So, this summer I took part in a fanfic game where people pretended to be other people, and I finally went back to review the last fics because it’s that time of year.
Social media and trainers and things being less glamorous than they appear! I like how well you get across the girls from scraps of information, it both makes them feel well-realized and shows off how he can pull this off.
And I adore how lovingly he interacts with Ding.
[Ding made the change for him before he could lift his hands to the keys. He felt the urge to hug her—thinking how the sound of her drivers reminded him of a purring cat—but he’d have to wait until later.
…
For now, he “pet” her with the cursor, and her on-screen avatar emitted a shower of hearts. That had been added in the update, too. Judd couldn’t keep the goofy grin from his face. His sweet, smart pixel-bird.]
Purring! A petting update, because she is a good bird who needs pets!
and
[As he hammered out his rebuttal, Ding prompted him, Did you mean: Thanks so much, Mimi. I really appreciate it.
“Right, right, right.” He took a deep breath and allowed himself a smile. “Thanks, Ding-a-ling. I appreciate it.”
Ding rained animated hearts and played a couple seconds of his favorite song (Glitch City by m1ss1ng_n0). She really was such a smart bird.]
I especially like how they echo each other. Ding’s soaking up human interaction, him included, and he’s copying her back. With how much he respects her judgement, it makes such sense that he listens when she starts taking more initiative.
[She wasn’t done. Did you mean: everythign?
Judd took another drink of coffee slush while he considered that one. The details were fussy, but he liked having to think to make himself sound like someone else. It made him feel powerful. He was careful about his own typos, but it was usually a good idea to side with Ding when she made suggestions.]
What an interesting statement from the the person running the pretend to be someone else competition. (And then, after doing this to me so well on the other fic, of all the typos you had a rogue Pokémon in there.)
So I love the balance of pokemon caring in this – keeping them has its difficulties and accomodations, but not to an unreasonable degree. Rin is doing a great job and also understandbly struggling with getting everything right, and she obviously respects her pokemon a lot. And the idea of mimikyu stress-shedding their costumes makes so much sense with how animals overgroom while also being significantly less distressing because they’re not actually hurting themselves.
Sairi thinking maybe she’d stay if he was an eevee is heartbreaking! And you write his voidy undead tendrils so cutely.
[rin7: Fala’s doing okay. We got all the plant stuff boxed up and ready to go today.
daresDevils: ah good
daresDevils: let’s be real it’s not the ghost that’s gonna get me
daresDevils: more like I’m going to accidentally knock over an adorable tiny tree and get disemboweled by a leaf blade
rin7: Okay, realistically, yeah.]
I also found it hilarious that the fic is focused on the mimikyu, which involves a naked ghost horrorterror, while in the background there’s Bryss’ other soon-to-be-pet/roommate, a giant praying mantis with her own intense care requirements, but she’s not distressed about the move itself so Rin’s just “yes Murderbug the Obliterator will be over soon, she’s great at packing isn’t she, now back to Sad Baby Concerns”.
[“Oh my god, is that—is he supposed to be disguised as you?”
Sairi trilled and bounced, and Rin laughed at Bryss’ expression. “He wanted a costume he knew you’d like. Looking to start things off on the right foot, you know,” Rin said, unable to control her smirk. “I made a suggestion.”]
And this is such an adorable resolution. Just as he’s trying to make a cute enough costume to make her stay with him, of course he’d be anxious about if Bryss would like his costume. And of course a mimikyu and a mimikyu owner would go “yeah why not go with a stitched together effigy of me?” (Also it’s probably important not to just tell a mimikyu what someone’s favorite pokemon is and to make a costume of that, since they probably have enough complexes already.)
[The mimikyu trilled and sheepishly shrank backwards, slinking sheepishly half back under the couch]
Sheepy.
Okay, everyone else is wrong, this is 100% me. Even the bits that are suspiciously too obviously me are plausibly what I would do in a contest where I was intentionally trying to be identifiable, a thing I only hesitated to do because I was in turn worried that going too over the top in being myself might make people suspect me to be someone else zoroarking.
I theme my scene breaks so I would not have .▲. since like I said elsewhere I was picking it for Alolan fics because of this whole thing about their iconography and spearpoints I have brewing, EXCEPT I did in fact consider that .▲. was probably the most memorable/distinctive of my recent scene breaks and so the best one to flag as HI HI FARLA HERE GIVE ME POINTS.
