TEEN: some rise by sin

[Beth Pavell]

Har har

Actually, though I hate to say it, this was a lot better than your "Noodle incident" chapter last year

 

[kintsugi]

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chapter xiii. things fall apart​

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

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

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

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

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

“Because I don’t think it’s true,” I replied tersely. “You could’ve told me that I’m a time-travelling four hundred foot purple psyduck-ursaring with pink horns and silver wings because of some circumstantial evidence you found, but I’m not going to accept that as fact just because you said it. And besides,” I added, even though some internal voice of mine was screaming caution, caution, don’t open up to him like this, “you’re a week late. The xatu basically told me he thought I was destined for the unspeakable when he gave me Icarus, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen.”

“I suppose,” Silver said, uncharacteristically quiet, but he refused to meet my eyes.

Through it all, although they seemed intent on thwarting my every request, Silver and his abra were treating me like I was made of glass, like I was something to be pitied. Compared to the harshness of our last encounter, this was downright strange. {We think your floor will be very telling, regardless,} the abra said hesitantly.

“Too bad. I think his floor would be very telling as well, but I respect your personal secrets, so I’m not going to force you to show it to me since, clearly, none of us want to. Let’s just skip them both.” I tightened my grip on Gaia.

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

Of course he would see this as justified. If anything, he probably thought he was helping me. But gods knew he wasn’t. “Fine.” I folded my arms and planted my feet. “Then I’m not going. Trust me, I have far better things to do here then escort you through my nightmares.”

Without warning and as if on cue, the rafters let down a flurry of dust onto our heads. There was a distant rumbling from the top of the tower, and I felt a light breeze ruffle my hair. As I blinked away my confusion, I waited for Rousseau’s floor to spawn demons, but I saw nothing. The room looked otherwise unchanged. “What was that?”

“What we’re going to find out, if you would stop getting in the way.”

There was something deeper afoot. But I was still being held hostage here, effectively, although semi-friendly conversation had almost allowed me to forget that. I realized that my previous analysis was flawed: Silver and his abra were treating me like I was made out of glass, but not because I was something to be pitied, but because I was something to be afraid of: they didn’t want to see what would come out if I broke. I took a deep breath. “You get two minutes, and I don’t have to tell you anything about what it means.” Hopefully I ended up getting something indecipherable like Gaia’s meadow of flowers or Rousseau’s empty room, and Silver could puzzle through that until the end of time.

“Agreed, on the incredibly clear condition that we aren’t stopping on my floor.”

“But—”

Silver’s response was immediate, the hard glint not fully gone from his eyes. “It’s not negotiable. Dante will literally force you up the stairs with telekinesis if he has to. Also, I’ll probably punch you in the face.”

His tone left no room for argument, and I didn’t know how to start a debate anyhow. The fingernails of my free hand, the one that wasn’t holding Gaia, dug into my palm. “Are you going to lead the way, then?”

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

Funny how threatening to kill someone really bombed your chances of befriending them in the future. Not like the heir to—erm, a person who worked for Team Rocket and might one day become its leader through hard work rather than nepotism—and the idiot with the dark-type starter who might one day undo them would really get along anyway. I sighed and began walking toward the spiral staircase leading up, Silver and his abra trailing behind me. “I’m curious, though,” I said as we walked, desperate to lighten the mood somehow. “What did you see on the first few floors? We had one floor for each of us, but there’s only two of you.”

Silver’s brow creased. “What floor are we on?”

“Fifth,” I said as I finished climbing the spiral staircase and set foot on Silver’s floor. “Why?”

“From the outside, Sprout Tower has three floors and an attic.” Silver proceeded to push me toward the next set of stairs, steering us around the glowing central pillar as his abra began dissolving the illusions with blasts of psychic energy before they could form. “This is our third floor, you’ve been on five, and, if those stairs are anything to go off of, there’s another one coming up.”

I frowned, suddenly entertained and simultaneously terrified by the idea. Entertained, because this seemed like one of those times that I tricked Atlas into trying to catch his own tail, and terrified, because this seemed like one of those times that I tricked Atlas into trying to catch his own tail. And Atlas, well, wasn’t exactly the sharpest bulb in the toolshed, and—

I honestly hadn’t intended to turn around. I hadn’t. Despite my distaste for Silver and what he was making me do right now, I didn’t want to make him suffer even though he was forcing me to. I wasn’t about to make him unveil his deepest fears to me. He wasn’t my pokémon; he wasn’t my friend; he wasn’t under any obligation to do that for me, even if he would do it to me in a heartbeat. Call it kindness.

Okay, call it what it really was—a tiny attempt at penance for dropping a tree on his pokémon and cutting up his face, but the point remained.

But what I saw, even for just that half second, made me turn and look without thinking.

The hair was a different color from what I was used to, but I definitely saw a flash of myself running behind the central pillar away from—

Without skipping a beat, he was gone again. The nice, courteous kid who’d almost managed to convince me that he felt sorry for me and held my best interests mildly close at hand vanished, and the asshole who’d jumped me in the middle of the woods and had his abra almost kill Icarus was back. Silver punched me in the jaw, knocking me over and completely breaking my focus from everything besides mitigating the enormous blast of pain coming from my head without dropping Gaia.

“Dante,” I heard him say curtly, and then I felt the soft tug of a psychic as I was lifted by the straps of my backpack and unceremoniously dragged up the stairs. “You saw nothing,” he snarled in a voice that left no room for argument.

Did I scare him? So much so that the floor dedicated to his darkest secret had me in it? Part of me felt guilty for looking at his floor, and the other part—perhaps the one closer to the bruise forming on my jaw—reminded me that he was still a violent, manipulative douche who was forcing me to allow him to witness me at my most vulnerable, and that our trust was set to fall apart at any moment. “At least you keep your promises,” I muttered as I was deposited gently on the next floor, rubbing my jaw gingerly and trying to puzzle through what I had just seen. Was he the nice kid who only became an asshole when he had to, or was he the asshole who only became a nice kid when it benefited him? And how in the world did this tie back to me? I let the calculation run in the back of my mind.

“One of us has to,” Silver said, stopping short and looking around.

Whatever witty retort I had died in my throat as I realized numbly the only floor left was mine. As I looked around, the pain in my jaw receding in the wake of the fear that was rising up in my stomach, I began mentally counting to one hundred and twenty. Two minutes. I didn’t even have to look if I didn’t want to, but I knew already that I was as doomed as Odysseus was with his sirens.

It was completely empty.

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

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

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

I strained my ears, perking up at some imagined noise, but it sounded distant and far away.

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

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

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

The grass grew outward in a ripple around us, spreading from the base of the stairs and aging a year every second until the tallest stalks reached my waist. Bark crawled up the side of the central pillar, obscuring some of the green light but still letting the rest cut through the cracks. A massive oak tree twined around the bellsprout’s core, the upper branches vanishing into the rafters.

The blades of grass parted for the image of a little girl in a periwinkle sundress, her eyes bright as she darted barefoot toward a flock of pidgey. Long before she reached them, they retreated to safety in the upper branches of the tree. Her dark hair streamed behind her, dancing in an unfelt breeze, and she didn’t look at us for a moment before rustling away into the grass again, her silent laugh hanging in the air from her open, smiling mouth.

I’d never believed in fortune-tellers for one key reason: they showed you vague images, and let your imagination fill in the rest. Perhaps the ghosts had shown Gaia a meadow full of flowers arbitrarily, or Iris’s room full of her kin, or the empty room that was Rousseau’s, and my pokémon had extrapolated a fear out of that because that was what they’d been expecting to see. But as I looked to the shadows at the back of the room, barely illuminated by the central pillar, those theories were completely dashed. Whatever was behind this wasn’t creating images at random. It knew, without a doubt. It knew. And I knew that it had never happened like this, that it would’ve been too godsdamned poetic for it to have happened like this, that it was never truly my—

Isn’t it prettier to think so?

They were in the back of the room, ignored by Silver and the girl in her muddied sundress, I couldn’t help but stare after them. Through the deafening roar in my ears and the increasing pressure against my forehead, I formed a single, coherent thought: at least this fear is my own.

{What is that?} I heard the abra say, but I shook my head and refused to look at them. Tears burned in the corners of my eyes.

“Are you okay?” Silver asked, and he at least had the decency to pretend that he wasn’t analyzing every second of what he had just seen, even as I was furiously trying to—

To do, I don’t really know what. Something. I’d wondered at my floor as I saw my pokémon’s, wondered if there could truly be some skeleton that I kept buried so that seeing it here would completely undo me. I had never considered that I had an image so troubling that it could quiet Rousseau or tear apart Gaia’s walls or send Iris fleeing, but this seemed to fit like a key in a lock.

The girl had run out of our sight, but they were still there in the quiet shade of the oak tree, his arm around her shoulders as they watched their daughter frolicking through Goldenrod National Park, careless and carefree. And they were smiling and together and through it all content, and then she turned away from watching the girl to look at me, the real me, with eyes that saw far too much and her lips mouthing words that I couldn’t hear because all I could understand was this is a lie this is a LIE THIS IS A—

The room seemed to tip, or maybe it was my legs threatening to give out from beneath me. I threw one hand out to the central pillar to steady myself and immediately wished I hadn’t. Searing pain washed through me and I pulled my hand away like I had been burned, but even as I cradled my left arm, those thoughts were replaced by the overwhelming terror that flooded through me as I saw what I had done.

The room changed again. The girl in her mud-caked sundress was gone. The park was gone. The father was gone.

She remained, sitting on the ground with her knees tucked into her chest, alone in a dingy reproduction of our kitchen. Water stains spiraled around the ceiling above her and the faucet was still running, but she paid them no mind. Her hair, matted and tangled and like but so unlike mine, hung in her face, but it wasn’t enough to hide the staring eyes that saw straight through me. I stared at her, transfixed and horrified simultaneously.

{Trainer?} Gaia whispered.

“She can’t hurt you, I promise.” Silver ignored the more pressing question, something I hadn’t expected from him.

“She never could.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Pause.

The easy answer was no. The smart answer was no. He held all the keys to my destruction at the moment: he was the only Rocket who knew where I was, who I was, and possibly even what I was. No need to give him personal dirt on me as well. But I was alone and afraid and scared, and I didn’t know what to do, and maybe I could trust him, despite the odds. “What happens when we get out of here?” I asked instead, shaking his hand off of my shoulder and not tearing my eyes from her for an instant. We’d forged an uneasy alliance out of the acceptance that we needed each other to get to the top, but we were hardly keeping it together as it was.

Silver’s answer was far too immediate for my taste: “It depends.”

Gaia asked it for me, because I couldn’t: {On what?}

“On what we find at the top.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to steady myself. I couldn’t. Not with someone as dangerous as him. I ran through the options. I did the math. And I found myself coming to a single conclusion, one that I’d fumbled at before but had held secret then, because knowing it wasn’t fair. I’d had most of the pieces of the puzzle before. His words back when we’d first met in the forest. His reaction to my victory. His theory from the Tower. And that final clue I’d seen on his floor, the one I wasn’t supposed to have seen, and somehow that made it all feel so much worse.

And, above all, the way that—out of all of my Pokémon—it was Gaia who seemed to understand him the most, who had repeatedly offered him forgiveness even though he’d hurt her more than any of us. She had been the one to mediate his words and try to forge a peace between us, and, and—

Because she truly did understand him the most. Because the broken have a way of sensing their kin, no matter how many lies they tell.

Seeing him in this light, the thought formed, one that I couldn’t negotiate: he was human too. I can’t bring myself to betray his trust like this—

{Why does that scare you?} the abra asked, but this time I could hear the probing calculation in their voices beneath feigned the concern.

