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Pokémon [COMPLETE] The Origin of Storms

Tanuki

Friend of All Chu
Location
Rhyme City
Pronouns
He/him/his
This is a really interesting story so far. A whole lot of mystery that I'm having fun speculating with. Namo suggested it to me, actually, though I've forgotten exactly why. Whatever his reason, good call, because I'm loving it.

Odd to start with speculation, but I kinda can't resist, hope you don't mind. If it's a world where pokéballs exist, yet pokémon can also drive, and there's an intensive program getting pokémon used to their abilities, I'm thinking some Detective Pikachu esque event caused all humans to turn into pokémon. That'd explain the mass exctinction bit, at least.

I liked how you used scientific jargon and such to explain the pokémon's moves. It gave it a really good, clinical feel to it that made me feel like I was really in a hospital. There were a few times where the prose felt a bit overdone, where less would've been better than the more we got, but it was nice for the most part.

In general, I enjoyed the prose. It has a bit of a tendency to be wordy, but that's closely tied to its strength of how incredibly descriptive it is. I love the detail, but perhaps just a bit more tweaking on where exactly you need to put it. And a shorter sentence or two here and there wouldn't hurt.
which would only open the light-adjustment process was finished.
I assume you meant "only open once the..."
“But I’m not alone. I adopted a son.”
Naked dialogue isn't always bad, as sometimes it's just how conversation goes, but this feels a bit weighty to just leave hanging. I imagine the arbok would have some sort of body language going on here. Even if it's rather nonchalant, I'd kinda need to be told that because this is a pretty chalant thing to just half-mention.

I think a lot of your naked dialogue would benefit from a little bit of character action. Like above, it's just a nice opportunity for characterization, and it really helps get an image of the character in that moment. Maybe not with every single bit of dialogue, that'd bog down the prose, but here and there, it's nice. Like salt: some enhances the dish, too much ruins it. I'd be particularly mindful of too much since you already have very descriptive prose.

As an aside, I love that you included a female mr. mime. There were plenty of little tidbits of humor that I liked, but this one really hit my humerus.

These were a great two chapters to read (if a bit short)! I'm excited to see what else you've got.
 

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Tanuki: Glad the jargon's going over well! Sometimes I've had my doubts about it because, cards on the table, I frequently didn't (and don't) entirely know what I'm on about. :B So for anything along those lines that I've gotten right, odds are I've just sort of fallen bass ackwards into something that makes sense. But hey, nothing wrong with happy accidents!

At any rate, clueless or not, I did enjoy coming up with all these terms and speculations. It's fun, trying to piece together how something I'm interested in works, especially when it comes to something as bizarre as wobbuffet. They're weird, and I love them for it. :D

I think, wrt the "oh hey btw I'm a dad now" reveal, I might've been going for a sort of record-scratch effect--hence the starkness. That said, I'm not even altogether sure how well it landed in my eyes, either. There were lots of spur-of-the-moment gags that got thrown in over the course of the series (even though said series as a whole is honestly pretty dark), but not all of them have worked.

Meanwhile I have no clue how that "once" got away with not existing for so long. Maybe it's been there all the while, or maybe it accidentally got thrown out with the bathwater during some revision or another. Either way, it's wild how easy it is to overlook missing words while reading, heh.

Thanks lots for the read 'n' reply! :D
 
Chapter 13

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Chapter 13 – X


Esaax wasn’t unconscious for long. He awoke and immediately wished he hadn’t; he was fatigued and nauseated, and pain pounded in his head and seared down the length of his spine to the end of his tail.

He tried to stand, but found that he couldn’t. Instead, he fell into a four-legged version of a kneeling position. He looked around, sweeping the space surrounding him with a gaze that wouldn’t quite focus. Grumbling, he buried his face in his hands and tried to rub the haze out of his eyes.

When he looked up again, he spotted movement off in the corner. He turned his head toward the motion. There, he saw Travis the smeargle crawl out of the junk pile, brush himself off, and begin walking up to him. The smeargle was covered in black scorch marks, with the metal shard still pierced right through him.

“Feeling all right?” Travis asked amiably.