I have absolutely made pokemon talk with far less reasoning than “bird based on an animal that really can manage human words” if you look far enough back, illustrating that it’s okay, if your old fics really are bad enough people won’t read them/will repress the memory so deletion remains unnecessary! And there is a scene in a chapter I haven’t published where a baby bird pokemon can say words. I got addicted to the fun of different people having different capabilities to communicate so things tend to be heavy on who’s saying what how, but one pokemon being capable of speech and not others and then exploiting this fact would be a perfect iteration of that. (I think the one thing I’d have done is something like when one of her other pokemon says something the murkrow lies about what was said, and even then, arguably it makes more sense that Mei is too in her own head to even think of the other pokemon noises as having any meaning.)(And yes, for similar reasons it very much needed time spent on the fact the other pokemon knew what was up.)
Also I am capable of not killing people you guys… I mean, I did kill someone in my entry, but. Mei isn’t that bad, and she’s getting her comeuppance during the fic (Is this what it means to be chosen? Mei smiles even though Murkrow digs in her talons. yes). It’s perfectly on the level of the sort of stuff I have happen in Unoriginality – add a rant at the end about the point you’re making and other things people could do instead and it would be a chapter. I agree it’s a tad too open an ending – I think I might’ve ended focusing on how bad losing her badges was for her? But also I finished my entries at the last possible second and I do end abruptly a lot.
And someone like Mei calling it kibble is me making a point about how she viewed them as lesser creatures! I even specifically ranted to someone calling it pokemon food that he was feeding his supposed equal kibble and what is my writing but slightly disguised complaining?
In conclusion, I wrote this, and the only reason anyone thinks I didn’t is because they reasoned that no one would want to write surprise corpse puppet murder but me.
The only fumble was the Pokémon typo, and even then the only true proof that wasn’t me was that I was daring to show my face in chat despite its continued existence, and maybe I was doing that to delay the moment people realized the shameful truth.
(And that I think pokeballs are metal. But I am prepared to be convinced.)
Seven After
Generally delighted by the cultural stuff.
I feel like I can follow this on the surface but I have so many questions about how it’s actually working.
Among the Five Nations no decree may be made without first considering its effects on seven generations.
So, the main question I had about this by the time I reached the end is that while of course as an attitude, this can only go so far because you can only guess the impact seven generations down the line, but if there’s actual magic, shouldn’t our first Kawisenhawe know all the way to the final Kawisenhawe? Because the final Kawisenhawe does seem to be able to see seven generations forward, but it’s too late to do anything. Is the problem they’re not very good at picking who should Kawisenhawe? Does this all go sideways because the one with eyes like ice properly marked by Kyurem died, or is the final one’s future vision an unrelated talent?
To consider seven generations you must know seven times seven lifetimes. does suggest that they only know the past and have to extrapolate, but even then, 49 generations, assuming the standard of 25 years to a generation, would be over a thousand years. And if we’ve counting by Kawisenhawe deaths, if they’re consistently picked as children and live to old age, then at minimum that should be fifty years between them (and I’d think sitting quietly in a cave all iced over should make you live longer than people running around doing work), which would be about two thousand five hundred years, and of course it’s also referenced that they might know “infinite” or “from the beginning of memory” lifetimes. It is plausibly outside their context so they wouldn’t know what was going on well enough to have a better idea how to handle it, but it generally seems things wouldn’t have played out the same as in our non-magical world when, at the least, they should know just how anomalous something has to be to manage to be outside that long of a context. It’s also not clear what, if anything, Kyurem actually contributed to the process. In terms of their actual impact it seems more like the Kawisenhawe are sacrifices to keep Kyurem around and the isolation/personality fuckery that results renders them relatively impartial judges of disputes, so they ended up with that role. They’re somehow connected mentally, but Kawisenhawe seem to rely on their non-Kyurem cultural experience when making decisions. The only time Kyurem definitely has an opinion is at the idea that outsiders will have the Cradle, and Kyurem still doesn’t actually respond to that in any way but to be annoyed by the wording, and doesn’t seem concerned that if everyone’s gone there won’t be a new Kawisenhawe. It seems like the issue is more that the Cradle is Kyurem and Kawisenhawe is misinterpreting it as a dislike of outsiders rather than the idea anyone else owns it, except Kyurem does seem to be attached to the Five Nation people in particular and not view outsiders as acceptable replacements. And it seems like Kyurem must have some investment in her Kawisenhawe and possibly the Five Nations as a whole, given Kyurem keeps taking the new ones and the doubt and discomfort at seeing the group march off for war seems to be coming from Kyurem, but what Kyurem is getting out of this? Is Kawisenhawe serving to somewhat fill in Kyurem’s hollowness?