—but he’s already betraying mine. He was backing me into a corner again and again, trying to get me to do far too much and threatening me every time I backed down. If I didn’t draw the line there, I may as well have surrendered then and started heading back to Ecruteak. I tightened my grip on Gaia. {Trainer—} she began, perhaps sensing my intent.

What I was going to say was horrible and unforgiveable, and Gaia would never understand why I did it. But I wasn’t like her. And neither was Silver. This was the person who tried to kill me and Icarus and Gaia in the middle of a deserted forest. This was the person whose room full of fears showed a terrified fifteen year-old girl. This was the person whose goal was—“To stop what you perceive as evil, to protect what you perceive as good. I’m not really sure. But your biggest fear is that you’ll never be good enough to do it when your time comes.” I could feel my voice growing colder, and I half-turned away from the illusions to look at him as I continued: “You’ve got me on a pretty tight leash, and I can’t do shit to you anyway. So why does that scare you?”

My words echoed in my ears as I realized what I had just said. I closed my eyes, waiting for some sort of outburst, but I only received silence.

The abra lunged at me then, a thin matrix of blue energy distorting the air around its paws, but Silver threw his hand forward and held it back. I flinched back as the abra flicked its tail in frustration, but it remained behind its trainer. {How dare you,} it snarled. The resulting psychic shockwave shattered every illusion in the room, but I could see the black smoke begin solidifying into her face again. I turned away.

I could see the calculations running in Silver’s eyes, and I realized with a jolt of horror that he was wrestling with the exact same dilemma I’d just faced. We were both smarter than we’d given the other credit for, and now we were both going to pay that price. “They say people fear what they don’t know,” Silver began quietly, picking each word with care, and I was too slow or too scared or too guilty to stop him. I’d just given him the last piece of my puzzle, and now he understood.

“Wait—” I began, but the words died in my throat. I didn’t know what I was going to say. Please don’t make us do this, or I’m sorry, or I didn’t mean—

“But you and I aren’t like that, are we?” He laughed mirthlessly, running one hand through his red hair. “You and I spend so much time afraid that these fears are what we know best. They’re all we know.”

His eyes hardened, and I knew then that something had shattered between us, perhaps irreversibly. I could feel him gearing up to strike back, to hit me just as hard as I’d hit him, and I realized that I’d sparked a fire that I should’ve never even touched. He had all the resources he needed to destroy me. Giving him the incentive to do so was even worse. “Please,” I began. “I’m s—”

“You run and hide because you’re afraid that people will be able to look past your lies and see what you already know: deep down, it’s actually all your fault. The murkrow. Your parents. Everything.”

I wasn’t looking at him by the time he finished saying what we both knew. I was staring at my mother’s eyes as they slowly reformed on the other side of the room.

{Trainer,} Gaia began again, either to console me or to warn me, but by then I was crossing the room with long strides, my free hand extended so I could dissolve her vacant face before those eyes could drown me in their depths.

I turned to look back at them—Silver, his abra, and Rousseau. “I know,” I whispered as the smoke swirled around my fingertips and began reforming back into those cold, sightless eyes that saw all, set first in what could’ve been a reproduction of my face before the bags and the wrinkles made it hers. “It’s been two minutes.” I clenched my first. “We’re leaving.”

He didn’t argue.

{You are wise indeed, ma chérie,} Rousseau whispered in my ear as I held tight to Gaia with one shaking hand and began climbing the wooden ladder with the other, casting one last look beneath us. She was coming back again, and I was running away just like I always had, ever since I was a little girl in a muddy, blue sundress, running and running until I came home and found her on the floor like this, alone and a wreck, and when I turned I collided with him again, and he in his rage had finally turned from her to me until it all ran and ran together in thick pools on the floor, but he kept going, like everything in his life was okay except for his wife and kid (it wasn’t) and if he just kept hammering away it would all break clean eventually but I would run and run from all of that until I ended up here—

—only to find that she still managed to catch up in the end.

How fitting.

The ghost called me wise.

If only the fool knew.

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I was breathing so hard I could see spots by the time I pulled myself out of the trapdoor and heaved myself to my feet on the next floor. I didn’t, I couldn’t—

“This is the top, right?” My voice cracked when I asked the question. This room was smaller than the rest, and the ceiling was slanted in all directions, low enough here that I could almost bump my head on it if I tried, and high enough in the center that I couldn’t see the rafters.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the dejected look in Silver’s eyes. Had he been genuine? Had I gone too far? Had we gone too far? Sure, I hadn’t really had a choice¸ but was that true? “This looks like it’s it,” he said in a low voice.

The elaborate carvings of the wall panels were almost invisible here, obscured by a thick curtain of vines, some as thick as my arms. They twined around the beams, vanishing into the ceiling, and they all pulsed with that same faint light that the central pillar, clearly their source, did. It was like a heartbeat.

“Dante, is he real?” I heard Silver asking, and I looked up.

My eyes fastened on the sitting figure at the back of the room, a tall, wavering man with dark blue hair. His clothes were disheveled and I could smell the reek on him from where I stood, but what scared me most were the eyes—red-rimmed and distracted, darting around the room to miss nothing.

“That’s Falkner?” I asked Silver, slightly nervous.

{So it would seem,} the abra replied curtly.

My eyes caught on to something else, the only thing that could’ve torn my attention away from the spectacle before and beneath me. “Iris?” I took a step forward, noticing the slumped mess of brown fur by Falkner’s feet, but she didn’t stir.

Silver’s eyes narrowed. “The sentret?” He pointed. “Is she yours?”

It was a bit of a grey area, but this was hardly the time. I hadn’t even finished my nod before the abra vanished and reappeared across the room and then back before us again, holding Iris in his hands the second time.

{That is no illusion,} the abra told us at last, nodding curtly to the man leaning on the wall opposite from us. He deposited Iris in my other arm, and while she shifted slightly, she didn’t wake up.

“Then it’s Falkner,” Silver said, but he didn’t sound certain.

I stood there with my hands full of unconscious or immobile pokémon, neither of whom had the reason or the means to fight or get hurt for me, and I realized that I was going to have to convince them to do both if we wanted to get out alive.

It wasn’t going to work.

“In a strange room,” the man began calmly, looking at me with wide, raving eyes, “you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.”

Beside me, as I struggled to comprehend what Falkner was trying to say, Silver stiffened.

“Um,” I began quite eloquently. “Do you—”

“—And Pidgey is, so Falkner must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is,” Falkner finished dramatically, sweeping one hand away from him for a final flourish.

I closed my mouth as I remembered why I’d been really bad at English class.

{Please,} his pidgey began, flying towards us. The silhouette of her wings looked tattered in the backlight of the pillar.

Silver was frowning, hard, and one of his hands was reaching into his pocket. I didn’t even want to know what he was planning next. “What are you and Falkner doing at the top of the Tower?”

To be fair, that seemed a little harsh. It wasn’t like he had to be in his gym every minute of every day, but now that I thought about it, the lady at the pokémart had mentioned—

“He hasn’t checked in since the grid went down. That was a week ago,” Silver said without tearing his gaze from the gym leader. “The doors haven’t unlocked since. I wanted to investigate, and, conveniently enough, I ended up running into the other candidate.”

{It’s not—} the pidgey began, but then stopped as the man began talking again.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon,” Falkner said quietly, hands reaching out blindly for the bird on his shoulder that wasn’t there, “cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the center cannot—”

{Falkner’s not well, miss,} the pidgey said, flapping her wings to stay aloft in front of us. {Please.}

“—hold. Mere anarchy is loosed on the world,” Falkner continued softly.

Against my will, I found myself mildly interested. “What is he even saying?”

“Yeats,” Silver answered curtly, which really wasn’t an answer, but okay.

{He has a penchant for literature,} the pidgey said, snatching up the point of conversation. {He hasn’t been doing it quite right since—}

“The ceremony of innocence,” Falkner spat, lurching forward and catching himself with his hand on the polished floorboards, “is drowned. The best lack all conviction.”

I was putting together the pieces, probably a lot slower than I should have.

Silver took one step forward, making motions behind his back with one hand to his abra while he held out the other. “Falkner, I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to talk about a few things.”

“Oh, gods,” I whispered aloud.

{And you, child,} the pidgey whispered, gathering herself to fly a few feet higher into the air and to fix me with her gaze. {You must be careful that you do not lose your way in the dark.}

Silver tore his gaze away from Falkner, frowning at the bird. “What did you say?”

She beat her wings heavily, propelling herself into the air before launching herself at me with all her might. {You must be careful that you do not lose your way in the dark!} she shrieked at me before diving and lunging for my face, talons outstretched—

—and dissipated into a puff of black smoke against my outstretched fist.

{Quick show of hands, who didn’t expect all six of us to fall for that again?} Rousseau asked loudly, orbiting the two of us and trailing purple smoke even as the room began to dissolve to match him. {Oh, right, the sentret is unconscious and the metapod and I don’t have hands, but if I did, I would—}

“Whose floor is it?” Silver shouted, while I was filing him away as irrelevant. It wouldn’t really help us much to whose literal fears we were facing now, but it might give us some tiny advantage. And, on top of that, whose fears entailed—

Oh. Oh. Oh, shit. This wasn’t a floor at all.

{Ourssss,} half a dozen voices said at once, issued slowly from the mouth of the too-limp body of Falkner as it slowly pulled itself into a hunched standing position.

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[Beth Pavell]

Not your best chapter, I'm afraid, El. I think I can winnow my criticisms down into three:

Point one. Now, whether this is really a criticism or not depends on what you were going for, so bear that one in mind. Silver is a jerk. And a cruel, mercurial, violent and self-righteous jerk at that. If you were intending to paint him as a victim of circumstance - with his enmity with TUPpy almost a case of two warships passing in the night - then that's something that only exists in TUPpy's own mind. At every point Silver could have simply avoided her. Instead he's consistently threatened her with violence the moment he hasn't got his own way. The justification of Icarus or her attack on Ariana just doesn't hold up, since two minutes thought would tell him that she really didn't have any other choice. Or her attack on himself, which doesn't hold up because he very much started it. The Rocket regime is one step away from INGSOC in the way that it punishes sedition. Silver has choices - she doesn't.

Point two. I'm beginning to hope that TUPpy's attitude towards herself isn't going to last through the entire fic. I'll be honest, by the end of this chapter I was beginning to get tired of her constant vacillating between guilt over, well, defending herself against a violent thug and recognising Silver for what he is. The unreliable narrator is all very well, but it's possible to overdo it. In this case I think the reason why it's getting tiresome is because it's all predicated on one short conversation under the illusion of a truce. There's all this talk of uneasy alliances and matters of honour, and all I want to to is shout "HEY, it's not a negotiation if you threaten to psychically squash the other person when they say 'no' to anything".

This leads me on to the related point three. This particular chapter needs some real tightening up. There's a lot of inner monologue that meanders around here, especially in relation to Gaia and Silver. That it's difficult to follow over 6,000 words is one thing - the bigger issue is that I don't think it serves to move the story on, either.

It occurs to me that this is probably the most critical review I've given this story so far. I've tried to frame it in a way that is as clear and concise as possible. I'm aware that some of my thoughts, particularly point two, probably won't be shared by other readers. It's probably fair to say that I have a lower tolerance for the unreliable narrator than others do. You've always had a habit, I think, of writing with a poetic bent; I think in this case you've got carried away and lost a lot of meaning. As I type this though, I return to that same 'but' - I suspect that I will be in a minority on this one

 

[Flaze]

All right, this time I actually have to agree with Pavell in some things. Basically that your poetic style (which I like) kind of caused the chapter to become really confusing, now you probably tried to do this on purpose, I know you're not below using your prose as a way to purposefully have your reader think about what it all means, but this time I think it actually caused it to become really hard to understand and figure out even though once you do it's all a lot more simpler.