Esaax stared blankly at Travis for a second. Then he tried to get back onto his feet again, succeeding this time, and started backing away from Travis in as much of a hurry as he could manage. His legs gave out from underneath him before he got very far, forcing him to kneel before the undead smeargle once more.

“What are you running from, huh? Can’t we have a little chat?” Travis asked.

“I’m not talking to you,” Esaax said flatly.

“Yes, you are, you just opened your mouth and said—”

“You’re a hallucination!”

“I’m a damn good hallucination, though, you have to admit,” Travis said, fidgeting with the bloody piece of metal that protruded from his chest.

Esaax shut his eyes and shook his head. To his dismay, Travis was still there when he opened his eyes once more. Esaax groaned. “I feel like crap,” he mumbled.

“Well, of course you do! I mean, think about it. You keep using that crazy black beam of yours, and you hurt yourself every time you use it, no matter how much you hold back when you do. And it’s cumulative, you know. That damage adds up over time.

“But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, isn’t it?” Travis went on. “See, every time that nifty little attack bounces back at you, that’s pure dark energy hitting your system. Psybane. Which really shouldn’t bother you that much, right? After all, you’re half-psychic, but you’re half-dark, too, aren’t you?”

Esaax sighed. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well, now, wait a minute. Suppose that’s… not exactly right.”

“…What do you mean?” Esaax asked, perplexed.

“Botched evolution, my friend,” Travis answered. “Or are you gonna try and tell me that there wasn’t something distinctly… off about your evolutionary experience?”

Esaax only growled in response.

“The problem with you evolving is that you weren’t supposed to,” Travis said. “Wasn’t supposed to be possible, was it? My friend, you got forced into this form. You got forced into this combination of elements, and it’s not one that’s meant to be fooled around with.”

The smeargle began to pace in front of Esaax. “Dark and psychic. That’s a completely one-sided matchup right there. One is devastatingly dominant; the other, totally helpless. Now, maybe somewhere out there in the wide world of nature and supernature, that works just fine. But not here. Not in you.

“You just can’t go forcing these things, man. Yet someone—I repeat, someone—forced it on you. Now, I want you to take a moment right now to think back. Can you figure out who might’ve done this to you?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Esaax did as he was advised, but his present illness made it hard for him to focus well enough to recall his memories clearly. As he managed to remember some of the most recent things he’d done, he was sickened even further, swallowing hard as his stomach gave a threatening lurch.

It wasn’t until he managed to recall the period of time immediately preceding his evolution that anything even remotely resembling an answer to Travis’s question came to him. “I… I don’t know who it was for sure, but… I remember something hitting me right before I evolved. And I thought I felt someone in the room with me… I think it was a ghost.”

Travis cocked an eyebrow at him. “You thought you felt a ghost in the room with you, huh?” he said in a skeptical tone. “May I remind you that you… weren’t exactly feeling so great at the time? In case you haven’t noticed, sometimes the mind plays tricks on you when you’re feeling under the weather.”

Esaax just glared dully at him.

“But anyway,” Travis went on, “try looking a little further back than that. Is there anything else you’ve experienced recently that had any kind of significant physical effect on you?”

Esaax combed through his memories again, trying to keep his thoughts moving in a straight line backward from his evolution without overlooking any potentially important details. He remembered being brought to the Haven, then remembered the ride in Jen’s car from Syr’s house, and then remembered the ride to Syr’s house from…

Esaax’s eyes widened, and he felt his mouth go dry. In his mind’s eye, he could see the private counseling office at the Hope Institute, wherein a needle sank into his arm under the guidance of a human hand…

DeLeo,” Esaax said hoarsely.

“Bingo.”

“It was that serum he gave me… that’s what started all this…”

“You’ve got it,” Travis said, beaming proudly. “You’re miserable now because of that sorry excuse for a human. He just tacked another type on you, and that screwed up the one you already had. Your new body was elementally unstable from the start, and it’s growing ever more so, I’m afraid…”

Travis came to stand right in front of Esaax. He stood on his toes, brought his paintbrush-tail forward, and painted a large “X” across the kwazai’s chest in bright red ink. “You’re a goner, Evergray.”

“What if I just don’t use that dark attack anymore?”