I do love the hopelessness of telling a kid to take on a hydregon and even more the deliciously terrible description of how it inevitably goes, but it seems like cheating on Kyurem’s part to allow Ghetsis to use his pokemon when being Kyurem’s prevented Kawisenhawe from having pokemon of her own and from the opening scene it seems like mourning wars are between humans, since there’s only mention of hands and torches. Also, I think Ghetsis wouldn’t balk at taking his staff and beating a child to death with it, and it would lend more weight to Kyurem’s grumbling if this Kawisenhawe could at least try biting his throat out or something but doesn’t have the familiarity with violence it takes to attempt that sort of thing. (Maybe Kawisenhawe tries to run for it only to be attacked by the hydregon, because if she breaks the rules he doesn’t have to follow them anymore? It loses Kawisenhawe spending her last moments trying to argue against this, though.)
The heronami have lived in the waters for as long as the Five Nations have walked the earth. No pokémon would ever just disappear like that. And in ten suns? No. Otetiani is a fool and a fearful one at that.
This is so interestingly positioned. It’s like someone in a story mentioning an extinct animal only it’s not a matter of recognition but of a lack of, because it’s really that we all know there’s no heronami in the Unovan pokedex, and that magnifies the loss of it. I think it might actually work better if you didn’t give any clues that match up to a real world animal and just made it a sad unknown hole in the story, but that could also be annoying because fakemon are fun to try to picture.
(It also suggests Kyurem’s generational memory really is closer to seven times seven than infinite given there were past extinctions, though given we don’t know when Kyurem lands or when they started offering people, Kyurem’s hypothetical capacity might be infinite.)
It was good for college applications and bad for the rest of your life.
So I think this would work fine if you just make it more hypothetical so it sounds like it hasn’t happened yet. “It would be good for…” maybe, or “People told her it’d be good for college applications someday…” Or maybe something about a school essay topic.
I really love the tone and feel of this. He’s aware of the world around him but still so disconnected, which is a feeling that lends itself well to the whole ghost thing. Particularly the contrast near the start, how reactive the ghost is to him and the room and his own calm reporting that yes, there’s a ghost here, and also he needs to put his clothes away.
The ghost appeared while the sage was explaining Father’s new name. The rechristening was necessary, said the sage, to ensure that when anyone talked about Father now, his ghost would not hear and come back to Earth to answer.
So it took me a bit to get a handle on if this was normal, or if anyone else could see it, and so forth, especially since the ritual isn’t completed, so I wasn’t sure if the ritual was to send away the ghost and it just didn’t work well enough. It’s at the start of the story so the POV isn’t established – I think adding “to him” would make it clear this was a personal event.
I did not figure out what was up with the ghost. I kept going back and forth on if it was the dad, and maybe he’d lost his memories, or if it wasn’t, or…
“It’ll be fun,” pressed the ghost. A little wisp of black shadow reached out from beneath the ghost’s mask and wrapped around Allister’s hand. For a second, there was a flash of white and red at the ghost’s heart, and then it was gone. “C’mon!”
The ghost pulled Allister upstairs, back to his room. It floated quickly around the room, surveying, and then grabbed the notebooks and pens off of Allister’s desk. “We could make pictures!”
At the same time, everything about the ghost’s identity is there from the start. It’s very satisfying.
Allister looked blankly at his ghost. The stories his father had told him pounded through his head. Ghosts meant that you’d done bad things. No one but you could see them, but they would always be there. They showed up when you did bad things, and they were bad things that stayed with you for the rest of your life.