An example of this is what happens in Ely's floor, it seemed like you deliberately made it so that it was hard to figure out exactly what was happening, at first it wasn't so bad, when it showed her running around as a child with her parents but it got really hard to follow and I had to reread most of it once things took a turn for the worse, it wasn't till I got to the end of the scene that I finally understood what it all meant to her but even then I'm not sure on it (I'd actually like to talk to you about it when you have time if it's okay). Again, I understand that this is a good way to make your reader think but keep in mind that if you go too deep with it it'll just cause it to get too confusing and instead throw them off.

With regards to Silver, I really don't know what to make of him. Obviously he and Ely aren't friends or even close to it, and really anything could happen with this story, I do disagree with pavell in that I can see why Ely would feel bad about what happened before and try to make sure to show him that he can trust her since she has pointed out many times that even if it was through self defense what she did in their first encounter still wasn't okay and it was something she felt really bad about. And also cause it'll be great if she can manage to not have someone important to team rocket wanting her dead since everyone else already does.

Overall it was...an interesting chapter, the latter part of it was the best part and I do wonder what happened with Falkner, the first part was good but kind of slow and the second was confusing. So I'd suggest for you to be a little more careful when you're trying to play around with your style so as to make sure that it's not too deep that it makes it hard for people to figure out what's going on.

 

[kintsugi]

Adding this up front: your thoughts are always appreciated + valued, especially the more critical ones. That's how we grow.

Silver is a jerk. And a cruel, mercurial, violent and self-righteous jerk at that. If you were intending to paint him as a victim of circumstance - with his enmity with TUPpy almost a case of two warships passing in the night - then that's something that only exists in TUPpy's own mind. At every point Silver could have simply avoided her. Instead he's consistently threatened her with violence the moment he hasn't got his own way.

I try to go with death of the author/not clearly explain my themes here, but in the name of improvement, let's go for it. I think there's some character developments here that I'm trying to get across that clearly aren't coming across as I'd like, and perhaps it's been unaddressed for too long. This was somewhat intentional, but Nara tends to, uh, try to see the best in people, even when sometimes there isn't a best to be seen and especially when there's no reason for it. This is something that she's been doing since the beginning, it's something central to who she is, and Silver is probably her first encounter where this is finally (or will, I suppose) really making her pay for it. In context, this is a list of the things she's decided to trust/see in a positive light in the story so far

• a psychic bird who has been helping Team Rocket systematically oppress Johto for the greater part of a decade (because he said some poetic things and looked old)
• a murderbird that literally everyone has told her is going to gut her in her sleep/eventually turn on her (because he didn't kill a pidgey when she yelled at it)
• a grumpy old shopkeeper who pointed a gun in her face and threatened to roast her alive many times before she opened up and told him a hugely important secret that she really shouldn't tell anyone after literally following him out into the middle of the woods by herself (because he said some nice things and promised not to actually burn her alive with his litwick)
• a sentret that has offered to flay her alive at basically every opportunity (because she sees part of herself, whom Nara has already acknowledge as really fucking dangerous)
• a talking ghost who promises to help her even as they're being tormented in a giant Tower full of malicious ghosts bent on farming them for fear (because he's... funny? And promised to help?)

I think you're right and I may have been overdoing the unreliable narrator a bit too much, but Nara is a fifteen year-old girl who's basically been told that, in a world where some people are destined for great things, she's destined to be a horrible human being whose best fit is a giant murderbird, and living a normal life in society is basically no longer an option for her, and it's basically her fault because that's inescapably who she is as a person. The idea of this terrifies her. In the face of all of this not-knowing-what-to-do/who I am/teenage angst, she desperately wants to trust anything as soon as it acts remotely nice to her. One of the early themes to this story is that first impressions are basically never right/that looks don't match reality. So far, it's been a lovely train of Nara learning that things aren't always as bad as they look, and that she can trust a lot more than she thinks, but she's gotten lucky with that so far. I'd argue that Silver is the first time that she's learning the opposite -- that sometimes people can be self-serving assholes who look like nice people and may actually have some rational thoughts behind them.

In regards to point two, though: this is definitely a lesson that she's going to learn the hard way, but not overnight.

The justification of Icarus or her attack on Ariana just doesn't hold up, since two minutes thought would tell him that she really didn't have any other choice. Or her attack on himself, which doesn't hold up because he very much started it. The Rocket regime is one step away from INGSOC in the way that it punishes sedition. Silver has choices - she doesn't.

To be fair, Silver thinks that her best choice is to turn herself in, and probably also that she brought this shit on herself by being such an awful/untrustworthy person that the xatu gave her a murkrow. He sees this as akin to a criminal trying to fight their way out of police encirclement rather than what it really is -- a frightened kid making some spectacularly misguided decisions.

There's all this talk of uneasy alliances and matters of honour, and all I want to to is shout "HEY, it's not a negotiation if you threaten to psychically squash the other person when they say 'no' to anything".

I think I mis-stepped here: Nara announcing what she's considered as Silver's greatest fear is her version of striking back. It's her saying "yo, you think you're super smart and I'm dumb, but I've figured out more than you might think and if you keep trying to fuck around with me I will fight back." She honestly has very few weapons at this point, and she considers this her only way to actually get this point across, but to her, the idea is hugely nauseating. She's sitting in living proof that the Tower can hurt people (and literally standing in her worst nightmare isn't really helping her reasoning at this point), and so far having her pokemon open up about what their fears mean is a deeply personal/vulnerable experience for them. In her eyes, even though she had no other option, revealing that she's figured out what is basically Silver's darkest secret is grossly infringing on him as a human being, no matter how much bad shit he's done to her, and she doesn't fully realize the implications of this until she's done.

That being said, reading over that bit + especially her reaction when he reciprocates, there's definitely some tightening to be done/will do when I'm no longer dying from finals. Some of the meandering with Falkner/Faulkner is probably going too far as well.

You've always had a habit, I think, of writing with a poetic bent; I think in this case you've got carried away and lost a lot of meaning. As I type this though, I return to that same 'but' - I suspect that I will be in a minority on this one

I'm afraid I don't know which 'but' you're referring to, haha.
Similar points group together:

Basically that your poetic style (which I like) kind of caused the chapter to become really confusing, now you probably tried to do this on purpose, I know you're not below using your prose as a way to purposefully have your reader think about what it all means, but this time I think it actually caused it to become really hard to understand and figure out even though once you do it's all a lot more simpler.

An example of this is what happens in Ely's floor, it seemed like you deliberately made it so that it was hard to figure out exactly what was happening, at first it wasn't so bad, when it showed her running around as a child with her parents but it got really hard to follow and I had to reread most of it once things took a turn for the worse, it wasn't till I got to the end of the scene that I finally understood what it all meant to her but even then I'm not sure on it (I'd actually like to talk to you about it when you have time if it's okay).

...the poetic waxing eloquent is me trying to imagine how I would tell a story if I were reliving the absolute worst thoughts of my life while surrounded by a bunch of people who are probably trying to kill me. In many ways, I didn't want it to be very clear what was happening, but when the prose gets in the way of the actual meaning... yeah, I'll be editing that as well.

In terms of what actually happened, I'm actually curious to see what people's interpretations of it are. Both to see how well/badly the prose did at dropping hints, and just in general how people are thinking things went down for Nara in the past.

the latter part of it was the best part and I do wonder what happened with Falkner

ah shit this was the one part that I actually wanted to make very clear
he died like a week ago and is possessed by ghosts, yo.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Coming back to a few of these points, because I think I haven't been as clear as I should have been.

A big problem I'm seeing is that you're trying to give shades of grey to the points of view here (Silver's and TUPpy's points of view, specifically), but you've shot yourself in the foot with the relentless practicality of the plot. Some things that she decides to put up with are dubious, yes, such as the xatu's prophecy and sentret (Although not without clearly stated reservations on either of those points, which is a point in their favour). Others, she doesn't have a lot of choice. Icarus is an excellent example. She did need a pokémon, and now she has several it's hard to see how she would be able to get rid of Icarus, given that he's explicitly made clear that he doesn't intend to go anywhere. Or Bates - a man with very good, very explicit reasons to be hostile, who then becomes explicitly decent. She's not really in much position to second-guess that (Even though she does get carried away).

I hadn't really thought about how the culture of the new Rocket regime might affect the first generation of people raised in it, not till much later, and the more I think about it, the more I think it's worth using some more. There seems to be this assumption that both Silver and TUPpy have that the xatu is infallible. Now, in all fairness that could be a good justification for Silver's instant hostility and TUPpy's self-esteem issues, but I also think therefore that you need to make more of that.

At the moment, as the story stands, I'm still not sold on the way TUPpy sees her own actions in regards to Silver. I actually looked back at their first encounter to see if I was misremembering - and really, I don't think so. All the way through that meeting Silver is coming out with violent threats, and when he loses out comes the knife. Putting aside whether TUPpy's reaction makes sense for a moment, from my perspective as the audience I have no sympathy whatsoever for him. That's the long and short of it - chapters four and five set up Silver as such a threat that I can't buy the idea that TUPpy is a real threat to him.

But I'll reiterate - I do have a fairly low tolerance for the unreliable narrator. This is partly why I said that I hope it doesn't last, rather than declaring that it's outright bad. Frankly I'd love for someone to pop Silver's self-righteousness at some point. Again, on second thoughts, perhaps that is appropriate for a twerpy teen given power and prestige like sweets, however put upon he thinks he is.

 

[kintsugi]

Coming back to a few of these points, because I think I haven't been as clear as I should have been.

hi yes your banner is fucking fantastic

A big problem I'm seeing is that you're trying to give shades of grey to the points of view here (Silver's and TUPpy's points of view, specifically), but you've shot yourself in the foot with the relentless practicality of the plot. Some things that she decides to put up with are dubious, yes, such as the xatu's prophecy and sentret (Although not without clearly stated reservations on either of those points, which is a point in their favour). Others, she doesn't have a lot of choice. Icarus is an excellent example. She did need a pokémon, and now she has several it's hard to see how she would be able to get rid of Icarus, given that he's explicitly made clear that he doesn't intend to go anywhere. Or Bates - a man with very good, very explicit reasons to be hostile, who then becomes explicitly decent. She's not really in much position to second-guess that (Even though she does get carried away).

I'm a little lost here, though -- it's not like Nara is super trusting of Silver like she was with the other things? A lot of what he says seems circumstantially true/there's a decent amount of evidence supporting it, but she's mostly agreeing to do what he wants because he's threatened to force her several times. Should I be making it more explicit that Nara thinks this is complete ass?

I hadn't really thought about how the culture of the new Rocket regime might affect the first generation of people raised in it, not till much later, and the more I think about it, the more I think it's worth using some more. There seems to be this assumption that both Silver and TUPpy have that the xatu is infallible. Now, in all fairness that could be a good justification for Silver's instant hostility and TUPpy's self-esteem issues, but I also think therefore that you need to make more of that.

This was in some of my most recent rewrites, although I do struggle with background worldbuilding a lot (see: mentions of Gifts not really showing up until now-ish). I have difficulties having my narrator address things that to them are so blatant/incorporated into casual life that there's really no reason to bring them up -- that the xatu is infallible or that trainers get Gifts is on the same tier as Nara mentioning that she has thumbs in terms of "it's been like this my whole life." Would appreciate worldbuilding advice from the queen.