Travis shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid it’s too late now, my friend. Too much damage and too much stress in a period of time that’s much too short for your poor body to cope with… and there’s no fixing it, man. You’re on your way out, and there’s no turning back…”

Esaax spent a few moments in silence. “So this is really gonna kill me,” he said finally, wearily.

Travis made a small, affirmative noise, nodding. “And it’s all thanks to Mr. Sylvester DeLeo.”

Esaax sighed and knitted his spidery fingers on top of his head, covering his face with his large palms. “Maybe I should go,” he whispered. “I hate what I’ve become. Do you realize how many people I’ve killed just tonight?”

“You’re a predator now, so what? You’ve gotta eat, right?”

“I killed you on a full stomach,” Esaax pointed out.

Accidentally. And no, you didn’t kill me, anyway; I’m just a hallucination, remember?”

Esaax groaned miserably and lowered his gaze to the dirty floor. “This is all just so wrong…”

“I agree,” said Travis, lowering his head somberly. “I wish that there was some way to change your fate… but there just isn’t one, man. Sorry. Oh… but there is something you can still do about it…”

“What’s that?” Esaax asked, lifting his gaze.

“DeLeo put this misery on you. Why don’t you go pay him back?”

“What?”

“Come on. You know you wanna.”

“I don’t know,” Esaax muttered. “I’m just so tired…”

“There, you see? Your time is running out. So go on, get going. It’s not too far from here.”

“I don’t know if I can walk there right now, even if it is close. I’m sure I can’t run,” Esaax told the smeargle. “And besides, I… I just don’t think I have it in me… I mean, going over there, and then hurting him… killing him…”

“But you do have it in you, my friend,” Travis said with more than a hint of enthusiasm. “You can do this. You can pull this off. There’s just one thing you have to do.”

“And what’s that?”

The smeargle gave a bloody grin. “Surrender, Evergray. Let me take over.” His green eyes shifted dramatically in color, becoming black all throughout like a pair of deep, dark holes. The rest of him followed suit, the scattered scorchings of his coat spreading until he was pitch-black all over. He became an animate shadow, a dark mass that rapidly changed shape and grew into a dramatically different form.

Esaax now beheld another kwazai, one made out of softly glowing shadow-substance. He stared at them, and he quickly found himself moved by the sight and presence of them. They were beautiful, incredibly so, and he wondered why he hadn’t allowed himself to look at them and what they represented in this way before.

The shadow-kwazai lifted Esaax’s head in their hands, comforting him as if he were their child. They took him by the shoulders and lifted him back onto his feet, supporting his weight easily. They gazed deep into his eyes as they held him steady. “May I?” they asked in a hollow-sounding voice.

Esaax’s surrender was silent. He opened his arms to embrace the darkness, which melted into him like ice and left him feeling virtually nothing: no remorse for his recent actions or trepidation about what he was about to do, no pain or illness, not even the tiredness he’d known mere minutes before. All that was left was the cold simplicity of his new resolve: Go. Find him.

Esaax rose, left the empty store, and strode over to the curb, stepping over it onto the street. Headlights appeared from around the corner a short distance away, and the moment they did, he collapsed onto the asphalt.

The approaching car came to a stop just short of where Esaax had fallen, and the golduck who’d been driving got out and rushed to his side at once, leaving the vehicle running.

“Are you all right?” the golduck asked, concerned—then gave a squawk of surprise as a massive hand lying at his feet suddenly seized him by the ankles and pulled him to the ground. Esaax’s other hand came down hard in a fist against the golduck’s head immediately afterward, then did it again for good measure, knocking the golduck out.

Esaax got back to his feet once more, then went over to the car. He determined that he could probably fit into it and operate it just fine if it weren’t for that roof. With a fair bit of effort, he managed to tear enough of it away to suit his needs. He then smashed the window in his way and stepped over the door to get in, not noticing the shards of glass that bit into him as he did so. Somewhat awkwardly, he turned to face forward and extended his hind legs up and over into the seat behind him.

Had he been in his right mind, Esaax might have felt a thrill at the fact that he was going to drive for the first time in over a decade, with no Syr or anyone else around in any position to tell him that he couldn’t or shouldn’t. As it was, though, he was still focused entirely on the task that awaited him. Without a second’s hesitation, he sped off toward the Hope Institute, very nearly running over the golduck in the process.

