TEEN: some rise by sin

[kintsugi]

WOAH WE'RE ALIVE IT'S BEEN A WHILE.
This is an update that I've been agonizing over for a while now and cannot for the life of me make pretty. With that rousing statement of confidence, I hope you enjoy.

responses

Spoiler

I think (And this is something I may change my mind on somewhat, come the Violet arc) that once you decide on what you want the atmosphere of a given scene to be, you stick with it. I may well be wrong, but I kind of feel that's what was at the heart of my problems with the Violet arc: you wanted the desperate survivalist tone and then you wanted to go all shades of grey, but the one worked to contradict the other.

I'm afraid I'm a little bit unclear on this--could you elaborate what you mean with the tone stuff? I always love your crit, but I don't quite understand this one.

That leads me on to the second thought, which is that the edits here are definitely an improvement. The issue of Gifts and the cultural impact of the xatu in particular, but also the cold internal narrative - they all needed to be more prominent and you've put them all in their natural home. I actually thought for a moment that you were going to scrap that bit of warmth that Gaia brought, but you found another way to bring it in during the interlude.

eyyy squad

I think her internal narrative could do with some more recognition that so much of her so-called shitty behaviour was to avoid a summary execution - that way it would feel more like genuine moments of turmoil, and less like you're trying to pretend that TUPpy is something she isn't to make me look at Silver as less of a villain.

Aaaaand, yeah, elephant in the room acknowledged. I think this is less of you and I having similar perceptions of villains (I wrote Silver to be a largely unforgiveable bastard type, with some sympathetic moments as an afterthought), and more of me being inadept at handling narrators. Silver is an awful person. Nara is an awful judge of character, and when the lens is so tightly focused around what Nara sees, the narrative becomes really tinted with that view. I tried having the few scenes that don't follow Nara capture this, but since I also wanted them to have those few sympathetic-Silver moments...yeah, I can see how this all fell apart. There's retribution coming in the interlude, if that helps?

Whether you think those narratives are important socially or politically, they don't make for great stories artistically. Compare The Lord of the Rings, where for most of the story the plot is teetering on the brink of catastrophe, and the ending is distinctly bittersweet - but the moments of love and beauty throughout reminds us of why we should care that disaster looms.

This last bit was actually what made me think the most when writing these next few chapters. Thank you for that reminder. It's easy to lose your way in the dark become so edgy at writing that you forget the brighter parts of humanity, heh.

typo: couldn't make heads or tails*

hi hi I think I fixed all the typos you highlighted. Proof that I still can't English.

As I said, Nameless Narrator can be a bit complicated with her logic, and she tends to ruminate on literally every single detail of every single thing that's happening, will happen, or has happened. I like it because it's human - whether she's really human in the story or not, I don't know (yet - or if I should know by now, I didn't quite get it clearly enough). She's flawed and I can tell you're really trying to show that along with how terrified she is of what's happening, what will happen, and what has happened. This trait of hers is really... difficult to balance in writing, though, for lack of a better word. I quoted this portion in particular because I'd already read a similar paragraph probably 3-5 times before this, and there's not much point in bringing it up again unless new information is added to the mix. This isn't as big an issue from what I saw, compared to her ruminating - I just thought it might be worth bringing it up anyway, because the story (or at least, this arc) could be cut down quite a bit.

mmmmmmm yes, Nara's circular logic is basically my fatal flaw when it comes to writing this. I want to show that she's, like, desperately fixated on making sure things work out perfectly in a world that's spiralling out of her control, but I also don't want to make people take forever reading it. Gah. I'll throw these bits back at the editing board again (you should've seen the original cut lol).

Not sure how the sentret couldn't touch Brigid but Brigid could "pry" the sentret off. Unless it was with fire. 0_0

fuuuuuuck. logic. fixed that.

Answering to Bates later in the middle of a deserted forest makes far less sense than explaining to him up front when she was still in a relatively populated town area. She knew he would be taking her to an empty forest area, too. My understanding is that Nameless Narrator tends to act now and think later. For all the thinking and ruminating she does, she tends to go with where her emotions want her to go rather than her head. Not always, but usually. That's also very... human. Which makes her more interesting to me, given the idea that she might be something else entirely.

Yeah she's a teenager with 0 forethought. I'm glad that this finally showed through, though! She holds herself as a paradism of good planning and is honestly horrible at it, which I kinda struggle to convey sometimes.

My original comment I saved for this quote was: "Nameless Narrator's got a past even she can't explain, apparently. And the possibilities there are endless, really." Now that I'm caught up, I can confidently say that none of the possibilities I immediately thought of were even remotely close to what was actually happening. Oh, unreliable Nameless Narrator...

bwahaha

I liked this bit of tension in particular. And again, now that I'm caught up, I'm going to assume it's some light caused by Celebi's time travel shenanigans.

Reaaalllllly close to the money on this one in all the right and wrong ways

Except it's obvious to us readers that she knew she shouldn't have touched it while she was weighing her options. I personally feel like her behavior might seem more believable here, and in some other instances, if she'd just admited that made a mistake in her calculations, instead of having it seem like she never thought that the option she chose was a bad idea to begin with. Obviously this doesn't apply to things like when Gaia and Icarus were missing and she had no idea if that was her fault or not, but yeah.

General consensus was that this scene could've played out better. I'm trying to work on it.

Overall, I can't say I know what happened for sure. Celebi's strange, laidback and condescending dialogue put me off at first, but the more I think about it, the more it's growing on me. If the swearing were gone completely, I'd probably be sold on it.

The swearing is... yeah, not sure. If I told you I'd actually included it for some really obscure plot/mythos reasons that'll never get explained for another dozen chapters, that probably wouldn't reassure you very much, but that's what I've got.

I see that a lot of people reviewing you have been questioning Nameless Narrator and Silver, but my concern is more the former, and most of my comments revolve around her. I've given some criticism and some "here's what I got out of the story" for you to see whether or not you're succeeding in what you want readers to get out of this fic. I hope it helped a little bit, and I'll keep an eye out for the next update.

You are a saint for doing this. At some level, yeah, I think it lines up the way I want, and the bits where you've pointed out that it doesn't become a lot easier to fix. Thx sensei.

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chapter xvi. nihil supra​

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Silver was right. The girl I was staring at, who was only fifteen minutes removed from being me, looked completely inhuman. It was the eyes, too-dark and too-uncaring, that reflected nothing but the intent to follow through, that made me stop completely cold. There was a clatter as she threw the stake of wood that had impaled our thigh aside, not even noticing the bloodied splinters left behind. How could I fight something like this? How could I become something like this?

The answer came without preface, and suddenly I felt the weight of the past fifteen minutes landing on me.

My starter was dark. I had been granted admission to a locked Tower that housed impossible secrets for reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom. I had been thrown backward in time by the Forest Queen to save an ancient monument dedicated to uplifting human achievement in the face of inconceivable odds. This was just one last impossible thing in a string that I had to do. It was only a matter of time.

I was aware of Rousseau hovering around my shoulders and expelling thick clouds of gas from the nebula surrounding his body. {Whatever you do, ma cherie, do it fast. The others will notice soon.}

She lunged toward me. Perhaps she recognized that our existences were mutually exclusive. We locked eyes through the unnatural fog, and I saw the self-preservation painted deep in her pupils. She would stop at nothing to stay alive, and I was in her path.

But I was also smart, smarter than her, smarter than blind rage and the primordial desire to keep living. And most of all, I understood how my allies worked.

“Hypnosis,” I whispered sharply. Her focus pinned on me, she didn’t notice Rousseau phasing through her head until it was too late. She collapsed to the ground with a thud, and I winced in sympathy. “I can explain,” I said, as the gastly surged past my doppelgänger to look at me accusingly.

{Later,} he said. His wide smile remained, but I could see the way that his eyes were creased in a sharp frown, as if he were pondering something, hard. {And, honestly, I don’t think you can explain.}

The fog vanished as a blade of air cut through it, narrowly missing my head and splintering the wall behind us.

Right. I would deal with the ramifications that I was most-certainly prone to fits of utter evil at a different time. In the meantime, I had promises to keep. I turned toward Falkner and tried to keep calm.

Conventional battling wasn’t going to be an option. This thing could overpower us easily; the only option would be to use strategies it couldn’t expect. Luckily, I had zero training with this sort of stuff, so I wouldn’t even be able to consider how outlandish most of my plans were going to sound. “Rousseau, can you just hypnotize that?” I asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

{No. His mental defenses are significantly more advanced than… hers. The undead are less prone to the distractions of the living.}

I don’t know what I had been expecting, honestly. “Icarus, get ready grab Gaia and get airborne. I want as much of this room as possible covered in String Shot. We need to slow him down.” My murkrow cawed in affirmation, heaving the caterpie upward and taking to the skies. “Atlas, stay close. I need your fire in a bit. Dante keep him—” I was cut off momentarily as Falkner threw another razor-edged blast of wind in our direction.

{Distracted. I know,} the abra said wearily, flicking his tail in irritation and glancing back at Silver for confirmation. Silver nodded, but he was frowning at me, and it took all of my willpower not to cast a guilty glance at past-me’s crumbled body behind the rubble. {Anything in particular?}

“How many teleports do you have left in you?”

There was a hint of pride in the abra’s voice as he answered stiffly, {Enough.}

We honestly didn’t have time for their arrogance or distrust. “That’s not a number,” I said, letting a hint of steel slip into my voice. “Dante—”

My breath hitched as a honeycombed screen of light materialized in front of me, barely forming before another Air Slash shattered on top of it. The wind sent my hair flaring up in a cloud of orange, and I coughed in the dust cloud that formed after. {It depends,} the abra said, voice strained from the effort of expending so much energy so quickly, {on what else you need done.} He fired a Shock Wave to keep Falkner from advancing any closer, but the gym leader batted it aside with a flick of his wrist.

He had a fair enough point with that one. I thought back to what I’d learned last time—the ghost took on the weakness of what it possessed. My brush with the froslass had shown me that I didn’t really know how to deal with a ghost, but a person was a different story. “Okay.” I needed to keep Dante in reserve; he was the only pokémon here who could even remotely match Falkner in terms of raw strength, and he’d be the only thing protecting us if it ever came to dealing with Falkner head-on. Which ideally, would never happen. “I need screens on Iris, the kind you keep using to block his wind blades—”

{Air Slash,} the abra said in a level voice. {And Light Screen.}

“Yeah, those, okay, whatever. Focus on keeping her safe. Iris, you’ll be drawing a lot of fire, so you need to be fast. Understand?”

The sentret nodded curtly. This level of obedience was frightening; I almost hoped that by the time we got to the bottom of the Tower, she stopped listening to me so well.

“Right. Icarus, get ready.” From the rafters, a squawk of affirmation. “Iris, you’re in. Slash him up, but focus on not getting hit.”

With a tiny snarl, the sentret leapt forward in a flash of brown, her claws skittering across the floorboards as she closed the gap between herself and Falkner. I saw the telltale yellow shimmer of a Light Screen forming around her, which helped immensely as a blast of wind skirted just a hair too close for comfort. Above, Icarus wheeled with Gaia clutched tightly in his talons. She fired a blast into the air, and sticky strings of silk streamed down, haphazardly draping around the room before pulling taut as Icarus carried her away.

Hissing in annoyance and vaporizing one of the silk strings on his sleeve with a gust of wind, Falkner raised his hand and prepared to obliterate the rest, only for Iris to reach him and tackle him down with the force of a bullet. His hand and his strike went wild; the errant blast cratered another portion of the wall. I flinched: even with Dante’s help, getting hit by one of those at close range would end messily. Falkner yowled in pain as Iris spiraled up his body, leaving a pinprick trail of clawmarks as she did so, and then she went to town on his face. He raised a fist toward her, and I recognized the telltale signs from before. We needed to—

“Get her out of there. Now,” I commanded Dante, who obliged with a Psychic. Blue energy surrounded the sentret, and she was flying through the air, her claws still outstretched, even as Falkner obliterated the spot she’d been occupying half a second ago with a blast of wind. Dante set her down gently on the floorboards, only for her to leap back into the fray.

{Set,} Gaia called, and she was right: the criss-cross of webbing around Falkner was thick enough to almost be a cage, some areas so dense that I could barely see him. It would have to be enough.

“That’s your plan?” Silver called incredulously from his spot behind the pillar. “String Shot? Everywhere?”

“It’s working better than Plan ‘Get Hit by the Air Slash and Wait in the Corner to Die’, honestly,” I shot back through gritted teeth. From inside of the fence of silk, I could still hear Falkner’s growing frustration as Iris presumably antagonized him and then dodged. This would be our best chance to him with a surprise attack that he wouldn’t be able to block. “Icarus, get ready to go in. Dante, start charging Shock Wave. Fire it on my command.”

{It won’t possibly make it to him,} the abra pointed out. {Silk is an insulator.}

“There will be an opening.” Even though I should’ve seen it coming, I forced back the shudder of revulsion at the sudden déjà vu. I felt the cold sensation coming on, but I blinked twice and forced it down. Not here. Not now. I needed my team for this. “Atlas, fire.”

The houndour barked in delight at finally getting his turn to fight, and a trio of burning-hot embers whizzed past us, landing squarely in the middle of the silk. The fire spread quickly, incinerating the outer layer of string shot in an instant. The embers began chewing a hole through the silk where they’d landed, burning a gap nearly a foot wide. “There’s your opening,” I told Dante, and the abra didn’t need to hear it twice. “Icarus, you too. Iris, move out of there.” A sharp surge of electricity discharged with a hiss from between the psychic’s outstretched paws, and the abra fired the glimmering blue shockwave through the gap in the webbing just as Icarus finished phasing through the gym leader’s body with the last vestiges of a Feint Attack.

Iris was still skittering back to me when Falkner roared in pain as the electricity made contact with him. I thought back to Rousseau’s words: possessing a human might’ve given us the only possible advantage we’d had left to push. Falkner swerved, spinning around wildly to end the source of his torment, but by then the string shot around him had caught fire as well, leaving him with nothing but globs of sticky fire.

{It isn’t his fault,} Rousseau said half-heartedly, looking at the flailing gym leader with what might’ve been pity. {To die without memory—}

{—is no excuse to torment the living,} Dante said harshly, and fired another Shock Wave into the fray. Falkner screamed again.

The gastly flinched but said nothing more. He hadn’t joined in the fray, and now that I’d heard this, I didn’t think I would be able to ask him to fight Falkner in the future. But was this it? Had we won?

Too late, I mentally berated myself for tempting fate as an enormous blast of wind, bigger than any we’d seen before, formed around Falkner like a cocoon, sucking the remains of the flaming web into the vortex and extinguishing the fires in an instant. I took a step backward—like that would’ve done anything to help. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as Icarus began frantically flapping toward us, Gaia in his talons as he veered around the raging air currents. Squinting, I could see Falkner in the center, looking bruised and burned and generally worse for the wear, but nowhere near out of it yet.

His eyes locked with mine, and I saw those too-black pupils clearly even through the smoke, before he bodily threw the hurricane toward us.

Shit. Dante wouldn’t be enough to stop this. “Can you at least slow it down?” I shouted to him.

{I don’t think so,} Dante said grimly, but the abra tried anyway, his entire body glowing blue as he tried to grab the hurricane in a psychic hold. I stared, dumbstruck, as the pillar of wind ground to a halt, cloaked in Dante’s blue light, and then his eyes grew unfocused and the energy flickered out. The abra dropped out of the air in exhaustion, and I barely managed to catch him. Time seemed to speed up as the twister surged forward, unfettered, and we had nothing left to stop it with.

In the moments before the cyclone obliterated us, my mind remained stubbornly blank. I stared, dumbfounded, as the hurricane spiraled toward us, inexorable and unstoppable, while my brain replayed useless high school lectures about science. I was back in Goldenrod, pencil tapping in class, while my teacher droned on about weather patterns and air currents, how—

Hot air rises.

“Atlas, get all of your fire on that thing!” I shouted, one hand uselessly outstretched as a sort of shield. “Dante, Icarus, prepare to get in fast once the cyclone’s out of the way. We don’t have much time.” It wasn’t going to be enough, but it would have to be. “Iris, keep it occupied.” The sentret wouldn’t be able to attack the ghost directly, but we didn’t have much of a choice.

Atlas leapt forward, tilting his head back and charging his fire in only an instant before letting out the largest stream of fire I had ever seen from him, nearly two feet in diameter and glowing a brilliant blue at the core. I shied away from the explosion, trying to shield my eyes from the blinding light without looking away from Falkner. The temperature around us skyrocketed, and the remaining rafters in the ceiling gave in with a huge groan and flew skyward. Whining with exhaustion, the houndour collapsed at my feet as well, and I felt my blood run cold. That had pushed him too far. I could still see the coal-grey fur against his ribcage moving, but—

Iris slammed into the gym leader once more with her tail, using her momentum as a pivot and springboarding off of his knees before launching herself far away. Icarus did the same, spreading his inky wings wide to pull up short before arcing back in the opposite direction, beady red eyes glowing through the smoke.

They were too slow. Falkner whipped his hands through the air, blasting them back with an explosion of pure wind. My pokémon weren’t fast enough to escape the crossfire, and I watched with horror as Icarus squawked in agony and plowed into the ground. Iris landed ten feet from us, rolling to a halt and not getting up again.

{A gazzze as blank and pitilessssss as the ssssun!}

“Roussea, please!” I shouted over the tempest to the gastly beside me. I felt like an icy claw had wrapped around my heart. If my pokémon died here, I didn’t know what I would do. “Do something!”

{Ma chérie, I—}

“They’ll die, Rousseau!”

Black energy around him surging from his evident frustration, the gastly phased through my stomach and appeared in the middle of the carnage, combatting bits of errant wind with spurts of his own darkness. He screwed up his eyes and released a cloud of dark smoke, blocking out the possessed body of Falkner, as well as the struggling forms of my pokémon, from view.

I took several steps forward, Gaia still in my arms, as I tried to get closer to the fray to get a better look. “If you can hear me, strafe!” I shouted.

“That word, Boss,” I heard Icarus crow from inside of the haze of chaos. “You use it often, but I do not think you know what it means!”

I felt a flash of irritation at my murkrow, but it meant that he was alive. Icarus burst out of the smoke, a desperately flailing Iris in his talons, before he bodily threw her back into the chaos. I watched her eyes sharpen with determination as she straightened her brown body, sharp claws pointing in toward where she could barely see the outline of Falkner’s figure, striped tail flapping in the wind. Then, she sank back into the cloud and I lost her from my view.

I heard a howl of pain, indicating that she’d managed to make contact, and then there was another blast of wind that sent all three of them flying back again, clearing the haze in the process. Falkner’s slouched figure appeared out of the fleeing smoke, the cold fire still in his eyes, but I could see a pair of three unbleeding scratches on either cheek, right beneath the eyes.

“Icarus, now!”

There was a squawk of affirmation, and Icarus sprouted through Falkner’s stomach again, nothing more than a golden beak followed by a sprouting pair of black wings cloaked in the dark energy of Feint Attack. The gym leader stumbled in response while the ghost within shrieked wildly, but another cannon-like blast of wind sent Icarus spiraling to the ground. “Reeling shadowsss of indignant birdsss.” Falkner began staggering toward us, and I knew that we were out of tricks. Screeching, Iris leapt at him, and Falkner didn’t even look as he slammed her into a wall.

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the undead limping towards us to kill me. The cold surged up against me, but I forced it down. Atlas hadn’t moved, Dante was still unconscious, and the rest of my pokémon were scattered around the room. There was nothing left to stop him from—

{Stay back.}

I looked up in horror to see Gaia facing down a monster alone.

The hunched shell of Falkner slowly approached her, his grin widening on one side only. “My sssmall caterpie, unloved and unwanted. I’d be doing your trainer a favor, you know, if I killed you,” the creature said, tendrils of darkness wrapping the walls, forming into the shapes of illusory trainers. “Bug-typessssss are perfect for children. They grow up fassssst and are eassssy to train.” The ghost tilted its head to one side as it wrapped shadowy tendrils around Gaia, who feebly spat another wave of String Shot at it that was promptly batted away by another blast of dark energy. “But they jusssssst can’t keep up with the resssssst of the team, can they? I’m sssssure you were winning at firssssst, every time, but when the time comes that the battlesssss ssssstart actually mattering—”

With that, he threw Gaia into the ground, creating a crater three feet in diameter before picking her up smashing her into the wall on the other side of the room.

“Gaia!” I screamed, voice catching in my throat.

Icarus squawked in protest, pulling his battered form airborne and struggling to gain altitude, his wingbeats barely keeping him in the air, but Falkner easily clipped his wings with an Air Slash and set him spiraling back down.

“Now you won’t feel bad about replacccing her,” the ghost hissed. “You can get something really sssstrong on your team, can’t you? Sssomething that sssuited you more? Were you ever going to tell that you didn’t want her?”

I opened my mouth, but no sounds came out.

“I ssssshould give you the badge for thissss,” the gym leader said quietly, and, true to form, the corpse of Falkner lurched forward and patted his pocket before throwing a tiny lump of metal in my direction. The winged badge skidded to a halt near my feet. “You’ve done sssso well.”

I stumbled toward the wall, desperately trying to see if I could find Gaia’s form in the rubble, but the all-too-familiar whiplash crack of an Air Slash, followed by the rafters caving in above me, stopped me in my tracks.

The pillar glowed gold.

“The darknessssss dropsssss again, but now I know,” the thing crowed victoriously, hovering over all of us and preparing to wipe us out, before a blast of psychic energy knocked it to the ground. I blearily turned around, expecting to see Dante pushing the offensive, but he was still struggling on the ground as a purple blur sent me skidding back.

{That twenty years of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,} a second voice finished. Translucent wings flared out, and the subsequent draft was so powerful that the clouds of smoke were sent shrieking back. The butterfree rocketed forward, a multicolored beam of raw energy erupting from her glinting eyes, and I numbly watched as the creature I’d pegged with the killing instinct of a damp paper towel systematically smashed Falkner’s corpse into the ground until the planks gave way. {You aren’t the only one who knows how to read,} Gaia said calmly, flapping above the crater she’d created.

“Holy shit,” I breathed, and then limped over to where Falkner had fallen. I peered tentatively down the hole in the ground, half expecting to see him surging up, there was only an eerie calm. Beneath us, Falkner’s body lay crumpled in the center of a slowly-settling cloud. “Gaia, you did it.” I looked into her newformed honeycombed eyes, trying to see if there was anything familiar in there, but she only looked saddened.

Something black erupted from Falkner's still chest, its features too smudged and too faint for me to see, but I think I knew. {Thank you,} the ghost whispered weakly, sinking to the ground alongside Falkner’s corpse and dimming a little more. {You have come to sssave usss… You came to ssssave usss… You will come to sssave usss…}

Rousseau looked away grimly.

{You musssst be careful that you do not lossse your way in the dark,} the ghost whispered, its voice barely audible.

Almost touching the ground, the ghost's blank smile crumbled away to dust, the blisteringly dark energy around it no longer vibrant. {Pleasssse,} it whispered quietly, feeble, vaporous arms reaching out toward us. {Who wassss I?}

I opened my mouth to answer, prepared to be furious at the bastard that had nearly killed Gaia, prideful over the monster I’d never expected to vanquish, uncaring in the face of what as nothing more than a shell, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “I'm sorry,” I whispered instead. “I don't know.”

Maybe it didn't hear me. Maybe it did, and my uncertainty was the last thing it heard. The ghost did not respond, its eyes staring blankly upward before it, too, began to disintegrate alongside the long-dead corpse of its owner.

{The darkness drops, but now I know,} Gaia said from behind my shoulder.

Rousseau finished in a quiet, solemn voice as way of eulogy, {that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.}

I had nothing more to offer a ghost that cringed by a man's unmarked grave.

Dante picked up Atlas’s limp form in a weak cloud of energy. I scooped up Iris in my arms and offered my shoulder to Silver, who refused to meet my eyes even as his entire body shivered from shock. There would be people at the bottom to look after him, at least. We'd survived the storm.

We limped down the Tower together.

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[kintsugi]

responses!

