TEEN: What's Past is Prologue (Summer 2020 Oneshot Competition)

[unrepentantAuthor]

My last-second entry, featuring characters from Dispatch Deferred, but standalone nonetheless.

Barely-finished and with no time to format, but I'm still proud of it. Will edit for italics in the morning I guess.

TEEN for swearing, fantasy violence.

What's Past is Prologue​

Jesse stared up at a blue, blue sky, his ears ringing and his skull empty. He groaned and clutched his head, still weirded out by its shape and… the texture of his fur. This was turning out to be one hell of a weird day. He hadn’t even worked out what species he’d woken up as, and he’d already had the shit beaten out of him. He turned to see if his assailant was still present.
Yep.
The pokémon standing beside him didn’t much look like any species he was familiar with back home—wherever home was, he’d figure that out later—but the tufted eartips and thick grey-blue cheek fur put him in mind of alpine feline. This was a pretty hot, dry climate for a mountain cat, though. Maybe she’d migrated. She noticed his stare, and growled.
“Lay off,” he drawled. “You kicked my ass already, so what do you even want? I’m not fucking fighting you again, that’s for sure.”
The cat huffed and sat back on her haunches. “I defeated you. Will you not answer? Tell me who you are and why you’ve come to the Windblown Escarpment.”
Jesse shrugged, and winced at the pain. From his prone position, he tried to take fresh stock of his surroundings. Red, dusty plains for miles around, with great flat-topped rock-forms rising from the earth here and there. ‘Wild West’ said a faint memory. But… West of where?
She hissed at him.
“Excuse me Miss,” he answered with venom, “but I’m having a bloody awful day and you aren’t making it any better. I don’t remember who I am, or where I’m from, or what I’m doing here. Nothing except my name, which is… uh. Jesse. Yeah. Jesse something. Fuck’s sake... Why the hell should I answer you anyway, just ‘cause you assaulted me? Is that a pokémon thing?”
“You… are also a pokémon. When we are opposed, we fight.”
She seemed totally sincere, even perplexed. No irony. When her mouth moved, it matched up with the words she spoke, as impossible as that should be for a set of chompers like that to speak understandable language. Weirder and weirder. He sat up, and moaned softly as the blood rushed from his head.
“So, what, you fight to resolve all your conflicts?” he managed.
She glowered at him, as if she thought he was fucking with her.
“Only those that ought to be, Braixen Jesse.”
Oh, he was a braixen, huh? Yeah, that checked out. He had the fluffy tail and everything. He’d become a proper little Galarian Red braixen. (Galar? Was that… where he came from? He wasn’t sure.) He rolled his shoulder and gave it a rub with one hand. Or should it be paw? She'd done a number on him for sure, oww.
“Well, I'm still a tad lost and confused, I'm sorry to say. Your drubbing didn't do anything to help with that, Miss…? What’s your name, anyway?”
“Luxio Sierra. You have a strange tongue,” said the luxio.
“Aye, do I now? Well, let me tell you, of the two of us? I am having by far the stranger day.”
xXx
Gil lay on their back in the blazing sun, soundly defeated, grateful that they were a golett and not a grass-type who would no doubt suffer in this weather. They turned their head towards the luxio who’d put them there.
“I must ask, Ms. Brisa. Do you fight over every conflict?”
Brisa scowled at the ground, as if they'd pointed out something embarrassing. “Just the ones that oughta be," she said. “That’s how pokémon live. Isn’t that how you lived, back in your time?”
Gil scratched their head. “I confess that my memory might not be perfect after a century in a comatose state, but… Well, other pokémon might have. I was only concerned with my duties as mail courier. Battles simply weren’t relevant!”
“Huh. Could be that you were outta step, then.”
When Gil had last visited Desert Knot, nobody spoke like Brisa did now. Her accent was something entirely unfamiliar to him, as was the way in which she contracted and drawled her words. How curious, that the vernacular could evolve so dramatically in only three generations. They patted their ceramic torso firmly in all the right spots. No damage done to their casing on this occasion. Good.
“In any case, I sure hope I met your standards, Ma'am! If not, then I'm still in very much the same predicament I was before you battled me.”
Brisa huffed. “You're a peculiar one, ain'tcha?”
“I suppose I must be! But consider that not only you, but almost everyone I meet, is peculiar to me.”
