may have interpreted this wrong, but if Aaron Copland is possessed by a ghost would her floor be empty too?

Overall, I really liked this chapter. I genuinely hope that Silver and Merethe Soltvedt don't end up fighting before leaving the tower. This kind of calm, sensible conversation was an awesome subversion. It's great to see two survival minded characters not attempt to kill each other at first glance (which is not the kind of thing you'd really want to do in a survival situation). I'm very interested to see where you take Silver's character from here, and what happens of all these new plot elements.

Phew. Man, being critical and witty at the same time is hard. I apologize for any and all unfunny-ness. I missed reviewing. I didn't miss staying up until 3AM to finish reviews.

Also, I'm running out of improvised names for your narrator (because we're not allowed to use the same one twice) so I'm afraid I'll have to make use of some more obscure references

 

[diamondpearl876]

Looks like it's literally been a year since I reviewed this. I think I stopped because I asked questions in my last review and they were never answered, to be honest. But uh, I'm trying to review more and I do love you (I don't think we were talking before I reviewed the first time, actually) so here we go.

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.

Okay, as a bird owner I found this hilariously adorable. XD Anytime I think something is wrong with my bird, she goes and does something stupid she normally does and I think... "Nevermind, she's fine!"

He made it sound like the whole thing was his contribution to the field of stand-up comedy.

Isn't that what being a trainer in this Johto is all about? Being comedic?

“I’m not going to learn how to use a knife to kill people,” I said, flapping my arms as if that would help get my point across better. I stamped my foot into the ground for good measure.

Being immature won't get you very far in this world, nameless protag. But I'll be interested to see how you play out the whole pokemon vs guns debate everyone talks about in blogs but never actually really explores it in-fic.

“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.”

I guess that's one way to make her do what you want her to, especially if she owes you. Say you'll be doing her a favor.

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—

I like that your protag has decent flaws that obviously pose a threat to her, but I'm honestly not seeing many strengths here. Her light, saracastic narrative in the midst of dark situations doesn't get her far, and actually I find it kind of grating sometimes. She seems grateful to Bates and Brigid, yeah, but even in that scene she secretly wanted to keep the money. I can't think of much else at the moment. This whole aftermath chapter actually throws all her flaws into her face, so maybe we'll see some change from here.

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?”

I suppose this conversation actually expresses the real importance of your protag needing strengths, if she's going to believe she's not evil.

“Pokémon are careful when they attack each other. Even when ordered by their trainers, they’ll normally never attack one another meaning to cause lethal harm. The intent to kill comes from humans.”

Now there's a fascinating concept I'm sure will keep showing up as the fic goes on.

“Look at me. Promise me you understand. Pokémon are fragile. The Rockets love their pokémon. Their pokémon are also fragile. You do not fucking hurt their pokémon.” He paused, and seemed to reconsider things a little. “You actually do not hurt any pokémon, but not all trainers are going to ruin you the way the Rockets will.”

I actually really like Bates in this scene. He goes just a tiny bit overboard, but it seems emotion-driven, which isn't the most unforgiving reason, I suppose.

“I said goodnight.” He muttered something to Brigid, and the litwick plunged the room into darkness, leaving me staring at the darkened ceiling and wondering just how long it would take me to lose myself in this dark.

The last part of this sentence hits hard, but it would probably be more impactful if the word "dark" wasn't used 3 times so close together.

Shit, this is why I wasn’t supposed to leave my metapod in charge of the heavy literature.

This is when trusting your pokemon goes too far, I suppose. XD

All of that had somehow fit into a single ‘tret.’ I didn’t quite understand the semantics of pokémon communication quite yet.

Andddd as a speech therapy major I find all these details about linguistics very interesting. XD

Damn it all. 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-short, too-orange hair. “Do you have a name?”

I wonder if nameless protag here would be so eager to abandon them in a less cruel world. I'd like to think she wouldn't be so eager, but alas.

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 naming himself for an instant before settling.

This whole interlude was fairly well done, but I think I like Silver's introspective part right here the most. Names really are more than just words.

“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.

I'm finding it hard to understand why she needs supplies that badly, so soon, after a week. You made it pretty clear she was going to be okay for the long haul, several times too.

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.

Another thing about the narration you could probably stand to drop is the rehash of information like this. We already know all these things about the pokemon, and in fact they were just mentioned right before this bit, just in separate sentences. You also have a tendency to re-explain the events of previous chapters, but it's mostly for humor and doesn't actually remind me of what happened, nor does it add to what happened. In short, none of it is needed.