At the moment, as the story stands, I'm still not sold on the way TUPpy sees her own actions in regards to Silver. I actually looked back at their first encounter to see if I was misremembering - and really, I don't think so. All the way through that meeting Silver is coming out with violent threats, and when he loses out comes the knife. Putting aside whether TUPpy's reaction makes sense for a moment, from my perspective as the audience I have no sympathy whatsoever for him. That's the long and short of it - chapters four and five set up Silver as such a threat that I can't buy the idea that TUPpy is a real threat to him.
[...]
Frankly I'd love for someone to pop Silver's self-righteousness at some point. Again, on second thoughts, perhaps that is appropriate for a twerpy teen given power and prestige like sweets, however put upon he thinks he is.

...so you're saying I've written an unthinking twerpy ass who's been given everything he wanted except the one thing he wanted, and he's a total dick about it, and you want him dead?
fuck yes I've written a smaller, less subtle joffrey minus the infrastructure of other characters to bring him down

 

[AetherX]

april fools version was better tbh

Not feeling very witty or verbose right now, so I'll keep it short.

Very interesting chapter. The background on Vadym Kholodenko was much needed and adds a lot more depth to her and the story. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but how little we know about her life pre-Magnarok was kind of frustrating to me. Lifting the veil, even just a little bit, really helps to keep me hooked on the story.

You could’ve told me that I’m a time-travelling four hundred foot purple psyduck-ursaring with pink horns and silver wings because of some circumstantial evidence you found

Best fanfic idea ever? Certainly not a twist I'd see coming.

{Why does that scare you?} the abra asked, but this time I could hear the probing calculation in their voices beneath feigned the concern.

beneath feigned the concern?

—but if he was going to betray mine

by perpetuating this charade of pretending to look out for me while really trying to neutralize me as a threat, all holds were off.

I know you can't tell in the quote, but the italics here are off.

I have difficulties having my narrator address things that to them are so blatant/incorporated into casual life that there's really no reason to bring them up -- that the xatu is infallible or that trainers get Gifts is on the same tier as Nara mentioning that she has thumbs in terms of "it's been like this my whole life." Would appreciate worldbuilding advice from the queen.

I'm no queen, but given that this is something that's bothered me as well, I'll add my four and a half cents. Just straight up hit us with exposition. If you can't find a way to work it into the dialogue or narrative, then just have Nadia Ali explain stuff in a couple sentences right when it comes up. As long as it's not smack-dab in the middle of an action scene then you'll be okay. My favorite first-person book series right now is The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. In them, the protagonist is constantly explaining how the world works and it doesn't break immersion or anything at all, as long as it's in character. The exception would be if this story is literally supposed to be a message from Sarah Kerrigan to someone else. If not, then she "knows" that we the readers are unfamiliar with her world, and explanations are expected. A few sentences of exposition here and there is better than having no idea wtf is going on. You did it a lot at the beginning of the story and that was fine. It's no different than giving a history lesson on Team Rocket coming to power.

 

[Beth Pavell]

hi yes your banner is fucking fantastic

All hail the queen. Real quick on the response here - the whole issue might read differently if read consecutively rather than as each chapter comes out. My memory is pretty good for story details, but it's not perfect. Point is, from what I recall of the story, I'm finding TUPpy's attitude towards her own actions (That especially includes dropping a tree on that Abra) difficult. It comes out in the narrative too, with the way she describes what's going on in Sprout Tower as an uneasy alliance as opposed to what it patently is (A hostage situation with a veneer of diplomacy)

You're right that in first person narrative it doesn't make an awful lot of sense to mention the bleeding obvious. Aether kind of has that covered. So I'll only add that in a fantasy world, especially one with a society that's radically different to the one your audience lives in, that comes under suspension of disbelief.

 

[AceTrainer14]

Review Game brought me here, would've reviewed earlier anyway but was waiting for my own chapter to come out cause I'm a selfish bitch that way.

I think the others have discussed this at length, so I'm not sure what I can really add, but I have to say this chapter had me quite confused. It wasn't necessarily the vagueness of her secret - once we get the reveal before the break it does make sense... well, I think. My interpretation is that she had/has a violent/abusive father? I'm fairly certain I interpreted that part right at least, but it does feel a bit left field. That may because its been a while since I've read the past chapters, or because my own penchant for writing is dropping vague hints no one ever notices, but I certainly haven't noticed or can't remember any references or hints towards that reveal if I did get it right.

I think the problem for me was the mix between her facing her secret and trying to deal with Silver. The first thing I thought of when writing this was the final chapter of Backgrounds, where Gela's having her gym battle and flashing back at the same time: that just confused me a great deal, and there were plenty of times reading this I felt the same way. To me, the constant monologue about two/three things at once just made it quite difficult to follow. It is fairly realistic, my own brain works like that at times, but it can be very confusing to read and it distracts from the beauty of your prose or indeed helps to follow the plot.

Characterisation wise, since you asked, I think Silver fits in well with the preconceived set up, though it does feel a little too convinient at times that they are trusting each other. I also found it odd how TUPpy thinks he is afraid of her, but then willingly lets him boss her around about their respective flaws. The ghost TUP was an interesting take and I'm intrigued by that. I do think he is in danger of being too sympathetic despite his nasty tendancies, which is perhaps where a lot of the conflict comes from (consult my latest lesson for more on that subject #shamelessplug #toldyaimaselfishbitch). It doesn't help TUPpy as a character to face someone who is potentially quite tragic.

TUPpy herself. Firstly, why are complicated female characters so common on here? I feel like there should be a crossover battle between her and Alaska at some point that just collapses into a massive angst fest - though TUPpy definitely has more sound reasons (for now). I think the problem with her on her floor was the need to analyse and justify everything. I think it would have been better to perhaps address her secret first and then have led to her outburst at Silver. It would have flowed better, i think, and would give both parts the attention and focus they needed. I think you do such an excellent job at personifying and characterising the Pokemon in this story, but at times it feels like you don't have the same confidence or focus on TUPpy as a character Perhaps that is simply because she is an unclear character and is not certain herself, but as a reader, it is becoming very difficult to make sense of her, especially when written that way. Also, her comment about Iris on the top floor annoyed me - it seemd a bit random and out of place in the rest of the story, and indeed where I thought she was as a character.

I am excited to see how it ends, but I think if there is going to be a face off between TUPpy/Silver and the ghosts in the tower, it would be of the benefit of the story to step outside of her head for a bit. I was very pleased to see you kept this to one chapter instead of splitting it up, so it made for a satisfying read, and it was all on your usual level outside of the scene on TUP's floor. I think your strengths lie in your prose, so you should try to let that shine instead of letting it get caught up with monologuing. I remember asking int he FOTM interview how long the story could continue at it's current pace, and TUP's continual self doubt/depression/negativity, whatever you want to call it, it does feel like it's nearly hit peak levels already, and that's worrying for the future of the story.

 

[kintsugi]

All hail the queen. Real quick on the response here - the whole issue might read differently if read consecutively rather than as each chapter comes out. My memory is pretty good for story details, but it's not perfect. Point is, from what I recall of the story, I'm finding TUPpy's attitude towards her own actions (That especially includes dropping a tree on that Abra) difficult. It comes out in the narrative too, with the way she describes what's going on in Sprout Tower as an uneasy alliance as opposed to what it patently is (A hostage situation with a veneer of diplomacy)

You're right that in first person narrative it doesn't make an awful lot of sense to mention the bleeding obvious. Aether kind of has that covered. So I'll only add that in a fantasy world, especially one with a society that's radically different to the one your audience lives in, that comes under suspension of disbelief.

Ah. Not sure when you last read, but I've also done a fair amount of rewriting since the last Awards beause I'm a compulsive editor I noticed some attitude things I didn't like. Maybe that's the sole reason; maybe not, but I'll definitely keep it in mind as I keep going -- I've been polishing up each chapter as I post them on ff.net, which means I've been slowly slogging through and updating things. I've been kicking at the Sprout Tower dynamic in particular, but I'm still editing Chapter 7, so it might take a while lol.

That may because its been a while since I've read the past chapters, or because my own penchant for writing is dropping vague hints no one ever notices, but I certainly haven't noticed or can't remember any references or hints towards that reveal if I did get it right.

They're scattered around.

I think the problem for me was the mix between her facing her secret and trying to deal with Silver. The first thing I thought of when writing this was the final chapter of Backgrounds, where Gela's having her gym battle and flashing back at the same time: that just confused me a great deal, and there were plenty of times reading this I felt the same way. To me, the constant monologue about two/three things at once just made it quite difficult to follow. It is fairly realistic, my own brain works like that at times, but it can be very confusing to read and it distracts from the beauty of your prose or indeed helps to follow the plot.

I'm torn here, though. This is a legitimately confusing situation with a lot of shit going down simultaneously; telling it linearly didn't really seem to fit. I've been cutting out the monologuing, though; it's always been a weak point of mine lol.

Characterisation wise, since you asked, I think Silver fits in well with the preconceived set up, though it does feel a little too convinient at times that they are trusting each other.

The intention was definitely not to make it seem like trust. Oops.

I also found it odd how TUPpy thinks he is afraid of her, but then willingly lets him boss her around about their respective flaws.

I never said that Nara was right. Or particularly clever, for that matter.

The ghost TUP was an interesting take and I'm intrigued by that. I do think he is in danger of being too sympathetic despite his nasty tendancies, which is perhaps where a lot of the conflict comes from (consult my latest lesson for more on that subject #shamelessplug #toldyaimaselfishbitch). It doesn't help TUPpy as a character to face someone who is potentially quite tragic.

I've read and reread this quite a few times and don't really know what you're saying here. Is it bad that situations pit Nara againt people who are actually decent people? Nara is herself a good/average person placed in a shitty situation that makes a lot of Johto see her as a villain, and no reader ever really questions that. But having Silver as a good/average person placed in a shitty (for Nara) situation that makes her see him as a villain is a bad thing?

Or, I guess: why does the antagonist have to be the obviously evil party?

I think the problem with her on her floor was the need to analyse and justify everything. I think it would have been better to perhaps address her secret first and then have led to her outburst at Silver. It would have flowed better, i think, and would give both parts the attention and focus they needed.

I think I'm reading this wrong, because the first and second sentences appear to be giving conflicting advice. If her overanalysis and constant justification is bad (which, yeah, is something I struggle with when writing), then wouldn't addressing her secret also be even more analysis to justify her outburst?

I think you do such an excellent job at personifying and characterising the Pokemon in this story,

d'aww

but at times it feels like you don't have the same confidence or focus on TUPpy as a character Perhaps that is simply because she is an unclear character and is not certain herself, but as a reader, it is becoming very difficult to make sense of her, especially when written that way.

Tried to pull the unreliable narrator card here, but in hindsight, this could use some fixing.

Also, her comment about Iris on the top floor annoyed me - it seemd a bit random and out of place in the rest of the story, and indeed where I thought she was as a character.

turns out I didn't like it either, and now it's gone eyyyy

I am excited to see how it ends, but I think if there is going to be a face off between TUPpy/Silver and the ghosts in the tower, it would be of the benefit of the story to step outside of her head for a bit.

But howwwwww
also this seems like an intriguing idea, but why?

I remember asking int he FOTM interview how long the story could continue at it's current pace, and TUP's continual self doubt/depression/negativity, whatever you want to call it, it does feel like it's nearly hit peak levels already, and that's worrying for the future of the story.

shit's gonna hit the fan soon
i promise


FORGOT AETHER I SUCK

Fixed all the awkward typos you found ;-;

[

]I'm no queen, but given that this is something that's bothered me as well, I'll add my four and a half cents. Just straight up hit us with exposition. If you can't find a way to work it into the dialogue or narrative, then just have Nadia Ali explain stuff in a couple sentences right when it comes up. As long as it's not smack-dab in the middle of an action scene then you'll be okay. My favorite first-person book series right now is The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. In them, the protagonist is constantly explaining how the world works and it doesn't break immersion or anything at all, as long as it's in character. The exception would be if this story is literally supposed to be a message from Sarah Kerrigan to someone else. If not, then she "knows" that we the readers are unfamiliar with her world, and explanations are expected. A few sentences of exposition here and there is better than having no idea wtf is going on. You did it a lot at the beginning of the story and that was fine. It's no different than giving a history lesson on Team Rocket coming to power.

