Heya, squeezing in a review of your LLV-based Drabbles as a bonus to my review of Chapter 4 tonight. Since hey, I remembered you talking about them back in the spring, and why not take a gander?
"A Walk Through the Woods" / Sendoff Spring
Giratina rarely crosses over the boundary between their world and the material world, but when they do, they prefer it to be at dawn or dusk – a moment of liminality, neither day nor night. Now is one of such times: the woods are cold with mist and dew, and the sun has yet to wrap everything in its light. Carefully, they become one with the mist, floating away from the small lake connecting the two worlds.
So how much moaning does Giratina usually get off on these jaunts about “this is so
boring, why isn’t there any ground overhead?”
They can hear the chirps of birds waking up, the rustling of leaves brushing against their wings as they take flight. A caterpillar crawls on the ground, tiny feet stepping on dead leaves with crunching sounds just as small. A snoring noise vibrates from somewhere, so relaxed this deep in the woods. In the distance, bells ring faintly alongside the gentle wind.
Wait, so is Gira moonlighting as a human right now, or else are they just in full six-limbed dragon mode and prowling through this forest where nobody’s bothering to look.
These sounds fill their mind; songs they don't have – refuse to have – in their world. After all, if they had these songs in their world, they are sure that they would hide under a rock soon enough. They can't even bear to stay in this world for more than a day.
Kek, I knew that I was onto something with Giratina finding our world off-putting and alien. Even if I didn’t peg how grating they’d find it.
Yet they still peek into this world every now and then, doing nothing but observing the sounds they hear beyond the mist. Perhaps that's just as well.
So people encountering Gira in Turnback Cave every blue moon is a “get off my damn lawn” moment for them, isn’t it? :V
"PC Box" / Oreburgh City
"Error here, too. Yup, I guess that's it," mutters Luca under their breath. The trainer clicks on an icon on the screen, making the cylindrical machine next to the PC pop open. Inside it, a red-bordered white Poké Ball sits innocently.
Oh, so we’re getting a proper appearance from the LLV cast, huh? I mean, I suppose Gira is part of the cast, too, but I hadn’t gotten far enough into the story for them to be relevant.
After staring at the ball for a while, they press the button to minimize it and shove the thing into the depths of their backpack. Considering the strange happening at the Spear Pillar (that oddball is a god? Really? Really?), it's probably for the best that the system thought the Poké Ball was broken. Maybe it really is broken. If nothing else, they can act like it's broken and the capture never happened. (If it really did, it didn't feel like it, anyway.)
I
kinda wonder if this would’ve worked better with Luca’s thoughts being hard-separated from the rest of the paragraph in parts, since it admittedly threw me a bit to read the “oddball is a god” part in the middle of an ongoing line of narration.
Yes, this will be their little secret. They, and the error log of their Pokémon storage account.
Yeah, no. Bebe’s gonna see this in short order, since she almost certainly gets tipped off to weirder error logs.
They reach for the internet browser and start looking up whether such error logs will be deleted from the system.
Narrator: “They won’t. And your internet searches will lead to an even bigger footprint.”
Since when has information logged for surveillance purposes
ever wound up truly being deleted?
"City Lights Again" / Jubilife City
Perhaps he would have been less surprised if he didn't sleep through most of the centuries. When he decided to return to the "TV station" to look at the painting depicting his daughter again, when he looked outside the window by chance, he wasn't expecting himself to be captured by the sight of the city at night.
Oh, it’s an Alfa-perspective drabble now. Duly noted.
In his memory, the light that the mortals held at night was a modest glow, just enough to keep themselves safe. Now, however, it's as if they had taken a shard of the starry sky and made its brilliance their own to decorate the earth with. If he felt generous, he would compare it to the sight he had seen from his realm – the lights of many worlds and possibilities, swaying between the real and the imaginary.
Until Alfa notices that he can’t see the stars in the sky properly anymore around modern cities and takes that an affront over “how dare you upstage my creation”, anyways. :V
How pompous. How adorable. Was it this that his beloved wished to see? If only he could know. Until the end of time, these thoughts will be for him alone.
Bold of you to assume that humans consciously wanted this and it isn’t an externality of their thoughtlessness. Though I suppose Alfa always
has given off a vibe of “seen humans in brief slices, spread widely apart”.
A fun trio of drabbles, really and they weirdly enough were a good companion to the parts of LLC I’d gotten up to. Since aside from the Giratina drabble, everything here dovetails right in along with moments that happen in the story within the first 4 chapters of LLV. I don’t know if that was conscious or not, but it’s a nice touch.
I thought that you got a decent spread of scenarios from three prompts, and you’ve got me interested in seeing what Giratina is like in LLV from that opening one since I can already tell that their reaction to our normal reality has some prime comedy / Starfish Alien potential. The PC Box one was pretty funny from a ‘digging yourself deeper’ sort of comedy perspective, and the Jubilife City one felt like a nice breather that fits in quite organically after LLV #4. It felt kinda like reading a supplement to the main story.
I don’t have a whole lot to complain about these drabbles, since they’re kinda inherently cut down by the choice of format of delivery. That said, I
did feel that the paragraph from the PC Box drabble where Luca’s thoughts interrupt the narration mid-sentence was a little jarring. I do wonder if you could’ve accomplished the same effect by just breaking it up into two paragraphs and interleaving Luca’s thoughts in between those. Something to consider if you’re making any post-publishing revisions at all.
Nice work on the drabbles,
@silurica . They’re cute companion pieces to your main work and hopefully this won’t be the last we see of such drabbles in the future, since hey. Sometimes a reader just needs to have a little bite-sized breather to put a smile on their face.
📝 Thanks for giving me an idea...