Brisa thought about this for a moment, then allowed herself a small, dry smile. By her standards, it was a belly laugh. She helped Gil up onto their feet, and looked them straight in the eye.
“Gil, you ain’t tough enough to make this trip. I think ya know that, huh?”
They nodded. It was true.
“Hmph. Well, if you’re gonna insist on taking it, I reckon I’d better accompany ya.”
Gil clasped their hands in humble delight. “Miss Brisa, I would be honoured! Still, please do not consider it any obligation. You have already done so many kindnesses towards me, in restoring me from my slumber, in letting me take up your guest room, in—”
“Yeah, I have. Come on, we gotta get goin’.”
“Yes, Ma’am!”
“Wind and weather, Gil. Ya know I hate all those fancy forms of address. Especially ‘ma’am’. Will ya please jus’ call me ‘Brisa’?”
“No can do, Sir!”
“Hell. I guess I can put up with ‘sir’.”
xXx
“Jesse! I need your help!” shouted Sierra, leaping from rock to rock in desperate bounds. With each jump, she cut off a route of escape for the sandaconda bandit, but left the previous path open again. She couldn’t keep this up alone.
“I’m trying!” Jesse yelped. He raised his paw again and fired off another bolt of psychic flame. It went wide of the snake once again. “I don’t wanna hit you by mistake!”
“I can take a hit!” snarled Sierra. “Blast us both if you need to!”
Jesse stammered a non-answer, and stuck out both palms. A little concentration and… whoomph. A plume of magenta fire burst from his paws and engulfed both the slithering outlaw and his luxio companion. His heart pounded in his throat, and then the afterimage faded enough to see Sierra, atop the sandaconda with both paws pressing down on his head.
“Now you’ll answer for your wrongs,” she told him, flatly.
The snake hissed a response filthy enough to turn Jesse’s ears pink. Sierra didn’t balk, but pressed a little harder, and the snake whimpered as his fangs met rock.
Jesse sauntered over, flush with relief.
“How’d ya manage that?” he asked.
“You need a focus for your magic,” she snapped in response. Okay. Harsh, but fair.
“Sure. I’ll start using a fox-staff just as soon as I find a decent tree in all this fucking desert.”
Sierra spat on the ground, beside Sandaconda’s head. “All this was not always desert.”
“Wait, so the climate’s fucked up, or?”
She looked him in the eye, and for the first time since meeting her, he could see fear in her expression.
“This desert labyrinth is known to civilised peoples as a mystery dungeon,” she said. “A space that defies reason and robs pokémon of their wits. And with every passing year, since before I was born, the dungeons have been growing. In generations to come, the world outside the dungeons may be swallowed entirely, and all pokémon, civilised or rough-living, will be consigned to a life of madness, violence, and constant hunger.”
Okay. Wow. This was some heavy shit.
Jesse scratched his chin. It was disturbing how fast he was getting used to his new body, although he supposed it was at least a bipedal one. “Isn’t anyone investigating that?” he asked. “Trying to, you know, find out why and maybe put a stop to it?”
He got a weird look in return. That was two brand-new expressions from the luxio in one day. He was starting to worry.
“Would you do that? Would you search the land for answers?”
Sandaconda muttered something incomprehensible from beneath her paws. She pressed a little harder.
Jesse gave it some thought.
“I mean, I guess? I think I’d want to round up a few allies first, secure some resources, learn how things work around here, search for some leads… but yeah, sure, if nobody else is doing it. It’d be real fuckin’ interesting, at least. I mean, this is one strange world you live in, you know that?”
“I’ve met none stranger than you, Braixen Jesse.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment!”
“It was not meant as one. But if you are sincere, then will you travel with me? I have long yearned for a partner to join me in searching for answers. You may be uncouth, and near-insufferable… But perhaps you could be that pokémon.”
Huh.
Tramping around a godforsaken desert, constantly getting into terrifying fights? Trying to figure out a way to stop the apocalypse, his amnesia be damned? Hanging out every day with an asshole pokémon who kept calling him dumb shit to his face?
“Fuck it,” said Jesse. “Why not?”
xXx
Gil sat on a small rock, twiddling their fingers as they watched Brisa at work. One of the disadvantages of travelling with a companion was that unlike golett, most other species were not capable of walking indefinitely without need for rest and recuperation. Brisa’s accompaniment slowed Gil’s travel time considerably, when only periods of walking and resting were considered. However, having her at their side provided other advantages.