AH THANK YOU.

kinda. The feedback I've been getting is largely "why are your first two chapters only exposition you suck," so I think that made me pretty paranoid about ever having explanations again.

 

[AetherX]

kinda. The feedback I've been getting is largely "why are your first two chapters only exposition you suck," so I think that made me pretty paranoid about ever having explanations again.

that's okay i forget myself sometimes too

I think this is where I make some vague and unhelpful comment about "finding the balance" but honestly the truth is you just can't please everyone. Make your best judgement. Take criticism at your own pace. Do whatever the fuck you want because this story rocks anyway.

 

[AceTrainer14]

They're scattered around.

Like I said, I haven't read the story in full for a while. I tend not to re-read chapters, but maybe I should.

I never said that Nara was right. Or particularly clever, for that matter.

Most of my characters are like that, so I know the feeling

I've read and reread this quite a few times and don't really know what you're saying here. Is it bad that situations pit Nara againt people who are actually decent people? Nara is herself a good/average person placed in a shitty situation that makes a lot of Johto see her as a villain, and no reader ever really questions that. But having Silver as a good/average person placed in a shitty (for Nara) situation that makes her see him as a villain is a bad thing?

Or, I guess: why does the antagonist have to be the obviously evil party?

I can't quite remember myself, it has been a while XD I meant more that his backstory is very sad in a teenage way and it makes him less of a threat, and does less to paint TUP in a more positive light.

I think I'm reading this wrong, because the first and second sentences appear to be giving conflicting advice. If her overanalysis and constant justification is bad (which, yeah, is something I struggle with when writing), then wouldn't addressing her secret also be even more analysis to justify her outburst?

I just meant that a different order probably would have made things flow a bit better and seem less intense, but I am willing to admit I am most likely wrong.

But howwwwww
also this seems like an intriguing idea, but why?

POV from one of the Pokemon, or perhaps from Silver? I will just say from experience that I think it probably would've been to the benefit of 8ES if we had gotten into Sandy's head earlier. Personally, I wouldn't change it as I can't think of any moment early on to put her in, but if there was an opportunity/I find one I would go for it, and I think taking a break from TUP and letting someone else run the show for a chapter would work out for you.

As Aether says, and I've justified my own story with a number of times, it's your story so it is ultimately your decision how things play out as only you knows how things will end up. I do think though that this was a rare slight mis-step in the story.

 

[Beth Pavell]

Ah. Not sure when you last read, but I've also done a fair amount of rewriting since the last Awards

It's possible I've missed some of the edits. I don't recall when last I read through this start-to-finish, but it may well have been the last Awards

 

[kintsugi]

This isn't exactly the new chapter, but as I do final edits to it: I ended up rewriting a fair portion of the Cherrygrove arc. It can be found elegantly crammed into this post. Chapter Seven is mostly the same, and Chapter Eight is entirely new, and there are minor edits to the interlude after that.

...or you can just ignore it and pretend like it never happened; heh. It's meta.

 

[kintsugi]

holy update batman! turns out I do still focus on things.

I'm updating two chapters at once, because the pacing was weird in both of them and I spent too long tampering with it with no actual result. Some things to keep in mind:
1. it's not April Fool's

also, I made shitty title art~~

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chapter xiv. the first coming​

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As the room erupted into clouds of black smoke, I realized two things.

The good news was that the possessed-by-ghosts-person in Sprout Tower wasn’t me.

The bad news, naturally, was that the possessed-by-ghosts-person at the top of Sprout Tower wasn’t me, was trying to kill us, and easily outmatched the forces of my metapod and unconscious sentret.

“Take this, quickly.” Silver, evidently, had connected the dots a fair while ago, and had already pulled out a spiky, white crystal that I recognized as a—“Revive your sentret. Now.”

I didn’t have time to question his goodwill or point out that he would be better off constantly using his revives on his abra instead of trying to keep my pokémon conscious, because by that point Silver had crammed the chunk of rock down Iris’s throat and she had spluttered back into reality in my arms.

The sentret hissed as she came to, writhing wildly out of my arms and falling to the ground with a thud. She scrambled back to her feet, claws skittering on the vine-covered floors, and she refused to meet my eyes.

“Do you—” I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I was cut off anyway.

“Dante, screens!” Silver shouted, pushing me behind him as his abra reared up to intercept a whip of dark energy hurtling toward us. I recognized the shimmering blue glow of a reflect flickering around in a five foot radius from the psychic, but that didn’t stop the blast of wind that followed.

I took a staggering half-step back, shielding my face from the buffeting wind that was so strong it threatened to knock me over. “What are we supposed to do?” I shouted to Silver over the tempest’s roar. The alarm was beginning to set in, but I couldn’t help but notice how devastatingly unfazed Silver and his abra were being in the face of this development. They were acting like they’d seen stuff like this before. His boasts downstairs were definitely true: he outclassed us. By a lot. Whether it was enough to keep us alive was still up in the air.

“I’m not sure. I’m working on it.” The blast sent clouds of black smoke everywhere, granting clarity for a moment.

“What is he?” The smog quickly reformed again into the hazy outline of the attic.

“Dante’s got a theory that we need to test, but I’m working on it.”

I covered my mouth with my sleeve to keep the dust from filling my throat. “Why is he doing this?”

“I’m working on it!” he spat back through gritted teeth, and I realized then that he was feeling about as lost and overwhelmed as I was. Behind him, the abra was frantically weaving a light screen around us, and the wind lessened a little. Silver shouted over the tempest, “Falkner’s on-record Gift is manipulation of air currents, but it’s being accessed and maybe augmented by whatever’s possessing him because there’s no way he’s naturally this strong. Dante, can you hold him off?” Another cyclone of wind began hurtling toward us, ricocheting off the walls and gathering bits of wooden shrapnel in its wake.

With considerable effort, the abra caught the tornado in a matrix of flickering blue energy and deflected it to one side, where it cratered the paneling opposite us. {Doubtful. Unlike our gym match with him, he is not holding back.}

{You won’t be alone,} Gaia said firmly.

Silver straightened his back a little, and I swear I could’ve seen a touch of pride in his eyes, had the buffeting wind not made it difficult to focus. “I’m not allowing a rookie trainer who doesn’t even have a badge to get caught up in this. Take your pokémon and get outside. Find help.”

I felt a grim feeling settle in the pit of my stomach. Somehow I knew without truly being certain: if he and the abra stayed here alone, they would never make it down alive. Asshole though he was, he still represented a life. “I’ve already been caught up in a lot worse than this,” I shot back, trying not to think about how outmatched we were now and how possible it was that running from the froslass with Bates or starting the Rockets on my headhunt might actually be less dangerous—

My attention was torn away by the sight of an enormous beam of wood being peeled away from the ceiling supports by the blasts of wind and rocketing toward us. I saw Silver’s eyes narrow and his mouth begin to contort as he tried to command his abra, but even at the lightning-fast speed with which they communicated, we were all too slow to do anything but brace for the impact, an impact I surely could not handle even as I turned away so that my ribs would take the brunt of the collision instead of Gaia—

There was an enormous crack. Iris hurtled through the air, her striped tail fully extended and rigid as it impacted the beam, the force of her blow sending her back even as she shattered the wood. Splinters rained down on us as Iris hit the ground hard on all fours, panting.

“Iris?” I asked in disbelief.

{Obviously,} she replied, curt as ever.

“Are you—”

{You’ll explain later,} she hissed, arching her back and allowing her fur to inflate to twice its normal size.

“I, uh, okay, yeah.” It was hard to hide my confusion, but it’s not like that was a big focus at the moment. “We’ll talk later, sure.”

“Ssssurely,” shouted the marionette-like body of Falkner, hands thrown back, “ssssome revelation issss at hand!” Around him, around us, the winds picked up once more, coalescing into another miniature cyclone around him that picked him up and sent him hovering three feet in the air, his legs pointing limply downward. The elaborate paneling, thousands of years of recorded history and legend, shattered around us from the force, and the pieces were sucked into the orbiting vortex around the gym leader.

“Dante, keep those screens up,” Silver said tightly, dark eyes narrowing and fists clenching as he watched the situation with barely-contained panic. “Have you found an opening yet?”

{Nothing. His mental defenses are secure.}

“Iris, uh.” I didn’t know if we could even lay a hit on him, but we had to do something. “Try to do that tail-hitty attack again.”

The sentret shot me a disparaging look, but she obediently tucked her tail in and launched herself toward Falkner. She was instantly slammed into the wall with a gust of wind for her efforts. I winced sympathetically, but I honestly hadn’t expected her to listen to me at all. Oops.

But as I watched even the central pillar of the Tower caving inward under the force of the buffeting winds, as the roof began peeling off in thick layers and spinning around Falkner like armor, as Silver’s abra shook under the sheer effort it took to maintain the flimsy psychic shields that were the only things keeping us from being ripped apart, I came to a chilling conclusion: there was no way we could win this fight in our current state. It was a different level of being outmatched; it was totally unlike Brigid and the froslass. This was no wandering spirit, and Silver was no champ-in-the-making. This was some ancient foe, as old as humanity’s fear of the dark, and if we tried to fight it alone, we would surely be destroyed. “We have to get out of here,” I said, but I was too quiet, too slow.

I could’ve sworn I’d heard Icarus’s keening cackle as I ducked for cover.

As if to further cement my point, one of Falkner’s hands tipped forward and a searing blast of wind cut through the air. The command “—shit, go for a Psychic—!” come a fraction of a second too slow. Silver’s abra took the hit head on, its tiny paws crossed over its torso to defend itself, but it wasn’t enough. The yellow psychic flew back, brown chestplates denting from the force with which it was thrown into the wall, and then the tempest hit us full force as the screens flickered away.

“Dante!” Silver shouted, his composure slipping in an instant, his voice nearly lost in the wind. He scrambled to his pokémon, already fumbling with the pull-tab of a potion—

There was another sharp crack, and I heard Silver scream again.

I ran over to him, ducking under another blast of wind that cratered the wall behind us, desperately cradling Gaia, Iris swirling around my heels. The abra was up, floating around in alarm even as it desperately tried to renew the screens around us. “We have to get downstairs! We can’t win this!” I shouted.

“Got hit. Air Slash,” Silver said through gritted teeth, and I looked down to see a thin but growing trickle of blood snaking around my shoes. “Left leg.”

For a moment, my mind went blank, and then I was kneeling down, helping him roll the cuff of his pants up to reveal a deep, clean cut that extended from the base of his ankle to the back of his knee, first-aid lessons flashing through my head. There was a vein in the thigh that was important. I had no idea where it was. But we had to disinfect the wound. No, we had to stop the bleeding. No, we had to stop the madman that was trying to kill us. My fingers stumbled against the zipper of my backpack. I had a first-aid kit in there, but I didn’t think it was enough for this. I dug around, looking for the canvas sack filled with things I barely knew how to use, but my hands closed in on Gaia’s stupid rock instead. This was too slow; by the time I got the bandages out he was probably going to lose too much blood. There was a better way; there had to be. “Gaia, String Shot over it,” I rasped, tears slipping into my voice. I didn’t know what to do. “That’ll slow the bleeding. Um.” I didn’t know what to do. The silk looked like it would hold the blood in, but I had no idea for how long. “We have to get you out of here. Can you walk? Can your abra lift you?”

Silver opened his mouth to respond, and then we both watched in numb horror as Falkner floated slowly toward us, head tilted to one side, eyes impossibly dark even as the fetid stench of decay filled the air.