Spoiler

but when are we gonna get some Team Rocket action? They've been in the background for a LONG time. I feel like they haven't really earned all that monologuing about their evil exploits, so to say. Sure, Momofuku Ando told us that they're evil, but can we plz see some evil in action?

azalea
everywhere
azalea

I read through a lot of the fic again to get a handle on the things you've changed. It's definitely better than I remember. Good job on keeping up to date with edits. That's not easy to do, but it results in a much higher quality story.

holy shit someone actually noticed! makes it all worth, tbh <3

My main complaint is that so far the plot has not progressed so much as slowly grown more complicated. I suppose in a way that's kind of the same thing, but I'm still shaky on Captain Planet's goals and motivations.

pinky promise I had the title of this chapter set a long time ago

DROP THE Bates
He's a sort of one-off mentor character from what we've seen so far. We see the usual fare of hints at a dark past. Good stuff, but nothing hugely exceptional. His level of trust of Samurai Jack goes up and down. I guess there’s a tiny bit of development, but he barely gets established in the first place before he’s left behind.

never stop being awesome
OH BUT HE IS COMING BACK.

It's not the most original thing, but it fits the style and it's certainly entertaining. The prose can get a bit ramble-y when dealing with exposition, but at the same time that exposition is often necessary and rarely uninteresting. Exposition is always a YMMV thing, and this fic is no exception. As a fan of explaining all the things, I like it.

I, uh, have read and re-read this and still can't figure out -- is the style something you like, or no?

The meta-setting is great (that is, Johto as a whole), but I'm not sold on the setting description in a scene. We've been stuck in the same rather boring tower for several chapters now, which doesn't exactly do a good job of highlighting descriptive prose, unfortunately. I suppose it's a symptom of the style (first-person narration in particular), but I think a bit more effort could be put into making the world feel more real.

Describing rooms has always been a weakpoint for me, which is unfortunate given how often my characters are indoors. I'll work on this eventually.

Overall, still one of my favorite fics in the Workshop. Keep doing the thing you do.

thx u. this actually means a lot to me

Here's my judging review. Sorry it took so long.

yo holy hell don't apologize for this review; it was amazing and full of so much good advice

I like it, I really do. I've seen the "Team Rocket has taken over!" schtick maybe a dozen times, but this is the only story I've found so far that's actually tried to make it more compelling than "they're evil dicks". I can't tell if I'm supposed to hate them or love them for what they've done. They've done terrible stuff to get into and cement their power, but they then turned around and made things a lot better than they ever were afterward.

Yay! This was one of my frustrations with YA -- dystopias being assholes just for being assholes, when there are so many real world examples of people being assholes while also doing good things .-.

One thing that stuck out to me, in the first chapter, was the reference to Jesus and crucifixions. Seemed a little jarring to hear a real world reference in there, but I can see why you made it.

This is actually a remnant from a much older time when I didn't have the lore fully fleshed-out. I'll probably remove it; on a re-read, I'm not the hugest fan either.

However, it did feel like the setting wasn't utilized as much as it could have. It's described well enough, but it felt more tell than show and I often found myself lost in literary limbo where I was reading the description but it wasn't forming a picture in my head all that much. Maybe that's a problem on my end. / Maybe it's a consequence of the first person narrative, but the unnamed protagonist really started to grind my gears after awhile with the seemingly endless internal monologue even in quick, fight or flight situations. In rapid fire situations where I need a response NOW, I do indeed think a lot in that moment but I probably understand only 10% of it. The protagonist here seems to go on essay-length thought binges even in situations where they might need a snappy response.

I'm not the biggest fan of how telepathy is written. The lack of quotation marks around it, substituted with a 'non-standard' character instead, distracts me from when it's actually taking place. I could look the other way if it were italicized or made more obvious that it's not just more description. But this is more of a personal gripe, so... you do you.

...I think I'm going to keep it this way. If only because I personally can't see italics as telepathy, don't like bold in prose, and I don't know what other conventions are left.

I found this story enjoyable, if a little rough around the edges. The setting in particular is my favorite bit. I don't see many people step away from the comfort of established apocalypse settings and try something 'new' in that regard, but that was done well in this case.

Sorry for getting back to you so late! Thanks for picking this up for judging -- I know it's a bit of a clusterfuck in places, so all of this feedback was really useful for me.

QUOTE="Beth Pavell, post: 6110201, member: 33222"]Six months ago I intended to do a proper re-read. Now whatever happened to that.

holy hell. thanks for keeping up with this

throwing in a general note that I've read the typos you've pointed out + will address them. Faulkner/Falkner is actually hardwired from years of being a high school student in America, and the rest are just me being stupid.

Bringing in the froslass was a smart idea. By herself Froslass simply plays to your strengths in tightening up what was something of a non-sequitur chapter before. Atlas doesn't quite work in the new version - inevitably the tone is off for the entry of Doug, which I'm not that bothered about. I think his dialogue misses a certain something. Oh, speaking of which, is the chronology of TUPpy's hair right? I seem to recall she hadn't actually dyed it till she left Cherrygrove proper.

Eyyy, good to know that having an antagonist during that scene helped tighten everything. you're totally right about the hair thing, though.

I'm uncertain about Froslass' cryptic comments to TUPpy. I can't quite decide whether it distracts from the predatory, albeit creepy nature of the attack. I suppose it may be building to something later, but as of now I'm leaning towards feeling that it doesn't really add much.

very badly-handled foreshadowing

I like Bates' pragmatic attitude. It's not often you see humans willing to play kill-or-be-killed in pokémon fanfiction, which is frankly bizarre given how many of them try and portray pokémon as realistic in a red-in-tooth-and-claw sense. Naturally I'm kind of doubtful about his comments on wild pokémon battles in that light, but then he did exclude predation from that, so ... in any case he's a valuable antidote to TUPpy's usual rationalisations.

hurrah, glad that point worked out as planned too

I'm pretty sure previous versions didn't spell out Silver's own lack of choice in being involved in Team Rocket, which does give some genuine shades of grey to his own behaviour. Still quick to forget that whatever he thinks TUPpy is harbouring, she's been given no choice in doing anything since the xatu handed over Icarus. I suppose he can be forgiven - or at least excused - for not trying basic decency as a defence against the dark arts. I couldn't help but think during his interlude (And this isn't a complaint), that he's lucky the Rockets command the fear they do. Bates could have so easily made him disappear.

I don't keep chronological drafts, so let's just call it that.

The rest of it is kinda a setting issue -- I want to convey that the Rockets purged dark-types so well that, by the time Nara is around, no one remembers what they are outside of hazy specters. But then I also want to imply that there was a really huge reason why such a complete purge was necessary, and it was because they were dangerous and terrifying.

I'll start with the problems. I think I've said before that action scenes aren't your strong suit, and I think the battle in Seventeen shows this. In short, I found myself getting bored. It reminds me of something I learnt during my roleplaying days, especially as a player in someone else's Pathfinder campaign: don't let the battle become repetitive. If you find it is, then either find a way to bring an ending closer or rewrite the boss as an easier fight. It might well make perfect sense for it to be a sweat and tears matter of attrition, but your players won't thank you for it when they spend an extra hour rolling dice.

Yeaaaah, the battle was the part of the chapter I wasn't totally on board with, and I ended up releasing it unpolished because I had no idea how to fix it. OH WELL. live and learn.

I still love Chapter ten. Damnit, your Violet City is better than mine

Was damn clever, and I wish I'd thought of it

I'm going to come right out and say it - I love Celebi, and I want to write about her interacting with my characters. I can't fault her. She's a bit like Eostre of American Gods, albeit one that doesn't need to care about people. She puts the whole importance of this story, of TUPpy, the Rockets and everything, into perspective. I love the idea that legendary-fuelled regimes have been set up before and failed. I love that she's the first being to interact with TUPpy who does so in a frankly ordinary way (Ironically, given the plot that leads to it)

I think I'm going to propose to my kouhai

senpai noticed me :O

___________________________________________________________________________​

interlude iv. motives​

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rousseau

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{Ma chérie, what is the word you humans use to describe it? Déjà vu?}

From the distance, the Tower almost looked peaceful. The ashen cloud of debris had finally settled, and if I didn’t squint too hard, I couldn’t see that the edges were jagged, sheared off by some incalculable force. But I wasn’t from around here, and the skyline wasn’t burned into my memory, and the fact that Violet’s tallest building was now no higher than the rest didn’t mean much to me, even though I could feel the entire city mourning.

We weren’t dumb enough to get close. The gym and the Tower alike were cordoned off and swarming with Rockets. When we’d staggered to the bottom, Silver muttered something about how I shouldn’t go far, I told him to shut up and get medical attention before he actually bled out, and now I was milling through the streets with Rousseau, trying to lose myself in the crowds and ignore the fact that I could see Dante hovering in the corner of my vision no matter where we went. I sighed and pushed my hands further in my pockets. I’d hoped we could shake them. This wasn’t ideal.

Luckily, Silver could only track one of us at a time. Probably. So my pokémon were hanging low in the forest—I’d told them to stay away, but it wasn’t like Icarus ever listened—and I was stuck with a morose gastly who had no home and a penchant for Kalosian, because he didn’t count as mine anyhow.

“Sure,” I muttered darkly, flipping the hood of my jacket up and barely registering what Rousseau had said. I had been hoping to escape in the chaos, maybe run down and just camp it out in the wilderness near Azalea for a few months, but I had the sinking feeling that Dante wouldn’t let me get far.

His smile still painted firmly on his face, Rousseau said in a quiet voice like it was the punchline of a joke, {You know, ma chérie, I watched you die.}

“You what?”

{You didn’t see it. You were unconscious. Gaia refused to drop a building on Falkner, he seemed to take it a little personally, so he threw you into a wall. You got knocked out then. You might’ve even been dead from that; I forget how fragile your kind can be,} he remarked off-handedly.

“I got up.” I’d never been able to have existential conversations with Brigid, but perhaps all ghosts didn’t have an understanding of life any more. Rousseau had a point: why care about something you could never lose?

{Except instead you got up. You knew how to take on Falkner, you had a plan, and you vanquished him. You lived. Your red-headed friend, too, and he still hasn’t called in the Executives because he’s afraid they’ll find you, when he still owes you his life.}

“Now you’re just being stupid,” I muttered, casting a furtive look over my shoulder to see Dante bobbing behind us, apparently engrossed with a pebble on the ground. “He’s trailing us right now, I promise. Once he’s gotten his leg healed up, they’ll hunt us down, and we’re just standing here doing nothing.”

{I thought maybe I’d just had a nightmare. Maybe I was remembering something from my previous life, and what I was seeing had nothing to do with you. But then I looked at your eyes. You saw something. You had the eyes of a ghost.}

“I’m not possessed,” I lied firmly. But I’d seen the way my eyes had flashed too, before I’d stopped myself, before I’d been able to rewrite it.

{I don’t think you are. Even with what I remember seeing of you.} Rousseau’s leer faltered for a moment, just one, just enough for me to remember that it wasn’t permanently attached to his face. {I saw you twice. Once, you were cold and inhuman, but you were not a ghost. You did not attack out of provocation or boredom or vengeance, as the ghosts do. We need not lash out in self-defense because there is no self to defend. The intent to kill in your eyes was something wholly else. Something wholly human.}

A twisted knot formed at the bottom of my stomach. He wasn’t supposed to remember this. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

{Sometimes I don’t, either. Because you cannot have been in two places at once, and this version of you is a dream. But there’s a moment that every ghost knows, when they remember dying and they can’t quite place how, and then they have this understanding that no matter what happened they’re here now and they’ve just got to make do with it—}

“Rousseau. I’m fine. The Tower was making us all see things.”

{You have the eyes of someone who remembers their own death.} Rousseau floated in front of my path. {Maybe you didn’t see it, but I did,} he said firmly, blank eyes piercing through me. {You died, ma chérie. Your red-headed friend went soon after. The rubble rained down on Violet, countless more perished, and finally the Executives were able to get a teleport in to clean up, but they were too late.}

He was saying it with so much certainty. “What are you saying?” I whispered, hunching my shoulders and waving away a street vendor, who seemed to think we’d taken undue interest in his collection of useless electronics.

{I shouldn’t know this. I shouldn’t remember this.} The gastly should’ve sounded distressed, but he kept his voice perfectly level. {No one else seems aware of it. But I remember feeling the Tower shudder and then flinch, and we were all back where we started, except we weren’t. Déjà vu.}

I was morbidly curious against my will. “You know about the first time we tried?”

{It comes in flashes. You became cold, and then you died.} The gastly sighed, and then he flashed his fangs at me again. {Falkner rained destruction on you, and then the Executives rained destruction on Falkner. I watched. And then I exited the rubble and drifted to the Dragon’s Den because I felt compelled to be there, but I waited out my days in silence. In another world, I have a conversation like this one with the Forest Queen at the heart of the shrine, and it ends when she realizes what I am, what I can do, and she turns me to dust.}

She what—

{I do not pretend to understand the affairs of the Forest Queen. Do you trust her, ma chérie?}

“She saved my life, Rousseau,” I said quietly, unsure of how to place this.

{And I saved yours, and you saved Silver’s, or at least you did so once,} the little gastly shot back with his smile, casting a meaningful glare toward Dante. {But that doesn’t mean he’s blind to what you really are.}

___________________________________________________________________________​

dante

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“So how do we want to handle this?” I said aloud to myself, the ranger station between Violet City and Route 32 looming ahead of me. “I know Silver told me not to go far, but what will you do if I try it?”

The abra pretended not to hear me.

I sighed. “Dante, I know I haven’t exactly been giving you the best examples of it, but I’m not stupid. I know you’re there.”

Nothing. I set my jaw and began walking toward the outpost grimly.

{Ma chérie,} Rousseau began hesitantly, and then more urgently: {He’s—}

With a flash, the abra appeared in front of us, his face contorted into a fierce scowl as he completed the teleportation. {You were told not to go far.}

“And? I’m getting my pokémon and getting the hell out of Violet.” I paused, folding my arms and hoping that Rousseau looked more intimidating than I did. “What are you going to do about it?”

{My master is in your debt, but do not take that privilege lightly.} The air around the abra’s left paw began to shimmer with latent energy.

Gaia darted between us. {We were allies when we had a common enemy,} she said in a firm, even voice.

Rousseau bobbed up and down in affirmation. {I see no reason why that needs to end here.}

Dante batted her aside without a second thought, snarling and turning to Rousseau. {Do not think that your involvement has gone unnoticed, undead. One good performance does not undo what we have seen of the world.}

And that applied to me as well, of course. But— “He’s not wrong, Dante,” I said softly. “We don’t have to be enemies now that we’re back on the ground.”

{Then stop disobeying my master’s commands.}

Last week, I might’ve given him that point. This week: “That’s not how alliances work.” I tried to keep my voice hard, like there was no room for argument, like I wasn’t trying to tell the protégé of a dictator that unilateral chains of command weren’t the right thing for everyday relationships. “It goes both ways.”

{You cannot even forge a simple bond with your starter,} the abra replied with a scoff. {Do not condescend to tell me how to relate to someone.}

“You don’t know a thing about me and Icarus,” I spat back, although in hindsight, it was probably a good thing that he didn’t.

{We know enough. The ghost still clings to you.}

I folded my arms across my chest, feeling my heartbeat in the tips of my ears. Yelling wouldn’t do me any good here. “I don’t want to pick a fight here,” I said, as if Rousseau and Gaia (and me, I guess) could actually take him. “Especially not in front of so many people. But I will, if I have to.”

{Why are you so insistent in being impertinent?} the abra hissed back. I could almost see Silver’s annoyance etched in his face. {Just listen for once.}

“For once?” Maybe I was right from the beginning, and no one had ever refused them, so this was all news. “I let you push me around the Tower because we both thought I was a monster.” I didn’t have to tell them what I’d seen, what I knew: that I actually was a monster. They’d forgotten, and I was never going to let it happen again. “That isn’t the case anymore. I’m just a girl and her bird. Surely you have bigger problems.”

{Just a girl and her bird couldn’t have taken on Falkner,} Dante challenged.

I took another step toward him, anger and adrenaline pushing me further than anything else ever would’ve. “There’s just no winning with you guys. Either I’m a monster because of some circumstantial evidence that you threw together, or I’m dead because I wasn’t strong enough to take out Falkner, or I’m still bad because I managed to scrape a hard-fought win. How many hoops will you make me jump through until you just leave me alone?”

I could lie like this all day. Silver wasn’t around to call me out on it, and even if he had been, there was still the fact that—

{It’s not like that.}

“Then let us go. I’ll stick around outside of Violet until Silver recovers if he really wants to talk, and I’ll be easy enough to find, but stop following us.”

I watched his gaze flick between Gaia and Rousseau and me, between the beauty and the monster and the ghost, between the ones who had saved Silver’s life.

{How can we trust you?}

I folded my arms. This was the problem with psychics. You didn’t know if you’d actually convinced them of something, or if they’d realized a more beneficial path that just happened to look like you were winning. “You trusted me with your lives at the top of the Tower.”

{We don’t trust you with yours.}

“Too bad it was always mine to begin with,” I shot back, and, though every bone in my body screamed against it, I shouldered past him and began walking away from Violet City.

It wasn’t until we’d reached the output that it finally sunk in that he hadn’t tried to stop us.

___________________________________________________________________________​

gaia

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“Don’t idolize me,” I muttered darkly as I pretended to look interested in the plaque outside of the Ruins of Alph. The Unown, it said, were psychics of legend, said to possess enormous power and the ability to seal away knowledge of the future.

Yeah. There was no way in hell I was going inside of that exhibit.

{I don’t,} said my butterfree, leaving me wondering just how much she knew. {We are only mortal, after all.} She perched serenely on my head, flapping her wings a little to keep her weight from crushing my neck, and it was only then that I realized I would never hold her in my arms again. {You make your mistakes, as do I. But in the end, in the dark, we both protect each other. That is what our team does.}

She didn’t remember how the girl had callously commanded Dante to fry her just to delay my death by a few seconds. Of course she wouldn’t. But I could. “You aren’t mad at me?”

Gaia paused, and I felt her sink deeper onto me as her wingbeats slowed. {Why would I be?}

“Falkner wasn't wrong. I captured you just to save my own skin.”

{Perhaps.}

“It wasn’t for you.” No more lies. Not to my not-starter.

{I know.}

“I almost got you killed. Many times.”

{True.}

“Then—”

{You lied to me. You hurt me. But that does not mean for a moment that I loved you any less.}

I hadn’t cried after Silver, or over Bates, or with Falkner. I’d grit my teeth through the froslass and turned my chin up to the apocalypse. But hearing Gaia tell me something as simple as that hit like a punch in the gut. “I don’t understand,” I whispered thickly.

{For a long time, I didn’t either.}

Her weight sank heavily into my shoulders, and I felt her wings brush against me as she flared them to steady herself.

{There’s an interesting quirk in the biology of my species,} Gaia mused. {Only butterfree are capable of producing offspring. The irony, of course, is that very few of the young grow strong enough to reach adulthood. It is as the ghost in the Tower said—our weakness makes it so that many of us end up abandoned before we can grow strong.} Had her voice always been this somber, or was that a byproduct of evolution? {But now that I have reached this form, I find that I already have a family to look out for, and I will do whatever it takes to protect them.}

My knuckles whitened on the edge of the brass plaque of the exhibit, obscuring the raised text beneath. “I will never deserve you.”

{Sometimes,} the butterfree said serenely, {we are given things we do not deserve, and sometimes we deserve things we are not given. That is the way of the world.}

I could feel the docent’s eyes fixated on me—after all, who took their butterfree to a museum for a nice chat on the same day that a national monument collapsed for unknown reasons? It was time to leave; knowing me, the longer we stayed, the more likely it was that a swarm of the Unown would appear and somehow ruin things even more. “But still.”

{I am quite glad to have finally found you, trainer, despite it all. Maybe it is more accurate to say that we do not deserve each other.}

___________________________________________________________________________​

iris

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In the grasslands, with just the sentret and the houndour, things were different.

{So why can you make fire?}

Atlas tilted his head to one side, brown eyes going wide and unfocused in confusion. {What do you mean?}

Iris’s tail flicked in annoyance as she struggled to remain patient. {In my clan, those who can create fire are considered the best of warriors. The elite. They are the ones who were gifted the power of light and warmth, and they receive the mantle of being our greatest protectors. There is no higher honor.}

Atlas, who had been happily rubbing the coal-black fur of his back into the grass, looked up blankly.

{Did you hear anything I just said or did you stop paying attention three words in?}

The houndour whined guiltily and refused to meet her eyes.

Iris threw her paws into the air in frustration. {This is what I mean!} she shouted, claws sheathing and unsheathing involuntarily even as Atlas cowered away from her. {I’ve been training day and night for as long as I can remember trying to be good enough, and I’ve always told myself that it’s okay, only the greatest of warriors can possibly tame this raw force of nature, that I’ll get it if I just keep working harder, getting stronger, becoming better. And, and, and…} She had to stop talking for a moment, shallow breaths consuming her words. Half a moment more, and the sentret composed herself, a frigid sort of anger slipping into her voice. {And then whatever gods there are hand me you and the girl, and everything I thought I knew gets turned on its head. And she serves the Forest Queen, as do I, and I was commanded to trust her, so I shall obey. She took my clan from me, but you… you took my future. I will never be her elite.}

Atlas’s tail stopped thumping. {Think of happy thoughts.}

{Do what.} In response, the sentret’s voice dropped into a dangerously low octave.

{I think of things that make me happy, like unexpected snacks or a funny smell beneath a tree or someone like the tall old man from the forest finding me and saying hello, i am very glad to meet you and protect you and the Master from the nasty ice monster. These are things that are happy. These are things that are to be protected. These are the reasons I can make fire.} Atlas inched back on his haunches and pointed his nose into the sky. He paused for a moment. {I hold these thoughts inside of me, and then I am filled with warmth.} He snorted, and a small ember escaped his lips, the smoke curling around his nostrils. {And this is how I make the flame.}

Iris deflated.

{But—} she began in a small voice.

Atlas nudged her sharply with his wet nose. {There is no doubt in fire,} he said, his voice surprisingly firm. {I must be absolutely sure that what I want to protect is something that must be protected by me, or else there will be no spark.}

The sentret took a step back, disgusted at first by the hondour’s intrusion of her space, but she did not retreat any further. Her left paw curled into a tight fist. She glared firmly at it, the intensity in her brown eyes so brilliant I was certain it would ignite instantly.

The moments ticked by. Nothing happened.

The houndour’s ears flicked back. {What was your thought?}

Iris turned away, panting heavily, but she glared straight at me. {My real clan,} she said curtly, and then leapt away into the underbrush, leaving me and Rousseau hiding behind the tree and feeling like we had trespassed on something precious.

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icarus

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“Badge, bitch!”

“Excuse me?”

Icarus cackled gleefully before a disc of metal about the size of my thumb hit me in the face and he repeated his exclamation.

“Why would you do that?” I asked, fishing around in the folds of my jacket to see what he’d thrown. When I turned the metal over, I couldn’t help but freeze. “Where did you get this?” In my hands was an honest-to-gods Zephyr Badge. I could recognize the wing-shaped insignia stamped into the metal, and I could practically feel the faint power humming off of it.

“Dead-man threw before throwing Gaia,” Icarus said, clacking his beak and then snatching the badge out of my hands again. “Shiny.” He clamped down on the badge as if experimenting with the feel of the metal in his beak. “We keep?”

“Don’t do that,” I snapped, grabbing the badge back despite Icarus’s protests. “That’s mine. Boss’s. Don’t touch.”

Like Gaia’s evolution, I felt like this was supposed to be one of those momentous times. I’d gotten my first badge against incredible odds.

But all I could think about was how this badge had been given out by a man who had genuinely cared about the people around him. Despite whatever people said about the Rockets and their peons, Falkner had taken it upon himself to test the mettle of fledgling trainers and see if they were ready to leave the nest. This was a token that was meant to be earned with respect, not one something to be thrown by a spiteful ghost wearing the husk of a man.

“Boss sad,” Icarus said astutely.