I like this because there probably is some good correlation there, where bad things spawn ghosts, but it’s such a wonderfully unhelpful view of it.
He made a picture of a purple specter with enormous teeth that hung its arms around the boy’s neck and pulled him to the ground. A wispy, bleached-white skeleton twined through his teacher’s ribcage and made her stand stiffly at attention.
His ghost drew a different set of paintings altogether. A blobby purple figure with a wide smile told jokes to a little boy and made him giggle. A chunk of coral grew like a tree in the middle of a field so that a woman in a shawl could lean on it.
“You make them so sad,” said the ghost.
Allister shrugged, and continued to add more teeth to his drawing.
Also I really love this. Ghost: have you considered maybe things not being wholly awful. Allister: toothmonster hasn’t got enough teeth yet.
I’m not sure what to make of the mask at the end. I think a bit like fake it until you make it? Masks tend to be pretty negative but coming back somewhat to the description – The ghost’s mask had his father’s nose, and eyes, and lips. But it had Allister’s smile, the one he used to have, the one he could recognize in all the pictures of himself but that he couldn’t see in the mirror now. – it seems it’s also about being able to feel happy, which would make it a positive move.
Words: 5903
lol
It let you give a really nice sense of place, though, as well as a very fitting pace. This feels medieval knighty fantasy in style.
Seven, one to make each of Xerneas’ antlers, spreading out to shelter all Kalos within their light.
“Shelter” and “light” pair really badly to me. “Cover”, maybe? Though that’s not as strong of a protecting word, admittedly.
“Do you think it’s a tarasque?” So my first thought was that mixing in non-pokemon monsters is a bit weird, but then, Tarasque, six-legged beast in blood-colored armor, master of fire and water alike. and it makes so much sense that some rampaging supermonster wouldn’t be properly identified by official species and that’s conveyed really well by having it by known by a medieval monster name, like how the questing beast was an actual animal that was just unfamiliar to everyone talking about it.
She barely had time to rise, gritting her teeth against the pain in her right leg, before a rapidash hurtled into view. It was a fine courser, bedecked in ribbon and pageantry, and on its back a fine knight.
In the other direction, as cool an image as knights on rapidash is, the split between pokemon as riding animals and pokemon as partner-knights doesn’t seem right. I think this might be one of the rare times it actually does make more sense to have a mix of pokemon and real animals – King Arthur stuff got wild, and so it would fit in for there to be a spectrum of power/magicalness where there’s mundane animals and ordinary people, pokemon and magical knights, and legendaries/gods, all coexisting in the same area. (And you do reference regular sheep – and even a legendary probably wouldn’t do well going after entire flocks of mareep when it’s a water type.)
Caelia hadn’t expected anyone else to take interest in this out-of-the-way place. But it was a tarasque, after all, a powerful and magical beast. It was bound to attract the glory-seekers who wouldn’t otherwise care about the sleepy villages it attacked.
Lunete laughed. “I should have expected that. If I had to pick any knights of the realm to fight a tarasque in single combat and win, it would be you and Tenebrae. There’s no need for you two to fight alone, though. I would be happy to join you.”
“No,” Caelia said simply.
Love just how committed Caelia is to her bitterness. She has to do this because nobody else will! Someone’s here to do it, how awful of them, clearly they’re just in it for personal glory. And they want to work together with her to help out? Terrible. Just the worst.
Tenebrae muttered something to Glace and came running after, no doubt intent on scolding his partner for her lack of manners.
So I was never clear just how much of a partner their partners were. Here, “no doubt” adds an extra layer of removal that I don’t think you need, especially with the Caelia not being a wholly reliable narrator about other people. I think just “scolding his partner” would be better, making it clear it happened and wasn’t just her speculation about what he meant to do.
Caelia caught the gleam of irascible blue eyes beneath armored brows and knew this for a beast true and not merely an automaton
Always nice to have people observing and updating what they know.
I did not get the mega stone/mega evolution thing at all, but that might be more that I don’t usually think about it so it’s hard to realize that’s what’s going on even when there’s references to stone and light and so forth.
A moment later the jerked and let out an indignant roar
Dropped word.
Caelia yelled, rolling instinctively with her nose full of the smell of burning. The mud around her was barely cooler than the air, and it coated her so thickly it was as though she’d been wrapped in a burning shroud.