“Sssssurely,” his lips said in a cold, rasping voice, “sssome Sssecond Coming isss at hand!”

“Dante, Psychic,” Silver hissed through gritted teeth.

Slowly, because the effort must have cost him greatly, the abra raised its paw and threw the possessed body of Falkner against the wall. The ceiling collapsed on top of him with a sharp crack, showering him in rubble. The winds died down for a moment.

“I’ll be okay. Don’t focus on that.” Silver turned to me, his eyes wide and frantic, but when he spoke, he was eerily collected, albeit rushed, and he gave no other indication of the bleeding wound in his leg. “There’s no time to explain. But, well.” His breathing hitched for a moment. “I’m sorry.” His hands seemed to move of their own accord as he continued spraying the potion on his abra’s chestplates, the pokémon’s wound knitting itself together before my eyes, and I saw the focus return into his eyes. “What you saw when we first fought was probably the lowest end of Dante’s combat ability. You got a brief snapshot of his upper-level skills just now. He can produce psionic shields and use Psychic to telekinetically manipulate objects weighing up to around my body weight, but overuse will tax him,” he recited quickly. “We’ve been practicing Shock Wave, but it’s a little new for him. He can safely use his Teleport with one at most non-psychic passenger, but only if he has direct line-of-sight with the final destination, and it’ll exhaust him immensely if he carries anyone but himself. He passively regenerates up to a missing limb if removed from battle; possibly more, but we haven’t exactly tested it. He can also—”

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. It was growing hard to catch my breath.

“Because,” he said, his voice more serious than I had ever heard it, “if we don’t fend that thing off, we won’t make it down alive.” He squared his jaw and looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

Pause.

“Do you understand?” Silver asked, and then took a deep, shuddering breath that surely wasn’t only because of the leg. He locked eyes with me and winced before he said, “I know you can hear me in there, and I doubt you like any of us, but if you don’t act right now, we are all going to die. You are going to die.”

Oh.

Too late, I realized what he was trying to do, and it terrified me. “Wait. You can’t—” I began, but that was washed away by a cold sense of calculation as the winds howled around us. My legs were already in motion, and then my body was standing upright, facing a demon.

The situation at hand was easy enough to size up: there was a threat. It needed to be removed. The available pieces made this task difficult, but not impossible, so long as it was properly understood. “Rousseau. Advantages and disadvantages that a ghost would experience when possessing a human corpse.”

There was a long pause before he answered, and when the gastly finally glanced up, he looked conflicted. {Ma cherie?} he asked tentatively.

There would be time to explain later. “Advantages and disadvantage of human possession.” The memories resurfaced easily. “You mentioned downstairs that it ‘wasn’t your style’. Explain why.”

The gastly blinked several times, and then finally spluttered, {Possessing an object gives the ghost the strengths and weaknesses of whatever we possess. The ghost within Falkner can access his Gift, but it must also compensate for the weakness of Falkner’s form. It must become tangible, so it opens itself up for physical attacks.} Rousseau paused, and then began, {Are you okay? I—}

As suspected, there wasn’t much unexpected in the actual possession. The rest of his speech was filed away as irrelevant. “Dante. Start laying down a Light Screen, but conserve your strength. You’ll need a Teleport soon. Keep your screen in a tight radius: four feet.”

The abra flinched at the sound of the command.

I glared at it. “Listen to me, or we all go down.”

The psychic looked uncertainly at Silver, who hissed, “We don’t have a choice. Trust them.”

He was starting to see things our way instead of wasting time on needless arguing. Finally. The abra looked uncertain, but it weaved its paws through the air, leaving a shimmering wall of light in its wake. It wouldn’t hold up, but it would be enough. Cushioning off Falkner’s ranged attacks was critical for drawing him in closer, where there would be a better chance of making contact. The ghost had chosen a physical form, and all that remained was to exploit it.

The floorboards ahead of us exploded into action as Falkner burst through the rubble that had previously trapped him.

“Iris.” The name of her attack sprang to mind. “When he approaches, Slam him out of the way. Gaia. Prep for a String Shot. Dante. On my command, Teleport with Gaia to Falkner and then Shock Wave. Slow him down instead of damaging him.”

{I cannot try to Teleport to him,} the abra protested. {I require a line of sight. The path toward him is too clouded, and even if I made it, Falkner will shred me before I have a chance.}

“There will be an opening.” The gastly was still an asset, but he also remained largely unknown. “Rousseau.” I hesitated for a moment, although it was unclear why. “What attacks do you know?”

A crack of energy rippled through the air, like the undertow of a wave. I felt something strange in the pit of my stomach, and I wanted to reach out to Gaia so I could—

{Ma cherie,} the gastly began, hovering closer. {I don’t think it’s particularly wise to—}

{She’ll get us out of here,} Gaia said confidently. {She’s done it before.}

“Listen to me!”

The gastly refused to hear. {But she’s not in there.} There was anguish in Rousseau’s voice. {I promise. That isn’t your trainer. It has no regard for your safety. It probably endangered you the last time this happened, didn’t it?}

Gaia faltered.

The central pillar began to glow brighter. This was no time for remorse.

Silver’s voice echoed from behind. “So then what is inside of her?”

A blast of wind came at full speed. Wood paneling tumbled through the air, blowing the floor and ceiling back and sending my body tumbling to the foot of the stairs. Rubble scattered away as my torso made contact with the wall.

My right hand grabbed a cratered portion of the wall to pull my body up. Splinters, ignored. Slight pain in in the chest suggested one broken rib, maybe two. That would explain the coughing.

Bloodied fingertips fumbled for the knife in my pocket as another realization settled in: undead or not, Falkner would die for this.

The light of the central pillar was almost blinding, but no one seemed to care.

Silver’s voice was louder now, more urgent. “That thing just threw her into a wall and she shrugged it off.”

They had to be stopped from discussing this matter any further. There were still assets available, and the elements for distraction had already been set. Iris, for whatever reason, seemed the most loyal at this moment. That was unexpected, but it would have to be addressed later. “Iris. Now.”

Falkner wasn’t quite within the protective screens, but the sentret launched herself out from behind them, her tail flapping in the wind as she attempted to slam into him again.

“Gaia. String Shot.” Cough; blood appeared on my fist. Irrelevant. “Aim to her right. Dante will teleport you shortly. When you reappear, hit Falkner with another String Shot.”

The metapod hesitated for a moment, but then Falkner whipped his hand through the air and again sent Iris flying before she’d even gotten within three feet of him, sending her plowing through the smoke and toward the wood paneling. Gaia had no choice but to obey or let Iris fall. The line of silk shot through the air, sticking to Iris and slowing her flight before she crashed. “Dante. Bring Gaia with you.” Falkner’s blast of air had momentarily cleared the smog and dust cloud around him. “There will be no second opening. Shock Wave. Three seconds, then get out.”

{Your metapod will be caught in—}

“Silk is an insulator. She’ll be hurt less than he will.”

The abra disappeared and reappeared a tenth of a second later, its frail arms latched around Falkner’s chest and Gaia latched on to his tail. A bright blue frizz of electricity surrounded all three of them; the pungent smell of singed hair filled the air; a delayed blast of string shot pinned Falkner to the ground; the gym leader sagged, sparking.

{You knew that would happen,} Dante said flatly upon reappearing. {You used your sentret as a distraction. You let your metapod get hit by that. You planned for that to happen.}

There was no point in denying it. Falkner was momentarily paralyzed at best. Time was running out. “Iris. Knock him back. Now is your chance; he’s stunned, so you’ll be fast enough to hit him now. Gaia. When he hits the central pillar, String Shot him in place. Dante. Prepare for a Psychic. Sever the vines above the pillar and bring them down on top of him. Aim for the points he’s already weakened. He’ll be buried beneath the rafters of the Tower after you take out the last supports.”

The sentret surged forward for a third time, her claws and tail outstretched, and she slammed into the stunned Gym Leader with all the strength she could muster. She connected with his torso with bone-crushing force, and this time he flew backward, colliding with the ground and plowing a furrow through the floorboards until he collapsed at the base of the Tower’s pillar.

“Gaia. Dante. Now.”

{No.}

I almost dropped Gaia. It wasn’t the refusal that surprised me; it was the speaker. “What?”

{No,} Gaia repeated. There was fire in the metapod’s voice as she continued, {When you used me to take down Silver, I was convinced that it was a one-time thing. That you would never resort to rashly endangering us in the name of your survival. But you did it just now, and you’ll probably do it again. Rousseau’s right. That’s not you in there, Trainer.}

There wasn’t time for this. Couldn’t she see that there wasn’t any other choice? “Gaia—”

{I cannot allow you to destroy our team,} the metapod replied firmly.

The abra screamed a too-late warning as a blast of air smashed it back into the wall, and undead, too-black eyes turned to me as their next target.

It was too late. Falkner had recovered. The plan had failed, all because—

The swirling vortex propped the Gym Leader to his feet. One hand reached backward, winding up the final blast of air that would doom us all. The scene played out in fast-forward: a blast of wind would throw my body into a support pillar, which would not yield. Instead, my neck would.

Mentally, the pieces connected half a second before Falkner’s hand brushed against the central pillar and the room was filled with blinding light.

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[kintsugi]

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chapter xv. the forest queen​

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I landed. My mind felt like it was aflame.

The intensity was searing hot, a thousand times worse than the xatu’s intrusion into my mind, and as I blinked away spots to try to focus on the room around me, I could’ve sworn I’d died. I was standing in the gentle light of the unscathed central pillar of Sprout Tower, which was a little duller than I’d last remembered it. The walls were untouched, the floor intact, the ceiling unharmed. If this was hell… my imagination needed a lot more work.

Tentatively, I touched my forehead, expecting pain, but I felt nothing. My breathing quickened as I looked at my torso, which was unbroken and unbloodied.

But when I turned around, I saw a green, fairy-like creature floating toward me, and that was when I was convinced I’d truly passed on. Blue eyes rimmed with black stared firmly back at mine. Gossamer wings kept it hovering in midair, but as it floated to me, it looked like it was trapped in a stilted animation, skipping over frames and reappearing in places too quickly for logic to comprehend.

My mind screamed: this was wrong. I shouldn’t be seeing this.

I gawked, vaguely aware that I should’ve fallen to my knees already. “You… you’re real.”

{Yup. I’m the Forest Queen,} said the fairy in a voice that sounded too bored for the deity that, legends said, had once directed the trees of Ilex Forest to strangle Team Rocket as they marched on Azalea. The Celebi blinked calmly. {Surprise.} Tiny fingers waggled in a motion that I numbly registered as jazz fingers.

{You’re working with her?} another voice said, emerging from the stairwell. I turned to see Iris at the base of the staircase, her eyes wide.

I tentatively reached out and passed my hand across the Celebi’s face, half-expecting her to dissolve in a cloud of black smoke.

The goddess of time was real and she had a sense of humor, and for the second time, I was left awkwardly stroking the very real, very annoyed face of someone I’d never expected to see here. She brushed me off almost instantly. {Touch me again and I’ll give you roses for hands,} she said flatly, sizing me up carefully. And then, to Iris: {Little sentret, your trainer and I have to have a little chat. Rest assured that she’s working with me, and whatever she did to anger you downstairs is something she’ll explain later. For the time being, leave us alone, and when the time comes, trust her.}

I braced myself for Iris’s scathing retort, which only made me even more surprised to see her look at me, her expression mixed between awe and terror, and then meekly say to the Forest Queen, {Of course, your majesty.} Without sparing us a second glance, she began running upstairs again.