* * *​

Just as the three pokémon seeking Esaax left the forest, Ntairow abruptly stopped in front of Syr and Karo. Syr very nearly ran right into her, reeling back and veering off to the side just in time.

“Ntairow… what’s going on?” he asked her.

“I’ve lost him completely,” Ntairow said heavily. She turned to the others. “I can’t sense anything of him now. It’s as if he’s simply gone.”

“You don’t think that he’s… that he’s no longer alive, do you?” Syr asked fearfully in barely more than a whisper.

Ntairow lowered her head. “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I honestly don’t know.”

Out of nowhere, two shapes burst onto the scene: the two surviving smeargle. They stopped dead at the sight of Ntairow.

“Run for it, it’s another one!” said Tom.

“No, it’s not…” said Mark.

“Yes, it is,” said Ntairow. She swiftly grabbed both smeargle by their tails and raised them to eye level. “You two have seen Esaax, then?”

“If by ‘Esaax’, you mean that big, blue thing who killed our friend, then yes!” Mark said, flailing in a futile attempt to escape.

Syr and Ntairow both winced at the news of yet another murder committed by their friend. Karo, meanwhile, came to stand before Ntairow and looked up at her two captives.

“Give them to me,” the nosepass said. There was an ominous weight to his voice that hadn’t been there before, and he seemed to be bearing down on the smeargle even from below.

It was then that the smeargle finally noticed Karo. Their nervousness visibly increased, and they began to struggle even more desperately to get away.

“Karo, you have no way of knowing if these are the same smeargle who broke into your house,” said Syr.

“Are you sure about that? Cause I’ve gotta say, they’re looking pretty guilty from here.” He edged even closer to the smeargle, and their reactions made it clear that they badly wanted to be somewhere else at this point. “See how they fear me,” Karo said with a laugh. “They know what they’ve done. And they know what’s coming. Now, let’s see…” he said, examining the ink that was beginning to leak from their tail-tips under the pressure of Ntairow’s grip. “There’s Mr. Blue… there’s Mr. Yellow… hey, where’s Mr. Red?”

“I already said, schnozzo, that ‘Esaax’ thing killed him! He tried to kill all of us!” Mark said angrily.

“And he was the one trespassing in our territory!” Tom added.

“Yeah, but then I blasted him with one of these—” Mark raised his hand and shot a reflux into the sky, at which Ntairow nearly dropped him. “—and down he went.”

“…You didn’t kill him, did you?” Ntairow asked shakily.

“No, Tom wouldn’t let me finish him off,” Mark said acidly.

“Cause when you shot him, it hurt you, too! You might have died if you’d killed him!” Tom responded.

“You can’t possibly know that any more than I can!” Mark argued. “Well, okay, then. When that blue freak wakes up and decides to come after us, I’ll just tell him he can go ahead and blast your brains out first since it’ll have been your bright idea to show mercy to the monster that’ll have made that lovely scenario possible in the first place, you dumbass!”

“Stop it, both of you,” Ntairow said firmly. She knocked the smeargles’ heads together. Karo cheered. “Is he still where you left him, then?” Ntairow demanded of the smeargle.

“Urgh… I don’t know,” Mark replied after he stopped seeing lights bursting in the back of his eyes. “If he’s stayed unconscious, then yes, he’s probably still there.”

“Actually… he’s not,” said Tom. Everyone, including Mark, turned to stare at him. “Over there,” Tom said, pointing.

Everyone looked in the direction that Tom was indicating. There they saw a kwazai in a mangled blue car hurtling down the street at an incredible speed.

Ntairow threw the two smeargle facefirst to the ground. “Come on!” she shouted, taking off at a run after the car. “And leave them alone!” she added over her shoulder to Karo.

“Awww…” the nosepass groaned, disappointed. He turned to the two smeargle, who were still sprawled out on the ground and rubbing their sore muzzles. Now he really was bearing down on them. “Make no mistake—I am so gonna squash you one of these days,” he told them, using the “ominous” voice once again. Then he shot off a tiny bolt of electricity to send the smeargle scurrying off on their way.
 