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.

Well, maybe this explains why she needs supplies. She's using them all carelessly. XD Which fits her character at the moment, really.

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.

Beautiful section at the middle of this chapter here (extends before/after this quoted paragraph, but am only quoting this for post length). Love the take on Violet City and its people, as well as the protag's little revelation. This chapter (middle part, anyway) was desperately needed.

One of them, a trainer with dark hair and a red vest, appeared beside me, a pokéball in his hand and a small, golden electric-type that I recognized as a pikachu perched on his shoulder.

What's up, Red? Didn't imagine seeing you here.

Rather than reeling back in abject terror, some part of my mind was casually admiring what I was seeing and imagining how to best study this for science. I’d seen it before—when I’d first met Icarus, for example—where my rational brain didn’t quite catch up to whatever else was going on around me, so I was instead left tilting my head to one side as I airily dissolved another trainer with a flick of my wrist. Why was this happening?

I vaguely understand this brain error, if that's what you want to call it. I also vaguely wonder if something--something that can named scientifically in fic, anyway--is actually wrong with her brain, since Silver pointed out a sense of oddness and now she herself has too.

She’d still been a caterpie when we’d met. She’d had sixteen trainers before me and not a single one had even used her enough to get her to evolve.

Nameless protag is going to feel shitty for wanting to abandon Gaia just as well, I hope. Because she should.

{Do you know why snow falls so slowly?}

I tried as hard as possible to swallow my guilt.

{Because it doesn’t know where to go any more.}

I'm not sure if those bracketed parts are from anywher in particular, but they're very poetic and beautiful.

I closed my mouth. I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen her like this.

They haven't known each other long at all - none of them have, really - so the emotion seems a bit dramatic here.

{When I saw you, you were helpless and weak and in danger, and I thought that the laws of the clan would understand that. I did not think that this would be my time of choosing; I merely saw a child in need and was foolish enough to act with my heart instead of my head.}

This sentret's story sounds a bit familiar... wink wink

Everything’s a calculation to you, Captain. Everything’s a battle. You say what you think other people want to hear.}

Damn, Iris. Iris is certainly right, though... and while nameless protag really sucks at trying to reason with others, she does have her own valid points as well.

But I silenced her. “This is the package. This is what you get. I’m not going to grow up and become the Champion.” I turned back to Iris, who still stood in the tall grass, half her face cast in sickly-green shadow by the light of the pillar. “I’m not going to be your level-headed, military-trained Captain.” I turned back to the gastly. “And honestly, I have no idea what you even want from me, but there’s a fair chance I can’t deliver. Okay? This is it. This is all I have. If you came on board expecting a miracle from me, well. Tough.”

This particular dialogue broke my heart, because I understand her problem so well, and also because the wording itself is strong and assertive.

I suppose, to her, that made me the xatu. Which, well, was a little unfortunate. At least the xatu had pretended to understand how hard it was going to make my life before it dropped the bomb that changed everything. I’d sort of just showed up.

Interesting parallelism, I must say.

I could fracture my team and send everything to shit once we got out of the haunted Tower that was currently trying to kill us.

You always use the word kill, which... I don't quite think is applicable half the time? XD The illusions are trying to mentally kill you, I guess, but certainly not literally. Yet.

{I called myself Rousseau,} he repeated, like a mantra.

Really liking the name theme, I must say. I tried using it myself in Survival Project, but I don't think I use(d) it nearly as well or as consistently as you do.

Overall this chapter was also desperately needed - for the nameless protag, anyway. I'm not sure I like the enjoy of exposing so many character pasts at once... since you easily run into the obstacle of trying not to overshadow one with another's. It looks like Iris is getting the attention right now, but I'm hoping Gaia is still able to not be undermined simply because she didn't react as badly. Even Rousseau got more attention than her so far, and he's a brand new character.

“So, if I may ask,” my unofficial rival said, eyes sliding sideways to look at my hand. “Why are you stroking my cheek.” It wasn’t really a question.

Well, then. I lol'd.

The look Silver gave the two of us was so pained I may as well have told him I believed the Breloominati were real. In fact, my stupidity was so massive that he completely forgot what he was saying in favor of: “You can’t possibly call the magnetic apocalypse ‘Magnarok.’ Do you realize how ridiculous—”

And now I'm dying inside. The humor doesn't really fit the rest of the chapter, but I'll forgive it because obvious reasons. XD

I pretended not to hear her, though. It was a lot easier to act like I was the only one who had a rough day when everything went to shit, even though basically every interaction I’d had with a living being since then (Bates, Gaia, Iris, Rousseau, and now even Silver)

Gaia and Rousseau much less so, though.