Delightfully terrible.
Caelia leaned on her sword, exhausted and with leg aflame, the crystal in her leg no doubt grown larger. Someday she’d lose the ability to move it at all.
Similarly! The ice knight getting frostbitten was an easy thing to understand but I spent the fic waiting to find out what the cost could be for dark/ghost and oh, it’s specific to sableye and even more specifically ties in to how mega sableye transforms.
To pull it back to the knight thing, I liked that it managed to end on a pastoral note despite going all body horror. That’s really the right bittersweet-and-chill-about-it feel.
But when this thief, who called herself Midnight Silk, attempted to steal from the lucario colony of the Glimmering Ravines, she ran into some trouble. The lucario sensed her intention and converged upon her just as she entered their inner cavern.
Eeesh. It’s all fun and games until you try to stealth past people who can mindread.
“Great Yveltal in the sky,” Midnight Silk murmured, at last understanding why she felt no pain.
“Yes,” said the voice from the darkness. “That’s my name.”
:D
“Lord Yveltal?” she said, her voice still bright with artificial cheer.
“still” doesn’t seem right, since she was thrown for a moment there. “bright again”, maybe?
Nothing grew. The trees—if they could be called that—jutted up with obsidian branches. Clustered like leaves on each branch were fragile crystals, gleaming with inner light. Their light was the only illumination.
“Life-stars,” Yveltal said. “When they fall, I know the life has reached its end.”
Hm. So, Midnight Silk definitely doesn’t see the trees leafing out. Is that part of the way time and space are warping in the rest of the domain, so you’re never there when a new life appears? Or do the trees start with all the lives there ever will be and the garden is a very long countdown?
Midnight Silk opened her mouth to say, “Of course, it would raise my spirits considerably to see the earth again—” but instead found herself asking, “What about you?”
On the one hand, this definitely makes sense from a person who would end up working to help Yveltal. On the other hand, I think it gives the game away to have her switching focus so easily this early. Having her make excuses that this totally does fit her plan, or having her follow up the question by suggesting bringing her along to his earthly visits might perk him up, would leave her motives a little more suspect.
“I see. Thank you for bringing this to me. You may tell Yveltal that the issue will be dealt with.”
But what’s up with it?! Is it a ghost type or is it that it’s someone fated to be healed by Xerneas from the brink of death or…
“Beautiful,” said Yveltal hoarsely, touching a talon to the face of the statue. “That’s what I thought when I first saw him. One of his earliest victories. The dead lay thick as apples in a fruiting orchard and he stood, watching it all, his mane agleam in the red light of dawn. Magnificent.
I really love the description – harvest gets tied to death, but it’s usually sickles and cutting wheat, and fallen fruit is a great visual as well as better fitting the idea that everything just has a time so even those dying in war aren’t thought of as having their time cut short in a death god’s eyes.
“You were doing so well too, until the apology.”
Midnight Silk risked a glance up. Xerneas’ eyes had hardened like old wood.
“Yveltal does not apologize.
…
“Xerneas, I have no right to speak to you, but speak to you I must. Through my folly, the balance of life and death has been endangered. My helper has stolen your horn and fled to earth to make herself whole. I am sorry.”
Ah, immediately proven wrong.
It’s interesting that in the end, it’s not so much that Midnight Silk solves the problem as that attempting to solve the problem itself breaks the stasis the two of them are in.
For your courage today, you shall not fade</i
I think this would be stronger if it more explicitly echoed what Midnight Silk said about how she expects to leave nothing behind, or perhaps if Midnight Silk had described it as fading from memory first.
D
:D :D :D
:D :O :) :O :) :O :) :D
Hey. Hey did you know the Wattpadian branch of our fandom has a contest this month where one of the prompts is about competitions? You technically do not even need an account since the submissions are by email! (And also they do not know they need to worry about zororaks ¬.¬ unless this is me pretending to review my own story!)
She lifts the last pie, gagging on grease and apples. Primitive people believed that gods were appeased by their own image. The pie trembles as she holds it out.
An actual explanation for food pokemon that makes them good!
“Too big?” she coos to Yum-Yum, who glomps upwards like he’s trying to kiss her.
also god I would be one of the people getting killed. The only reason I have survived this long is that boa constrictors and alligators are expensive.