“Don’t let me catch you round here again!” she snarled, slamming electrified paws into the pangoro’s head and shoulders, over and over. Somehow Brisa always got past the pangoro’s fists, which she kept raised to defend her head, and delivered yet more explosive blows. It was a stunning sight, seeing a three-foot luxio bludgeoning a pokémon more than twice her height and four times her weight into submission. Where did power like that come from, Gil wondered?
“Good-fer-nothin’ lowlife!” hissed Brisa, eyes blazing. “Outlaw!”
“I yield!” cried the pangoro. “Let me leave this place and I shall never return!”
“See that you don’t!”
Brisa let up her volley of attacks, and her defeated foe rose, first to stagger, then to run from the copse. Brisa spat on the ground where she’d been fighting a moment before. She didn’t even seem out of breath.
“Miss Brisa, Sir?”
“Yeah?” she snapped, whirling round at them. The battle-fever hadn’t left her eyes yet.
“Might I ask, if it’s not too personal a topic, how you came to be so…”
Brisa narrowed her eyes. “Violent?”
“Formidable! I was going to say, formidable.”
She took a deep, steadying breath. “Guess you’ll find this out sooner or later,” she drawled, instantly subdued. “More or less everyone in Frontier Town knows it. I dare say most folks in any town in this part of the world know it. You were asleep in the ground for the last hundred years, so you missed the peak of the dungeon crisis, but two pokémon—”
Gil couldn’t help but pipe up helpfully. “I learnt about this in Frontier library! Delphox Jesse Stranger and Luxray Sierra Escarpa saved the whole region, if not the world! I remember! Um.”
Brisa’s stony face cut them off mid-flow.
Oops. Probably.
“Have a real hard think for a second,” she said. “And see if you can’t figure out why I might’a brought up Jesse and Sierra.”
Gil shook their head and shrugged.
The luxio gave a sigh, and broke eye contact. “Jesse was human. Transformed, sure, but human in the first place, and human in the head, still. Humans have got minds like no pokémon, all bright and piercing. Sierra is a roughlander, what folks in town might’a called ‘feral’ in your earshot. Roughlanders are tough as nails, they can survive near enough anything. Turns out what happens when you mix the two, is you get a pokémon with a brain and body both damn near perfect for fightin’, and…” she sighed again, harder, psyching up to finish her sentence. “And I don’t have nobody to fight save fuckin’ outlaws and two-piece bandits. No world to save. It’s all done.”
Oh.
“Miss Brisa, I’m so sorry to raise the subject. Please, we need not discuss it further!”
“It’s fine.”
“O-oh, okay.”
Brisa watched the pangoro for another hour in silence, in case she turned back. She didn’t.
“I’m not a good fit for you,” said Brisa, eventually.
“Sir?”
“You want someone like my pa. Smart, easy goin’, talkative. Someone who’d help you figure out what happened in the last hundred years while you were sleepin’. I’m more like my ma. I’m just fuckin’ vicious, I guess. That’s me. Brisa the ranger, here to beat the shit out of every wannabe criminal for fifty miles, and no worries, you’re so fucking welcome.”
She went silent again.
Gil stepped over to her, as fast as they dared.
“Miss Brisa?”
“Uhuh?”
“Miss Brisa, you’ve been nothing but kind to me since you found my buried form. Please do not be uncharitable to yourself. I’m glad to have you with me. You most certainly saved my life from that bandit, did you not?”
“…uhuh.”
“Well, in my eyes, that most certainly makes you a hero.”
“…huh. Thanks.”
Something in the luxio’s rigid posture changed, and while she didn’t speak up again except for essential communication that day, there was just the smallest difference in her eyes.
xXx
The stars overhead were stunning, with so little light pollution in this world to spoil them. (Wait, light pollution? He came from somewhere where there was too much light to see the stars? That was fucked up.) Jesse searched them for constellations he knew—and he was sure, somehow, that he knew many constellations—but not a one was familiar to him. This was a different world for sure.