“Yes, Ic,” I murmured, running my fingers through his silky feathers while turning the badge over in my other hand. “Boss is sad.”

“Why?” My murkrow tilted his head to one side, making half an effort to peck the badge out of my hands again before stopping. “We win.”

If I showed him weakness, how would he react? The textbooks had said that predators like these weren’t to be trusted; to train them correctly, you commanded from the top and never saw them as equals. Anything less was an invitation for a new alpha. But the textbooks had also said so many things that were wrong about us so far—“Boss didn’t like winning this one,” I said.

“Gaia was fine,” the bird said, a strange fierceness in his voice.

“Boss wanted to make sure everyone in the Tower was fine.”

“Everyone important fine, too.”

Maybe he truly only saw things in black and white, just like the world only saw him in light and dark. Maybe he wouldn’t understand what it meant to win and feel bad, because the fight was all he’d ever known. Maybe he needed a team who was more ready than we were. “Boss wanted to save Falkner.”

“Falkner dead long ago. Ghost bragged. Boss never had time.”

Or maybe he was smarter than I was. “Boss wanted to save Falkner anyway.”

“Boss looks after murder. Boss cannot save everyone.”

“Ic, that’s not how that works. That’s not how I work.” I leaned against the tree and sighed, turning the badge over in my fingers again. I would never be worthy of this; would never be flying; would always be dark. But I was still me. “I will never turn my back on people who need me.”

“Boss cannot save everyone.”

“Ic—”

My murkrow flapped in front of my face and then landed on my shoulders, plucking the badge out of my hand. “Bystander died. Is sad. Boss cannot save everyone. Is sad. Everyone will not save Boss. Is sad. But sad not your fault.”

I hadn’t expected any of this. Not the apocalypse, or the Dark-ness, or the Rockets or the or the frosslass or the Gym Leader or anything else, but above all I hadn’t expected my pokémon to look after me. Not my starters, not like this, not when I was still learning what it meant to depend on another.

Icarus nudged his head reassuringly against my open palm. “Boss sad,” he said for the second time, and for the second time that day, I let myself cry.

“No, Ic. Not quite.”

___________________________________________________________________________​

atlas

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“Who’s a good boy? Who’s a big, strong boy who totally showed that thing who’s boss?”

Atlas was beside himself with glee, twisting himself into frantic knots on his back as I rubbed his belly. It was hard to believe that this was the same pokémon that had nearly burned down Sprout Tower yesterday, but—

The houndour stopped for a moment and cocked his head upward. One ear flopped comedically onto the ground. {Hello!} he greeted cheerfully, his stumpy tail still tracing out a substantial arc on the grass.

“Ah. It’s you.” I tried to think about the least awkward form of greeting and came up with nothing. “I’m, uh, glad to see that you’re okay.”

Silver tore his gaze away from Atlas to look at me and ask incredulously, “You give belly rubs to a houndour? Where even did you find one of those?”

“We nearly got killed by a froslass.” I paused. “He’s mine, and I totally have him under control.” Best not to say anything more specific in case it could be interpreted as a lie. Silver had adopted that tone of voice that suggested that I’d said something horrible again, so I tried to change the subject. “Um. Are houndour rare or something?”

{They’re dark-types,} Dante said, while his trainer struggled to comprehend my idiocy. I figured this must be a pretty common occurrence for them by now.

“No, he’s a fire-type.” I laughed nervously, waiting for someone else to get in on the joke, but no one did. “I’ve literally watched him breathe fire for so long now. You can’t fool me.”

“Your murkrow is a flying-type and a dark-type. Your metapod evolved yesterday, and now she’s a bug-type and a flying-type,” Silver said with exaggerated patience. “Surely the idea of having two types isn’t foreign to you.”

Ah. Well, shit. “I mean, he never did anything dark. He’s, uh, really adorable, actually.” If I could convince him to stop chewing on my shoelaces at night, he’d make an excellent pillow. He also treated my every move with constant and unadulterated admiration, which was something I’d never really had before. “I caught him so he could light fires.”

“You do know that when he evolves into a houndoom, his bites could literally cause never-healing burning sensations that have been described as hellfire.”

Atlas seemed to have finally picked up that we were talking about him, and I heard him whine a little and nudge his head back under his head so I would keep petting him. {I love you!} he supplemented unhelpfully.

I filed that information away for later. I’d let him teeth a little on my fingers, but there was no way in hell that was going to continue in the future, then. “I didn’t know that, no.” Pause. I cringed a little in advance for what I was going to say next, and I asked sheepishly: “He evolves into a houndoom? I read about those in the books. They aren’t very friendly, are they?”

Silver threw his hands into the air out of exasperation. “How can you not tell that houndour evolves into houndoom? How did you even make it this far?”

The conversation had gone on quite a while since he’d last insulted my intelligence, so I figured it was a fair enough jab, but I wasn’t going to let him keep verbally beating me up like this. “Does staryu evolve into staraptor? Does crobat evolve into croagunk? I mean, shit. What about torchic, tornadus, torkoal, and torterra? Only two of those things are even remotely biologically similar in the sense that they sort of have shells, and one breathes fire and the other makes mountains. One is a flightless bird and the other is the literal epitome of flight. Pokémon Anatomy was literally my worst class in high school, I feel like they were named by fifty different people with different naming schemes, and the dark-types aren’t even in most textbooks anymore.” I glanced at Gaia for support and got nothing. “I was freezing, and this adorable, fire-starting puppy literally lands in my lap and wanted to play.”

Silver only stared. “We need to talk.”

“About what?” I asked, raising my hands defensively. Hadn’t I done enough to prove to him that I wasn’t a destructive little shit? “Oh, sorry, is this about how Dante’s been keeping tabs on us ever since we reached the bottom of the Tower, how we destroyed Sprout Tower, or how I saved everyone’s life and I’m still being treated like a criminal to you guys?”

“Not here,” he said, looking around as if the trees had ears. “There are too many people around. Meet me on the bridge in three hours.” He hunched his shoulders and limped away, favoring his left leg.

___________________________________________________________________________​

silver

___________________________________________________________________________​

Against my better judgment, I went anyway.

I didn’t like it. At all. It wasn’t until I was on the bridge when I realized how stupid I was for ever showing up, and I realized this might actually be this mistake that finally cost me my life.

I could try to slip under the guardrails of the bridge and plummet away, hoping that, at this distance, the water would only leave me with a few broken bones instead of flattening me. I couldn’t fight without any pokémon. Running didn’t even begin to qualify as an option, given how slow I was and how fast Dante could be, and—

“I didn’t think you’d actually come out here.” Silver said, in a tone that seemed to say I didn’t think you’d be that stupid rather than I didn’t think you’d be this honorable.

“Yeah, well. Some people never learn.”

He didn’t take the opportunity to insult me, for once. Maybe curiosity wouldn’t kill the kadabra.

“So.” Silver sighed and ran a hand through his red hair, distracted. “In the Tower. On your floor.” He paused for a long moment, but I didn’t break the silence. “And everywhere else, really. I did some awful things to you.” Another pause. “And I suppose forcing you up the Tower was hardly fair either, even given the circumstances.”

He paused again, and I figured that this was my turn in the conversation to say something sappy or cheerful about how it all worked out in the end and we came out stronger because of it, but—

No. He wasn’t wrong at all. He’d done some terrible things to get us to the top, and he’d actually hurt me most of all. I hadn’t had much time to think about it in the heat of the moment, but now that we were sitting on the bridge of Route 32, legs trailing above the waters, I finally had the time to realize that he was right. I hadn’t exactly been the bastion of good behavior either, and his actions would’ve made a lot more sense if I’d actually been a ghost, but that wasn’t an excuse. “Yeah,” I said dryly. “Hardly. That’s a start.” I absent-mindedly wondered if dropping into the river was even an option, or if Dante would just snag me with a Psychic before I made it ten feet. “You’re kind of a dick, you know?”

He pursed his lips. “I just think we got off on the wrong foot, that’s all. I’m sorry.” He said it with the forced, choked air of a child.

Before the Tower, I might’ve let him get away with saying that. I might’ve felt bad for someone who looked like they were apologizing for the first time in their life. I might’ve backed down and admitted that we’d both done some stupid things to get to this point, but I was still high on the adrenaline. I’d taken down an undead gym leader. I’d travelled through time. Compared to this, Silver was child’s play. “The very first thing that you did when you saw me was try to throw Icarus into a tree.” I narrowed my eyes, trying to gauge the distance between us and the river. At this distance, it wouldn’t quite feel like concrete, but it definitely wouldn’t be pleasant. Worth?

He raised one eyebrow. “Actually, the very first thing I did when I saw you was watch you command Icarus to attack Ariana.”

My response was a little slowed by the realization that Dante could do line-of-sight teleportation, and there wasn’t a good way to obscure his vision, jump off the bridge, and land safely before he got to me. “Ariana, one of the Executives of Team Rocket, who—”

“—was unarmed and didn’t have a pokémon available to defend herself. You knew the consequences.”

This time, I raised an eyebrow, while wondering how many broken limbs I could get away with if I needed to swim to safety directly afterward.

“Okay,” Silver amended hastily. “She didn’t have a pokémon available to defend herself, but she was definitely armed, and the consequences might’ve been a little unclear.”

“She was pointing a gun at me.” The answer to the ‘broken limbs’ question was somewhere between ‘zero’ and ‘the number I’d get by jumping off a bridge.’ I sighed, leaning back on my arms and gazing upward. It was honestly a nice day outside, too nice for conversations like this. The aurora was almost invisible in the bright, noonday sky. It was almost possible to pretend that the world wasn’t ending. Almost. “What was I supposed to do, Silver? Let them take me into custody?” If this was an actual trap, there were probably Rockets on either end of the bridge and in the river already, so I’d lost my chance to run several hours ago.

No, I’d never had a chance to begin with. I could see that now.

“You aren’t running now,” Silver said. “Or should I expect Icarus to attack me out of nowhere while you make a daring getaway?”

“I’m not stupid. I know Dante’s range. He would incapacitate me before I get to my feet, and even if I did, you can outrun me at this distance,” I said listlessly. There was no fire in my response because there was no room for it. “Assuming I’d survive my next best option, jumping into the river, Dante would probably stop me with a Psychic before I got too far. Even if the fall didn’t kill me, he could Teleport to the bottom and snag me back before I managed to drift away.”

My response was too fast for me to pass it off as a joke. Silver looked at me curiously. “Have you actually been considering that?”

“It may have crossed my mind once.” Saying it out loud, when no ambush had occurred, did make me feel a little stupid, but not that much. There was still time. “Or twice.” I shifted my weight. “Maybe a lot more than that.” This was why I was no good at talking to lie-detectors.

The horrified look on Silver’s face told me more than enough. “Do we really scare you that much? We don’t murder teenagers.”

My temper flared up. The one thing I’d never been able to understand was how naïve he was. “You execute your criminals on public television. I don’t know if I’ve legally done anything wrong outside of the Ariana incident, but I’m sure that’s more than enough,” I muttered. “You bragged about how Team Rocket shot the Xatu for just giving me a murkrow. What would you do to me for earning one?” I sighed, wondering if he could look past me long enough to see the dark bags under my eyes, or the way I hadn’t been able to hold my shoulders upright for a week and a half now.

Or if he knew that I could see the same reflected back in him. We’d started off afraid of each other, and that had made us unable to understand. And then things had escalated, until I was shouting his greatest fear to him at the top of a ghost-infested tower, and he was forcibly unleashing whatever hidden dark side lurked within me in the name of keeping us all alive, and we were both justifying our awful actions with even more awful reasons.

“When you asked me what was going to happen after the Tower, I told you it depended on what I found at the top,” Silver said at last, sighing heavily.

“And what did you find?” I didn’t look back at him. Instead, I kept my gaze trained skyward, where I could see the blotchy outline of Icarus wheeling back and forth, his silhouette barely visible against the sun. If it came to it… I wanted my last thoughts to be of the sky. Of watching Icarus and the rest of my pokémon escaping without me to pull them down.

Silver’s voice was strange. “Why did you bother saving me?”

So that was really it. That was why he hadn’t done anything yet.

In his eyes, I should’ve left him up there. His blood would’ve been on Falkner’s hands, not mine. The only person who knew who I was, the person who was currently so terrifying that I was debating jumping into a river rather than letting him arrest me, would’ve been neatly tucked away, a forgotten corpse lost in a random act of tragedy. He’d given me a chance to escape, and I hadn’t taken it, and now the fallout was probably going to kill me, and for the life of him he couldn’t understand why.

Remorse for dropping a tree on his pokémon? Pre-meditated attempt at forcing him to owe me? Ruse so I could gain his trust?

“It was the right thing to do,” I said firmly, closing my eyes, but I could still sense his curious gaze trained on me. I sighed and looked at him for the first time in our entire conversation. His expression was mixed between surprise and suspicion, but most of all, he looked tired. “Icarus and I aren’t evil,” I said, my voice hard. “We want to stay alive, and that’s it, but don’t we all?”

He didn’t mention the fact that most people didn’t have a mysterious dark side that resorted to extreme levels of violence when threatened. Maybe my dramatic, vague statements had been enough to distract him, or my actions at the top had been ‘enough’, somehow. Maybe he didn’t want to acknowledge what I could do when pushed too far. Maybe he didn’t want to acknowledge how far he’d pushed me.

Instead, he said, “Did you recognize the man you saw on my floor?”

I didn’t answer him. What he hadn’t realized, and what I hadn’t considered until now, when the dust finally settled, was that what I thought I’d seen in his room—an illusion of myself—was actually me, except from the then-future. Yet somehow my guess at his fear, completely founded on falsehoods, had still been right enough for him to recognize it.

Maybe there was a something with this future-telling business after all.

“Executive Archer is the first person who I realized was unrepentantly evil,” Silver said when I didn’t say anything else. “Not in the sense that he goes out of his way to cause harm to anyone, but because he never goes out of his way to prevent it. If he marks an enemy, they will be destroyed. He does not see sides because the only side that matters is his own. He has no sense of collateral. He has no understanding that anything else in the world matters but his goals. He is well aware of this deficiency, and still he stays the course. And, most frightening of all, he has the skills, charisma, and power to capitalize upon this.”

I halfway guessed at what he was trying to say: I wasn’t a threat. I lacked skill, charisma, and power in such great amounts that it was actually hard to tell what I was missing the most of. I certainly wasn’t the fear that kept him up at night. “And I don’t.”

Silver’s response was immediate. “Not at all.”

I shrugged nonchalantly. He wasn’t wrong. “Well, at least you’re honest.”

“One of us has to be.” He stood up, adjusting the sleeves of his jacket without meeting my eye. “Dante and I are heading west, back to HQ in Goldenrod. Go wherever you want. If you keep the houndour, make sure you keep him hidden. Your murkrow, too. Keep your head down, and I think things will blow over in a few weeks. Team Rocket has bigger problems than a girl and her bird. I, for one, won’t tell them what you look like or where you’re going.” He ran a hand through his hair and then looked back at me with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “I doubt you and I will cross paths again, but if we do, let’s just say that I owe you one.”

The questions must’ve been written on my face, because Silver sighed heavily and picked the easiest one for him to answer: “What I fear most of all is that one day, I’ll walk into my father’s office and see Archer there instead of an empty chair. Because that’ll mean that my father has failed. That’ll mean that our organization has failed. That’ll mean that I failed to protect Johto from a monster that we let grow in our backyard until it was too powerful to put down.”

That night, in the river that I hadn’t had to jump into, I dyed my hair red.

___________________________________________________________________________​

motives: final

___________________________________________________________________________​

“What did they end up saying about the Tower?”

“Destroyed, mostly.

“I’d rather not make a habit out of destroying national landmarks.”

“About that…”

“At least the Bellsprout stands tall. It’s seen worse than this and I think it still will, yet.”

“It’s dying, Silver. It was dying before you arrived.”

“…you aren’t from the Violet Sector, are you? You aren’t from Team Rocket at all. What are you trying to do here?”

“Trust me. I know these kinds of things.”

“If you’re after me, you’re woefully unprepared. My Gift is lie-detection. Stop screwing around. Who are you?”

“Okay, fine, you know what? I’ll bite. No, it’s really not. You tell people that so they’ll tell you the truth, but that’s just a bluff. ”

“That’s a stretch.”

“And that’s a lie. I don’t need a Gift to figure that one out. At the top of the Tower, that girl told you a massive lie and you didn’t doubt her for an instant. And she’s managed to get away with a lot of smaller things and you haven’t even blinked. But you don’t like to think of what people don’t do; you prefer to see what they actually do, so let’s look at that instead. You took an Air Slash to the leg yesterday and you’re walking just fine now. That girl cut up your face back on the way to Cherrygrove, and the cut was gone before you rolled into town the next day. Your abra—”

“That’s enough.” Pause. “Who are you?”

“You know already. The center cannot hold.”

Pause. “Holy shit, you—”

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​

prev || next​

 

[kintsugi]

hey. it's been a year. a lot of stuff happened. let's roll.

review responses below. it's been a long while and I'm really sorry for not responding directly; the thought process was that I'd just tack them on the next chapter so as to not clutter up the thread but OOPS. hit the ground running and hope for the best; thank you all for sticking with me <3

Spoiler

Just one comment on this one - old habits die hard eh?

Fixed the "gossamer" thing, but you listed that as the second one. Idk if you still remmber what the first one was but I can't find it from your comment haha.

In this case they might as well be one and the same, so I'm going to fold them together. Well, I like this new TUPpy. As much because I like to see arrogant self-centred bullies get knocked down a couple of pegs. I mean, this is the funny thing, fundamentally TUPp's no brighter or stronger than she was the moment she opened the door of Sprout Tower. The difference is she's much less prepared to take a verbal beating even if she can't do anything about the abra.

Thank you! A lot of this character shift is actually from the comments you kept sending me in the Tower chapters, so I'm glad that you like the resulting growth.

it occurs to me that Silver, in his own way, is as dumb as TUPpy. He's had a slightly better education and is a better trainer in, probably, every aspect, but he doesn't really think things through and in terms of emotional intelligence there are brighter eight year olds.

hue hue hue isolated loner children of whom greatness is expected deconstruction

Gaia is the brightest character in this story

<3

Alrighty, let me start with the technicalities. Firstly, ctrl+f "Faulkner" and you'll see all the spots where you typed "Faulkner" instead of Falkner, the ripperoni'd Gym Leader. You may have already corrected them, but that's a reminder just in case.

Fixed at some point; idr when. Thanks!

This may be a matter of style (and I may have commented on this before, fml) but the Rocket quartet is known as the Executives (unless you specifically want to call them Admins). Either works!

Y I K E Did some research; this looks like a Johto vs Kanto thing; my b. It should be Executive + I've updated this chapter and a few earlier ones.

I felt like these breaks, while structurally useful, had confusing titles. Han Solo was ultimately the main focus (excluding the Atlas/Iris scene and the Silver/Un-undead Falkner[???] scene at the end. And did you mean to put the lines on the right margin, or is that {edgy srbs style}?

edgy style, heh. I tried to balance first-person narration here: these are all convos framed around Nara, but the emotional revelation/focus of each section is meant to be the one at the top of the chapter. Do you feel like that wasn't accomplished either?

then he vanished?

when everyone needed him most

This sentence doesn't make sense.

gottem; fixed

The last sentence is sort of confusing?

This is meant to tie back into the fire thing -- like she mentions, in her clan, the warriors who wield fire are the Best of the Best. And in this new team, which is her replacement clan, Atlas (who she thinks is a dumbfuq) is officially the Best of the Best already. He's the one Nara calls when the fight gets rough and the things gotta burn.

10/10 BEST LINE OF THE CHAPTER

thx for the inspiration

Is this a semi-subtle reference to Flying in the Dark? And "I would never be worthy of this; would never be flying; would always be dark" was a bit confusing.

Nah, it's more about how she's been trying to fake that Gaia is her flying-type starter, but recent events are leading her to believe that that isn't possible.

However, I've gotta say that the paragraph on "lemme education you, bitch" was a little overboard. And I think one could argue that since "tornadus" stems from "tornado," it might not work in context with the others with "tor" (ex. "torch"). Even "torchic" might fail to work, since "torterra" came in question, and that "tor" stems from "tortoise."

That was kind of Nara's point, actually -- Silver is grilling her because she doesn't see that houndoom and houndour are related because they have the same name, but there are so many pokemon that have similar sounding names that are completely unrelated. Does that make sense?

"I'm still being treated like a criminal to you guys" is a bit of an odd way to word it.

effs yeah

MATH QUESTION. So, the question is, "how many broken limbs I could get away with" and the answer is, "somewhere between ‘zero’ and ‘less than the number I’d get by jumping off a bridge"? Is General Grievous saying that: 0 < actual_broken_bones < less_than_jump_off_bridge_bones, even though the fall would surely cripple her? Or is she saying that it'd be better than jumping off a bridge into, say, concrete?

yeah it should just be "between" and "zero" and "the number of bones I'd get jumping off a bridge" rip.

In conclusion . . . good chapter

THANKS MOM

Really like this description for the opening. It's really telling of the protag's character that she doesn't care about the chaos that just happened in terms of how Violet's residents feel about it. She still cares, but only in regards to how it applies to her. I prefer the characterization "shown" here rather than "told" through her saying "I'm a monster" or anything blatant to that effect.

hi just wanted to chime in here that, again, a lot of the diverging character arc here was based off of the feedback that y'all gave me in some of the earlier chapters ty ty

I like the irony here, but I think I'd have liked to see a tad bit more detail regarding the setting. It's a tricky balance with emotional scenes like these, I know, but yeah, I didn't get a super clear picture of the setting here.

I will continue to work on writing more descriptive settings until they actually get better, fuq

Heh... Nara's a bad liar, obviously, but this is still really adorable dialogue.

Oh heh, I didn't meant to make it sound like she's lying. She really had no idea, but idk if I conveyed that well.

Is this an homage to houndoom's pokedex entry I see here? I kind of thought I was the only one who really used pokedex entries as a reference, but this seems to be the second homage I read today...

could I NOT use hellfire bites??

Even with his injuries?

he heals fast. That's his schtick that Silver mentioned in the Tower, but given that that happened almost two years ago irl, I'm taking a solid L here

So... Falkner's not actually dead? Did I read that right? how 2 even read?

S P O I L E R

Anyway, obviously I'm a fan of the switching POV technique

<3 ty for all you do

This is probably my favorite part of the fic so far, emotion-wise. I don't know where everyone's headed next, but... plz post soon?

FUCK

Okay, so after months and months I finally caught up with this damn excuse for a fic seriously will you ever finish it or are you just messing around now?

hnnnnnnnnnnnnnngh

But mean jokes aside, the last two chapters have actually been the best ones. The final chapter against Falkner was the best battle you've written in my opinion, your battles tend to be a bit...subdued, like you're trying to stay realistic. That's good, but it also makes it harder for it to really become engaging, especially since Nara tends to gloss over events.

<3 <3 ty ty

Then going to the interlude (seriously what's with people writing interludes that are basically just chapters?)

tbh it's longer than a chapter

That's what I like about your writing, you're able to really get into their heads and make us empathize, you don't have to implement fancy tricks or make the prose more complicated than it is.

thank you for everything you do too <3

___________________________________________________________________________​

chapter xvii. imago dei​

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It was times like these that reminded me why I was glad to be a trainer.

I hadn’t actually been on a real journey to know the difference, but something told me that I hadn’t exactly taken the traditional path. Maybe Johto had a really great food scene, and I could just go around exploring that quietly while making a platonic relationship with someone who didn’t end up threatening to kill me at least once. Maybe I could just go around feeling like it wasn’t all the same old iterations, an utterly unpredictable projected illusion of survival, or me and Icarus flying in the dark. Honestly, the possibilities seemed endless.

The alternative was coming to terms with the fact that I’d used one of Johto’s oldest landmarks as cannon fodder to kill one of Johto’s most respected gym leaders. Which, no, even if he’d technically already been dead before all of that, really wasn’t something I wanted to think about.