In hindsight, this explained a lot, like how his abra was so good at fighting, or how it had already learned TM’s, or really how Silver had behaved like he was leagues better than me when— clearly, he was.

In Bates' POV chapter, didn't he explicity say that the abra was lower leveled though?

Wrong move. I flinched as his hand curled into a tight fist around the handle of his backpack. “Daddy,” he said in a careful, controlled voice, “ensured that I was a rival to all of his Admins the minute I was born. I had no other career path than to follow in his shadow. Archer first tried to kill me when I was six, and when I told my father, he told me I should’ve expected it and that I needed to toughen the fuck up.”

Huh. I might’ve actually just met someone who had father issues that rivaled my own.

I liked Silver's dialogue, and then name protag's monologue response actually kind of pissed me off. I am really hoping her character development delivers.

But uh, her story seems to have just gotten a lot more fucked up. I agree with Aether about "some things should have been delved into sooner to make this chapter better" but in general, I have few criticisms. I'm actually even kind of rooting for Silver to keep showing up. Sorry, nameless protag.

And with all that, I'm caught up. Keep writing, please?[/quote]

 

[kintsugi]

Hi, friends. Post-awards rewrites have finished.

I, uh, have been staring at this 'Best Story' thing for a while. Didn't expect it. Still am confused by it. My final thoughts on the matter, I guess, is this: SRBS, Nara, and I have all done a lot of growing since we started nearly two and a half years ago, and I couldn't have done it without you guys. It sounds ridiculously cheesey but it's also true. None of you are obligated to read my weird fanfic, but you all do, and you take the time out of your days to help me get better and all of that is so ridiculously amazing that it's hard for me to wrap my head around it at times. Thank you all.

Anyway, new chapter is ready, but I owe a lot of people reviews and I'd feel guilty posting without getting to those first. Dropping replies now before I forget about them, though. Also going to be going off into the wilderness for a week in a few hours, so cheers.

I knew college would turn you into a flirt

; )

Positive you didn't mean that

...starting off strong, I am.

Well. This was quite the game-changer, wasn't it. That matter-of-fact business in the earlier chapters wasn't entirely down to your limitations as an author. I mean, I stick by my assertion that it had a habit of slowing the narrative. I'm also sure that it would have been more effective if we'd seen more of TUPpy emoting outside of the calculating moments.

Yeeeeeep, I ended up feeling like this too, especially after this chapter started growing, but I couldn't edit it 'cause Awards. There are definitely more scenes of Nara being a scared teenager (although, having written them, I also know that I avoided them for a reason because teenagers suuuuuck sometimes). Also yay highest praise from you omg.

That's a clever explanation regarding human psychics. The world continues to generally work – what I'm curious to see is the downside of the Rocket regime. So far it's boiled down to that kids can be executed, but I'll bet that any dictatorship will have its detractors, and probably for good reason.

Honestly, that's one of the things that bothered me about most YA fiction -- some of the dystopian dictators are just way to extreme to be legitimate. Broadcast the death of children yearly while making vague social commentary about circuses and bread battle royale did it better? Force people to be one of five traits? A lot of them felt like random constructs so that the protagonists had something to fight against, when in actuality stuff like this probably wouldn't stand in the first place. I took a sociology class once so I know that this is true.

tl;dr: there may be a lot fewer drawbacks than you might think.

You're really getting a lot of mileage out of Sprout Tower, aren't you?

*glances at notes*
...yeah. Um. Just you wait.

I am in two minds about your progress here. Firstly, things have kind of slowed down by having her in a tower for four chapters. I was kind of hoping to find a battle against Falkner closer by the end of this, so I'm a bit disappointed by that. However, the character development here is interesting and intriguing.

I was a bit of two minds with this set-up. One one hand, I hate trees and also I think that Sprout Tower is rife with material for crafting lore. On the other hand, yeah, four chapters talking about interior mahogany panelling did happen. Hopefully the next few chapters keep things interesting for you, though.

It felt a bit too early for the Iris/TUPy (I nearly called her Alaska; am I that vain or is that a fair mistake?) face-off and revelations, in my view, but it was interesting all the same. I think that perhaps things are getting a tad too philosophical: you are a talented writer and you do this all well, but it feels like reading a thesis sometimes where every chapter/discussion has to be a deep and meaningful discussion. I think you are talented enough to show development without having to have these long monologues.

lols us adults writing about what it's like to be a confused teenager good times, good times.
I'm going to redirect the rest of this with my "but Nara is stupid" card, though -- but only because I feel like this is one of the places where it legit applies. This girl literally dies trying to sound intelligent while quoting Shakespeare; of course she's going to be pretentious monologuing when she's alive, I feel.