He did his best to set up their tent as Sierra fetched wood for the campfire. To his surprise, dexterity wasn’t the chief problem. He had that in abundance—even Sierra’s paws could grasp items as well as a human hand. (A human hand? Was he… human, before? What was a human, anyway?) No, the problem was in remembering and implementing the instructions he’d been given by that bloody cacturne at the trading post. That motherfucker had smiled and wheedled and promised him it would be easy, and here he was struggling to figure out the poles. He was supposed to be smart! He was smart!
He could figure out ancient puzzles in the hearts of dungeons, interpret the languages of the strange pokémon they met, come up with foolproof strategies to take down any foe. He was so fucking smart. And here he was, pissing about with a tent he clearly didn’t understand how to pitch. What was he even doing? A quest to save the world? That wasn’t him. He was just a fun, clever, witty sort of person. He had hobbies, whatever they were. He had friends, or he felt like he did. He was… just some guy. Who was he, anyway?
Who the fuck was he?
When Sierra returned with the firewood, he’d been sobbing into his arms for a solid minute.
“I don’t have time for this,” she told him. “Start a fire while I pitch the tent.”
He obeyed, gritting his teeth hard enough to aggravate his mounting headache. It didn’t take much to do as she’d asked. Barely a touch and the assembled logs and sticks lit up. He shifted them until they seemed like they’d smolder in a stable way for a while, and busied himself getting out some of their supplies to cook. Sierra made short work of the tent, somehow, and joined him with her usual stern expression fixed on her stupid fucking face.
They didn’t talk at first. Usually it was Jesse who filled the silences, babbling away about his latest theory, or working out aloud whether something was a legitimate memory or just a stray fancy. Sierra would interject every so often to call him an idiot. It was an ideal arrangement, because it let him talk endlessly about shit that didn’t matter, and it let her call him an idiot.
When he didn’t say anything, it took Sierra a while to break the silence.
“I need you to be a hero,” she said.
He didn’t bother replying. Dumb fucking thing to say.
She stared a hole into his head. She had a way, he’d learnt, of looking right into your skull.
“Well fuck you!” he barked. “You’re the heroic one, all stoic and brave and ready to do the right thing. I’m just… the stupid fox you dragged along for the ride! Some nobody! Some fucking idiot who doesn’t come from anywhere or know anybody—” he choked up and pounded the earth with his fist, achieving nothing, helping nothing. Damn it. Damn it.
Sierra waited for his bunched-up shoulders to sink again before she replied. “You do not have to be one right now. You need not be like me, or like whatever it is you are thinking of. I know you hate to fight. I know you are only interested in your intellectual fixations. I know you did not choose this life, and would leave for home if you could. Nevertheless, I truly do believe that you were sent here to help us. Whoever you were before… that does not matter. You can be Jesse the Stranger forever. But I need to trust that you will stay with me. That you will see this through to the end.”
It was the most she’d said in one go to him since he’d met her. Like all unprecedented Sierra stuff, it was kinda scary.
Part of him was saying that he may as well, it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go. Part of him was saying that the next dislocated shoulder or lacerated ankle would be one too many, and Sierra could sort her shit out on her own, thank you very much. Part of him was prideful and pissed off at the suggestion that recovering his past didn’t matter.
Another, much smaller part of him was saying that no, no, he wasn’t a hero, he’d never be a hero, but… maybe it would be enough to help someone who was.
“Alright,” he said. “If it’s you.”
He smiled at her, in a wavering, teary, vulpine sort of way. In yet another terrifying first, Sierra smiled back.
xXx
“Little Scriven, huh? Nice place.”
“Oh my, Miss Brisa! It’s scarcely any larger than when I left it. I was sure there’d have been urban developments of all kinds!”
The tiny settlement stood on a rocky plateau. Little Scriven’s earth was fertile, and space around its rim was given over to modest allotments and trellis gardens. In the centre was the scriptorium for which it was named, a stone building in the town’s centre that resembled nothing so much as a xatu’s avian head.
In a far, small corner of the town, Gil could just about make out a tiny dwelling, clinging to the plateau, with a little wooden deck and gazebo reaching out over the side, on which one might take shelter on an especially scorching day.
“Look familiar?” asked Brisa.
“Oh. Oh, yes. It looks like home.”