Hell. Even just saying it like that. There hadn’t been time to let it sink in during the chaos that had followed, but now that I had a few days in the wilderness with nothing but my thoughts, it was all coming back with the subtlety of a lead brick. I’d exploded Sprout Tower, met a goddess, and killed Falkner. The son of Giovanni had helped. I questionably was still possessed by a ghost, but everyone who had any memory of that timeline no longer existed (had never existed?) except the actual ghost because time travel, and—

{Child of the city, are you sure your houndour does not wish to join us? The waters are gorgeous today, by the blessing of the Forest Queen, and the school would be more than happy to carry another.}

Right. Right. Don’t think of the wild stuff. I had a cute puppy and I was also not going to internalize Silver’s warnings that houndoom had never-healing hellfire bites. I squinted over at Atlas, who loped alongside us, nimbly navigating around outcroppings of boulder. His tongue lolled out of his mouth, but occasionally he would veer in the complete wrong direction to check out a particularly interesting-smelling rock. “Oh boy.” I watched him skid to a halt because talking and running simultaneously were too much for him. His inky fur shrank away in the darkness as we sped past him. “I do not like swimming.”

Honestly, I was pretty sure that he’d run forever if I let him, and even more sure that he’d jump in the water if I told him it would make me happy. “I don’t think he’d like the water very much,” I admitted. “But your offer is very kind,” I added hastily.

{Very well.}

See, it was here, toes skimming the surface of the water as they dangled off the edge of the rubbery, blue skin of a cheerful lanturn that had expressed absolutely no intention of killing me, that I figured maybe I was doing something right. “So you normally give rides to trainers like this?” I called down over the rippling water. This was actually incredible; as it turned out, my pokémon could move really, really fast when I wasn’t there to hold them back. Gaia and Rousseau zoomed by overhead, and even higher in the recesses of the cave, Icarus was skulking around somewhere.

{Our school takes pleasure in lending our strength to the children of the cities,} the lanturn that called herself Ria replied cheerfully, the golden glow from the orb on her head brightening in synch with her words. Iris, who had at first resolutely clambered onto her back while muttering something about not being outdone by a human, now looked quite uncomfortable as the waves rocked her back and forth and her striped tail bounced up and down in the breeze. {We know that it is difficult for the young to find their way through the dark, even moreso in times like these.}

She hadn’t been entirely wrong there. Union Cave wasn’t the most hospitable of paths to Goldenrod, but there was no way I was following Silver through the eastern trails. That being said, I’d almost regretted my decision upon hiking to the cave and discovering that, like most natural accumulations of rock, the interior was quite dark. Night-hiking was a thing, but night-hiking through a cave I’d never seen, and spending what would amount to literal days without sun, had been a little off-putting. And climbing it, with days of switchbacks and the peak trails still littered with unattended mudslides from the summer rains, almost seemed worse.

I’d only stood there for half a minute before an entire school of lanturn had surfaced, ball-lightning sending shocks of distorted light up through the waves, their chorus of humming translated by Rousseau’s telepathic field into a dozen offers of help. Between the blinking lights and the sudden clamor of noise, I almost thought I was back in Goldenrod, trying to hail a taxi.

And honestly, with the wind blowing in my hair and the gorgeous sprawl of the cave clipping by, a collection of stalactites miles long that would’ve taken days to cross blurring behind us, this was far nicer. There was a strange beauty in the way that the granite reflected the flashes of the lanturn’s light. Part of me almost wanted to spend a few days exploring the far reaches of the caves—there was the occasional rumble in the distance that could’ve been anything, like an onix or even a lapras—but part of me had accepted the grim inevitably that, as soon as I stepped off the path, I would run into the zombified time-travelling future-heir to Team Rocket riding on the back of the Articuno. Or something.

Beneath me, the lanturn named Lex hummed in harmony. {It is our highest honor to help Bugsy by assisting the young.} His tail beat out a rapidfire rhythm as he surged like a ship through the waves, the yellow markings around his face matching the permanent smile that he seemed to wear—and unlike Rousseau’s, this one seemed entirely genuine. {He guards the city, and we do what we can to guide and protect the cave.}

{You work with Bugsy?} I could hear the edge of wonder in Gaia’s voice as she flew overhead, reveling in the newfound strength of her wings. She’d spent the first day after her evolution recovering, but after that I’d barely seen her touch the ground since. {What is he like?}

{Bugsy is the true savior of our town, daughter of the wind,} Ria replied without a moment of hesitation. {He and his partner Syrio are fearless and brilliant and strong. Our school holds nothing but the highest respect for him.}

Gaia dipped a little lower so that she could fly between the two lanturn, her wings barely needing to beat as she drafted between the two of them. {My colony is from the east, by Cherrygrove, and even we know the legends of Azalea’s Heart,} she murmured solemnly. {I never thought I would one day have the honor to meet him in the flesh.}

{He will be honored to meet with you, too,} said Lex, humming contentedly. {Of all those I have met on my travels, Bugsy is by far one of the best. Why, when I was but a chinchou and I was having difficulties producing electricity like the rest of my clutch, he spent the day teaching me how to find the spark.} The light on his head dimmed and flashed as if to prove his point.

Ria trilled in agreement.

He was one of those genuinely brilliant people, I think, or at least that was what I could guess. He wasn’t very popular in the history books given his status as ‘technically a war criminal’, but even the passing mentions couldn’t cover up the fact that he was one of the most skilled strategists in Johto. He and his scyther were the perfect combination of rapidfire unpredictability and ruthless strength.

{I heard he single-handedly led the defense of Ilex Forest when the Rockets invaded,} Iris said, her ears pricking up as she took sudden interest in our conversation. {He and his team held the line for weeks longer than anyone ever expected him to.}

Rousseau, too, took this as his cue to speak up. {I heard that between him and his starter, they’ve killed over a dozen people, and at least fifty pokémon.}

Ria’s cheerful chirp of agreement petered off pretty much instantly.

I really shouldn’t have expected everyone to get along on this boat.

There was a long pause. A really long pause. Long enough that, even with my expert skills in pretending to be fascinated with the rock formations that we bulleted past, I still felt pretty awkward.

{Both of those things are true, yes,} Ria said at last.

I tried not to let anyone see my face, and for the first time on this trip, I was incredibly grateful for the way that the lanturn-driven shadows made it impossible to see anything for more than half a second at a time. Bugsy was a killer; of course he was; it really wasn’t anything unexpected. There were people in Goldenrod who still petitioned for his public execution. Everyone from that generation had been in a war. Bates wasn’t the only one who’d been through hell. The only thing that continued to surprise me was how young they’d all been: Bugsy would’ve been in his early twenties at the latest when it all started.

{The Rockets took a lot from us.} It was hard to tell from this angle, but Lex seemed to be swimming with more gusto than before, bodily throwing himself into every breaking wave. {It’s hard for the young to understand exactly how much.}

{The atrocities were brutal on both sides, and Bugsy was forgiven for his war crimes and allowed to continue leading Azalea toward a path of reconciliation,} Ria said firmly, almost repeating the mantra from memory. I’d heard that phrase so many times on the news, with the exact same wording. {This was the only treaty that prevented those from Azalea from rebelling until we were exterminated. It has given us tentative peace.}

I almost said it. Almost. I wanted to just flat-up tell them that supporting the Rockets was the least of my troubles, and they didn’t have to mince words around me of all people. I wanted to let them know that, flying high above us was the murkrow that was the current root of everyone’s problems, at least a little, that I was the last person in this entire country who was going to give their leader shit for messing with Team Rocket.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I’d learned something in the Tower, something sinister, something that you can’t keep hidden once you’ve actually unearthed it: secrets were a currency. I was broke in this apocalypse, with my shambly squad as my only real assets, and I simply couldn’t afford to trust everyone like I’d been doing. Bates had gotten the benefit of the doubt, and that had turned out okay; Silver had gotten the benefit of the doubt and we’d all nearly died. By all logic, Silver should’ve arrested me that day on the bridge, but I couldn’t hope that the next person I opened up to would have so much emotional baggage that they’d be too weighed down to take me out.

I looked up at the roof of the cave, where I could dimly see the outline of Icarus’s black wings flapping silently to keep up with us. He’d been uncharacteristically docile when I’d asked him to follow from afar. Maybe he was starting to realize it too, the aura of dread that was descending on us day by day as our options dwindled.

I told myself it was for him that I held my tongue and let Lex and Ria think we were average trainers with average thoughts about Team Rocket. It let me feel better about the lies I was starting to tell, even if it didn’t take my mind off of the conversations I found myself wishing we’d had.

Did Bugsy know how much his loss would mean?

___________________________________________________________________________​

“I’ve been waiting for you. Come on, there isn’t much time.”

“Excuse me?”

I really had to stop walking into things with the hope that I wouldn’t, say, run into self-appointed nemeses or shotguns or, in this case, a random stranger standing sternly across from the entrance of Union Cave. The man in front of us looked more like a park ranger than a Rocket, which was nice for my immediate survival. I was mentally running through the list of rules I remembered for catch-and-release; maybe hitching a voluntary ride on a lanturn qualified under poaching for some reason? Was it breeding season? Was this really how I ended up going down, though? For the training equivalent of a parking ticket?

“Atlas, stay in the cave,” I whispered out of the corner of my mouth. He was still twenty feet from us; maybe he couldn’t see what I was saying yet. I heard a sharp whine of disapproval that cut off immediately as I gestured with my open palm. “Stay, Atlas.” Thank the gods we’d at least practiced that one a lot and that he was extremely food-motivated.

“You’re the murkrow girl.”

“Excuse me?”

No, scratch that, I was going down for all the reasons I’d been expecting at this point. I’d had a nice few hours of thinking I wasn’t going to die because of Icarus, and that was a good vacation, but it was time to return to reality.

“Yeah, I don’t really have time for the innocent act, so if you could just speed through that, I’d be greatly obliged,” the man was saying, gently stroking the base of Ria’s light stalk. He whispered something to them that I couldn’t catch, and then he stood up from his crouch and didn’t look back as both of the lanturn vanished beneath the waves. “Look, Route 33 isn’t the best place for talking. Lotta eyes that’ll probably pick you up accidentally. And it’s going to rain soon. Are you coming or not?”

I went with the tried and true: “Excuse me?”

“Where’s your murkrow?”

“What’s a murkrow?”

He sighed and folded his arms. Huh. I recognized that pose, actually, the way that his jaw set a little before he—“Seriously, if you don’t shut up with the wounded stantler act, Syrio’s going to cut you in half. I might be fast enough to stop him, but I really don’t feel like it.”

There was a schnick sound from the underbrush, and when I blinked again, I could see the gleaming white blades and angled green face staring at us, sharp like a knife, blades so deadly at the end that they seemed to cut the air around them. Four translucent wings sliced through the air, but they weren’t like Gaia’s at all—these tapered off to deadly points.

I knew what I was looking at. That was a scyther, and—“You’re Bugsy.”

He didn’t look like a killer, or like the kind soul who had coached a young chinchou into finding his spark. He looked like a sleep-deprived, lanky grad student who should’ve been alternating dollar drip coffee and free beer mooched from a stolen keg. He had a pair of khakis and a green polo that looked like they belonged to a junior scout, and a pair of bags under his eyes that looked like they belonged to the lead scientist of Silph the week after the Master Ball had failed to contain the Lugia. He held a crowbar in one hand and used the other to massage his temple wearily, locks of purple hair falling around his fingers. “Look, we were expecting you three days ago, and after Violet went dark, no one knew what to think. Let’s get you inside before anyone sees.”

I couldn’t help but feel like everyone here knew something I didn’t. Bugsy was a pardoned war criminal. He’d once led a rebellion against Team Rocket and was now working for them. “Are you arresting me or not?”

“Where’s your murkrow?” Bugsy sighed, and I got the all-too-familiar feeling that he was making a point of looking more patient than he felt. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got Syrio with me. You don’t have to play it stupid right now; they won’t know.”

Oh. That was cute. He thought I was playing. It was almost refreshing to have someone misjudge my grasp of a situation this badly in the opposite direction. “Um, actually, clearly, they will.” Maybe he’d even trip up and tell me who they were, and I’d be able to pick up some stuff.

Bugsy’s face hardened, and suddenly the scyther was at my neck, razor-sharp scythes on either side of my neck. I was acutely aware of just how much the muscles of my neck actually throbbed now that I could see them pressing stubbornly on the blades that were going to cut my throat. “You are the murkrow girl, right?” He hadn’t even moved.

Gaia responded on my behalf with a blast of psychic energy that sent the mantis skidding back. Six-inch claws dug into the gravel as the scyther screeched to a halt, eyes narrowed to shards of amber. I tensed, but I launched straight into my next-best attempt at de-escalation: “Gaia, stand down.” If he was dumb enough to think I was smart, maybe he’d be dumb enough to think we were strong, and that this threat held any water.

But Bugsy was studying us with a chessmaster’s precision, one hand drumming patterns into the starched fabric of his khakis. His eyes darted across the path to where we were standing, taking in me and my team in an instant. Knuckles whitened around the haft of the crowbar. His lips curled into a smirk that was too small to be a bluff. Falkner was a blind wave of force, all the might of a hurricane spiraling off aimlessly into the ocean. But one glance told me this was a different matter altogether: this was the man who’d held down a warfront for weeks using nothing but a forest and some bugs to fight the Lugia. I knew with sinking finality that even at five-versus-one odds, he’d have that scyther back at my throat in under a minute.

“Trust me when I say you don’t want to try this,” he said calmly.

I knew I didn’t want to try it, but what choice did we have? If I got taken in to custody by a gym leader, morally gray or not, it would only be a matter of time before the Rockets found me.

I straightened my back. Next option. I would keep checking through them until something worked, or until I died. Whichever came first. I could bluff my way out of this without starting a fight against Johto’s best strategist. I had to. “I-Imago dei.”

He raised an eyebrow. The scyther stood like stone, legs still bent in a deadly crouch. “Your pronunciation is terrible. That phrase is almost entirely phonetic and engraved on every League poster. And you still managed to mess it up.”

“But you know what I mean.” I wondered what my teachers would’ve told me—this was the most literal answer to the question “when is learning Latin going to help me in the real world?” It seemed like this was the price I paid for staring off into space instead. But Azalea’s motto was one of those few buzzwords I’d managed to hold on to. Like a teenage fashion trend, they had one schtick that they slapped on everything, even the names of their landmarks. Image of God. My friend Whitney had tried to tell me that most people interpreted the words wrong, and there was something weird about tenses or conjugations that made it more than just that—

“Do you?” Busgy’s eyes narrowed. And then: “Things fall apart.”

I don’t know what made me say it, but I did, and I think it might’ve saved my life. “The center cannot hold.”

The scyther straightened up and took a step back, apparently satisfied. I couldn’t begin wondering why.

{Why are you waiting for us?} Rousseau asked. He’d been taking an unusually large berth around Bugsy; I couldn’t help but think back to his comments in Union Cave. It was hard to reconcile all the rumors: the brilliant strategist, the defeated rebel, the kind-hearted mentor, the cold-blooded killer.

“I wasn’t.”

Two could play at that game. “I don’t have a murkrow. The butterfree is my starter.”

Icarus, of course, took this as his cue to come flapping in with a triumphant, “Boss tells truth!”

Little shit.

One eyebrow raised disparagingly. I felt his chessmaster’s gaze turn to the two of us—my unkempt, hastily dyed hair; Icarus’s bloodred gaze socketed in a fledgling’s face that was far too small to intimidate. “Pardon the cliché, but I’m the only one who can help you now,” Bugsy said, with so much conviction that I almost believed he believed himself. “If you don’t come with me, Syrio won’t be the one killing you, I can tell you that much.”

This is how I ended up walking into Azalea with a scyther at my back.

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prev || next
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[kintsugi]

responses!

Spoiler

I spotted every single one of those references and hate the fact there weren't more and that I didn't get a shitty reference.

soon my pretty, soon.

Did you mean boldly?

Actually, nah, I did mean bodily; he's throwing his entire body into the wave / I swear this is a real word

Oh, well at least Atlas is finally getting the hang of some tricks, I wonder when he'll be able to play dead.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I gotta say, I think this is the first story I've seen where Bugsy gets so much attention, he tends to be a smudge in every Johto story with most of them tending to keep him as a down to earth experienced trainer, that is otherwise just really dully and unremarkable when compared to every other gymleader shown, even the games kind of ignore him so it's interesting to see him being treated as such a renowned trainer and strategist here. The other thing that jumped at me is how much you aged him up, especially considering that one of Bugsy's gimmicks is how young he looks (and how short he is).

He is, admittedly, one of the only things I remember standing out in Azalea.

Description-wise there's two things I can comment on, at first it's a bit hard to tell where the characters are exactly, maybe I just didn't read right but when I first started I thought they were in the forest by a lake or something, then I thought they were just resting by a lake in a cave before realizing that they were actually traveling on Lanturns. Also, I kind of forgot what a Lanturn was for a moment...I ended up confusing it with a lampent and had soooo many questions.

Rip. And with the description, Rip. I imagined them going through this part of the cave:

Which, granted, isn't a river going through the entire cave, but some creative license there. Atlas is running on the river banks because the idea of slow-moving bodies of water not having shallow river banks doesn't make sense to me.

The other issue to bring up in that regard is that we're constantly reminded about the situation Nara is in. I'll give you a pass on this since this is the first chapter in over a year (thank you very much) and readers need a catch up, but it's just something for you to keep in mind.

yeah lol I added in a lot more since it's been almost a calendar year since I updated, but reading them sequentially probably makes that a lot less fun. Thanks, doc![/QUOTE]

haha I get two clauses fuck you fellow journeyfic authors

ty senpai

Fixed the typos.

The First Bug of Azalea. You might have made a bit of a misstep, there. Much as I enjoy the reference I wonder whether I'll be able to take the scyther seriously now.

HEH. Everyone gets a naming scheme and some of them get the badass water dancer.

Thought I'd just bring this up, but I do like the unusual language you use here and there. And no-one ever calls you loquacious for it, damn you.

Thanks!

Now onto the stuff that actually matters. First things first, I like the indulgence in some upbeat travelling - I've harped on about it before, but it's the good moments that ought to remind you of why you should give a damn about the world in the first place. To an extent that's what's missing from A Song of Ice and Fire, and from Breaking Bad.

this chapter was not a full chapter in my original outline -- I experimented with fleshing it out based on people's (/your) feedback that we only see the grimdark edgy parts of the travelling, and I agree with you that there could be more of that in this fic. Thank you for your previous advice + I'm glad you liked it here!

And on that note I think it's worth pointing out how much I really do like Gaia. Not just because she's fundamentally nice and starts off very much the underdog and is the persistent warm heart of the story. She's unusual for one of your characters. In a way Bugsy reminds me of this all the more - there are moments to his speech that sound very familiar, with the casual threats and the tired, matter-of-fact tone. Whereas Gaia doesn't have a sarcastic cell in her chitin, takes the joys of life as they come, and seems determined not to let cynicism rule her thinking.

<3
bugs think alike tbh
this is an actual plot point and I'm extremely glad that it came across in their characters this early

Review for the last two years:

This is all a fine story, really. I enjoyed reading it and I thought that it was one of the best fics currently active on the forum. So while this review might lean to the concritical, just know that it doesn't exactly reflect my feelings as a reader.

What the story has going for it most:

-Silver as either a horrifically cruel person, a self-centered asshole who doesn't consider anyone else, a scared kid or all three
-Possession plotline was fun
-Celebi was adorbs and I loved her
-There were no grammar errors to calmly point out.

the good things i can tell you is that all of those things come back except the grammar errors those are gonna stay forever; you just have the benefit of reading after Pav and Flaze put me through the wringer

My interest in Nara's starting to draw down. Don't get me wrong, she's a fun enough character and I think she has her quirks but. When she's not in mortal danger or dealing with someone more interesting, I can lose interest in the story. And I think that's because she's never /quite/ been humanized. Outside of her floor (more on that in a second), the most we really know about her (or that I remember about her at this point, at least) is that she's kind of sarcastic and has horrible luck.

This is an interesting point ... and I could see some argument for saying that TUPpy's humanisation ought to be ambiguous, given developments in the Violet arc. But I at least agree with Athena in that it wouldn't be a bad idea for us to see more of what TUPpy was before the business with the Xatu, for basically the same reason that Gaia is a good idea. Her world has been turned upside down, but Athena's right, we don't really know much about what that world was

I think this is entirely accurate, and it's something that's made struggle with writing SRBS a bit more as of recently.

The original intent when I started writing was to have Nara be this secretive, walled off narrator who paradoxically is retelling her entire story while giving a ton of detail on everything around her except for herself (and maybe her surface-level thoughts, which typically amount to "I don't want to die" and "sarcastic quip #28"). I thought this would be a neat gimmick because she's inherently distrustful and only has even more reason to be distrustful after the story starts off, and while from a theoretical standpoint I still think that's an interesting concept, I never fully considered how utterly damning that is from a first-person narration standpoint. And there are a couple of details of her character that are completely critical, and the explanations for her ridiculous sarcasm quips/crippling fear of death are intertwined hardcore in the plot, but looking back on things now I do understand that they inherently aren't enough to carry a character this far. On some level I planned on relying on her team to make the story more interesting, but even then, I don't think it was enough.

Moving on from here, I dunno. I've also done a lot of thinking on this, but I'm not sure if I completely agree with you on your fix (adding more subtle details about her) -- I dropped some references to her schooling/past friends but I don't think they helped much, either. To me, the key thing is that she doesn't yet have any sort of motivation that lasts for more than a chapter arc -- get a halfway decent starter + make prize money from training gets scrapped for don't get killed in this instant gets scrapped for go undercover in the woods and hope no one finds me gets scrapped for don't die in Sprout Tower, with the vague underlying motivation of "gotta get back to Goldenrod to get back home" that at this point is so buried down that I don't think anyone would've even listed that as critical.

...I hope that that's a more accurate representation of your frustrations with her character, because those are the ones that I've been feeling, and the ones that I've been primarily rewriting this arc around.

As for her floor, there's a sort of a double-edged sword with going into the abusive parents backstory to round her out. To start with, it's... not particularly uncommon (Pixie/Skysong, Avis, Sai, Alaska (if we count severe neglect), Evelina Joy (if we're counting emotional/social abuse, etc.)) So, it's not really a particularly unique backstory in and of itself without more little details to support it. But it also can provide an emotional core if PTSD and whatnot are handled well, so there's that.

there's a plot-critical reason that I picked this specific family dynamic. It doesn't help much for me to say that there's a reason without giving the reason, but I hope that it'll at least convince you that I didn't pick it for the easy pity points or something

I'm tired. Might tell you more in chat later.

ilu mom thank you

___________________________________________________________________________​

if you know me at all you know this isn’t chapter xviii. atlas shrugs​

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

So we spent a lot of time talking to the man with the funny hair who smelled like he was sad. There was an old man next to him who smelled like he was dying of colon cancer but didn’t know it yet. I didn’t like that smell. Master spent the time glaring at them with her eyes all narrowed like she was trying to be fierce, so I puffed up the furs on the back of my neck to look bigger.

I do not think anyone noticed.

Now, Master huffs and storms away, muttering something, and Gaia flap-flips after her. Icarus and Rousseau start to follow.

I want to go too!

“No,” Master says sternly, and I freeze guiltily where I am. “Atlas, stay.”

We have practiced the ‘stay’ before. I do not like the stay. Nothing good happens when I do the stay. Last time, everyone almost blew up and a talking onion teleported me into a tornado.

{I will protect you!} I say, huffing out my chest to make it look very big. I like protecting people. I am very strong. Gaia is also very strong. She has freaky-freaky psychic powers now and hasn’t figured out a way to tell anyone. She told me once because she said she could tell that I was also very strong, and she wanted to know how I was so good at hiding it. I told her it was very easy; you just had to spend your time thinking with your heart instead of your head.

She said that didn’t help very much and asked me not to tell anyone. So here I am not telling anyone.

“Atlas,” Master repeats sternly. “Stay.”

So this is how I ended up sitting in the smelly-man’s house for a very long time.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

I spend the first chunk of time pacing around the house anxiously. The smelly man has a strange house. It is covered in tools and sawdust and little bits of wood shavings that smell like food.