Warrior of the forest. Forest Queen. Huh. That kind of made sense, actually. Unfortunately, with Iris gone, that left me with—

{Wow. You’re certainly an underwhelming one, aren’t you? No offense, kiddo.} She must’ve noticed the way that my breathing had hitched, or how I was frantically looking around the room while my legs trembled beneath me, because she said in a calmer voice, {Slow down, kiddo. It’s okay. You’re safe here.}

The flash of light. Falkner, bearing down on us. My body, flying through the air. “I died,” I said, connecting the pieces just as I said the words aloud.

The Celebi’s smile dropped for a second, just one, and she floated before my eyes, her expression somber. {Not yet.}

She circled me quickly, and I could feel her piercing blue gaze poring over every inch of my body, scrutinizing. What did she see in my mud-stained jeans, or the tattered, green bomber jacket bates had given me to stave off the cold? Did she notice the dirt beneath my fingernails, or the still-healing scratches from when I’d been slammed into the ground by the froslass, or the way that my face was already starting to grow gaunt because I was trying to split my meager rations among four extra mouths?

Or could she only see the darkness, the kind that was visible to everyone but me, that had marked me for Icarus?

“You’re reading my mind,” I said at last. I felt her touch withdraw hastily, and the questions stopped curling on the edges of my consciousness from where she’d been drawing them to the surface.

{I didn’t want to waste time talking it out, yeah. Sometimes you’re just a little too melodramatic, you know? You got a murkrow from a bird claiming to know your destiny. Tough. Take down the dictatorship, don’t take down the dictatorship, whatever. Take it from me, kiddo; people who try to predict the future never get all the facts right. That xatu didn’t know the start of it.}

There had been legends of her sightings, and I knew that she lacked the raw destructive power of something like the Birds Regent, but that didn’t mean that an encounter like this was normal. “But why—”

{Why am I here, at the top of the Tower, talking to an apparently random idiot who almost destroyed one of the oldest landmarks in Johto?}

I closed my mouth. “Yeah. That.”

I hadn’t even finished before she rolled her eyes in a disturbingly too-human motion. {There are few things left in this world that I give a shit about, and Sprout Tower is, remarkably, one of them. I want to protect it, but I needed help.}

“You needed help from—”

{Yes, I know. Embarrassing, isn’t it?} the Forest Queen said with a tittering, too-adorable chuckle. {I had to ask a little egghead like you.}

“Are you still—”

{Am I still reading your mind? No. Retrieving your actual words would take significant effort at this point, given that your brain is slowly turning into a psychic’s worst nightmare. Don’t be so stupid. You’re horribly predictable, I was born at the literal beginning of time and I’ve lived even longer than that because of all the time travel, and also I might just be smart.}

I decided to stop asking questions.

{You’re downstairs. I launched you back in time by about ten minutes.}

I almost instantly broke my promise to stop asking questions, because what the—

{I didn’t want to involve you, trust me. You’re okay when you shut up, but you’re so incredibly slow as soon as you start talking.} The Celebi flickered back in front of me, seemingly skipping a foot of space until she was staring directly into my eyes. {I’m gonna go over this once, kiddo, so listen up. The Beast of the Sea and the Sacred Flame are your past and future, the sea and the sky. I am the Forest Queen, the boundary between them; my domain is time, but that shit is complicated. Most things get devoured by paradox if they even try to mess with time. Even for a being of my power, there are three immutable requirements for more than a few seconds of time travel. One for each of the Birds Regent, one for me—it’s how we keep the timeline intact.}

She swung back in front of me, flickering back and forth like a hypnotist’s pendulum, and I struggled to focus on what could only be a post-death fever dream. {First, a spiritual locus, to anchor you to the past. The belief that the supernatural can overwrite the existence of something as impassable as time itself.} She gestured with one waifish arm toward the Tower’s central pillar. I realized with a jolt that the light was paler than I’d remembered before.

“Are you saying—”

{Yes, I’m saying that I just consumed several centuries’ worth of quasi-atheism to save your skin, because I quite liked the décor of this place. Nihil supra. The idiots. There’s always something higher.} The Celebi looked at me impatiently, still jumping back and forth through space—through time, I realized. {The next thing you need is a creature that can survive the journey through the temporal winds, to tie the abandoned timeline to the new one. The catalyst, who must remember the specific events of what was to come, and whose vision of the future is set in stone, lest the world fall into paradox. Because of the intense psychic power involved in meddling with time, few pokémon can serve as catalysts, and even fewer humans left alive can do the same. Do you know why?} She paused, looking at me expectantly, and then added, {That isn’t a rhetorical question. Go ahead and make your stupid guess. I’m curious.}

My throat felt dry all of a sudden. “Team Rocket eradicated the dark-types.”

The way she carelessly shrugged her shoulders suggested that she hadn’t expected me to be right. {Nice one, kiddo. Okay, you might be a little smarter than I thought. The third requirement is the most common, and also the most unintuitive, but you gotta give up one future if you want to make another one. The sacrifice, not of property or even of life, but of time itself. The scales must be kept in balance. In order to gain time, you must lose it as well, and undo a future in the process.}

For the first time I noticed the caterpie in the corner of the room, where she must’ve fallen from my arms when I’d hit the ground. “Gaia?” When had she ended up here? Terror flooded over reason, and I scrambled toward her.

{I already told you we didn’t have much time and—kiddo, look, she’s fine,} the Celebi huffed, teleporting in front of us and hoisting Gaia into the air with a casual wave of her hand. {See? Perfectly unharmed. Just a little smaller and a little more unconscious.}

She wasn’t a metapod. “But how—”

The Forest Queen folded her arms and looked at me, daring me to continue. I shook my head. {Good.} One of her antenna twitched. {You wouldn’t even begin to understand the whole of it, so here’s the simple version: evolution is crazy stuff. Most pokémon, under certain circumstances, are capable of condensing generations of mutations into a single instant. Think that through. That makes zero sense. And then, on top of that, it isn’t a random thing. It’s like a time-bomb, coded into the genes of every pokémon, somehow identical to each member of the species. Ho-oh’s gift to the world, they call it, and also her way of saying, ‘screw you, time goddess, I’m Regent and I don’t need to follow your rules.’}

“Um.”

The Forest Queen threw her hands into the air with a huff. {So yeah. I was minding my own business, this Falkner brat comes out of nowhere and decides he can start turning one of my favorite buildings into cannon fodder, and I was all, ‘ugh, there goes another one of Johto’s monuments’—by the way, screw you Team Rocket; I know Brass Tower was Lugia’s and you needed something to win your asinine war, but you didn’t have to raze the place—and I was resigning myself to that dinky little crapshrine in Ilex Forest when suddenly, out of nowhere, I sensed you.}

She’d been telling the whole story like it was a joke, but her tone completely shifted on the last three words. “Me.”

{Yeah, trust me, I was confused too,} she muttered darkly, lazily waving her hand to toss Gaia into my arms. I caught the caterpie out of sheer instinct. {But there was a human with a half-formed dark Gift who was basically a beacon—anti-beacon, I guess; that’s a joke; you can laugh—and this is the second-largest spiritual locus in the country, the metapod was right there, and I thought, ‘huh, I don’t know if she’s got enough dark in her to make the jump safely, but it’s worth a try,’ and then bam, here we are. Turns out you’re strong enough after all!} She tilted her head to one side, raising her left hand in a mock-thinking motion. {Which is a really good thing, too, because it would’ve been pretty messy if you hadn’t.} She shrugged. {Like, ‘scattered across ten minutes’ messy.} Another shrug. {Well, the Tower would’ve collapsed on what was left of you, so I guess it didn’t matter either way.}

She paused expectantly, and I didn’t really know how to react to the callous discussion of my temporal dismemberment.

“So you can time travel,” I began, trying to form a thought—

{Kiddo, I’ve already established that I think your intellect is comparable to that of a wet paper towel. You have five seconds to finish that question.}

“—can’t you use this for something more useful?” I asked, staring back at her in amazement. My ribs were fully healed. The damage to the Tower was undone. It was like nothing had even happened in the first place. “You could destroy Team Rocket in an instant. Or—”

{Aaaaaand five seconds is up,} the Celebi said loudly, blinking back and forth in front of me to prove her point. {No. And,} she added, raising one finger in the air, {because I know you’re about to ask something stupid like why, here’s your answer: I don’t give a shit.}

I blinked.

{Your kind has been fighting their own little wars since they first picked up sticks from the mud,} the Forest Queen said disdainfully. {If I were to get involved in every one of your little conflicts, there would be no end for me. Before the Rocket regime, there was the shambles of Kanto’s government—and trust me, that was beyond stupid. And before that, the rise of the Harbingers, and before that, the monarchy and the peasant’s revolt, and then the Tohjo Great Wars, and then, well, you get the point.}

“But—”

{Look. For you, this is probably the end of your world. For me? It’s Tuesday. If things go really south, I can just make another loop and try again.} She teleported halfway across the room and back in half a second, just to prove her point. {I swear, people pass stories around about how regal the others are, and they assume we’re all the same. Tough. The other legendaries don’t have to deal with the mindscrew that’s time travel.}

“Team Rocket has the Lugia, though!” I protested, and I figured I must’ve surprised her enough because the retort wasn’t ready instantly. “You have to—”

{Have to?} she asked, and did that little titter again. {Kiddo, remember when I compared your intellect to a wet paper towel? Your kind has been trying to use us to end the world probably once every two centuries, and it’s never stood up against us, against time. I don’t have to do anything. I didn’t even have to have this conversation with you; I could’ve just taken all the information from your head, but I was being nice because you’re doing me a favor.}

“A favor?”

{Well, yes and no.} The Forest Queen made a shrugging motion with her arms and then pointed at the central pillar. {See, I like having the Tower in one piece, and you like being in one piece, and it turns out the only way for the latter to happen is if you do the former. So really I think I’m doing you a favor, but let’s just leave it at this, kiddo: if you manage to keep the place mostly intact, I’ll owe you one. Otherwise, well.} She winked at me.

I muttered something under my breath.

{Excuse me?}

“Otherwise what?” I grumbled. This whole thing felt surreal, like I would wake up with a horrible head injury from when Falkner had thrown me into a wall. Trust my comatose brain to imagine that the Forest Queen was actually a sarcastic, fast-talking onion fairy.

{Otherwise the original timeline runs its course and you die again,} the Celebi retorted, hovering in my face. One antennae twitched. {I just saved your life. Kids these days need to learn their place.}

I could feel the air around me curling with energy, like standing in the middle of a thunderstorm just before the lightning. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. “Okay,” I said, taking a step backward and doing nothing to get out of her range. My entire trip through the Tower had just been one power to another, threatening me to do what they wanted. Why would I expect this to be any different? “I’ll do it.”

{Lovely,} the Forest Queen said, her voice slipping back into its saccharine tones. {I’m so glad we could see eye-to-eye!} She hummed for a moment, darting around the room, and then waved one hand carelessly in a tight circle. Icarus and Atlas appeared in midair, and the latter promptly fell flat on his face as gravity ran its natural course. {One more thing,} she said, holding up a finger to forestall a happy reunion with my pokémon. {I started weaving the loop around when you got thrown into a wall, so that’s your timeframe.}

“My what?” I asked, absently scratching Atlas between his ears to keep him quiet. If I annoyed the short-tempered forest goddess, I had no doubt that Atlas would make things even worse.