 

[System Error]

There seems to be a good number of PMD or otherwise Pokemon-centric fics about in this contest. Well, expected one from you, at least. Let's get to it. I assume you'll fix the spaces issue later, so.

- Blue, blue. Happy happy!
- Which species he'd woken up as? It's implying he's woken up as other species before.
- Of course there'd be a cat. The cat writes about cats!
- What a violent world, especially to be casually talking about fighting just like that.
- Galarian Braixen, huh? Interesting concept, if one that isn't touched on in specifics.
- That feel when Braixen itself isn't capitalized because thing that caught on, yet the "Red" in "Red Braixen" is.
- Naming conventions for PMD Pokemon or whatever...
- Gil lay on their back <- Ahh, he's back! On his back. But, this is some weird wording choice. Calling Gil a they in general just feels off.
- Shoutouts to the way people saying things changing. Do like that Gil itself has a slightly archaic way.
- Can Braixen even use psychic flame/Mystical Fire? TM notwithstanding.
- Cat the bounty hunter? Seems legit.
- Staff or stick not included upon evolution. It makes sense for it not to materialize, though, where do they go to find these tools? Also I just realized, hey. A rare male Braixen in a fic, or seemingly so.
- Well Jesse seems to live by the seat of his pants. Adapting to this real easy.
- Two rough and tumble female Luxios who stand for TRUTH AND JUSTICE and hunting jerk Pokemon? Huh.
- Calling her Sir at the same time as calling her a Miss made me chuckle a bit.
- Stranger as a last name? Well, stranger things have happened. Especially in a Tomino anime, those names can be bonkers. Shot Weapon being one of my favorites.
- Ohh, I see, that makes a bit more sense now. It's a generational thing. And...transformed PMD former humans breeding. Not shy about going there at all.
- Is a roughlander? Well using the present tense there implies Sierra is still around. Though that goes unexplored in the end.
- A speech that'd probably be a bit more meaningful if I'd read Dispatch Deferred. Maybe.
- The parenthesised part about light pollution reads a bit awkward. As is the part about being human later, to a lesser extent
- Well given kids these days, I wouldn't be surprised if Jesse, in fact, didn't even know what the big dipper was.
- This guy loves fucking dropping fucking f-bombs in his fucking narration!
- A lot of angst attack out of nowhere. Well okay, Jesse is angsting a lot throughout the entire fic, but it almost kicks into overdrive here. Which isn't unsensible, the way Sierra suddenly just asks him to be a hero out of nowhere.
- Sierra is suddenly talking very sage-like. She doesn't have any contractions in her speech and is pretty formal all of a sudden. Kind of jarring, really. Actually she does that quite a bit come to think of it, slipping in and out of being sage-y.
- "I-if it's you, it's okay..."
- And the last scene. Bit of an abrupt ending, too. Was expecting things to come full circle with meeting the former heroes or something.

This one felt like a collection of loose ideas in places. I get the theme of throwing a normal guy into the role of a hero, kinda typical. Yet there's also the OTHER right character, wrong genre of Brisa being a hero in an age where one isn't needed (I think I'm the only other one who doubled up, that I've read so far anyway). But between the two plotlines and short length, it felt a bit unfocused. It was hard to get into Jesse much; he was a typical PMD amnesic transformed hero, just with 400% more angst and going with the flow out of apathy. Brisa isn't given much room to breathe either, despite her interesting backstory with a lot of potential. Gil is Gil but played a secondary role here. Sierra is...well. We really don't find out much about her, and she's hard to pin down. Exposits a lot, too.

I guess, the pace is too quick for its own good. It's also probably something that needed to be longer to be great. Time crunch happened I suppose, since this checks in at just 3.2k words.

There's some good nuances in there, that said, like having to get used to a new body. Or some of the fish out of temporal watering of Gil. Brisa's base concept was interesting enough. The self-loathing of Jesse is also uncommonish, although he seems strangely unconcerned about his own world. Amnesia and just not caring, I guess. But yeah. In short, while this was good, I feel this was an idea that probably should've been bigger than you can be in a one-shot to be REALLY good - or maybe just strictly focusing on one of the plots. Alas, time crunch - the other bane of us all besides 2020 and word counts. x-x

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

This fic was temporarily edited to fix some formatting issues caused by pasting into Bulbagarden; it has since been reverted to the original form with formatting issues intact. It will instead be amended to the fixed version at a date after the competition has concluded.

 

[Daren]

*Some things never change, and that includes solving everything with monster fights.
*Gil and Brisa are back!
*Dungeons growing and expanding is certainly a worrying form of apocalypse..
*You know, when I got a bit older I began to realize the hero in MD being a transformed human might be sort of an awkward aspect to a romantic relationship with partner. Of course real world mythology has that sort of thing all the time.
*And you address something I note about the MD games (and a lot of games in general); going from a presumably normal-ish human life to a danger and violece filled one with very little trouble. Jesse reacts rather more realistically than many do.