Chapter 14

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Chapter 14 – Chasing a Rumor


Esaax rushed recklessly through the streets of Convergence, which were fortunately more or less deserted at the time. Most of the local pokémon were diurnal, and with sunrise approaching, most of those who didn’t keep daytime hours were getting ready to go to sleep.

The kwazai found what he was looking for fairly quickly, recognizing the squat box of a building that was the Hope Institute right away. He entered the parking lot and parked at an odd angle across two spaces, then jumped out of the car, landing less than gracefully and struggling for a couple of moments to keep from toppling over.

Esaax didn’t bother making his way around to the front door. He could sense living presences just a couple of yards past the wall that lay before him, two of whom were familiar—one of whom was his target.

He fired a sustained reflux into the barrier in front of him. As soon as enough of the wall had been weakened to admit him, he stepped forward right into it, causing the weakened portion to crumble into powder around him as he passed through it.

It turned out there was another wall between him and his quarry, but this fact didn’t faze him; he simply decided to repeat the process that had gotten him into the building in the first place. His body was somewhat less willing to oblige this time. There was a slightly longer delay than usual before the black beam came to his summons, and when the dark energy began pouring from his outstretched hand, his senses faltered a bit, his vision briefly dimming, the raised voices from the other side of the wall temporarily drowned out by a ringing in his ears.

Just as he’d done the time before, Esaax pushed his way through the wall and into the room beyond it as soon as he could. He was met with the sight of a small crowd of glalie with dark blue protect auras, and he could sense DeLeo’s presence behind them as the human used them for cover—but before he could try to leap over the glalie and get at his quarry, there was a loud crack, and he was down in an instant.

DeLeo stood and made his way over to the now unconscious kwazai, then looked down at him and sighed. “You could’ve just knocked, Esaax.”

* * *​

When Esaax awoke, he was greeted by the sight of a long, spindly, robotic arm that extended from somewhere above him to a point right in front of his face. It clutched a now-darkened revive crystal in its metal fingers. Esaax considered biting the arm and tearing it down as he watched it swiftly ascend once more, but lingering grogginess kept him from acting on that idea before the arm had vanished.

It was then that his senses reawakened enough to detect the familiar presences from earlier very nearby: DeLeo and Solonn—the former of which provoked a very strong reaction. Esaax’s eyes and oculons both locked on to the human before him, and his exhaustion seemed to shatter into pieces; he promptly rose and began snapping and swiping at the wall of glowing, green energy that separated him from DeLeo.

In the next moment, however, he was no longer interested in trying to break out, lowering his arms and sinking to his knees. A calming gas had been released into the containment field from above while he’d been so distracted by his target.

“Shh… it’s all right, Esaax,” DeLeo said. “You’re exactly where you need to be right now. I’ll bet you’ve got a lot of questions about what’s happened to you, and I’ve got all the answers.”

DeLeo looked at him expectantly, but Esaax only stared back. The kwazai still entertained thoughts of attacking and killing the human, but no longer felt any need to act upon them.

DeLeo approached the containment field. He came to a stop right in front of it and leaned against the glowing wall as if it were ordinary glass. Doing so apparently didn’t hurt him in any way, just as it hadn’t hurt Esaax.

“You probably didn’t know you could evolve, did you?” DeLeo asked. “I know most wobbuffet don’t. So I’m gonna tell you a little story, Esaax. One that’ll explain why this has been kept from you—and why you shouldn’t be scared of it. No, you should be anything but scared…” he told Esaax with what sounded like awed excitement.

DeLeo took a step back, clasping his hands in front of himself. “There’s a legend,” he began, “hundreds of years old, about a king of the Mordial region named Asotura. His reign was glorious but short—he was killed by an assassin who was never found.

“The king’s body was discovered by his most faithful pokémon friend. And that friend was a kwazai, Esaax. Just like you are.

“Anyway, according to the legend, this kwazai refused to let the king be taken from him, and so he called on his ‘ultimate inner power’—and actually raised Asotura from the dead.

“Now, that was the good news for the king. The bad news was that his people decided they didn’t want his reign to continue. They didn’t exactly like the tale of Asotura’s resurrection, you see. They called it unnatural, and they called him an abomination.