Your pace just always worries me: I feel like the only way this story can carry on is if it ends at Goldenrod. I don't know if you are going to do a full eight gym thing, and I doubt this will be that kind of story, but the quality of writing does not help the fact things will languish a bit if we need four chapters just to get to one big reveal.

The story isn't really going to end at Goldenrod, if I get my shit together, so, uh, I'll definitely have to keep this in mind. Thanks.

Oh wow Silver can actually be a pretty rational guy :O I will agree with Pavell that he's not completely right in his treatment of Ely just cause he also had a tough time, it's not nearly as tough as hers was consideirng how sudden it was.

Silver is, well, less of an ass than Nara claimed he was in their first meeting, but he's not exactly going to be civil to the random passer-by who set a murder-bird on his bosses, tried to cut him up on the road, and dropped a tree on his starter. She may have been horrifically misinformed about some of this, but that's hardly an excuse.

The revelation at the end was really interesting and makes sense of a lot of the way Ely acts sometimes but I'm still not completely sold on it, I mean there wasn't really tha tbig of a hint that she was possessed just from her changing her attitude when she's in danger, I think that could still be explained with he rjust being secretly psychotic or something but the possession thing still makes sense of the way she acts at least.

hue
I never said that anyone was right

Post awards feedback:

Hey, welcome aboard! I always feel awkward responding to positive things, but thanks for them, heh.

It is one thing to say a character feels an emotion, but adding in details of that emotion (shaking and sweating palms for fear, for example) would really enhance what is already here--and lead to some interesting description

As it is, this is a hauntingly beautiful and at times entertaining look into a different side of an in game event. However, the quick and snappy style of writing is a double edged sword--while entertaining to read, a little more showing and a little more detail could really make the story shine.

Noted! Thanks!



PAV AGAIN OH YOU FLIRT

The first thing to mention is, despite in other respects your technical accuracy being spot on, you do have a habit of mentioning pokémon names out of place. I mean, this time round Icarus got referred to by name before TUPpy formally names him - in Chapter Three, so I think that was an editing error. You already know about the Nietzsche/Rousseau one.

have fixed, thanks

One: "Hanging when done properly breaks the neck. Just being pedantic." - ok, that really is pedantic because TUPpy might not know that, but if she's seen hanging executions she'd have cause to know different.

I remember writing that line because I'd just learned about why hanging was used as an execution method. Without the "golly, learning is cool!" mindset that I had then, I ended up editing it out. Heh.

Five: I apparently spotted a moment when you say Silver is wearing dark clothes where in his introduction in Chapter Four you explicitly state that they're white. Except I can't find the damn mistake now because I didn't note it down > >

UGH I CAN'T FIND IT EITHER.

Eight: Now this partly a reprise of things I've said before, but I just didn't believe in TUPpy's panic in this chapter. There was also rather a lot of cursing from her, for a girl who supposedly has a hard time bringing herself to swear. A possible mistake, I'm not sure

have removed the swears and tried to address the panic
The rest of the things -- emoting and such, I have also hopefully tried to fix/addressed above
thx senpai

BECAUSE THIS JUST TURNED INTO ANOTHER SHITTY AUTHOR-INSERT/EDGY RIVAL SLASH FIC UGGGHHH I KNEW IT.

RAAAAAAAMEN!
ALSO THE FACT THAT YOU CHANGE NAMES EVERY TIME MAKES ME CRACK UP EVERY TIME THANK YOU SO MUCH

This is still something that doesn't make a lot of sense to me and I'm not sure I ever talked about it? Maybe I did? Too lazy to go back and check. So... reiterating some points.

It took me a while, but I finally realized that the scene I pictured and the scene that I told everyone was happening weren't really the same if you read it in a certain light/without being me. Have fixed. The gist is that Nara makes Gaia tether herself to the tree, the abra uses psychic to send Gaia flying, and by extension, the tether and the tree. The tree is already all splattery/weakened from getting hit by machine-gun silk, so instead of the tether snapping, the tree does. Boop goodybe abra. This is reflected in the rewrites.

...hopefully is a more logical explanation.

He says, despite being totally aware of the fact that she was pretty much exiled from average society and now has a price on her head from the most powerful organization in the region. What a dick.