Brisa is a variant on a common occurrence in fiction (and real life)--the soldier or hero often has trouble returning to normal life, but in her case she's the perfect warrior born to a time of peace. That said, as Gil points out her skills still matter on an individual scale.

Definitely a nice story that compared and contrasted the two periods with their respective duos while playing with the theme in two ways across them.

Good luck in the contest!

 

[bluering8]

Oh hey, weird to read a thing you've posted that I haven't already rubbed my grubby beta-reader hands all over! (But I get to beta it properly when the contest is over, right? Right??)

This review's going to be very brief, as I'm saving up most of my detailed opinions for the betaing process. So, in short: this fic feels incredibly rushed and bare-bones. The characters and their relationships are obviously intended to be the main focus of the narrative, but the brevity means they're only lightly sketched out rather than fully explored. It's all tell with no space to show, so the story feels shallow and the emotional moments fall flat. I did enjoy the fic, but I also have a strong pre-existing attachment to Gil and Brisa, so all the heavy lifting has already been done for you; I don't think it works well as a standalone, is the gist here.

“Gil, you ain’t tough enough to make this trip. I think ya know that, huh?”
They nodded. It was true.
“Hmph. Well, if you’re gonna insist on taking it, I reckon I’d better accompany ya.”

This is a perfect example of how sketchy and obviously-rushed everything is, because there's no elaboration at any point on what "this trip" is referring to or why Gil wants to make it. Sure, I know it's Gil wanting to revisit their hometown, but the average person reading this fic hasn't spent ages chatting to you about your OCs.

A space that defies reason and robs pokémon of their wits. And with every passing year, since before I was born, the dungeons have been growing.

I'm like 80% sure you've read the Southern Reach trilogy (or at least the first book), but remind me, did I ever manage to make you read the Sick Land? Love a good slowly-expanding pre-apocalyptic hellscape, especially when it fucks with perception.

 

[Flaze]

Boy when you said unformatted you really meant it. I'll have to give this a reread once you've edited it and all.

That aside, I think what I liked the most was the setting, or rather the concept for it. A yea old western PMD story is not one I've ever seen before and I like how you blend elements of wild west stories with it, especially considering you have two timelines. It's an idea and a story that I'd really love to see explored in a lot more detail.

On the story itself, I liked the back and forth between the two couples, especially Gil and Brisa, I think their dynamic was a little stronger for me. Sierra and Jesse are fine, but they felt a little more like the typical two future lovers that just can't relax around one another, Gil's and Brisa's felt more genuine and you could see a mutual respect an understanding that was conveyed faster. That being said, I do think you progress through the character beats a little too fast.

In general it feels like the oneshot is a sort of summary of a bigger, more detailed story that I'm sure you would've wanted to get fully into if you'd have more time. There's a lot of concepts and ideas that are stated and glossed over. Granted, all of that could also just be a thing of the timeline split and how we're meant to learn about the different events on each timeline as we go. On that note, the reveal that we are experiencing two different timelines (while also dealing with the fact that Gil is from another time himself) was interesting and it did give an extra layer to the oneshot as a whole.

Now for some things that jumped at me while I was reading.

“Excuse me Miss,”

Excuseeeee meeee princesssss

“but I’m having a bloody awful day and you aren’t making it any better. I don’t remember who I am, or where I’m from, or what I’m doing here. Nothing except my name, which is… uh. Jesse. Yeah. Jesse something. Fuck’s sake... Why the hell should I answer you anyway, just ‘cause you assaulted me? Is that a pokémon thing?”

Now, I'm of two minds about this paragraph. On one hand, I don't think it's a bad way to introduce us to Jessee and show us that he's kind of neurotic and a worrywart. On the other hand, I feel like he does say a little too much here and at the end the dialogue falls into more outlandish territory. Maybe more back and forth could've helped but as it stands it kind of feels like you were trying to speed up through their interaction.

(Galar? Was that… where he came from? He wasn’t sure.)

Nothing really wrong here, just that maybe em dashes worked instead of parenthesis (?) I don't know, I'm probably wrong here since I don't really understand the difference between using either myself.

“I suppose I must be! But consider that not only you, but almost everyone I meet, is peculiar to me.”

Gil's a cinnamon roll and must be protected at all cost.

Brisa thought about this for a moment, then allowed herself a small, dry smile. By her standards, it was a belly laugh.