Ah, I finally return to these.
The pokeballs were the obvious tell, but even without them her profession wasn’t hard to guess. Her pants had more pockets than a fisherman’s vest.
Practical trainer/backpacker gear!
I also like how the first thing she does is make up a story. It’s not what they’re asking, but it’s also not not what they’re asking, and it says a lot about how she sees the situation.
All kinds of rare plants and fungi made their homes at old shrines, and her funds were running precariously low.
Is that like divine magic radiation, or because people aren’t harvesting or otherwise disrupting the area?
It’ll have to come up at some point. Trainers made a bad habit of speaking in cliches and worse, thinking in them. He probably expected a hefty metal body to launch slowly out of the dirt.
Actually, that makes me wonder, what happens if a pokemon digs underground, the other pokemon can’t reach it, and it just stays put? Are there timeout rules? Given diglett canonically somehow never fully emerge from the ground, we know that staying partially under the whole time is allowed, though maybe there’s some rule about what percentage needs to be exposed to count as emerged – wrapping the other pokemon in vines, sure, but maybe not one tendril poking an inch out of the soil… (I always wished I could just tell my pokemon to dig and stay dug while toxic/leech seed worked).
Lauren waited. Some trainers called it the moment they saw the fight was lost. Others held out until every last drop of energy had been drained from their pokemon. She had an inkling of which kind of trainer she was facing
Well sucks for the simisear, but that actually seems to her benefit assuming leech seed is transferring the energy and not just draining it.
I like the battle but agree it’s a bit disconnected from the rest. You’ve got a couple lines here that I think could tie into the whole story/truth thing – his self-identification as a member of his hometown’s group and possibly IDing her as a rival, speaking/battling in cliches, thinking he knew how the battle would go. He thinks he knows the story, and he’s telling a story, but he’s not good at it.
Her clothing seemed ripped from the front-page of Trainer Vogue magazine. A light blue zip-dress hugged her body. The pockets were far too small—probably decorative—and the leggings underneath were too thin for outdoor travel.
…
As she followed Thea through the underbrush, her gaze was drawn to the white soles of the girl’s shoes. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on them, even after a full day’s travel.
So this is obviously doing its job of signaling something’s up, it also seems very fitting for the awkward space of someone raised by a human but whose interactions with humans were really limited. A worn-looking outfit like Lauren’s, where it’s got so much ground-in dirt that it’s hard to notice it’s not picking up more, would be a much better idea than pristine white shoes or leggings that should be picking up holes, and if you’ve got a heavy fur coat it’s probably a good idea to always look like you’re dressed heavily instead. (Visibly decorative pockets, though, are actually a really good idea when all your “pockets” can only be decorative – actually, I could see some zoroark going with female forms because people are less likely to be suspicious of impractical clothing, while it’s probably hard to keep track of what fake clothing is weather-approriate when you’re actually always in a heavy fur coat. )
“Unwanted children are left at the Celebi shrine. My father did his best to care for them. But I was unlike the others, from some far-away place. When he touched me, my shape changed to match his own. My fur to match his skin, my claws to match his five-fingered hands. He taught me his tongue and gave me this name. But now he is gone.”
This sounds like it’s pokemon children rather than human ones? And that raises the question of what the shrine is to the forest pokemon.
Anyway, I’m hoping things work out for them both!
Well, getting back to this took me forever.
[“Not on this road. They stick to the main paths. More prey.”]
So it took me a while to work out what was going on, and I think it’s because this is him saying that he’s avoiding the “highway” and going by this hidden route, but calling it a road gave me the impression he was just saying this whole area/route was a minor one in the scheme of things and didn’t have a main path or have highwaymen anywhere around.
[Seiko had known his fair share of swindlers. His uncle was a con artist until the day he died and his father a merchant. (Just a thief by another name. He can practically here Uncle saying the words.) Customers, marks. He’d heard those words more times than he could count. Prey. Seiko shuddered despite himself. The highwaymen weren’t the city thieves he was used to. They were feral beasts, men who became monsters and killed whom they wished.]