I eat one.

It is not food.

I very gently deposit it back on the ground. Maybe no one noticed. I look up carefully and saw the man staring at me, so I pretend that I am just sniffing around like a good boy and that I absolutely had no tried to eat his not-food.

I think he fell for it.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

The smelly man has a workshop full of magical balls. They are magic because if a human picks them up and throws them, they are full of magical energy that makes them impossibly fun to chase.

Unfortunately I cannot throw them myself. Throwing is hard when you don’t have thumbs. Also I am not magic so they do not work for me. Making balls magic is a technique all humans have, just like all butterfree can fly and all sentret can puff up very big to tell me to leave them alone.

I wonder where the other houndour are.

Anyway. I tried convincing the smelly man to make the ball magical but he told me to go away.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

The next thing to do when you are anxious and alone in a house is to conduct a shoe heist. This is a very difficult endeavor because humans are very particular about their shoes and very good at finding them, but if it succeeds it is perfect.

The shoe heist has three easy steps.

First, you must find the shoe.

Then, you must hide the shoe.

Finally, you must pretend that you have not executed steps one and two. If the shoe heist is successfully orchestrated, the human will be unable to go outside ever again and therefore will never leave you.

I have thought through this plan and see no flaws in it whatsoever.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

Update on the shoe heist.

It does not work if Master has already left the house.

It also does not work if you are not staying in Master’s house.

The man named Kurt is very mad at me, but I cannot remember where I put his shoe.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

{Iris,} I say at last. {I have come to the only possible conclusion. Master is dead and she is never coming back.}

I forgot to mention. Iris is waiting with me here too! She is not one of the cool kids today. That is good. Last time she was one of the cool kids she got exploded out a window. This was before I got teleported into a tornado. She doesn’t like talking about it.

{Atlas,} Iris responds. {She’s been gone for five minutes.}

I don’t know what a minute is or why there have been five of them, but it has been long enough that we should all give up.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

I spent the next five minutes staring at the door. It was a very ugly door.

Sometimes I would hear people passing by outside. That was nice. I hope they had a good time.

I am not having a good time.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

I am having a good time!

The old man left a piece of food under the cabinets. This is excellent.

The cabinets are shorter than me and therefore I cannot fit all the way. This is less excellent.

{Iris, could you help me?}

{No.}

I like Iris. She is very smart.

I decide to turn my head sideways so that I can shove my snout under the gap and try to get the snack. I like snacks. Master gives me lots and would give me more if she weren’t gone forever right now. My favorite snack is peanut butter. Sometimes when Master is not looking I will sneak into her backpack and eat it all and feel guilty afterward.

Oof.

My snout is too short.

You win this time, cabinet.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

I had another great idea. I was going to burn the cabinet out of the way to get to the snack.

If you are smarter than I am, which Iris was, you may have already noticed the critical flaw in this plan.

Did you know that snacks melt when you light them on fire?

Kurt is very unhappy with me now.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

{Atlas. Hey, Atlas. Atlas.} Iris is sharpening her claws or something. I don’t know. When I look over there, she’s sitting on one of Kurt’s fancy workbenches, her tail flicking back and forth as she watches me.

{What are you doing? Can I join in?}

{Yes, okay!} She sounds so excited! She never sounds excited! {This game is called Standing Very Still and Making No Noise.}

{Okay!} I bound up to her and knock over a bucket of scraps. {How do we play?}

Her face contorts in annoyance but her voice is happy so she must be happy too. {First you must Stand Very Still.}

I can do that! {Okay!}

{And now you must Make No Noise.}

I can do that too! {Okay!}

{You just made noise. The point is not to make noise.}

{Okay!}

In the corner of the room I can see a piece of wood shavings that I must’ve missed the first time when I tested all the wood shavings to see if they were food or not. I need to go check it out.

{Atlas, are you listening?}

{Yes!}

{You aren’t Standing Very Still.}

Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

I do not like this game.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

I stopped playing Iris’s game.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

I have had a very busy day today. It is time…

For a gentle…

Snooze.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

Sometimes when I fall asleep I go to a different world. This is called dreaming. You are supposed to dream about the best times of your life, so naturally when I dream I dream about what I do every day.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Oh boy.

Snoozing is a very good way to pass the time. I am sure that all day has passed and Master will be home soon to do more edgy things. Soon, soon! Imagine if all we did was hang around inside all day and talk to each other and have fun and get to know each other. I would get many belly rubs and maybe scritches beneath my ear the way I like them. It would be a very good time.

Maybe that’s what we will do when Master gets back! That would be nice.

{Iris, how long has it been?}

{A month.}

{What??}

{No, let me check.} Iris pauses for a moment. {Yeah, it's actually been more like a month and a half since she was back. That's awkward. She'll probably come back eventually.}

She does this sometimes. That's okay. I will be a good boy and she will come back.

Oh boy.

Soon.

___________________________________________________________________________

Spoiler

some cheerful crack; a real chapter is coming soon-ish

much inspire from the twitter THOUGHTS OF DOG, which is overall wholesome and lovely
also much inspire from my real dog, who is a real fucking goofball/

 

[kintsugi]

ah man. I've been back and forth on this chapter/arc for a while now, but fuck it.

responses btw ilu all

Spoiler

LOL, even though these are forced references, they feel pretty natural. Sporting themes from a conglomeration of other fics seems to be your specialty, eh?

u kno it

There's a pretty distinct change in the style of narration in chapter. It feels a lot less sarcastic and a lot more weighed down by emotions that feel realistic compared to the borderline melodrama from before. I'm fairly certain this was a change you were aiming for, and if I'm right, you did a good job at it. It gives the impression that Nara's taking her situation a little more serious as more and more conflicting details pop up.

mmhmm yes this is 100% because of a conscious narrative choice in the early chapters and not because I was writing badly mmhmm yup yup

Interesting thought, but I disagree with Nara that she's been trusting people easily. I get more the impression she's trusted people because she's had very little choice. That, and/or the benefits of trusting people that might not be untrustworthy outweighed the potential backfiring. With Silver in particular, I feel the trust is more of an illusion she tells herself is real to justify her decision in interaction with him as she has, and Bates, well, he was indeed decent, but she still had her reservations with him.

Getting this said openly was was kind of a mixed bag for me -- from a narrative standpoint, tied to a first-person narrator while trying to avoid flashbacks, the main way I can get Nara's motivations and thoughts on the page is to have her say them. Out loud. Usually to relative strangers. When it's in fic it's more palatable and suspension of disbelief usually covers it, but early on she mostly says her thoughts and motivations at face value for sake of character establishing. In-universe it's explained as her being pretty sure she's made some objectively dumb decisions with trust that haven't killed her out of sheer luck. Her MO in the past when anyone has questioned her is usually just to blurt out the truth, but that's... gonna change a lot from now on. This was my way of trying to foreshadow that before shit starts going pear-shaped.

The Atlas April Fool's thing... the most adorable thing I have ever read. That is all. It made me laugh, it made me smile, it made me go "aww," and it made me love the team's dynamic all the more. xD Now I'm imagining all of SRBS in Atlas's POV and I can't unsee it.

I will go ahead and save you the unnecessary suspense: the answer to the Eternal Question is YOU! You are a good boy!

So unsuprisingly, it was me judging some rise by sin again this season. I forget how many times I've read through it. Giving the usual feedback probably isn't going to work, given that I'd likely be repeating what I've already reviewed anyway, so instead I'm going to do a chapter-by-chapter commentary from my notes.

Unclear if I've ever said this in person, but it bears repeating: thank you for sitting down and re-reading this fic over and over again, year after year. Glad the edits make it more enjoyable; I do put in some effort on them.

Ironically TUPpy is the most empathetic of the cast. Quite possibly this wasn't planned, but it's there - she's the only one who really tries to see things from the other person's perspective. Silver and Iris are obvious examples of characters who just don't do this, but even Gaia, more emotionally intelligent than anyone, is quick to wave a verbal finger at TUPpy when she's standing up for herself.

So on the whole I think TUPpy works better than she's given credit for. some rise by sin is a story with an ensemble cast - kind of the main point of the story is that the world does not revolve around you - but she's right there in the middle of all the overarching themes: fairness, empathy, identity.

Some of it is intentional; Gaia probably wasn't but I'm gonna act like it was because man does that add some painful nuance to their conversations.

Atlas is a bit of an oddball in this story. The other characters - and by the time the Azalea arc starts there are a lot - all have their own point in the story, one way or another. Icarus kicks off the plot in the first place. Gaia is the emotional intelligence. Iris is all about (un)fairness (Though I am beginning to wonder whether she's one-note). Even Rousseau has the capacity to do something narratively the others can't. But Atlas is really comic relief at best. Icarus has done that before now, and Gaia fills the role of a pokémon with a warm heart.

I'll actually agree with this. His current incarnation was the least planned character -- in initial drafts, he was a smoldering, edgy houndour who was aware of what the Rockets did to his species and was very, very upset about it. This served as a counterpart to Icarus's general lack of engagement with his dark-type past.

Then I got a dog and realized that no dog ever would act like this, but at this point I was pretttty far into the story. One of my lesser planned aspects. He and Iris do end up fitting into more defined niches around Goldenrod onward, but for now my approach has been to shove them into corners while other characters get more focus. Unclear if that's working.

I wonder whether this comment, coming up time and again, is responsible for your later protagonists being decidedly less prone to quipping.

95% yes. It'd probably be 100%, but at least some amount of this lack of quipping also comes with five years of realizing that being a sarcastic teenage asshole is a lot less fun than it sounds like. Thank you for sticking with me enough to get the honest feedback through.

Something that bugged me re-reading the chapter (And I apologise for the lack of concrete examples here, my notes are silent on it and I'm short on time) was that she does think a lot of dangerous thoughts for a girl educated by the Rockets.

Nope, that's very fair! I tried to slow it down -- in the initial drafts she jumps straight into thinking about burning down the establishment -- but it's probably gonna slow down a loooot more.

I wondered whether it's particularly apropos that Icarus is quicker on the uptake than TUPpy. He's a bird that thinks very pragmatically, perhaps that ought to be a true trait of Dark-types?

yessir

Probably you won't be surprised to hear that my notes say "I still think Silver is a bit thick". I did also notice, to my own amusement, that Abra's not brighter than his own trainer, given that he's not listening to the orders TUPpy gives Gaia, either.

I struggle with this, because I want him to be an intimidating antagonist, but his whole point is that he has to be the least competent named member of Team Rocket. If he were good at his job, the story would end in that chapter.

Typo.

Oh man. This is awkward. I distinctly remember you pointing out these exact same typos to me and me correcting them. I think what happened was I corrected the forum version and not my word doc version, and then when I posted edited versions from the word doc version, I cleverly erased those edits. I'm a genius. Fixing these in both places now.

All these little twerps have been growing up thinking that a person is fixed and defined before they've even finished puberty. Nobody gets any hope that they can be something different - this kind of neat Sorting ceremony always appeals to teenagers, so long as they're confirmed to be be what they want to be.

Shit, I've gone from knockoff Hunger Games to knockoff Divergence. So it goes.

Big old question here - how forbidden are Ghost-types? Clearly Brigid is no secret, so what is it about Bates that's allowed him to quietly run this store all this time?

This is something I struggled with stating vs hinting. Getting a ghost type as a starter is usually viewed as the trainer being a bad person; getting a regular starter that dies and becomes a ghost is usually viewed as a tragedy. People are usually leery of both types until they can figure out which method you got your ghost through.

I still think this chapter keeps tripping up over its own humour. Without Gaia being missing there'd be no problem with poking fun at the Sentret. In the context of the situation it just feels too indulgent. Once they've got on their way and the narrative is inching towards the froslass there's nothing wrong with it.

Mmm, duly noted. This and the hair-dye note from later are relics from pretty meh attempts to rewrite this.

I think there used to be an alethiometer joke in this chapter ... in any case, wherever it was, it's gone now.

There was! I started cleaning out arbitrary references to books I enjoyed to streamline the narrative :')

It occured to me at this point that Ho-oh doesn't seem to show up much in this story. Not just in that the Rockets haven't caught it yet, but that there doesn't seem to be much cultural baggage attached to it.

The main reason is that Goldenrod (Nara's hometown) is largely secular, New Bark has no real culture, and Violet prides itself on being atheist. Lugia gets a bigmuch mention because it's currently being harnessed as a nuke, but Ho-oh gets some solid focus once Nara gets to cities that actually give a shit about traditions. The "keep reading it gets better" is an excuse I personally hate giving, but in this exact situation it's the best I've got.

This chapter highlights that point I was making above about Iris. She very unambiguously made a choice, but lord how she likes blaming TUPpy for it. She's probably my least favourite character in this story, including Silver. Silver has at least been conditioned to be a bell-end. Whereas Iris, frankly, could do with a kick in the tail.

foils foils everywhere and not a drop to drink

There's no doubt the pacing is strained here. There's a pattern to TUPpy's reactions, which as I recall, boils downs to her saying something followed by the inner monologue explaining why it was a mistake. But it's kind of not, because whatever she says Silver remains precisely as much of a bellend as he ever is. So there's definately some tidying to be done there ... not to say that it would be an easy edit by any means.

gotcha!

This seems to be as good a place as any to talk Abra. His abilities are, well ... a bit silly. I mean, he is still a first-stage pokémon, but he is an absolute powerhouse of psychic ability. And honestly, I think it's just a case of getting carried away, given Alakazam's mimetic status in the fandom. You might argue that he needs to be for this Falkner duel to make sense, but well, I've already talked about that action scene once before (And how it really needs to be snappier).

A bit of a struggle here in stating vs implying. Silver's schtick to surviving in Team Rocket is talking tons of shittalk while appearing less threatening than he is. He talks big talk to make it look like he's just talk, but he does his best to back it up with a big walk. He tells people that his Gift is lie detection when it's actually far more game-changing; his primary battler is a pokemon known for sleeping and running from danger when it's actually his ace. He's a stupid teenager with the development skills that rival Nara's stupidity sometimes, but his pokemon are OP relative to Nara because he has been training for six years -- Nara's the one who's late to the party here.

Something I don't think I have properly acknowledged is how in large part their developing relationship mirrors TUPpy's own character development. The Violet arc is where she finally has had enough of being gaslit and assaulted by Silver. More significantly it's also where she starts to reject the idea that not wanting to be gaslit and assaulted makes her a bad person.

Ahaha. Thank you. This is something I've been trying to coax out of the narrative for a while, and something that probably didn't come across very cleanly in initial drafts. Glad it worked.

So there we have it. Sorry I couldn't be more coherent, but as I say, I think I'd be repetitive at this point. Who knows when we're going to see this again, but there's Bugsy being taken seriously, and whoever Whitney is. Let's face it, the story's come a long way since it was started years ago.

Thank you for the encouragement. It really means a lot. Not gonna say that I'm pre-emptively publishing a chapter I've been obsessively re-grooming for a year just because of this comment, but it was good inspiration.

The plot isn’t much like the typical journey fic. It departs from many of the standard Journey Fic staples which brings many positive but also some negative aspects to the story in general. The original plot helps set up more consequences and complications to a Journey fic that most people wouldn’t even think about. The rations of potions along with other items and the clear danger of travelling from town to town changes the challenges of the protagonist and makes the road to her eight badges much more muddied and harsher than it might normally be. These also help the thriller genre which is found in the fic well utilized in many places. The cliff-hangers used at the ending of many of the chapters do well at keeping the reader-hooked, especially in the first arc of the fic. It also allows for the plot to be darker without appearing overly dark most of the time.

Heyo, thanks for checking me out. These are all things that I knew I wanted to portray but had difficulties portraying clearly the first go-round, so I'm glad that they worked here.

The downsides of avoiding these standard hallmarks of Journey Fics apparently comes to it’s pacing. This isn’t as noticeable in the first arc as in the second but still many of the chapters feel a bit ramble-ly and padded out in ways it’s not necessary. We’re two arcs down and not too much has happened in terms of plot events. Although what has happened was interesting we should have probably done and seen a bit more by now. The Tower arc specifically was a good diversion from what a typical journey fic might include but it was also where most of the more 'padded out' chapters were. A faster pace would also increase the sense of tension as the story is indeed a thriller.

I appreciate this 'cause I struggled a lot with the pacing -- do you have any specific chapters that felt padded? I juggled a lot of elements in the first two arcs (Nara gets five pokemon, burns down a national monument, starts a war with a fascist government, and breaks the time-space continuum), and the crit I usually get is that the plot is rushed -- I'd love to hit a happy medium here.

The Pokémon characters are probably some of the best. The really focused on their backstories along with how those in the real Pokémon games tend to treat them, such as Gaia and her fear of being abandoned, Iris and her passion for her clan and Atlas just being plain adorable. They felt bright and animated and gave us the ability to see something we see more rarely in Pokémon Fanfiction. The aspect of them being able to talk to Nara really helps their character come across – of course, Pokémon normally can’t communicate in this way, so portraying their backstory would have been much harder without it (something most Journey fics can’t and choose not to do.)

I'm glad you enjoyed this part! It's a thing I also spent a lot of time trying to tease out, so I'm glad it worked.

Many teenagers are snarky and self-doubting, but writers also tend to write many teenagers this way In the grand scale of teenage characters, her most remarkable traits don’t stand out too much. A lot of Young Adult fiction have these kinds of protagonist, making the trope much more recognisable today. This makes her fall into a bit of an 'archetype'.

I get this a lot, and it's definitely something I'm trying to iron out -- a lot of the humor falls flat for some people, which isn't something I want.

But this is also a weakness in that sometimes she feels too much of a blank slate. I’m still interested in who her parents are and how she lived before. It’s hard to entirely gauge her character when I don’t completely know where she came from in the first place. Not even her name is mentioned for many chapters!

This is a bit of a relic of poor initial planning, and I apologize -- a lot of her backstory comes out when she goes home (Goldenrod). I didn't realize how long it would take to get her there, and as a character her backstory struggles as a result. Her name isn't gonna be revealed for a looooong time tho.

Another comment I have (although this might be down to the writing) I had a hard time sensing what was happening to Nara physically. She rarely seems to tell us the state her physical body is in when she’s doing all this crazy stuff in dystopia world and I feel as if this should be included more.

In one chapter, a forest is described as a ‘forest’ and a ‘tree’ is described as a tree. This mostly happens so that the dialogue can take more importance in the narrative. I can why you chose to not focus on it, but sometimes the settings are hard to imagine.

Thank you! This makes a lot of sense and is something I'll work on including -- I rewrite pretty much constantly, heh.

Falkner and Archer appeared especially OOC and because of these parts of the fic began to cross the ‘edgy’ line. Falkner is possessed and then used by the author to sprout literature references to show that the author knows them, and then acts as a creepy finale character at the end of the tower arc and not much becomes of him. Archer is characterized fairly poorly. People forget that he’s not villainous because he desires anything he wants for himself but because of his passivity and dedication to living out other people’s wishes. This can be used in an interesting and villainous way, but most people ignore that and treat the rocket executives like stereotypical evil henchman and this fic isn’t too different. If you do want to use canon characters, please, don’t make them the opposite of their canon interpretation for the sake of minor story roles, or else they might as well not be there.

Canon is definitely something I struggle with -- taking interpretations of characters that have more depth than their source material but could still be plausibly seen doing/saying what they do in the source material. Falkner I admit is a mixed bag, but he's mostly OOC because the character doing the talking certainly isn't Falkner any more.

Archer's... a bit harder, I guess? I'm not sure which canon you're basing off of; I don't watch the anime/read the manga so this is direct from my experience of Pokemon Gold -- I really only remember him having a few (like three-ish) lines of dialogue, most of which were the standard "I can't believe I got beaten by a child". It was kind of hard to draw motivations from so little text, so I interpreted things pretty loosely, but if I contradicted direct stuff from him, please lmk!

I know it sounds like I whined a bit in this review, really, I didn’t mean to. This is a good fic, a really good fic even. It’s not without its flaws but it’s still a unique experience which is eloquently written. I feel like with a few adjustments here and there it could be a professional piece. Although the issues that it does have are hard not to notice.

No worries! I really appreciate any/all feedback here, and thanks so much for taking the time to read through this crazy train.

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chapter xviii. swarm​

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“Kurt’s safe,” Bugsy said in a low voice as he looked over his shoulder before ushering me to stand in the porch. His scyther followed. I watched with removed interest as its razor-tipped wings scraped a fresh set of shallow gashes in an already mangled doorframe. “Most of Azalea is somewhat safe. Probably.” He knocked twice on the wooden door and then leaned against it expectantly.

I made uneasy eye contact with Rousseau, who was floating around my shoulders. Bugsy was the leader of Azalea. Why was he only “somewhat probably” certain that his people were safe?

The counterpoint was written all over the gastly’s face. Bugsy was the tactical strategist responsible for keeping the rebellion alive for as long as it had been. If he was wondering if his people were safe, he probably wasn’t wrong.

Counter-counterpoint: was Bugsy paranoid about the rest of Azalea because he thought they were rebels against the Rocket cause, or because they were rebels for the Rocket cause?

The ghost shrugged.

The door opened a crack. A gruff voice whispered, “Who’s there?”

Bugsy whispered back, {It’s Bugsy.} A pause. {Project Hamartia.}

I could see the wrinkles on the hand fiddling with the deadbolt chain before the door opened another crack and Bugsy pulled us both inside.

{I’ll give us light,} a third voice murmured, and suddenly I was staring at six tiny bulbs of light illuminating the room. A ledian fluttered away, pinpricks of illumination burning into my dazed eyes.

{Thanks, Marin,} Bugsy said, and then prodded me forward. {Have a seat. Keep the murkrow close, obviously.}

Obviously. Of course. I knew exactly why that was important.

I sat down on one of the wooden chairs around the narrow table, trying not to make it obvious that I was looking around intently. The house was hardly larger than a room, and the entire back wall was devoured by a work bench and immaculately organized sets of tools. I could almost see what one of the projects was, but—the light flitted away as its bearer settled down at the table next to me, throwing the scratches on the wood’s dark surface into harsh shadow.

It was a little disorienting trying to get used to the sudden, shifting darkness. I looked over my shoulder. It looked like the place had windows, but they were all boarded up.

{Syrio will brief the rest of your team on what they need to know. This is faster.} I registered Bugsy saying words as he pulled up a chair beside me. Too late, I turned and saw the scyther trudging off to a darkened corner of the room, apparently already deep in conversation with Rousseau. Atlas was sniffing intently at the mantis’s heels. Iris took one look at me and the humans gathered around the table and took off after Syrio, her tail fluttering behind her like a banner. I wanted to call after them; I felt naked without my team.

{I’ll stay with you, trainer,} Gaia murmured quietly, perching on the back of my chair. Her thin wings whispered across my hair.

“We stay,” Icarus said stonily, flapping his wings from my shoulder. Even from the side, I could feel the burn of his bloody glare.

When I was younger, I liked to go outside and watch the stormclouds gather over Ecruteak. On good days, there’d be an hour or so where I could tell that a good storm was coming: the air was thicker, somehow, and laced with the crisp and unmistakable tang of ozone.

I was no expert at the trickier kind of storms, the human kind, but something was coming.

{Listen,} Bugsy said, the already-familiar crease between his eyebrows deepening again. {You probably have a lot to discuss. Kurt and Marin can swarm too, but we don’t have forever. Someone’s bound to notice that we’re off the grid.}

“Swarm?” I couldn’t help it; I had to ask a dumb question. It had been a long time since the last one.

The old man—Kurt, ostensibly—fiddled with his fingertips before speaking. {Our Gift. It keeps us safe. We commune automatically with our pokémon; together, we are one. From afar, our minds look the same, and our presence is masked by our pokémon. We cannot be located at a distance through the telepathic network, nor can our words here be intercepted by psychics.}

Belatedly, I realized Icarus and I were the only ones talking out loud.

“We don’t have to worry about being overheard, though,” I said, slowly trying to piece the words together. Of course Azalea’s Heart would have some crazy ability that had to do with family and unity. And of course he’d found a way to weaponize that bond into making his strategy as impermeable as it was unexpected.