GUYS HE MAY WEAR NICE JACKETS AND SOMETIMES BE POLITE BUT HE'S STILL THE MAJOR BAD GUY OF THIS SHINDIG

Jarring typo is jarring.

lols fixed

This is a really cool idea, and one that adds another layer of originality to an already very original story. My main concern is that surely this would have come up earlier? I suppose that's a side-effect of taking the non-stop action route of plot structure rather than taking time to set up the world and characters before nonchalantly kicking them off the cliff that is the first turning point. In light of that, I guess this is the best place to put this kind of exposition, though I think a couple casual, unexplained references to "Gifts" would have been nice before this (unless there were and I missed them).

I actually had a lot of struggles here (and with the Legendaries, and with things like the CAT tests) because they're so fundamental to this world that I don't know how to make Nara explain them, and I don't really know how else to bring things up in first person narration without exposition dumping all over the first chapter oops. It'd be, like, if you were retelling the story of your life and you take an aside to talk about the inner workings of the cardiovascular system. I think. I dunno. I did make one reference to Gifts earlier (in Silver's Interlude, he says something like "I can tell if you're lying" and then Bates is like "oh shit ur gift u wot m8" and Silver is all "yeah, try me, bitch"), but I tried to throw a few more references to this as well as casual Legendary game-changers in the earlier bits.

Anyway, ghosts. At first I was about to go off about the importance of foreshadowing again, but you clearly point out in the story that you did foreshadow it more than a little, even if there was no conceivable way for anyone to guess what was going on. So I guess my main surprise with that revelation is the fact that it seems like a bit of a departure from the tone of the rest of the fic up to this point. I imagined this as being more of a gritty, "realistic" (or as realistic as this kind of thing can get) take on the Pokemon world. Ghost possession is quite far outside of what I expected. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The story's still pretty new and finding its footing. I look forward to see where this twist takes things.

Ah. Gritty, yes. Realistic... well, you saw what I did with magnets.

Also, I'm running out of improvised names for your narrator (because we're not allowed to use the same one twice) so I'm afraid I'll have to make use of some more obscure references

Erigeron oreophilus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Looks like it's literally been a year since I reviewed this. I think I stopped because I asked questions in my last review and they were never answered, to be honest. But uh, I'm trying to review more and I do love you (I don't think we were talking before I reviewed the first time, actually) so here we go.

oooooofffff my sweet honey child i am so, so very sorry. It obviously doesn't sound like much on paper, but I legit value everyone's feedback to this story so much. Like. I sit down after every chapter and read the reviews, mull them over, and almost always end up making the changes that the reviewers suggested. For every chapter. And, at every awards season, I do this for the entire story, because I know you guys put in a lot more work than you have to to make this story grow ;-;

For what it's worth, I went back and confirmed that I'd seen your review -- what happened there was that it got sandwiched between me being super inactive and me pretending to be Pav for April Fool's. It's no excuse, but ilu and all of the time you put into this. For cereals. Especially the older stuff. Senpai pls i'm so sorry I made you feel un-useful-loved.

here is spoilerception to try to undo the damage from a year ago ;-;

Spoiler

I love the main character's snarkiness, her (and oh boy, she's nameless but I was so happy when I picked up the fact that she was a girl) commentary is always witty and enjoyable to read. I do agree with other reviewers when they say sometimes it goes over the top, though. It seems like every sentence has a hint of sarcasm placed in it, when that's not always what you want to go for (ie during the OH GOD GAIA IS MISSING scenes).

I've, uh, been working to tackle that. Apparently it's gotten better? Definitely gave a lot of attention to the Gaia scene like you mentioned, though.

I know for a fact that some birds can speak words and have the intelligence of almost a five-year-old human. True facts.

NOT REALLY A VALID THING BUT I REMEMBER AT THE TIME BEING LIKE 'HMMM THIS IS ODD' BUT NOW IT ALL MAKES SENSE

As for Bates, I'm not sure what he means when he says, "She wasn't always a litwick, you know." Maybe it's because it's 4am and I'm tired, but if you could explain that to me that'd work too.

It was a mix of me trying to foreshadow a lot of stuff that I probably shouldn't have, and then mildly getting too attached to that line in particular. It mostly gets addressed in the interludes -- Brigid is a ghost from a different pokemon. This makes him sad sometimes. And also angry.

I do have to mention, however, that I hope the world, being what it is, doesn't make the narrator or your writing fall into the trap known as "the main character only runs into disaster after disaster after disaster..." Bates seemed to be a positive thing to happen to the narrator, though, so at this point I'm not too worried about it.