The Celebi sighed. {You’re the catalyst. Up until the travel started, your interpretation of reality has to hold.} She made a knotted motion with her hand, and a trail of blue energy followed her, twisting itself into y-shape. {I started shunting you back in time around here,} she said, pointing to the juncture. {And you’re trying to replace this version of events—} she paused to flick her wrist toward the top fork {—with something mutually beneficial to all of us,} she said, nodding toward the bottom fork. {But you’re actually here, about ten minutes before when I was able to arrive and meddle with time, because we needed some time to have this little chat. But this is stuff that you can’t mess around with, because I wasn’t around to start messing around with it in the first place, so if you start messing around with it, you’ll prevent me from being around to mess around with the stuff that’ll let you— Okay, I’m losing you. Right. You’re dull.} She paused, looking at my dumbfounded expression, and sighed in exasperation. In a much slower voice, enunciating every word, she said, {What you remember seeing, up until when I start the process to send you back in time, has to be the way it was.} The Forest Queen waved her hands again, and the knot wriggled into a twisted mess of glowing blue threads. {Otherwise, things start getting wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… well, you get the point.}

Iris had trusted me the first time around. Was it because of her personal epiphanies, or because this loop had already happened for her, and she’d seen me with the Forest Queen before I’d even gone up the Tower?

{Neither,} the Forest Queen said flatly. {Don’t think of it in a line, and it’ll make a lot less sense.}

“Don’t you mean—”

{No.} Another flick of her fingers, and Gaia was stirring in my arms, pink antennae twitching. {Well, good luck, kiddo. I’ll see you soon.} She paused and tilted her head. {Or I won’t. Who knows?}

There was a bright flash of light, and the Forest Queen teleported away.

“Pii!” Gaia shrieked in alarm, in a voice I’d almost forgotten to recognize.

“I can explain,” I said, which was half-true.

“What did you see on the first few floors? We had one floor for each of us, but there’s only two of you,” my voice said from downstairs, and I finally remembered to ask myself what floor of the Tower we were on. I glanced around for a clue, but the shadows hadn’t formed anything yet.

“What floor are we on?” Silver asked as he and I approached—

Shit.

—me, standing on his floor.

I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation play out identically to how I’d already heard it. I had already turned toward the stairs. We had to go up. “Stay quiet,” I hissed to Icarus, and I prayed to all the gods I knew, and twice as hard to the uncaring Forest Queen, that he would listen (but I already knew that he would, didn’t I?) as I began shepherding him and Atlas up the stairs. I’d almost reached the stairs when another wave of nausea struck, followed by blinding light, and I found myself standing in the middle of the room, blinking.

What?

I went for the stairs again and found myself in the middle.

I remembered the Celebi’s words: we’d started travelling in the attic, probably when the pillar had started to glow. But until that point, what I remembered had to stay? What was I doing here that was preventing that?

I found myself creeping behind the central pillar, trying to stare back at myself as Silver forced herself up the stairs. They weren’t looking at me; even Dante was focused on dispelling the illusion of Silver’s fears, and, and—

I’d never seen Silver’s fear at all.

I darted out then, slipping past them in the shadows and trying to remain hidden. Silver’s gaze remained firmly ahead, but I already knew that she would turn to look at me, her forehead wrinkling together in confusion as she saw me on his floor and made the only truly logical conclusion. I kept skirting behind the pillar, even as I heard Silver curtly say, “Dante.”

It was really, really weird to hear her shriek in pain in my voice, but I couldn’t stop moving. Lest the world fall into paradox, the Celebi had said.

Gods, watching from the outside, without the paranoia that he was actually right and I was the evil one, Silver was a total dick. I watched him force her up the stairs, where I knew he would make her stand and watch as—

Yeah, no, I wasn’t going to go through that again, even if it couldn’t change. Atlas barked at me, sitting in a rigidly-upright position by my heels, and I could see that he was absolutely straining between the desire to greet me and my command for him to stay quiet.

“Piiiii.”

“What in fornication name did you do?” Icarus summarized elegantly, cackling so loudly I was sure he could be heard throughout the entire Tower.

I looked around at them. Icarus and Atlas were supposed to be outside, Gaia was supposed to be a metapod, and I was supposed to be dead. We were off to a good start already.

___________________________________________________________________________​

As I watched myself and Silver try to fight Falkner and fail spectacularly, I realized I didn’t exactly have a good way to deal with this. Having Icarus and Atlas back was a huge benefit; they were my firepower (somewhat literally). But even with them, we lacked the raw strength to do anything to Falkner, and I didn’t know how to stop him. Watching our pokémon get thrown around the first time was evidence enough that we were going to need a lot more than power to get through this.

Ahead of us, the central pillar began to glow, and I felt that ripple of power surge through the air again. It was like a wave of static electricity, with my past self as the epicenter, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Here, at the back of the room, we were well-removed from the center of attention.

{Ma cherie,} I heard Rousseau say, and I watched him approach the girl standing in the middle of the room. {I don’t think it’s particularly wise to—}

There was something eerie about this. It was more than just watching myself with the sickening feeling of knowing precisely what was going to happen next. There was more to it than that.

{She’ll get us out of here,} a metapod was saying confidently, and I felt Gaia’s frail, unshelled body wiggle uncomfortably in my arms. I knew what the girl was going to do next. I knew that she wasn’t to be trusted with Gaia.

“Listen to me!” I heard myself shout, the pent-up frustration slipping through the control in her voice.

I didn’t want to look at her, at me, because she was about to command my pokémon to do terrible, terrible things, supposedly to keep them all alive. “Brace yourself,” I whispered to Icarus, glancing up at the rafters ahead. This looked like the spot. “Get to the rafters.”

He nodded solemnly and vanished into the shadows. The pit at the bottom of my stomach solidified into a solid lump. Here went nothing. There would be no third chance.

There was a tremendous blast of wind, and the girl’s body flew through the air a few feet from me. She knocked into one of the support columns, breaking the centuries-old wood and a few ribs with a sickening crunch. My chest twinged in sympathy, but I ducked down, protecting my head with my free hand as the rubble rained down around us, shielding me and Gaia from view.

As I stumbled over, the girl was struggling to her feet, even as she coughed blood onto the floorboards. She hadn’t seen me yet—she was too focused on disentangling herself from the splinter of wood the size of my fist that had speared itself through her thigh—but the look in her eyes made me pull up short. He hadn’t been wrong. My heart plummeted.

I wasted half a second just to confirm my suspicions. Silver was sheltering in the corner, straining despite his leg to see what had happened to me. And Falkner was descending slowly on his cyclone of air and debris, his eyes impossibly black.

The girl ripped out the wood that had stabbed her with a feral grunt, her expression showing only frustration and none of the physical pain, and I forced myself to check again, even though I already knew the answer, even though it was going to make saving us all even harder.

There were three people in this room, three pairs of eyes, and the only ones that looked human were Silver’s.

___________________________________________________________________________
​

prev || next​

 

[Beth Pavell]

Ok. So I decided to reread the whole story, given that there have been a lot of edits, I didn't want to try and review the most recent chapters without that context. At first I was going to go for a whole fic review, but given that I might have a lot to say I'm going to do it in chunks while the thoughts are fresh. So the usual caveat applies - I might, in later comments, rescind or modify my thoughts based on what I read later.

I'm as far in as interlude i now, and two thoughts occur to me. The first is that your style works very well for one-shots where you've only really got one thing to say, but over the course of a longer story the cracks begin to show. 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.

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.

Coming back to the elephant in the room: Silver. Now, I don't know what's been done with the Violet arc yet, so this is a bit preliminary. I feel that you have created something of a Joffrey. I'm seriously beginning to think at this point that if you accepted him as a villain, the story would be better off for it. The best villains have motivations that make good internal sense (Which is why Joffrey makes a better villain than Gregor Clegane). That's what you have in Silver. And for that matter there's nothing wrong with having a villain, particularly with this story. You've got plenty of things to make the audience think, what with TUPpy's problems with her own self-image/self-esteem, the different way you present an apocalypse (I.e; not all Doomsday Prepper rubbish), characters like Bates, etc

What I won't - currently - buy is a suggestion in the story that he too is a victim of circumstance, or really a victim of any kind. The disparity in power between him and TUPpy is too great; the way he constantly escalates the situation with aggression and threats compared with her explicit attempts to play by the rules sinks it.

I don't want to sound like I'm repeatedly banging the same old drum here. I could demonstrate that point by point, but I won't unless you ask. I do think the edits made to the first five chapters improve Silver as a character and as a villain. I think in relation to herself, more of TUPpy's self-flagellation makes sense. 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.

I was talking to Aether the other day about dark stories, and something we discussed seems relevant here (As something to bear in mind). All good dark plots need their moments of warmth. Now the reason I say this is because without that, the darkness has no meaning. If there is no warmth, no hope, no beauty, no love - well, then all you're really doing is showing off what an evil mind you have. There's only so many times you can read about the Riverlands burning before you get bored and fed up. Total dystopia doesn't make for a compelling story - here I cite 1984, and especially Grave of the Fireflies. 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.

Just something to think about, rather that criticism per se

 

[diamondpearl876]

All right, and now I've caught up with your main fic as well. I must say, the title seems very apt after reading these last couple chapters. I also read the Cherrygrove arc rewrite to make sure I wasn't missing anything important.

My first thoughts went to Icarus. Maybe he’d finally tried to eat her, like I’d always thought he would.

Lol, well, opening sentence in the rewrite and I realized immediately that I missed Icarus's interactions with the MC (who I guess I'll call Nameless Narrator).

but I couldn’t head or tails of him.

typo: couldn't make heads or tails*

“That’s odd. I always differently.”

thought differently?

The way they practically finished each other’s sentences reminded me of what I was missing: both the inescapable bond that you inevitably formed with your first pokémon, and my actual starters. Both of them. “Um. Should we go the other way?”

If a bond is really inevitable, I think the thought of that alone should calm Nameless Narrator down a little. Or at least I'd expect her to be more skeptical of it. Then again, her journey's been anything but normal. So I'm going to roll with it. Her logic is very... complicated, I've learned with these chapters. My rationalizing her logic, then, gets very complicated as well. Which isn't bad - the story makes me try to think outside the box.

Which only served to further my guilt, because if they’d run off like this, maybe they didn’t want to be. But I wanted to think that Gaia hadn’t run off to return home, that I hadn’t already terrified her this much. I really did.

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.

To put things into perspective, my Kindle calculated my reading speed for this and said I should only have needed an hour to catch up without the Cherrygrove re-write. It took much longer than that, and I spent a week coming back to these last couple chapters because there was so much to take in all at once, some of it confusing and some of it exposition-y. The latter isn't bad when there's no confusion put in the middle of it. Maybe I'm a slow reader, but I don't think it should've taken me more than two sittings to catch up with this arc that I've already been following for a while now.

Brigid calmly blew a wisp of purple fire onto the furball and then pried it off of my face, its scratches ineffectual on her intangible body.

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

I decided to risk asking about Icarus, even though I’d have to answer to Bates later.

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.

“Agreed, on the incredibly clear condition that we aren’t stopping on my floor.”

Some dialogue like this is really expessive, and I like that I can tell who's speaking because of how expressive it is... but some dialogue like the bit after this doesn't seem as inspired.

Did I scare him? So much so that the floor dedicated to his darkest secret had me in it?

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...

I’d seen the flicker too, actually. As if the room had been trying to decide, and it had settled on this. On nothing. Was this intentional?

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.

I could feel him gearing up to strike back, to hit me just as hard as I’d hit him, and I realized that I’d sparked a fire that I should’ve never even touched.

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.

I had a first-aid kit in there, but I didn’t think it was enough for this.

Well, nice to see that she's prepared, though I agree it was pretty useless here! Am I a bad person for laughing at her here?

As suspected, there wasn’t much unexpected in the actual possession. The rest of his speech was filed away as irrelevant.

Kind of glad she cut out some of his speech, because any more explanations/exposition crammed into what I would think is only a minute or so in-fic would be a bit much.

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. But yeah, there was an awful lot in a short period of time that I might have to go back and re-read before I read your next update when it comes around. 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.

 

[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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