I didn’t like where this was going. It was best to keep things vague: glancing, basic statements that couldn’t be held against me in the event that I was being detained for questioning and these guys were really, really bad at it. Maybe Team Rocket would be more lenient if I kept mentioning how much I didn’t want to burn their country.

Bugsy’s voice was sharp, like his scyther, when he said, {I will always have Azalea’s best interests at heart. For we were made in the image of gods.}

I looked between Bugsy and the white-haired man with wizened, delicate hands, who apparently took that as his cue to say, {Johto forever.}

I opened my mouth.

Then closed it.

I’d finally realized what they weren’t trying to tell me.

First, yeah, they were definitely the kind of rebel terrorist cell where talking to them would get you axed. Probably should’ve picked up that one from the passcodes and paranoia. But there was more to it than just Johto’s underground resistsance.

Bugsy had gathered me and my team here, in secret, in this tiny hovel of a house with the only people in the country who wouldn’t show up on a psychic radar. He treated me like I was a rebel with a cause because that’s exactly who he thought I was.

No, it went deeper than that. He treated me as someone who couldn’t trust anyone, who couldn’t talk to anyone, who needed to keep Icarus close at all times because…

I thought about what Bugsy’s profiles had said about him: that the key to his strategies had been his unpredictability. There had been tactical genius and sheer skill, yes, but that wasn’t how you held off an incoming army using a swarm of bugs. There had to be more.

Piece it together.

This was one thing that would never be in a history book, because it pointed to the craziest weakness of all. The reason why you couldn’t outstrategize Team Rocket on your own was the same reason why the siege of Azalea had been the longest part of the war. More than that. It was the reason why I’d managed to get the jump on an accomplished member of Team Rocket on my first day of being a trainer when my plans amounted to ‘if it moves, stringshot it’. The reason they were terrified of me.

The only reason I’d managed to make it so far without dying.

Bugsy’s strength was the fact that, to Team Rocket, he was literally unpredictable. In their ivory tower of telekinesis and mind-reading, they’d stopped needing to actually strategize in their battles because they’d found something more efficient. There was still intelligent planning, sure, but guessing and prediction was much less efficient than knowing exactly what your opponent was thinking via telepathy. Someone in their ranks had it. One of the Executives, maybe Giovanni. It didn’t matter. One was enough.

And with that gone? Facing Bugsy? Facing me? It was like having the internet your entire life and then being told you had to use a library for a research paper, or… having a country dependent on electricity only to have the entire power network knocked out.

For the briefest moment, I saw it: there was some weird, shadowy force pulling strings from behind the scenes. Everything that had happened so far was too interlinked to have happened by accident. Bates being in the right place at the right time to save me from the froslass. Silver being the only one to tail me. Our paths inevitably leading us to the one spiritual locus where the Forest Queen could rip me through time. It was all too much to be coincidence.

Most troubling of all: there was a wizard behind the curtain, and Bugsy and Kurt thought it was me.

“I’m not planning anything,” I said blankly, more aware than ever that I was the only person who got to use real words at this table. Did Icarus mask me that well, or were we all just staking our lives on a bird that was currently picking out bits of dirt between his toes?

{Of course not,} Kurt said smoothly. {After the power grid was brought down by external forces, a unified Johto is more important than ever. Participation in Project Hamartia would be treason.}

Oh, good, they had a name for their underground rebellion that was going to get us all killed. That made things much more legitimate. They probably even had passwords and secret knocks and… wait a second.

things fall apart

the center cannot hold.

Son of a—

“I’m just trying to go home.” This was crazy. Bugsy was openly a traitor to Azalea who was secretly a traitor to Team Rocket. He’d roped some old guy and his ladybug into helping. And, craziest of all, they thought I was the strategic genius behind Johto’s steady collapse. At this point, I was almost missing Silver’s constant derision of my mental capacity, because the other end of the spectrum, where they thought I was an untouchable mastermind, was actually laughable even to me.

No, craziest of all, they thought that I had a chance.

Bugsy nodded serenely. {Of course. Participation in Project Hamartia would be treason.}

“I’m resigning from this coup. I’m not working with anyone. You can keep the murkrow if you want; he probably won’t mind.”

Icarus squawked indignantly.

{Your resignation is accepted.}

Huh. That’d turned out to be suspiciously easier than I’d expected.

Gaia wasn’t convinced. {Are you just saying that because...}

{Your response is reasonable,} Kurt repeated. {Participation in Project Hamartia would be treason.}

They assumed I was lying to them on purpose, because I couldn’t trust them enough to say I’d obviously already planned this chess match out nine steps ahead in four different dimensions. “You’re seriously trying to undermine Team Rocket with this breloominati—”

{Illuminatu,} Bugsy corrected dryly.

“You shut the hell up right now with these puns I swear—you had to name your project?” I knew what names meant. “There are multiple projects in your organization? You made more than one suicide pact?” Icarus was cackling distractingly in my ears. Of course he would. This was his style, not mine.

{Participation,} Kurt said with herculean patience, {in Project Hamartia would be treason.}

I filed Kurt away as the NPC whose dialogue the programmers forgot to update outside of the tutorial level, and looked desperately back at Bugsy, metaphorical fingers crossed for a miracle.

{Team Rocket can ensure that anyone’s thoughts will eventually be laid bare if they so desire,} Bugsy said matter-of-factly, which dashed one plan. {And given our high-profile status, I find it frustrating that you can’t speak your mind, but I understand.}

Read: the Rockets could still pick his mind apart if they ever got ahold of him, which meant that running wouldn’t save me at this point. He knew I was the murkrow girl, and he’d seen my face. He’d seen my reaction to the idea that someone else could destroy our government for me. Could I kill Bugsy? Was it worth it? “I’m not planning anything.”

Bugsy blinked. {Of course.}

“I’m going to go poke around Ilex Forest and not die.”

{An excellent plan.} Bugsy paused, and then added placidly, {Ilex Forest holds the shrine of the Forest Queen. It is an excellent historical landmark and not at all linked to Azalea’s rebellion.} There was a minute quirk in his eyebrows that made me think he was questioning my ability to connect the dots if I really hadn’t figured out that Ilex Forest was the worst place to hide. Or maybe he thought I wasn’t hiding, and I was going to do something stupid like summon the Celebi.

Haha. Joke was on him; I’d already tried that and I was still in deep shit.

I started over. “I’m going to go poke around Slowpoke Well and not die.” Maybe, if I walked quickly enough, I could get to Union Cave before they noticed I was gone.

{An excellent plan,} Bugsy said. {Slowpoke Well is an excellent historical landmark and not at all linked to Azalea’s rebellion.}

Of course everything here was linked to Azalea’s rebellion, even the water; this was how they’d been forged. On second thought: I’d never actually confirmed with the Celebi that my actions in Violet constituted “saving the Tower.” The original idea there had been that she hadn’t left my body trailed across ten minutes, which I’d taken as a sign that she approved of what I’d done, but maybe I could get answers.

{I’m coming with you,} Gaia said automatically. {This forest has teeth.}

“Boss need no teeth,” Icarus added, and hopped up to my shoulder. “Boss has Icarus.”

{You are free to use our resources here as you please, in whatever way you think is best, for whatever you need. If your pokémon need to rest before the upcoming conflicts, we are more than happy to assist you.}

“There are no upcoming conflicts. I’m still not planning anything.”

{Of course.}

I stood up. Fine. I wasn’t trying to be a firebrand, but if they were going to be dumb about this, I could at least get some stuff out of it. “My awesome plan requires that I get fresh supplies, a change of clothes, and six of those no-tech pokéballs that you used to export with the apricorns. Oh. And the Hive Badge. That’s super important to my plan.” Why the hell not. If they were going to make me the lynchpin of their definitely-not-treason organization, I was going to take it for what it was worth.

Bugsy physically flinched at the last one.

{Of course,} Kurt said smoothly.

___________________________________________________________________________​

{They think you’ve got a master plan for taking down Johto.} Gaia perched around my shoulders, which felt incredibly light without my backpack on, and let her wings still for a moment.

I chewed on that one for a while. “Yeah. Me and my master plan.” I swallowed nervously. “Do you think this is how all of Azalea is going to be?”

{I imagine so. The rest of Johto, too, if we’re lucky.} A pause. {Lighten up, trainer. This is easier.}

“Gaia, this sucks.”

{The alternative,} she said in a fair voice that told me she and I both knew she was right, {is him trying to take us out with brute force. I do not think I could take his scyther alone. This is easier. We’ll find a way through this.}

{This… isn’t the way to Slowpoke Well,} Rousseau said instead.

“Nope.”

{You told Bugsy we were going to Slowpoke Well,} the gastly pressed.

“Yup.” I’d run out of words to tell the people of Azalea that I wanted no part in this bullshit, so maybe my actions could speak for themselves.

{I only came along because I wanted to see the Well.} Rousseau paused. {I told Iris I’d help her practice some new techniques.}

“Oh.” I hadn’t thought about that. “Sorry.”

Ilex Forest was quiet, almost peaceful. Sequoia trees as thick as doors clawed upward into the sky, twisted branches curling around the sunlight. The air here was at least ten degrees cooler, and the sweet tang of sap was everywhere. Every now and then, the gentle rustling of fallen cedar fronds on a breezeless day reminded me that we weren’t alone, but none of the pokémon had come out to meet us yet.

It looked like our reputation preceded us.

And yeah, I’d told Bugsy I was going to Slowpoke Well. I know.

We kept walking. I didn’t really know where we were going, but there was precisely one major trail through Ilex Forest, and thigh-sized roots hemmed us in from the other sides. Absent-mindedly, I rubbed at the bloodred edges of the Hive Badge. I kept turning the ledian-patterned stamp of metal in my hands; getting a badge this way hardly constituted as ‘earning’, but hey, I wasn’t going to look a delibird gift in the beak. If Bugsy was going to blindly paint me as the enemy of all of Johto, the least he could do was give me a badge.

How far did it go? Team Rocket probably couldn’t read every single person’s mind at once from any distance, but was there a range? If someone saw me, was the battle already lost? Were they able to hunt people down from a distance?

No, Silver had mentioned when we’d first met that long-distance teleportation went down with the grid for some reason. At the time I hadn’t had time to wonder why those two were related, but now… no, I still had no idea why they were related.

“They right, fearing us?” Icarus squawked from above. He didn’t seem to like Ilex so much, surprisingly enough—the branches were too high for him to perch in and talk shit from.

I had the feeling that Bugsy knew some of the answers, but I didn’t want to ask him—and from the way he was acting like I should’ve been acting, he didn’t think I needed to. I was only safe as long as he thought I was doing what he wanted. And the second that he realized I wasn’t, I would be the enemy of the town that was the enemy of the rest of Johto.

Hm. So did that make us friends again, or was I just screwed?

“I don’t know.”

{Are you sure?} Gaia asked.

“No.”

Somehow I don’t think that answered either of their questions.

{Are you hiding something like he suspects?}

“No.”

This time, Rouseeau—who had been increasingly quieter and wrapped up in his own thoughts—stopped to fix me with that same, empty smile.

{Trainer,} Gaia said at last, carefully, and a hurtling sense of vertigo filled me.

I couldn’t put away the trepidation; I suddenly knew without a doubt—we were doing this.

{I was a metapod when we went into Violet. I remember this. I remember the froslass telling me that you were more monster than human when she took me, I remember evolving to spite her in the forests of Cherrygrove, I remember traveling as a metapod. And yet, for some time atop Sprout Tower, I was a caterpie once more, until I was not.} She hesitated. {I know you are different. I know you are aware of more than you let on, but this is beyond even that line. This breaks all rules I have ever known.} She paused, and the silence weighed heavier on my shoulders than either of my pokémon did. {Trainer, what have you done? What are you planning?}

I could lie to everyone else. I could keep my mouth shut to the lanturn; I could convince Bugsy I had a plan; hell, I could even tell Rousseau to his face that I didn’t know what he was talking about when he called me out on this kind of stuff. But I couldn’t lie to her. Everything I told her to be—my starter, my moral compass, my rock—was already lies, but I couldn’t lie to her.

I kept my voice low and quiet, and with the trees standing watch, I prepared to burn a bridge.

“The first time we fought Falkner, we all died,” I said at last, glancing furtively around us. There wasn’t anyone in sight. It didn’t mean I was alone. “The Forest Queen intervened. She sent us back in time. She gave us a second chance.”

Gaia’s voice was firm. {Mortals cannot travel to the past. We are leaves in the stream of time. It only flows one direction for us. We cannot go against the current.}

“We did.”

{How?}

“There was a price. Three prices.” I tried to put the gifts of the Birds Regent and the Forest Queen into a simple of terms as I knew. “We sacrificed the way to past by consuming the spiritual energy accumulated in Sprout Tower. We sacrificed the present by undoing the reality I was witnessing. And we sacrificed the path to the future by…”

There was a long silence.

{By what?}

I opened my mouth and closed it.

Rousseau began, {She—}

No. She had to hear it from me. “By destroying you. She reversed your evolution.”

Icarus stopped his current task—using the edge of his beak to gnaw off the edge of a tree branch and sending a cascade of red back to the ground—to fix me with a bloody gaze. “You,” he growled, looking at me and the gastly with murderous intent.

{I had no part in this agreement,} Rousseau said. The gaseous nebula around him flared upward; I imagined it was the mental equivalent of him raising his hands in the air.

Icarus didn’t back down. “Yet Gaia says Tower only morphed after you appear.”

Pause.

Rousseau looked around pointedly. {If this is all we’re here to discuss, and we actually aren’t going to the Well after all, I’m going to go back spar with Iris like I promised her I would.}

“Words,” Icarus spat. “Cannot use many words and pretend to be blameless.”

But while they squabbled and Rousseau floated serenely back the way we’d come, I was looking to Gaia. I didn’t know what kind of response I was expecting, but it still hurt like a gut punch when my butterfree didn’t answer for a full minute. In the dead quiet of Ilex Forest, the silence meant that the pounding of my heartbeat was a war drum.

{Did you know that was the price when you made the arrangement?}

Something in her voice had cracked. Maybe now she understood what I’d meant back in Violet when I said I didn’t deserve her. “No. Gaia, please, no. I had no clue.”

Gaia didn’t falter. I couldn’t see her face, but it wasn’t like I ever had really understood her to begin with. {Knowing what you do now, would you have made the arrangement again?}

I—

I couldn’t lie to her.

“A chance to save all of our lives?” She hadn’t seen the first future, the one I’d left behind, the one that even Rousseau was afraid of. Anything was better than that. “No. Gaia, I know you don’t have to believe me, but I didn’t know the price. I didn’t even know I was making an agreement.”

{I see.}

Icarus’s claws dug into my collarbone, so hard that I could feel him breaking the skin. He landed aggressively, enough to for me to realize that he’d been making a point to be gentle before, and that point was gone. “Boss cannot let anyone suffer. Boss is to protect.”

There was a long pause.

{Knowing what we know now, I would make the same decision as you unknowingly did, every time,} Gaia said at last. {If it was anyone versus the life of our entire team, I would not hesitate.}

I could hardly believe my ears. This was not the timid caterpie I’d picked up on the first day of what was supposed to be an uneventful adventure. “You would. I would.” I paused. She didn’t seem convinced. “Gaia, we all would.” I took a step forward and something crunched beneath my feet; I looked down to see a strange shard of translucent yellow rock sticking out of the ground.

{You didn’t.} There was no room for argument in her voice, even though I knew there should have been. {So neither would I. It’s simple math.}

“No. Choice. To. Be. Made,” Icarus hissed, accenting every word by squeezing his talons tighter into my shoulder. “Boss is Boss.” He actually looked flustered; his gaze frantically flicked between me and Gaia. “Soldier jumps on grenade to save everyone in room. Is noble. General tells soldier to jump on grenade. Is cruel. Is wrong!” Icarus squawked. He flapped his wings directly into my face, but his furious gaze was fixed on Gaia. “Murder does not die. Murder does not pick who from murder dies. Murder means everyone lives.”

I stared at them all, lost for a moment in this three-way conversation. The last time they’d sat on my shoulders and offered conflicting advice, it had been so easy to at least see what was morally right, even if I didn’t agree—kill someone, don’t kill them. This was the same, but the roles were flipped, but it also inherently wasn’t the same. Gaia was asking me to lead them marching nobly to their deaths; Icarus was asking me to create a world where no one died.

“Gaia—”

{Are you a general or a soldier?}

I wanted to say soldier. I didn’t like the idea of being in a cloister, the king on a chessboard, the weakest piece whose only purpose was to be protected.

But that wasn’t how things had played out.

“I’m a trainer,” I said at last, crushing undergrowth beneath my feet. “I’m your trainer. It’s my job to be at fault.” But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t an answer. Did that mean I would make the choices that no one else had the heart to, and I could never let myself feel bad about it? History immortalized Bugsy for the loss he experienced at the hands of Team Rocket, but it was his pokémon who must’ve suffered the most when he fought, and I’d never seen a textbook entry on his scyther. “I’m not the king. I’m not the pawn. None of us are.”

The forest abruptly gave way to a strange rock formation. It was weirdly smooth, the way obsidian formed clean facets, and the sunlight filtering through the trees gave it a sickly yellow glow from within. Beneath the surface, just a few inches out of focus, the stone abruptly turned dark. I pulled up short; I hadn’t seen this on the route signs. The rock itself was huge, almost the size of a building, and it didn’t look natural. A monument? A landmark this big should’ve been marked. We couldn’t be at the Celebi’s shrine already; that was a few more miles in. I frowned, momentarily distracted as I reached in my backpack for the map—

{Icarus is your king,} Gaia said when I didn’t continue. {Maybe I am your queen; maybe not. But you are neither king nor pawn. You are the player.}

“That—”

I realized what the Tower had taken from me.

My pokémon were no longer my peers. Maybe they’d never been, and I’d just been fooling myself all along—the concept of a journey was inherently strange, after all. But now that they’d seen how the rest of the world wanted to see me, they’d taken away different images of who I was supposed to be: a puppeteer commanding them to victory in a playing board that spanned the world, a warlord who would kill all in the way to protect the flock. Neither of those roles were human. Neither of them were me, but somehow it was who I was supposed to be, now. It wasn’t like I’d actually had a choice.

So what did I want it to be? Did I want them to see me as a god? They’d believe me.

But I couldn’t lie to them like that. Not to Gaia. Not to my starter.

I stopped and looked at her fluttering wings and ruby-tinted compound eyes that, I realized belatedly, finally matched Icarus’s. “Gaia. I am a living creature. We are a team. You aren’t my pawn, you aren’t my queen, you are a living creature too. We don’t do that to each other . What happened to you was my fault but it’s not happening again.”

“Boss. Protects.” Icarus pressed the matter, flapping his wings in my face for emphasis.

{Except that isn’t how it works, is it?}

I spluttered and spat out a fragment of one of Icarus’s black feathers. I could see her out of the corner of my eye, barely needing to flap her wings to stay afloat. “Gaia,” I began, unable to bring myself to reach out for her. To do what? Pet her troubles away? I wasn’t sure. “I’m not sacrificing anyone. We’re in this together now, and—”

Gaia was still on my shoulders. My eyebrows knitted together. Icarus was suddenly bristling. “Who are you.” I spun to face the newcomer.

The insect had a golden carapace where hers was black, and instead of wings, it had six golden protrusions spaced out around its back. When I wasn’t looking at it from the corner of my eye, in a shadowy forest, it was hard to believe I’d ever mistaken this creature for Gaia. It was smaller, and its underbelly was silver, and above all there was a terrifying lack of movement or life in it, like a dead shell. Even when I stared at it, it hovered back and forth as if on an unseen wind; no part of its body moved.

{I am Naathi,} the strange pokémon said. I could feel Gaia peeking up curiously from behind my head, antenna ghosting against my ear. {Guardian of the largest mass grave in Johto. Welcome.}

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prev || next​

 

[kintsugi]

Responses

Spoiler

Doesn't it make no real sense in Divergence, though? I mean, this is my point. The Sorting Hat theme appeals to teenagers because it simultaneously makes the world nice and neat (All you people are Dauntless, or whatever the hell they're called), and makes a select bunch of misfits special (You are two kinds of personality!). What TUPpy's finding out is that a Gift no more completely defines anyone than does any other personality trait.

True, Divergence is a bit more of a pandering clusterfuck, but still, I'll do my best to stray from its mold.

One question of description I did have was the idea of sequoias clawing upward ... I mean it's a perfectly good image, just doesn't seem appropriate to what I've seen of sequoias. Oaks, certainly (Since they always look ancient no matter how old they are), ashes, quite possible

I. Hmmm. This is mostly inspired by me visiting sequioa forests and not quite having a word for it. I'll keep my thesaurus close to heart.

Kind of chewing over this one. Bugsy and Kurt (Apparently) disappear from the story a lot faster than I expected. And though the dialogue is obtuse and weird, it does remind me of that one comment from Small Gods about the difficulty of co-conspirators communicating and being paranoid at the same time. It follows the usual theme of nobody bothering to actually talk to TUPpy in favour of pigeonholing her into whatever role suits them.

The pacing of this chapter is the main thing I've been sitting on and decided to say fuck it, I'll revisit it later. cheers to later.

I think I may have mentioned it somewhere before, but TUPpy would never have been a very good trainer whatever she had been given. You've got to wonder what she thought her journey would have been like. I mean, ok, she probably hasn't seen what good leadership looks like, but her attitude seems to be to let her pokémon do what they want and desperately hope they dovetail with her own interests.

Yup! She's a trash-tier trainer who learns what it means to be less trash. To be fair, there was definitely a reason no one encouraged her to go out journeying in the first place, and it was probably a combination of her stunning lack of forethought and inability to coordinate others...

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chapter xix. a monument to all your sins​

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{How long have you been following us?} Gaia asked.

{How long have you been talking?}

I swore under my breath; this was probably the fifth time someone had snuck up on us and jumped into our conversation. And then I realized the second, stranger thing. Rousseau had been gone for quite some time now, and yet. “You’re what’s making the telepathic field.” I’d had Rousseau around for so long that I’d taken it for granted.

{Yes,} she said quietly.

“You must be one hell of a psychic.” As far as I knew, most bugs couldn’t develop telepathic fields. There were a handful of bug species that were decent psychics, and of that handful there were one or two utter exceptions. Sabrina’s venemoth, for example, but rumor had it that he’d also gone head to head with half of Red’s team. At the same time. With one wing behind his back, uphill both ways, et cetera et cetera.

Revisionist history was a pretty wild thing.

{I was raised by the best.}

That wasn’t remotely reassuring.

{You’re a ghost,} Gaia said, far more calm.

{Oh? What makes you say that, young butterfree?}

{You do not feel like one of the living,} Gaia said. She fluttered in front of the strange pokémon, looking like the distorted reflection in a funhouse mirror.

Naathi chuckled. The sound was cold and empty, and it seemed to echo around in the hollows of her shell. {You must be one hell of a psychic.}

“Why here?” Icarus asked. “Why ghost?”

It was starting to become formulaic. Another national landmark, another ghost. Was this one going to try to kill us, too?

{There is a lot in your question, young murkrow. Why are any of us here? What does it mean to be here?} A pause. Another serene, haunting chuckle. {And why indeed would I linger as a ghost?}

Well, at least that question was answered. Unless she wanted to talk us to death, we were probably safe for the time being.

Icarus glared daggers at the strange pokémon. While I’d come to accept the seemingly endless stream of strangers spouting non-answers, Icarus was a much more literal kind of bird. “Why?”

{Do you know where we are, young murkrow?}

“Not young.”

{Compared to me, all of you are children.}

Gaia’s head tilted at that one. In another time, in another place, I could spend years trying to understand and replicate the insight she brought to what was otherwise Icarus and me running around aimlessly. {You’re a ghost who remembers who you are.}

{And you’re a butterfree who’s so intertwined with fate that I can feel Time herself slipping off of you. Tell me, do you understand what your trainer’s actions made you become?}

All three of us fell silent. Icarus didn’t mean it this time, I think, but his talons clenched in my shoulder again, adding another set of puncture marks.