...
efffffffs
ps ilu

Isn't that what being a trainer in this Johto is all about? Being comedic?

YEAH MAN JOHTO IS JUST ALL ABOUT THE LOLS

I like that your protag has decent flaws that obviously pose a threat to her, but I'm honestly not seeing many strengths here. Her light, saracastic narrative in the midst of dark situations doesn't get her far, and actually I find it kind of grating sometimes. She seems grateful to Bates and Brigid, yeah, but even in that scene she secretly wanted to keep the money. I can't think of much else at the moment. This whole aftermath chapter actually throws all her flaws into her face, so maybe we'll see some change from here.

I do love nerfing my characters, heh.
That being said, I'm a bit confused here -- is it that she's a chore to read, or that she's just overall an asshole? The second one would be intentional, but the first one is definitely not my goal, heh.

The last part of this sentence hits hard, but it would probably be more impactful if the word "dark" wasn't used 3 times so close together.

LOL EDITING ;-;

Andddd as a speech therapy major I find all these details about linguistics very interesting. XD

Trying to understand how the anime Pikachu could convey so much in a single 'Pika'... years of pent-up rage have culminated to this single point.

I wonder if nameless protag here would be so eager to abandon them in a less cruel world. I'd like to think she wouldn't be so eager, but alas.

Oops. I kind of see what you were getting at earlier. I wanted her to seem like a somewhat decent person in a shitty situation, but the overal feel of the character is supposed to be one who would, in a less cruel world, do less cruel things.

I'm finding it hard to understand why she needs supplies that badly, so soon, after a week. You made it pretty clear she was going to be okay for the long haul, several times too.

...this was mostly plot. I'll try to write this one as less "because plot" in the next round of fixes, heh.

Another thing about the narration you could probably stand to drop is the rehash of information like this. We already know all these things about the pokemon, and in fact they were just mentioned right before this bit, just in separate sentences. You also have a tendency to re-explain the events of previous chapters, but it's mostly for humor and doesn't actually remind me of what happened, nor does it add to what happened. In short, none of it is needed.

Yeeps. That's an adaptation from when I used to crosspost this for a different site (in larger chunks, so this was the start of a new chunk/hence the recap), but yeah, that particular instance is gone now. Trying to streamline the rest out as well.

They haven't known each other long at all - none of them have, really - so the emotion seems a bit dramatic here.

ME? DRAMATIC? NEVER.

This sentret's story sounds a bit familiar... wink wink

hrrrrnnnghhh when I started reading SP for realsies I also started kicking myself, but Iris/SRBS were way too far down the plotting line for me to turn back ;-;

You always use the word kill, which... I don't quite think is applicable half the time? XD The illusions are trying to mentally kill you, I guess, but certainly not literally. Yet.

Nara often assumes that things are trying to kill her/that she's going to die when, really, there's no basis for any of that. That's kind of her schtick, actually.

In Bates' POV chapter, didn't he explicity say that the abra was lower leveled though?

This is me clumsily trying to establish a power ladder for the series. To Bates, who started training fifteen years ago, used to have a complete team of pokemon, and witnessed + survived the fall of a region in a world in which trainers were literally trying to decapitate his team, yeah, this runt and his abra are pretty vanilla. To Nara, it's more of a "holy shit you know more than just Tackle but I got my starter this morning" thing.

And with all that, I'm caught up. Keep writing, please?

Many thanks, Senpai.

 

[diamondpearl876]

I FORGIVE YOU AND I THANK YOU FOR THE LONG ASS REVIEW REPLY. To answer your only question, it's that she's overall an asshole AND it's grating to read. It's grating to read because that's probably where the overdone narration comes from. Anddd since you've read LaON, your nameless protag reminds me a lot of Annie and someone pointed out the no-strengths thing for Annie. And I agreed with it. I have no reason to root for nameless protag at this point. She's interesting, sure, but what happens to her doesn't matter to me at this point. Which - given the new information revealed - shouldn't be the case. Hope that clears things up.

 

[kintsugi]

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house of spirits​

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“So this is how it’s going to go down,” I muttered as I swung my backpack on and adjusted my grip on Gaia. “You don’t want me to see what’s on your floor, and I don’t want you to see what’s on mine.” I probably should’ve known better even before I said it. “So let’s just run really, really quickly through both of them.”

{Actually, we want to see what’s on your floor,} the abra said, casually floating up alongside me.