I wish this was developed a bit more. Is he hearing from his uncle and father that highwaymen are terrifying monsters who were totally different than their own way of preying on people, or is he kind of naive and believed every scary story he heard about highwaymen in a way he didn’t about city thieves because he knew better from personal experience there?
[The woman whistled and her rhyhorn sprung into action, slamming its feet into the ground and sending a rock blasting towards the bug-type. It managed to dodge the first but three more took its place. One struck it over the heart and the pokémon was staggered long enough for an apricorn to strike and dissolve it.]
Similarly – what’s up with the heracross here? I was not expecting it back after it sensibly went “nope not getting paid enough” and flew away from the tyranitar. This may be a less doomed fight, but it’s one that’s between strangers now. It seeking out Seiko while he slept made sense as something a domestic pokemon might do, but I don’t see why it’s that invested in him, especially since it was foraging for food on its own. Does it feel bad for fleeing and leaving the merchant to die and feel this is making up for it? Is it just pretty belligerent and willing to fight so long as it’s a pokemon more in its weight class? And that she catches it rather than trying to drive it off or kill it back suggests it’s reasonably powerful, but it doesn’t get in a hit, so maybe it’s more that tame/trained pokemon are valuable?
[Mostly we just plow the roads and collect taxes. ]
Ah, infrastructure and taxes! I really like this sort of twist in perspective.
[So many ghosts. Not just the damn mimikyu, which had tried in vain at least thrice before to break in. There was also a fright of gastly living on the fourth floor, a misdreavus that loved to drift through the halls and wail every night, and even the odd party of drifloon settling down in the courtyard on particularly bad days.
They were scaring the kids. Scaring the parents, too. The idea that their child would have their soul eaten as soon as it left their miserable, sickly body… she’d heard the same shouting, sobbing rant from more parents than she could count.]
Do they eat souls? Or do some of them, and that makes people want to get rid of everything even similar? Or is it just that people think that?
The ghosts are definitely “vermin” here, but are they like mice, bringing new dangers in with them and making everything worse, or like cockroaches, harmlessly feeding on an existing mess and unfairly maligned?
I think it’d have been good to have her firmly lay out the situation – is it that this is creeping people out and generally messy and troublesome, so it does come down to anti-ghost attitudes/the general heightened issues at having a reminder of death hovering when dealing with sick children, or is it that the ghosts are an actual danger to some degree?
[They’d brought in pikachu to play with the kids. Again. Just like they did every seven days. It wasn’t fair. Pikachu could come and go and the ghost couldn’t. She wanted to play with the kids, too. Soak in the love. The feeling. The meaning. Pikachu didn’t even feed on love and they got to come and go as they pleased!
Not. Fair. Not fair at all.]
So true, little mimikyu! Unless your love-soaking involves life-draining.
[Then a tentacle slips back in, testing with the tip and then splashing in, shadows moving the suds and cloth around until the bottom of the sink is clogged with twigs and mulch. Then she moved to the next sink and tried it all again. And again. Until the cloak no longer tasted of outside at all.]
It’s cute how she’s so thoroughly into getting herself clean and so unconcerned about the mess she’s leaving as she does so. The childishness and focus of her is there in so many different ways here.
I like the idea she was actually trying to get back to one particular person, but having it be a twist seems like a cheat – yeah, she’s pretty confused, but it seems unnecessary she’d avoid even thinking that there’s some specific thing she wants and that it’s presented for the first half as just a matter of ghosts generally loving hospitals, and I don’t think it’d really mess up the suspense to have her sure there’s something important to her in the hospital and that’s why she’s so determined to get in there instead of going elsewhere for her cuddle fix.
[But mostly? Mostly she was just glad to be here. To be loved. To feel a flicker of life flowing back into her from the cuddles.
In the morning the nurses would come. The exterminator might come back with his devil dog and its piercing shadows. That didn’t matter. Not anymore. She was here with Aiden.]
I’m pretty sure she’s just absorbing stuff that spills out anyway, but I can’t rule out that she’s feeling a flicker of life flowing into her because she’s leeching it out of him – she definitely doesn’t think she’s harmful, but she’s confused enough that I’m not sure I can trust her to know how she works. So this reads as both a cute “aw, she just wants cuddles with him, I bet they’ll be happy together” and an ominous “she doesn’t realize that Aiden might not live to see morning”.