{Your words earlier were truly spoken,} Naathi continued, as serene as ever. {Mortals can only travel down the stream of time, and they can only ever move at a fixed pace. And yet here you are, a child of the hive who has risen from servant to queen and fallen back again.}

“How you know this true?”

Naathi chuckled, unfazed by the murkrow glaring daggers at her. {Your companion is a stitch in the fabric of Time, now. Even if I can only move one in one direction across the cloth, I would have to be blind not to see the ripples from her rip.}

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” I said, taking a protective step between my pokémon and the ghostly carapace before us.

{Oh?} I’d have to be deaf to ignore the mocking tone that had slipped into Naathi’s voice.

“What you want?”

{On the contrary, I wonder what it is the three of you want. I doubt you will be able to find the path where you all end happily.} She laughed a little at a joke whose meaning only she understood, and it was then that I pinned down what I found most unsettling about her: when she said these grim things, she actually sounded sad. {Your physical path so far brought you here, which does not bode well for the road ahead.}

Gaia’s antennae flickered, the only sign thus far that she was even listening to the conversation. {What—}

{Hush, now. He comes.} Naathi’s voice had taken on a deadly-calm, almost prophetic quality. {Watch him falter, watch him weep. Behold, Azalea’s Heart.}

I had the presence of mind to pull Icarus back before he could open his beak, and I yanked him with me behind the trunk of an enormous sequoia tree, heart pounding, umber bark digging into my back.

The footsteps followed, dry crunching on dead leaves, and then they stopped.

Seconds ticked by. I held my breath, finally trusting Icarus enough to relinquish my deathgrip on his beak, but none of us moved.

{Did you come to heal again?} I heard Naathi whisper to the newcomer.

{Hello, Naathi,} a familiar voice responded despondently, and I had to bite my lips to keep the frightened squeak of surprise trapped, where it belonged.

Bugsy?

He didn’t answer.

The silence dragged on.

I was itching to see what was going on down there, at what you’d get when a priest, a dead bug, and Azalea’s gym leader walked into a mass grave, but I also knew that Bugsy had the kind of magnetic gaze that would pick out a pair of watching eyes in a heartbeat. Was he jumpy enough to kill me?

Not worth finding out.

New plan.

I angled the Hive Badge in my palm, catching first the reflection of the giant lump of stone, and then the blur of pine needles, and then—

The purple blur of hair that indeed resolved into Azalea’s gym leader, sitting forlornly at the base of the strange, golden rock formation, his head tilted upward to look at the empty blue skies above. His scyther was nowhere in sight.

That didn’t answer anything. What was he doing here?

“There’s way too much residual psychic energy here for the Rockets to spy here. You can come out now,” he said, and I realized that this was the first time I’d heard him speak aloud.

Shit.

{What is this place?}

Too late, I realized the second oddity—Gaia wasn’t hovering by my shoulder any more.

Bugsy’s head pricked up tiredly as the butterfree approached him. He leaned into his walking stick. I imagined his knuckles whitening around it as he prepared to strike. “Nokonozo,” I watched him answer, which wasn’t really an answer at all. “Is she here too?”

{No. She went to the Well. I wanted to see the forest.}

“And yet she didn’t bring her ace with her?” Bugsy asked. I could practically hear him raising his eyebrows. When Gaia didn’t answer him, he continued, “Nokonozo is the site of the last battle in the Rocket takeover.”

I remembered Naathi’s first words to us, and apparently so did Gaia. {This is the largest mass grave in Johto,} she said.

“Some things were wiped from the history books, young butterfree. Nokonozo is a pinnacle of triumph for order and prosperity. This is where, after five months of cowardly guerilla warfare, the last bastions of a backwards era were finally ushered out.”

I finally recognized that strange, golden-honey color that made up the faces of the enormous obelisk.

Amber. This was amber. And the twisted mass of darkened shapes in the middle, spindly like spinarak legs, tapered points like weedle stingers, segmented in the all-too-familiar silhouette of a butterfree’s thorax—

{Team Rocket won here,} Gaia finished for him.

“No,” Bugsy said quietly. “That’s not what the stakes were. Say it how it really was.” His reflection turned a shard of golden stone over in his right hand. “Azalea lost.”

The features of their faces were blurry, but somehow I didn’t think I’d have been able to read the smudge that was Bugsy’s eyes even if I’d been staring straight at him.

{Azalea still stands.} Naathi was back in this, although I couldn’t see where she stood in the limited view that the badge was offering me. {You made the right choice.}

{What did you do?}

{Young butterfree,} Naathi began. {He—}

“No.”

The clearing fell silent again.

I recognized the callous foolhardiness in his voice, the sensation of words being stripped of the emotion behind them—no, the feeling that saying the words aloud was only a fraction of the punishment he deserved—when he continued: “I held the warfront for five years after the rest of Johto fell. I organized the strategy and lost the war. I negotiated the surrender that came after. The results of that treaty are in front of you, Gaia. There is nothing new in executing war criminals. Azalea and I entered that negotiation table fully expecting that I had nothing to left lose. We were ready to die.” A pause. His first one, this time. The words here were tumbling out of his mouth like he’d been bottling the up for years. “They didn’t ask us to die. They asked me for something that everyone agreed was utterly abhorrent, something we couldn’t give, and when I gave it, the Rockets built Nokonozo out of my transgressions. How old is your trainer, young butterfree?”

{It doesn’t matter.}

Bugsy’s reflection made a blurry motion that might’ve been a shrug. One hand tapped idly on the handle of his walking stick. “I’ll guess sixteen. A strange age in these parts. She must’ve been born during the invasion.” No. He wasn’t bottling this up. The sentences were all there, like he’d been saying them over and over again, but the syllables were disjointed, like it was his first time saying them aloud. “You haven’t had time to see the city, young butterfree, but when you do, you and your trainer will find something quite strange. You can search every inch of the city, and you will find no one her age.”

The Hive Badge slipped out of my fingers as I processed the implication he was trying to make. It took the reflection of Bugsy before Nokonozo with it, which was a blessing, but it couldn’t take his voice.

“We took years of progress from the Rockets, so they took those years back from us. That was the price they asked of me in return for Azalea to be welcomed back to the fold. Every child born to us, pokémon and person alike, from the day the Rockets set foot in Johto to our black day of surrender. You won’t find them in Azalea because they’re all right here.”

I’d read stories, once, about how the Lugia could freeze things in time. I’d always thought they were just stories.

“It was a trade that no one else could have made, but it was the only one that let all of us be here to judge me for it. I had a butterfree, once,” the disembodied voice of Bugsy was saying softly. “She was wise, like you, and she told me something very important. It was from her that I learned a lesson that I hope you will learn soon—and yet one that I hope none of us ever have to learn, somehow—that once you start recognizing your pieces as pieces, you stop losing as many.”

{Surely,} Gaia said carefully, {you do not blame yourself for the choice you made? Naathi is right. You guaranteed the future of Azalea.}

{Bugsy has forgotten what it means to be Azalea’s heart,} Naathi answered for him, immediately. Even from where I hid, I could hear the contempt dripping from her voice. {Imago dei. The hive understands. We would trade drones for the queen a thousand times over and never look back.}

And then Bugsy answered for himself. “Naathi and I stopped seeing eye to eye long ago. Once you convince yourself that you play for the bigger picture, you can stomach trading your children for your future. And yet, Gaia, remember this lesson that my butterfree never taught me: once you become a piece, once your trainer becomes a player, neither of you will ever be able to go back to the children you used to be.”

The three of them were silent, so silent that I thought maybe they’d left. And then I heard Bugsy sigh heavily. “Before you leave Azalea, show your trainer this place, if you haven’t already. Show her my city, and show her where the children like her ended up. Make sure she understands what it means to make my mistakes.”

{She is young.}

Bugsy’s answer came too fast, as if he knew what was coming already. “And the world will expect her to be far older.” A pause, and then: “Much like you.” Another pause. In the mirrored surface of the Hive Badge, I couldn’t quite see his eyes, but then his entire head snapped to Naathi like it’d been loaded with clockwork. “Oh, my. You’ve been places, young butterfree. Are you a general or a soldier, indeed? You and she may be neither piece nor player.”

Swarm.

They were swarming. Naathi had been telling him everything. Or he’d been gleaning it from Gaia. Or one of the hundreds of bugs around us who had seen it happening. It didn’t matter, because at the end of the day the only important thing was—

“You know I’m here, then,” I said aloud, quite cleverly, from behind my tree.

“I think ‘knew’ is the correct word, but yes. Feel free to come out.”

This was probably Bugsy’s specialty back in his prime—pulling the rug out from beneath his opponent’s feet right when they thought they had an advantage. I sighed and shuffled out from behind the tree, keeping my hands casually in my pockets as if I hadn’t been spying on an incredibly somber and personal conversation. “You didn’t mention you were coming to the forest.”

He swung his walking stick around lazily, just enough for me to see that it wasn’t a walking stick at all. It was a crowbar. I tried not to look at the crowbar, because looking at it would remind me of my history classes, and my history classes would remind me that this crowbar was the reason that there were four members of the Rocket executive core, not five.

Bugsy noticed my obvious discomfort and said, “And you told me you were going to the Well. I do sincerely apologize for not reading deeper into your statements.”

Unless he had read deeper into my obvious lies, and he’d known where I was going to go instead, so he’d acted accordingly. Maybe I could pretend that I’d known he was going to know that I was going to do that, which is why I’d… tried to hide behind a tree from someone who could telepathically communicate with every insect in the forest.

Gods, this chessmaster stuff was way too above my level.

“They never mention this part of the war,” I said instead, looking up at the massive tower of amber in front of me.

“Of course they wouldn’t.” The scoff was back in his voice, and suddenly it was hard to remember how vulnerable he’d sounded just seconds ago. “That would create the idea that actions have consequences.”

“They’ve reminded me of that well enough,” I muttered darkly. Me and Icarus both. “The murkrow and I have consequences for things that I never even acted on.”

Bugsy raised one eyebrow. “If it helps, which I know it won’t, Azalea was weary of his kind long before the Rockets told us we were supposed to be.” He must’ve noticed me about to splutter something indignant and utterly incomprehensible, because he shrugged and said, “Murkrow eat bugs in increasingly cruel and creative ways. We like bugs.” He waited for me to close my mouth, and then added, “And besides, I’ve put my differences behind me, haven’t I? You have whatever aid you need from me, Hamartia.”

Hamartia. I was his stupid pet plan. It all came down to that.

No, not just his pet plan. Everyone had an idea of what we were. A dozen shadowy forces trying to tell me and Icarus what we should be—walking, flying disaster. The Rockets feared it because, well, I figured most governments were afraid of a sentient skeleton key in their formerly all-powerful control network. Bugsy welcomed it because, because it’d give him revenge for however many years of hardship left him still coming to an amber tomb to apologize.

Everyone was looking at us like we were actually a player on this board. Everyone but me.

“Did you take out the generators?” I said instead. If anyone could’ve done it, it would’ve been Bugsy. Informally confined to Azalea or not, he would’ve found a way.

“Of course not.” There was almost a look of profound disappointment on his face before Bugsy wiped it away. I figured he was either sad that I was stupid enough not to understand the real culprit, or sad that I thought he was stupid enough to hurt Johto like this. “Although I appreciate the message that was sent, one I think the Rockets have yet to receive despite our best efforts. That their kind of modernization has a price. They bulldozed their fabled route system straight through five centuries of heartwood, and there was nothing I could do about it. They burned Brass Tower to the ground to summon Lugia. They turned Olivine into an industrial wasteland for their generator field, which now doesn’t even work. Johto is dying, and it’s only a matter of time now before the Rockets suck it dry. But that wouldn’t make for good propaganda, would it?”

He waited expectantly, but I didn’t notice fast enough. It wasn’t until he was halfway through saying, “Syrio suggested to me that you might have been serious when you said that you weren’t planning anything,” that I realized I’d just failed a test. And by that point, Bugsy was already saying, “Perhaps I misjudged you. Perhaps you legitimately just wanted to go home, and perhaps you didn’t even mean for any of this to happen. You could just be a kid who bought into the Rocket propaganda and just happened to get the worst starter possible at the worst possible time.”

I, quite cleverly, decided not to answer that one.

And Bugsy, to his credit, chose not to look at me when he continued, “And if that were the case—which I’m not saying it is, by the by—I would tell that kid, who just wants to drink the lemonade and buy the propaganda and then go home to a quiet life, that some people don’t get that choice. Some kids end up becoming leader of a town at the age of thirteen, which is great, until some foreign terrorists end up on their doorstep with the closest thing they’ve ever known as a god, demanding that they roll over and let someone else destroy everything that they’ve ever known as home.” He turned to look at Naathi with hard eyes. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to her or me. “And maybe, in theory, the kid understands what it means to be at the heart of a cause, but they don’t want to accept it, because everything they’ve learned about reality up until this point told them that this situation isn’t fair and it shouldn’t be happening to them. And, hypothetically, as the leader of Azalea, I’d have one word for that scared kid.” He reached one hand out for the glassy surface of Nokonozo. “Sucks.” He pulled away, as if touching the pillar would burn him. “Reality doesn’t care about you. Zoom out far enough and we’re all just drones for another queen. The hive understands, even if it doesn’t realize how far up it scales. Reality will trade you for the queen a thousand times over and never look back. You either become the queen or decide you’ve got so little to lose that it’s okay to be part of the wager. This is imago dei. You won’t get anywhere just thinking about yourself; it’s the legacy that lives on. It’s about sending a message. This is what it means to build things that last.”

I followed his gaze.

Seeing Nokonozo this close was haunting. The strangest part was how serene they all looked, suspended in amber as time passed them by. I couldn’t help but linger on a butterfree, not much bigger than Gaia, the outline of her carapace distorted from crystalline refraction into a silhouette that was too familiar to be ignored; too alien to be accepted as real—

“I’m going to the Teneral Festival,” Bugsy said suddenly. “Do you want to come?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The Teneral Festival,” Bugsy repeated, as if that explained anything. “It starts tonight. It’s a tradition from a few hundred years back, after the rise of the Tohjo conflicts.” He paused to look at me, a wry smile crossing his face. “And besides, there’s a small battle tournament. Since you beat me for the Hive Badge and you’ve been shining it in my face for the past twenty minutes, I’d say you’re a prime contender here.”

The weight of his stupid ladybug badge weighed heavy in my pocket all of a sudden. “I’m sorry?”

“The Teneral Festival,” Bugsy said for the third time. The smile faded a little. “It’s a thing we do down here in Azalea. The final molting before winter. We gather together and acknowledge the hardships that came before, the rockiness of the road ahead—but above all, we share what we have. We are a place of community; our hive lives and dies as one.”

As one? I chanced a look at the massive amber tower before me, darkened shapes at its core casting twisted shadows around us. There had been a trade here, one that I could never imagine making, but it certainly hadn’t been made as one. “I’m. I’m going to pass. I have a lot on my plate right now.”

Bugsy wasn’t looking at me. This entire conversation, and he’d only been staring at one thing. The one piece that mattered to him. I almost caught the sound of his sigh through the breeze, but either the trees were so loud or he was so quiet that I was left wondering if I’d imagined it in the first place. “Look. Hamartia.”

“That isn’t my name. I’m not your stupid project.”

“Look.” There was a level of world-weariness laced in his intonation, like that single plea for me to just listen weighed like a heavy burden on his shoulders, that I couldn’t help but stop. “Either you’ll bring about the destruction of Johto or you won’t. Either you’ll prove to us that you deserved a murkrow, or you won’t. Either I’ll finally figure out how to redeem my people or I won’t. Life is made up of these uncertainties and at some point you can’t keep trying to strategize around them.”

The best strategist in Johto turned to stare me straight in the eyes, but what I saw in that purple gaze wasn’t desperation or anger or sadness; it was simply calm, even if his voice slipped into a plea. “It won’t do you any good. It never did me any good when I tried it, either. But there’s a festival about to begin, and I’m going to watch a bunch of off-pitch children absolutely butcher one of my favorite folk songs and I’m going to applaud them the entire time, and for one night we can all just forget about whatever horrible things keep taking from us and just enjoy what we’ve still got, you know?”

And I saw him there, slouched and smiling in the shattered yellow light of the monument they’d made to all his sins, and I finally began to understand how a man like him could possibly be all of the rumors the world had about him and more.

I let myself smile too. Just one night. “Okay.”

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prev | next​

 

[kintsugi]

responses:

Spoiler

Kind of reminds me a little bit about my usual speech about nice things in dark fics, after a fashion. In actual fact there are plenty of characters in some rise by sin who do emote sincerely, but the cleverer ones do have a habit of speaking like this is all a children's game. Celebi, for one, though I reiterate her character is great. One thing that does niggle me is how much you have to tell me she sounds sad. It would be nice if I could see that more clearly in Naathi's dialogue.

Oh, yeah, on re-read I see how Naathi comes off as too distant for my liking.

Out of curiosity, where did the decision to refer to an ace come from? I know mine was from watching Haikyuu!! and trying to figure out some reasonably authentic-sounding sports jargon for that damn Tourney arc. Anyhow, next:

Irony! Mine was from my short-lived stretch of playing volleyball in high school.

This is always a tricky section, because usually there's only something to add after a big edit. In this case I think I'd revise that big paragraph where Bugsy discusses whether TUPpy is some kind of revolutionary or not. It's technically accurate, but it tries to blur into a block of text. Either trimming the dialogue or finding somewhere to divide it into two proper paragraphs would be the solution, I think.

gotchu gotchu, that does make sense.

Strictly speaking this chapter isn't that long, but it felt like a longer chapter. This upcoming festival could be a welcome change of pace. There have been plenty of long, cryptic conversations, and if nothing else the plot could do with being shaken up a bit. We haven't really seen much of people just doing what people do, which wouldn't be thematically inappropriate, since TUPpy's whole character is about being much more ordinary than anyone expects.
[..]
My favourite theme looming on the horizon there.

Hurrah! The lack of breathing room definitely got to me in the Cherrygrove->Violet arcs; I ended up retooling a lot of Azalea to make room for scenes like these, so I'm glad that paid off!

But shitty jokes aside (especially since Pav already used that one sadly) of all the things for this week the last thing I expected was a srbs chapter, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw it. Admittedly the last chapter came out...shit, I think like last year? so it was hard to remember what exactly happened aside from the general stuff like Nara meeting Bugsy and the like.

i guess i'll see you next year geddit because 2019 is tomorrow

Anyways, moving into the chapter, you really jumped into high gear. And honestly, maybe this isn't what I should do as a reviewer since if anything I should focus on critiquing but I was wondering just how you're able to make every chapter feel so...like touching, like this has been a thing in your writing the last couple of years where there isn't a single chapter that is devoid of meaning, even chapters that don't matter to the story have some kind of moment or scene where you're just like "wow" and it's something that has me really curious.

hey. you in the chair. thank you for writing this. this made me feel really warm and fuzzy inside.

Also, what questions it does answer it mainly makes up for by raising new ones, such as that whole cryptic thing with Gaia "becoming a Queen but then going back to being a worker" thing they mentioned, which I assume has to do with the fact that Gaia was supposed to die.

It's actually referring to her evolution/devolution/time travel shenanigans back at the top of Sprout Tower -- turns out that time travel totally fucks you up; who would've known??

Hey, this is your secret santa review, I guess.

Okay, let me start by saying that I wish I’d started reading this story ages ago. With what there is currently, it’s easily one of my favorite on the site. It might just be that I’m a sucker for good worldbuilding, but I love this story. Anyways, onto the review.

Hey! Wow. Welcome to the party; glad you could make it + even more glad you enjoyed it.

It might not be intentional, but I feel that it kind of helps sell the “I’m not some destined hero to save johto, I just got roped into this” message that she keeps trying to tell everyone, even if they aren’t really listening. I don’t have any major problems with her, really, although sometimes her incessant sarcasm kind of interrupts the mood of some scenes.

The namelessness thing was done pretty much for the reasons you've outlined, yeah! And the sarcasm interrupting... is a thing I'm still working on toning down, heh.

As for her Pokemon, they’re all wonderfully lovable, too. Icarus and Gaia are the most developed of the group, with the others kind of just… being there, but that isn’t a bad thing. I do hope they get more depth soon, especially Rosseau. Iris gets a bit in Sprout Tower, as does Rosseau, but it’s still not anywhere near the levels of growth Gaia has gone through. Whew, Gaia is booking it. This little bug type has gone through more and grown further than most protagonists do in their entire story. Gaia is by far my favorite of all the characters, and it’s easily because of how much it’s changed. I guess bug types really do grow fast.

They definitely will get more growth! And I'm glad you like the other characters too; it's been a bit of a struggle getting them to this point, haha.

As for technical, no complaints here! I didn’t notice any errors, and even if I did, everyone else had already pointed them out. That’s what happens when I’m late to the party, I guess. Looking forward to more updates!

Thanks for reading this all so far!

hey look it's a christmas chapter??
can definitively say that there won't be another update until next year haha great joke

___________________________________________________________________________​

chapter xx. teneral​

___________________________________________________________________________​

{What is this. You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you.}

“No, Iris,” I said, swallowing a sigh as I popped the piece of funnel cake I’d offered her into my mouth instead. “It’s fine, see? It’s actually really good.”

{…Let me smell it again,} the sentret said after a moment of consideration.

I sighed and tossed her another morsel.

Tiny claws dug pinprick marks in the packed-earth floor of the tent as Iris sniffed her way in a circle. {It smells like sugar and fat,} she announced at last. {You are trying to kill me.}

I shrugged. “Eat it while it’s hot, if you want.” If not, well. More for me, then.

Hey. No one said I was going to be a great parent, least of all me.

I tore my eyes away from commotion in front of me—Kurt and his ledian were producing a cloud of glimmering stars and letting them drift through a crowd of delighted children—when I heard rustling from the parchment paper in my hand.

“Iris.”

I glanced around my feet, but she was already darting away, her striped tail fluttering in the air until she was safely out of range.

“Did you just say you didn’t want to eat any funnel cake and then eat all of my funnel cake?”

{No,} she said petulantly, which might’ve been believable given that telepathic voices didn’t convey the fact that she was chewing, except that she was still licking powdered sugar off of her paws.

I scowled. Normally I expected Icarus to do this, but it kind of made sense. If he was banned from the festival on the grounds that only “most” of Azalea was safe, of course he’d probably find a way to get Iris to do his dirty work for him.

It’s what I’d do, after all.

“May I give your sentret some more funnel cake?” a vendor was saying next to me, his voice carrying surprisingly clearly over the clamor from the puppet show beside us.

“I don’t have any more money on me,” I said automatically. I’d gotten used to phrasing it like that; ‘any more’ made it sound like I’d been able to afford the first funnel cake to begin with, instead of taking some random stranger’s charity.

The man smiled, the skin around his eyes creasing like the floppy leather of his beret. “Charging you? On Teneral?” Grease-burned hands were already holding out another parchment-wrapped parcel. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I could feel Iris’s eyes burning hungrily into me.

“Fine,” I sighed, making sure to drag the word out for as long as possible. The baker beamed, and Iris shot me a look that I almost thought was gratefulness if I hadn’t known her any better.

“Beautiful sentret you’ve got there,” the man said absent-mindedly, hands folding up more packets of parchment as if of their own accord.

I waited expectantly for him to say something heart-breaking about how it reminded him of his dead best friend, but instead he just added, “She has a nice colored tail.”

“Yeah?”

“The stripes. They’re like wood rings.”

He paused again. I didn’t prompt him. This was a quirk I was starting to see in the conversations here—people were much more slow and methodical. While Bugsy talked at a million miles per hour, that just covered up the fact that he was thinking at a million miles a minute, and every sentence came out strained and distilled anyway. But even the bakers here mulled over each word with the patience of watching grass grow.

Compared to the breakneck pace I was used to having information thrown in my face, it was honestly relaxing to have things segmented out like this. I took the few seconds’ pause to look at Iris as she began worrying away at her chunk of funnel cake, striped tail flicking through the air.

“Reminds me of mahogany.”