“Or if you even have a floor at all,” Silver added, moving toward the stairs. “The ghosts may not antagonize their own.”

“We were just on the gastly’s floor,” I said, inclining my head toward Rousseau. “His fear is, uh, complicated, but…” I didn’t really know what else to say, except: “And for the love of gods, I’m not a vessel for an undead spirit.” Huh. That was a sentence I’d never expected to say in my life.

“You’re taking this recent development quite well.” Silver’s voice was casual, but I could see his eyes narrow from the corner of my vision.

“Because I don’t think it’s true,” I replied tersely. “You could’ve told me that I’m a time-travelling four hundred foot purple psyduck with pink horns and silver wings and that would be just as ridiculous.”

{We think your floor will be very telling, regardless,} the abra said hesitantly.

“Too bad. I think your floor would be very telling as well, but I respect your personal secrets, so I’m not going to force you to show it to me. Let’s just skip them both.” I tightened my grip on Gaia.

Silver shrugged and then tilted his head to one side, eyes narrowing. “Okay, fine. We want to see what’s on your floor, and Dante has already shown that he can subdue you and both of your pokémon in under thirty seconds. Fifteen, if we’re being honest.” His hand drifted toward his pocket, an unspoken but clear threat. “As you can see so far, we’d much rather not, but—”

Ass. “Fine." I folded my arms and planted my feet. “Then I’m not going. Trust me, I have far better things to do here then escort you through my nightmares.”

Without warning, the central pillar began to glow a blinding green, so bright that it washed out my vision and left me seeing spots. There was a distant rumbling from the top of the tower, and I felt a light breeze ruffle my hair. As I blinked away the last of the light, I looked around in confusion, trying to place the source of the disturbance, but I saw nothing. The room looked otherwise unchanged. “What was that?”

“We’re going to find out.”

I was still being held hostage here, effectively, although our friendly conversation had almost allowed me to forget that. I realized that my previous analysis was flawed: Silver and his abra were treating me like I was made out of glass, but not because I was something to be pitied. It was because I was something to be afraid of: they didn’t want to see what would come out if I broke. I took a deep breath. “Thirty seconds, and I don’t have to tell you anything about what it means.” Hopefully I ended up getting something indecipherable like Gaia’s meadow of flowers or Rousseau’s empty room, and Silver could puzzle through that until the end of time. The fingernails of my free hand, the one that wasn’t holding Gaia, dug into my palm. “Are you going to lead the way, then?”

“And invite you to literally stab me in the back? Nice try, but I don’t think so.”

Whatever witty retort I had died in my throat as I realized numbly the only floor left was mine. As I looked around, the pain in my jaw receding in the wake of the fear that was rising up in my stomach, I began mentally counting to thirty.

It was completely empty.

I held Gaia tighter and clenched my free hand into a fist so no one could see my fingers tremble.

“You have the same floor as the gastly,” Silver remarked, peering into the corners closest to him and then checking the rafters. He paused to look back at me, his expression unreadable. “I thought I saw a flicker earlier, but…”

I’d seen the flicker too, actually. As if the room had been trying to decide, and it had settled on this. On nothing. Was this intentional? At least Silver didn’t know the significance of an empty room. I looked to Rousseau for reassurance, but he had been disturbingly quiet since this entire topic of conversation had started.

{Perhaps her fear is having the same floor as a ghost, stemming from this newfound paranoia that she could be possessed,} Gaia suggested.

{Perhaps our theory is simply right,} the abra shot back snidely. {Have you grown attached to your trainer so soon?}

“Perhaps,” I began, desperate to stop this fight before it started, and then I trailed off.

I’d never believed in fortune-tellers for one key reason: they showed you vague images, and let your imagination fill in the rest. Perhaps the ghosts had shown Gaia a meadow full of flowers arbitrarily, or Iris’s room full of her kin, or the empty room that was Rousseau’s, and my pokémon had extrapolated a fear out of that because that was what they’d been expecting to see.

But as I looked to the shadows at the back of the room, barely illuminated by the central pillar, those theories were completely dashed. Whatever was behind this wasn’t creating images at random. It knew, without a doubt. It knew.

Silver followed my gaze.

Through the deafening roar in my ears and the increasing pressure against my forehead, I formed a single, coherent thought: at least it exists. More evidence that I was myself. I clung to that thought like it was a lifeline and I the hapless sailor, drowning at sea.

“What is that?” I heard Silver asking, but I shook my head.