Good way of showing us that Brisa isn't all bite, you'd already shown us she was tough but at least here we know that she can relax and that she's slowly warming up to Gil.

“Gil, you ain’t tough enough to make this trip. I think ya know that, huh?”

Maybe it's just me, but it's a little weird that in almost any instance Brisa uses ya to refer to someone else, yet here she uses you at the start. Granted she could switch between the two, just pointing it out.

“This desert labyrinth is known to civilised peoples as a mystery dungeon,” she said. “A space that defies reason and robs pokémon of their wits. And with every passing year, since before I was born, the dungeons have been growing. In generations to come, the world outside the dungeons may be swallowed entirely, and all pokémon, civilised or rough-living, will be consigned to a life of madness, violence, and constant hunger.”

Gee willikers, just your typical mystery dungeon adventure with world ending stakes for the whole family. I do like the idea of an ever expanding mystery dungeon though.

Okay. Wow. This was some heavy shit.

I think the last paragraph gives us a good idea of how bad things are, it's a little unnecessary to have Jesse's narration clarify it.

He got a weird look in return. That was two brand-new expressions from the luxio in one day. He was starting to worry.

Quality friendship over here.

Turns out what happens when you mix the two, is you get a pokémon with a brain and body both damn near perfect for fightin’, and…” she sighed again, harder, psyching up to finish her sentence. “And I don’t have nobody to fight save fuckin’ outlaws and two-piece bandits. No world to save. It’s all done.”

I think what I like more about Brisa over Sierra are moments like these, where you can tell she's just a luxio trying her best to live up to the expectations she's set for herself based on who her parents were. It adds more depth to her and makes me empathise with her, plus it tells us that she's trapped in this cycle of trying to be a hero and being with Gil is the first time she's with someone that can make her feel like she's not just trying in vain.

Overall, I can appreciate a lot of what you try to do here and like I said, I'd love to see a more detailed take on the idea that can expand on the characters and the two worlds, and maybe even touch more on Gil's past and where he comes from. Right now, in its sadly unfinished state, it feels like it's trying to get through different parts of the story as quickly as possible and we're only getting sparknotes of more detailed events.

Nevertheless, still a fun read, and it's great to be able to read a story from you again (not cause you haven't written any, just cause I've been lost for a year and some change)

 

[kintsugi]

hey, here for judging + rocking that better late than never aesthetic.

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judging brain on--this story feels incomplete; the theme is there but it doesn't really seem to go anywhere; a lot of directionless backstory and the worldbuilding isn't quite cohesive. It feels short + is a fast read, but in the sense that it should be longer and the arcs don't seem to go anywhere. Some lines like "Red Galarian Braixen" and the whole "sir/ma'am" thing feel like they have greater importance outside of this oneshot but I have no idea where they land here.

judging brain off--I know Brisa, I know Gil, and I know Jesse; I see the broad strokes of the backstory you're trying to pull here, and I understand why you'd want to pair these sets of interactions off of one another. Based on the story itself + the comments you've made, I imagine you ran out of time to pull it off properly, and for that reason I don't really want to dig in too hard to the semantics here--I also hate the feeling of being judged on work I don't think is my best. If I made a mis-assessment here, let me know, but I think for the most part you're aware of the high-level things I'd point out here. Hoping to see a revised version in the distant future!

Some minor notes:

Gil lay on their back in the blazing sun, soundly defeated, grateful that they were a golett and not a grass-type who would no doubt suffer in this weather.

"grateful" feels very un-Gil in the context of someone else being in pain?

“Sure. I’ll start using a fox-staff just as soon as I find a decent tree in all this fucking desert.”
Sierra spat on the ground, beside Sandaconda’s head. “All this was not always desert.”

In general I think the scene cuts are functional if a little short, but this felt like those bits in the movies where they have a conversation across cuts even if logically a lot of time has passed between those scenes--surely this would come up earlier? This one felt a bit stiff in particular, and I imagine it's because you wanted to put the mystery dungeon worldbuilding in there, but I'm almost not sure if you needed it. Brisa revisits it shortly after and she/Gil seem to cover those bases pretty well tbh.

You may be uncouth, and near-insufferable… But perhaps you could be that pokémon.

Hanging out every day with an asshole pokémon who kept calling him dumb shit to his face?

Again, likely due to scene-rush, but this felt a bit tell don't show, especially since we don't really get to see the friction between these two.