Huh. I’d never noticed that before.

___________________________________________________________________________​

“You have… heavy hands,” the elderly woman who had introduced herself as Elena said at last, parsing her words carefully. “You aren’t from around here, are you?”

I flinched back without meaning to, and then calmed myself. This was a festival. Bugsy had said these people were safe. Icarus was far away. I was just a trainer with a butterfree and a sentret and a gastly, travelling the world without a care. “How could you tell?”

“Azalea’s children,” she said, her voice low and gravelly with age, “have a softer touch.” Her statement was serene, the way Gaia sometimes dropped bombs—with enough truth in them to make me shudder, but with so little judgment in her voice that it was hard to tell she was even critiquing me at all.

I glanced down at the crumpled mess of paper that I was supposed to be folding into a butterfree. Oops. I’d never been one for fine motor skills, but when I was looking at the razor precision of the creases in Elena’s paper compared to the haphazard folds I’d managed to impart in my own, it put things into better perspective. “Oh?”

“Insects are born soft,” Elena was saying. Her hands flew across the paper with an ease born of only practice, forming hard-edged creases where there had previously only been foil. “We grow strong, but still.” As if to punctuate her words, she ran the flat of her thumb across a particular bend in the pattern where four sheets of paper had to be flattened into one. “Our children learn it early. The emerging imago is strong. It has survived so much. It grows wings and flies above the desolation of this world.” She wasn’t looking at me; her tongue had tracked to the corner of her mouth as she gently pried a flap of paper out from beneath the incoherent mess of folds she’d created. “But the larva are soft. Their carapaces haven’t learned how to weather a storm yet, and until they do, they are vulnerable. They must be handled gently. So the children of Azalea learn to have a softer touch than the rest of Johto. We teach them, children and pokémon alike, how to grow strong alongside one another. It comes with the territory.”

Her fingers pinched the edge of her paper and pulled outward, and suddenly I was staring the fully-formed image of a butterfree, pressed into the floral pattern of the pale paper she’d started with.

“Oh. Wow.” I looked back down at the one I’d made—crumpled wings and thorax looking drab in comparison to the sharp creases in front of me.

“It comes with practice, too,” Elena said with a warm smile. She took the paper butterfree from in front of me and added it to the ever-growing pile beside her. Another piece of paper was in front of each of us before I could blink. “Would you care to try again?”

I wanted to say something, some dumb excuse about how I was out of time or second chances, but a tiny voice in my head reminded me what tonight was for. “I’d love to, thanks,” I said instead.

The next piece of paper I received was patterend with red maple leaves. “I do the diagonal creases first,” Elena said, using exaggerated movements and slowing herself down so I could follow along this time. “It helps the paper keep its shape.”

I nodded and followed suit.

“This will be a strange Teneral,” she said absent-mindedly, but I was suddenly aware of her eyes boring into me across the table. “The paper imago are the only ones we have.”

“What are you wishing for?” I learned this with baker from before: the people of Azalea spoke a different dialect, really. Growing up in Goldenrod, with the strange upbringing I’d had, I’d learned some of it—but clearly, with my clumsy hands, I hadn’t learned enough. The trick, though, was understanding what someone was thinking before I said it. Elena was folding paper butterfree after paper butterfree, and teaching the rest of us to do the same. At the end of the festival, they would be thrown to the wind.

There were two key bits of history to learn here. The first I had learned from Gaia, and the second from Elena.

First: that paper butterfree were seen as a token of good luck. If you folded a thousand, you could release them all and make a wish.

Second: that each paper here folded over a handwritten name.

“I had a son, once,” she said simply, and continued her work.

___________________________________________________________________________​

“Gather round, children,” a gangly, greying man was saying as he helped his equaully gangly ambipom methodically set up a white sheet behind him. “What story will it be this time?”

“The storm of Brass Tower!” one boy shouted, standing on his tiptoes and raising one chubby hand into the air.

“The siege of Azalea!” another girl cried out, no older than five.

I saw the man’s smile dip and rise for a second, the same way Rousseau’s did sometimes. “How about,” he said instead, not missing a beat as he fumbled in the wicker basket behind him, “the story of Kodama, who stopped the rot of Ilex Forest?” He leaned forward, brown eyes twinkling. “Coulter, could you give me a hand or two?”

The ambipom nodded cheerfully and then, with a flourish, produced a magnificently detailed pidgeotto puppet from their basket, flattened as if made of paper. Each feather was carved carefully into the puppet’s surface, tiny quills that tapered off into thin air, and tiny brass joints let it flap its wings as the pokémon deftly used both tail-hands to guide the bird to the stage, much to the children’s delight.

The story that the old man and his ambipom told that evening went something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a young pidgeotto living in Ilex Forest. She was still a very young pidgeotto, but today she was to go around the forest and gather berries for her nestmates.

And so Kodama the pidgeotto flew, very carefully, into Ilex Forest. She spent all morning carefully gathering the most delicious cheri and oran berries that she could find, because they were her mother’s favorites. But no sooner had she reached the first lake then did she see a swarm of heracross, who appeared to be laughing at something quite funny indeed! Curious, she alighted next to them.

“Hello,” she tweeted happily. She was careful to fold her wings neatly close to her body so that they wouldn’t accidentally cuff her neighbors. “What do you find so funny on this lovely afternoon?”

Momentarily, the heracross didn’t answer her, so busy as they were with their guffawing. Finally, one of them managed to calm herself long enough to respond, “The horns atop your head! They are so soft, little one. How do you intend to joust?”

“My horns?” the young pidgeotto asked, quite surprised. Her eyes widened as she realized that they were laughing at her crest! Her mother had helped her comb her crest this morning, taking care to pick the mud out of the five luxurious feathers that had slowly started to grow longer and darker than the rest of her plumage. When her crest was as long as her tail, her mother had promised, Kodama would be ready to evolve into a big, strong pidgeot. Kodama puffed out her chest. “I like my crest! It means I’m growing strong!”

The one who had spoken earlier shrugged and turned back to the other heracross, who was still guffawing, and swung her own horn at him. The crack that resulted sent a mighty shockwave that echoed through the forest. Kodama looked on in awe. “Can your crest do this?” she asked, as the two pokémon locked horns and began struggling back and forth.

“No,” Kodama replied miserably, suddenly painfully aware of the floppy weight that her crest had upon her neck. “I suppose not.”

Leaving the two heracross to their tussle, Kodama flapped away, but their words followed her.

Suddenly, Kodama came across a stroke of good luck! A patch of thick, sticky mud stretched out in front of her, and Kodama had a brilliant idea! She would cover her crest in this mud, and then it would harden and be just as strong as the heracross’s horn. That would sure show them!

She was in the midst of carefully using her talons to slather the mud over the feathers on her head when Kodama heard an astonished voice behind her: “Child, what are you doing?”

“Good morning!” Kodama greeted cheerfully. She looked up to see a magnificent fearow settled in the treetop, his long neck craning down to scrutinize her. Kodama dipped her beak to show her respect for the elder pokémon.

But the fearow scoffed, and ruffled his dark feathers in disapproval. “My, my,” he said, piercing Kodama with a scornful, sidelong glance. “What an ugly beak you have. It’s a good thing that you bow it in respect to me; I hope that you have the wisdom to keep it hidden beneath the rest of your feathers.” And with that, he tilted his own long, magnificently pointed beak away from Kodama and flew off.

Kodama looked after him, bewildered. Suddenly, her own beak felt short and pitiful in comparison. What an embarrassment to her family, and to her species! Her own siblings surely had brilliant beaks of their own, but she only had this short, stubby beak that was far too short to be beautiful.

Aha! Yes! Kodama’s keen eyes spotted something, and she knew what she should do. There, in the corner, was an energy root! She could tie it around her beak and it would look much more majestic, like fearow’s.

Yes, Kodama realized as she worked diligently to fasten the root to her feathers. This would do quite nicely.

“What ugly wings that poor creature has. How do you think she’ll ever attract a mate?”

Kodama looked up in alarm to see a pair of dustox flapping in front of her. She opened her beak to spout off a retort, but she stopped short when she saw the scintillating green and red wings that the pair sported. Flecks of glitter caught the sunlight and cast it all over the forest around her; Kodama could not help but stare on in awe!

“You have very nice wings,” she agreed in a very small voice.

“Of course I do,” the first dustox said, his golden antenna twitching proudly. “I work very hard to keep them this way.” He scoffed and then looked discerningly at Kodama’s own wings before fluttering off.

How could she be so foolish? She’d been so focused on her beak and crest that she’d forgotten her own dull plumage! Kodama stood stock-still, the shame and disbelief settling in. No, no! Kodama had a clever plan! She would use the berries she had gathered to dye her feathers green and red, like the dustox, and then she would have wings as nice as anyone in the forest had ever seen!

Kodama was so pleased with her plan and so intrigued in the work of smearing berry pulp all over her feathers that she almost didn’t hear the commotion gathering toward her, until—

“Run!” a poliwhirl shouted, stubby blue legs carrying her as fast as they could. “The gods have come back to Ilex Forest!”

The gods? Kodama looked around in alarm, and then lifted herself airborne as fast as she could, berries abandoned in a muddled heap beneath her. “Wait for me!” she called out, catching sight of Dustox’s wonderous wings ahead of her, but he was flying too fast for her. “Let me catch up!” she tried instead, but Fearow dipped his beak downward like an arrow and rocketed on ahead. “I want to talk to you!” she cried to Heracross, who was ripping through the forest with long, panicked strides.

“Great and magnificent Ho-oh, what would you want with a lowly forest-dweller such as myself? Please show kindness to your children and know that we worship you dearly!” cried the heracross, throwing herself prostrate onto the ground.

Kodama squawked in disbelief. Ho-oh was here? In Ilex Forest?

“Please! Be merciful to your humble servant,” Fearow said, and splayed his wings so that his wingtips and long neck trailed into the dirt. “We do not mean to offend you.”

It was then that Kodama realized they were all they were staring at her stiffened crest and her pointed beak and her stained wings, silhouetted and blinding in the sunlight.

They thought that she, with all of her imperfections and ugliness, was the Sacred Flame.

Kodama thought about that for a moment.

The wind blew through the trees, fluffing up her plumage.

Kodama puffed out her chest. In her deepest, most gravelly voice, she mustered the words: “I am indeed Ho-oh, and I am indeed offended.”

Dustox balked, yellow antennae flying in two directions at once. “Please, oh great one. Please tell us how we can earn your forgiveness rather than your ire.”

Kodama kept her voice as regal as she could manage. “You, dustox, made a young pidgeotto very upset when you called her wings ugly. And yet she surely must have beautiful feathers, because I, the great Ho-oh, have feathers like hers. Do you think I have such ugly plumage, dustox?”

The forest was so quiet that you could’ve heard a pine needle fall to the ground when Dustox replied, “No, your excellency.”

“And you, fearow. Would you dare me to hide my beak?”

Fearow’s wings trembled against the ground. “Of course not, oh great one!”

“And why would you, heracross, even think that my crest is unworthy?”

Heracross did not dare meet her eyes, but the bug pokémon did lower her horn in shame as she said, “I was upset because Pinsir said my horns would never crush enough boulders to be the strongest in the forest!”

And Pinsir clacked his mandibles together hurriedly. “I only said that because Parasect said my claws would never scratch through anything!”

Parasect retreated a little deeper into the shell on his back before murmuring, “Beautifly said that my nectar would never taste as good as hers, so I had to prove myself somehow…”

Dustox perked up. “Beautifly called my antennae ugly, which is why I lashed out at Pidgeotto! So it’s her fault!”

All eyes turned to Beautifly, who managed to splutter, “I felt miserable for saying that to you! But I was feeling bad because Beedrill called my eyes ugly!”

And Beedrill pointed one stinger to Scyther. “But I only said that because Scyther called my legs spindly!”

All eyes in the forest turned to Ho-oh.

“Oh dear,” Kodama managed to say. “We had better write this out.”

After a long while, and much discussion, Pichu finally held up a leaf with a veritable web of charcoal drawings on it. “And then Noctowl told Weedle that she was an uglier color of brown, so Weedle said Fearow was the ugliest brown of all, so then Fearow called Pidgeotto’s beak ugly.”

“So then it’s Fearow’s fault?” someone asked hopefully.

Everyone looked back at Kodama.

“No!” Kodama spluttered. “Er, I mean. Of course not. I, the great Ho-oh, clearly can see something you mere mortals cannot.” Kodama puffed out her berry-stained chest. “You. Weedle. Did calling Fearow’s brown ugly make you feel any better?”

“Not really, your greatness.”

“But do you think it made Fearow feel worse?”

Weedle cast a sidelong glance at Fearow before admitting, “I quite think so, your greatness.”

Kodama threw her wings into the air in frustration. “Did anyone here feel better by making their neighbor feel worse?”

“I did, a little,” said Psyduck, but everyone glared at him.

“No, your excellency,” Dustox said in a small voice, speaking for all of them.

There was a long pause.

“Then go, children of Ilex Forest,” Kodama commanded. “Stop this rot from spreading any further among my trees. Learn to love one another again. Thus declares Ho-oh.”

The old man and his ambipom folded up the pidgeotto puppet and packed their miniature stage away.

___________________________________________________________________________​

“I yield,” a boy no older than twelve was saying, watching with poorly-concealed concern as his beedrill wavered on dangerously weak wings.

Bugsy and Syrio nodded in perfect tandem. “I accept your forfeit,” Bugsy said on behalf of both of them. A sharpness seemed to leave his gaze, and when he straightened his back away from the makeshift battlefield, he suddenly looked human again.

See, when I heard the words “battle tournament” I tended to think of the televised events you’d see sometimes on cable. They’d do a bracket of a ton of trainers and focus on their favorites. There would be sob stories and underdog climbs and that one arrogant asshole who bragged about how they’d win the whole thing before getting eliminated in the second round.

This wasn’t like that. Not really. There was an informal bracket and a ton of trainers, but to call it a “tournament” would be to suggest that anyone had a chance to begin with.

No. After watching the fourth trainer walk away from this side of the field in as many minutes, it was pretty clear: the true word for this one-sided shredding of the bracket was “domination.”

The woman in her mid-forties standing in the middle of the field, a noctowl perched with shuffled wings beside her, nodded curtly. “Bugsy is the victor. Is there another challenger?”

{We will,} Gaia said, surprising me for the second time today with her boldness.

“Gaia, what?” Too late, I realized all eyes were on us. Iris instinctively stood on her tail to make herself look taller. “I mean. Um.”

Bugsy’s knowing smirk cut whatever else I was going to say off short. “I accept.”

Shit. Shit.

I didn’t really process what was happening next, and suddenly I was watching the back of my butterfree squaring off against all five bristling feet of Bugsy’s scyther. The next three things surely happened in sequence, but to me, they were simultaneous.

“Begin!” cried the referee.

“Go ahead,” Bugsy said lazily.

Syrio clipped into Gaia’s carapace. She went flying thirty feet in half a second.

“Gaia!” I was shouting uselessly, but the butterfree had already righted herself and launched a massive blast of wind, the likes of which I’d never seen from her before, from her splayed wings.

“Gaia?” I found myself repeating in a smaller voice, but I was washed out by the resulting shockwave as the ground beneath Syrio buckled and crumbled. I watched numbly as the mantis gritted his teeth and then vanished from my sight, reappearing with both scythes aimed firmly at Gaia’s right wing.

There wasn’t time to shout a command, but she was already expelling a blob of dark purple energy the size of my head where the scyther had appeared. I blinked and almost missed it, by which point Syrio had already twisted out of the way, narrowly dodging Gaia’s projectile before it smashed into the ground he’d been hovering over.

“Are you going to command your pokémon?” Bugsy asked over the chaos of the battle, his voice deceptively calm.

“Are you?” I shot back through gritted teeth, by which point I’d already watched another criss-cross of lightning fast blows exchange.

I couldn’t tell him the real reason that I wasn’t commanding Gaia—that I hadn’t seen any of these moves before, not from her, not ever. This didn’t make sense. I wasn’t used to watching this much raw power unfold in front of me, not when it was friendly to me. Gaia was supposed to be the moral compass of my team, not the nuke.

No, not just that. I wasn’t supposed to have a nuke. Where was this coming from?

Um. No time for that. I had to be there for my team.

Syrio’s carapace was deceptively rigid—I’d seen him tanking attacks from a graveler a few battles back with next to no damage. But he’d dodge Gaia’s attacks regardless, as if he knew how much more they’d hurt him. He and Bugsy were hiding something. And it certainly didn’t help that I was going to have to say all of my communication aloud.

“Air Slash. Aim for the knees,” I said. I could feel the crowd’s eyes pinned on me. This was my first actual, structured battle, and I had a feeling the best we were going to do was make it to a minute. “Hit like how Rousseau hit the froslass.”

Gaia reared back, wings flaring wide as she gathered energy, and—

There. I could see it. The way that Bugsy’s brow would furrow, just a little. The same way he did when Gaia asked him a question, the same way it didn’t when I spoke. If I had to guess, which I did, he and the scyther were communicating telepathically, because of course they could.

I hadn’t practiced non-verbal commands with her; after the Tower, I’d barely mustered the urge to train any of my pokémon at all. And now we were going to have to gamble on if Gaia could react faster than a pokémon fabled for its ability to cut raindrops in half in midair.

“Skill Swap.”

Syrio was already dodging away from the anticipated blast of wind, which meant that by the time he recognized the multi-faceted rainbow beam of energy hurtling toward him instead, he was midair and unable to pivot.

We had to take out their swarm. Severing their communication was the only advantage we’d be able to earn in such a short time—Bugsy and Syrio had accumulated their speed, strength, and tactical ability over the course of decades. Gaia was already fluttering through the air, the angle making it almost look as if she was catching the other end of the beam, when she and froze. Her wings locked up, and she plummeted to the ground.

Simultaneously, Bugsy’s right hand flew to his forehead, and his knees buckled before he managed to catch himself.

“Gaia?”

But the butterfree wasn’t responding to me. She’d managed to pull herself back aloft, but every wingbeat was suddenly laborious. She was keening something, something in a language I could no longer understand, mangled shrieks of “Freeeeyeh” trying and failing to convey a message I could barely piece together.

“Rousseau!” I shouted haphazardly.

But the gastly was already responding, {Her thoughts are with the swarm now.}

“Knock out. One of us,” Bugsy managed to grit out, an instant before Syrio expertly smashed Gaia’s wing with the flat edge of his scythe, sending her crumpling back down again.

Bugsy’s words from earlier were echoing in my ears. Winning meant sacrifice. Sacrifice meant blinding yourself to the perceived feelings that your pieces had when you wanted to play them.

I didn’t think his words over a second time.

“Skill Swap him back, and then forfeit.”

The referee nodded. Gaia gathered herself off the ground and fluttered back to my side. Whatever interest the crowd might’ve had in our particular battle died away as quickly as it had began.

I stood back by the sidelines, and Bugsy took the next challenger in stride without so much as another glance in our direction.

“Are you okay?” I whispered.

{Azalea’s Heart,} she murmured back, trying and failing to keep the quiver out of her voice, {harbors much pain. But you already knew that.}

“What did he do to you?”

I hadn’t calculated that the only way to remove Syrio’s ability to swarm with Bugsy would necessitate an equivalent exchange. I hadn’t calculated what it would do to Gaia.

{I understand him better now,} Gaia said instead, choosing not to answer my question fully. {I admit at Nokonozo I thought him a fool for not seeing things the way Naathi and I did. We are all servants of the hive, after all.} A pause. {But to see each drone lost as something intrinsically valuable, to feel so much pain even though so much time has passed… I admit, I will never see things the way Bugsy does, or even how you do, Trainer, but I understand you both. You are only human, after all.}

But even as Syrio swatted a weepinbell’s vines out of the air, or slashed a geodude’s projectiles in half with razor-sharp accuracy, or did the precise action needed to guarantee as swift and dominating of a victory as possible, I could see the scyther’s eyes trail away from his target half the time. I could see his eyes trail towards us.

Towards Gaia.

Too late, I remembered something else. Bugsy’s raw and unfiltered guilt might’ve momentarily paralyzed Gaia, but she’d managed to make the man who had commanded a warfront at age thirteen stumble back as well.

___________________________________________________________________________​

Bugsy wasn’t kidding. The children’s choir really did know how to butcher a perfectly serviceable folksong.

I stood off to one side, watching the crowd that had gathered beneath the lantern-strung trees. Young and old, many of them had started dancing in a square of tamped-down earth, clapping their hands and moving to the tune of the non-sensical cacophony of stringed sounds being produced behind them. They did it with an ease that suggested that this was regular, and yet an exuberance that suggested that this was genuine.

My eyes were drawn to Elena spinning in gentle circles with a yanma that streaked around her, painting the air near her head with flashes of orange and green. And yet despite this, there was a strange emptiness in her movements, her arms held out in front of her as if to cradle a third, unseen partner to their tango.

Seeing the people of Azalea all gathered here in one place made the lopsidedness of the picture clear at last. Bugsy’s words from Nokonozo echoed back again, and I looked and looked for anyone my age and found no one. The wizened parasect shuffling a brood of his children amongst a group of gawking toddlers. The middle-aged man and his noctowl. The puppeteer and his ambipom.

I wondered what it would be like to see Azalea on a day that wasn’t a festival. There wouldn’t always be laughter; there couldn’t, not in a small town that had lost so much. An entire grade of classes wasn’t being taught; shopkeepers probably rotated entire sizes of clothing off of the shelves. There was an entire generation here that was defined by the act of having their children taken before their eyes. There were dozens of children who had only heard whispers about their older siblings.

What did you do in a world like that?

The Rockets hadn’t been looking for loyalty with Nokonozo. They’d been looking for submission.

And yet. Iris was chasing a farfetch’d in lazy figure eights across the clearing, brown ears flicked forward intently and looking as if she was having more fun than I’d ever seen her have in her entire life. Gaia had taken up the empty third leg of the triangle that Elena and her yanma had created. Rousseau was bobbing in deep concentration alongside a slowpoke, apparently engaged in a conversation that made a true smile stretch across the nebula of his face. A thousand paper butterflies were strung up on the lights around us.

“You should dance,” Bugsy said from behind me. “The music gets a lot more bearable when you start moving; it gets a lot harder to hear.” He cocked his head toward the singing choir with an exaggerated grimace. “I still love this song more than I should.”

I thought of all of the awkward proms I’d spent in this exact same position, peoplewatching a crowd of people who had learned to look beyond those who were watching. “I don’t know how to dance.”

“Do you want some mead?” He tilted a glass toward me. “Have enough of this and I promise the songs won’t bother you any more.”

“I don’t drink.” Pause. “Didn’t you say you thought I was sixteen?”

The look he gave me bordered on pity. He opened his mouth, a fast retort at the ready, and then he closed it again, and then: “You’re on the run from Team Rocket, have an illegal starter, blew up a monument, are being charged for murdering a gym leader… and the thing that makes you pause is the drinking age?”

He did have a point there.

“One night of fun never hurt anyone.” He gestured with his chin to where Gaia and the yanma were creating a helix of purple and orange. “Look at them. Even your butterfree, who is burdened by so much. Smile, Hamartia, lest the people of Azalea assume we were bad hosts.”

I took a sip of the mead. “It’s sweeter than I thought it would be,” I said at last, mulling the taste of fermentation and honey on my tongue.

“A lot of things are.”

I didn’t really know how to explain to Bugsy that me sitting in the corner watching everyone else was my idea of enjoying the festival. I loved being able to spectate from the sidelines and see how everyone else was taking this day. If I had to choose between being the center of attention and being the wallflower in the corner… I’d pick the wallflower, every time. If I had the choice.

“You aren’t dancing. You’re still here,” I blurted.

“I’ll be back in the fray soon.” Bugsy smiled serenely. “I thought you would’ve learned by now, Hamartia,” he said, infuriatingly calm. And yet his back was ramrod straight with pride as he looked to his smiling, suffering town without sparing me another glance. There was a hint of laughter in his smile, the kind that was just starting to remember how to reach his eyes. “When you’ve got nothing left, there’s plenty to go around.”

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