It was gathered in one enormous lump by the base of a ladder, with a salty tang so strong I could taste it on the roof of my mouth even where I stood. I stared at it, the revulsion gathering in my throat as I watched it bleb across the floor, but—

“Heck if I know,” I said, answering Silver’s question once I recovered from the shock. I honestly had no idea what it was. It looked like a giant bead of water, but large enough that I could probably fit inside if I crouched.

{Awww, crap,} Rousseau said, floating up behind me. {I think I know what’s going on.}

A disembodied voice echoed from the rafters. {Foolssssss!} it hissed to no one in particular, enough anger in its timbre that I could feel the floorboards shuddering in response. {I sssssaid ‘make an illussssssion of her greatest fearsssss, not tearsssss!}

“What.”

___________________________________________________________________________​

Silver followed my gaze.

Through the deafening roar in my ears and the increasing pressure against my forehead, I formed a single, coherent thought: at least it exists. More evidence that I was myself. I clung to that thought like it was a lifeline and I the hapless sailor, drowning at sea.

“What is that?” I heard Silver asking, but I shook my head.

“I…” I trailed off.

Whatever I was going to say next was washed out by a wave of eardrum-shattering music, the first sound I’d heard from the Tower. I shied back as my vision was assaulted by blazing lights that changed colors at frequencies too fast for my brain to match, and the sticky, thick scent of fermentation washed over us. Figures sprang into existence around us, some wildly dancing in horrid attempts at rhythm to the music, some crouched on the ground frantically reading books that were at least five inches thick, some despondently eating noodles out of tiny cups. Somewhere, there was an obligatory reference to the sensual consumption of ramen.

{Greatest yearssss?} the disembodied voice shouted, bordering on disbelief. {Are you kidding?}

“I peak in college?” I said in horror, spinning around and, fascinated against my will with an image of my older self collapsed against a whiteboard with a half-scrawled cloud of numbers and Greek symbols. “Seriously?”

“This is how you imagine college?” Silver asked, his expression bordering on amusement and pity. I followed his gaze to see a girl curled up in a tiny bed, staring listlessly at a computer screen.

{Is that a funnel?} Gaia said from my arms. {And they’re putting it—}

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Silver followed my gaze.

Through the deafening roar in my ears and the increasing pressure against my forehead, I formed a single, coherent thought: at least it exists. More evidence that I was myself. I clung to that thought like it was a lifeline and I the hapless sailor, drowning at sea.

“What is that?” I heard Silver asking, but I shook my head.

I could smell it from where I stood, but I’d have to be dead not to. My shoes seemed to stick to the floor, trapped in a fine layer of whatever the stuff was, and I could see the sparkling amber droplets glowing slightly green against the floorboards. I leaned down to scrape my finger against some of the liquid on the floor, and I tentatively put a drop on my tongue before my eyes slipped to the barrel at the back of the room, where more of it undoubtedly was.

“Greatest beers?” I asked no one in particular. “Seriously?”

Silence.

"Well, it does bring some new meaning to the whole 'Tower of spirits' thing," I said after some reflection.

{Head hurtsssss,} said the disembodied voice plaintively. {Thinking hurtssss.}

Silver frowned. “Go home; you’re drunk.”

My eyes brightened, and I perked up. I think Gaia could tell what I was planning, because she began a frantic, {No, no, no, no—}

“Heaven forgive them, and heaven forgive us all,” I said, reaching into my pocket and fumbling around for my sunglasses.

Silver must’ve caught on then as well, because his head spun around and he began: “Don’t you dare say what I think—”

I put on my shades, gloriously unaware of whatever drinking age had been arbitrarily set in a country where preteens were given licenses to roam around with living flamethrowers. “Some rise by gin, and some by choujiu fall.”

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Silver followed my gaze.

Through the deafening roar in my ears and the increasing pressure against my forehead, I formed a single, coherent thought: at least it exists. More evidence that I was myself. I clung to that thought like it was a lifeline and I the hapless sailor, drowning at sea.

“What is that?” I heard Silver asking, but I shook my head.

A grid loomed above us, spanning from the floorboards to the rafters, with circles periodically marked every few rows.

“My gods,” I said, utterly horrified.

{Yessssss,} the disembodied voice said. {Your true fearssssss…}

The words almost clogged my throat. I could hardly voice them; they were that terrible and inconceivable. My greatest fear. “Regular updates.”

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Spoiler

Contrary to logical belief, this isn't actually the drunk chapter, but it may as well be. Full credit to Aether for coining some rise by gin as canon.

...April Fool's, yo.