“And the kwazai became demons in their eyes. The ancient Mordialans decided to just slaughter every single kwazai they could find. And they did the same thing to wobbuffet and wynaut, too, in order to make sure the kwazai were exterminated completely. Asotura’s own army even sided with the public. They went against the king’s orders to put an end to the killing and instead joined in the effort to eradicate your species. Doesn’t it just make you sick?”

Esaax neither said nor did a single thing in response. His two eyes and four oculons continued to hold the human in a dead, silent stare.

“Well, anyway…” DeLeo resumed, “as for Asotura himself, there wasn’t anyone around who didn’t want him dead—and permanently this time. But when they stormed the castle, he wasn’t anywhere to be found. Nobody knows how he got away, but he did, and he also managed to rescue a handful of your kind along with himself.

“After he escaped from Mordial, he looked for a place where your people could continue to be protected for generations to come. Apparently one was provided right here in Hoenn by a legendary pokémon—nobody knows which one. Whoever they were, they gave their home to the refugees. Then they used their legendary powers to hide the refugees’ new sanctuary before taking off for who knows where. You might’ve heard of this sanctuary, Esaax. These days, it’s known as Mirage Island.

“Anyway, the people of Asotura’s former kingdom tried to keep his story and the secret of your people’s final evolutionary form from surviving the ages. But their efforts ultimately proved useless, because that story was recorded—supposedly by Asotura himself—on a little something called the Tablet of Asotura. The tablet went missing for centuries, but it was eventually found by a human explorer from Pacifidlog. But before he could go public with his discovery, well… you know what happened fourteen years ago,” he said quietly.

“Luckily one of the explorer’s pokémon bothered to take care of the tablet after the explorer passed away. That pokémon eventually decided he wanted to see kwazai brought back into the world, and ultimately he found us and sought our assistance in that matter. Once he told me the story of Asotura and what his kwazai could do… well, there was no question about it. None. I knew I had to help him.”

DeLeo stepped back up to the containment field. “Do you remember what I told you earlier, Esaax?” he asked. “About why I founded the Hope Institute? This—” He gestured toward Esaax. “—ties into that. We turned you into this for a very special purpose, Esaax. A very, very important one.”

An expression that managed to look sort of hopeful and pained at the same time overtook his features. “I know what you’ve lost, Esaax. I know exactly what you’ve lost,” he said, and his voice cracked audibly on those last six words. “I’ve lost the exact same thing—the exact same people. But we’re gonna bring ’em back, Esaax. You’re gonna bring ’em back, as soon as we’re sure you’re strong enough.”

DeLeo pressed his hands against the wall of energy between him and Esaax once more. “You’ll see,” he half-whispered, sounding slightly crazed, his smile broadening. “It’s gonna be just like the old days. Only better.”

He then turned away from Esaax and made for the room’s exit, striding past Solonn as he went. Solonn had kept silent the entire time that DeLeo had been speaking to Esaax, and DeLeo had actually managed to forget the glalie was there until he walked past him.

As he spoke the voice command that opened the doors before him and then ushered Solonn out of the room ahead of him, part of him noticed that the glalie was wearing an expression that was severe-looking even for those of his kind, his large, luminous, blue eyes burning rather brighter than usual. DeLeo gave these details next to none of his mind, however, too absorbed in thoughts of how close he was to finally accomplishing the goal toward which he’d been striving for more than a decade, a goal that meant more to him than anything in the world.

A few seconds later, however, a low voice from behind him cut into those thoughts.

“How could you do such a thing?” Solonn demanded, sounding both angry and hurt.

DeLeo stopped in his tracks and turned to face the glalie. “…What? What’re you talking about?”

“You did this to him,” Solonn hissed, shaking slightly as he spoke, “without his consent? Without even so much as his awareness that he could be changed in such a way?”

DeLeo blinked at him, bemused. “What… what’s it to you?”

Solonn’s eyes narrowed. “You have no right to inflict a change on someone who doesn’t ask you for it first,” he said, moving even closer to DeLeo, causing the human to take a step back involuntarily. “No one has that right. You disgust me, DeLeo.”

Fear began showing through DeLeo’s expression insofar as it could. “Look… I’m sorry you don’t like how we’ve gone about this whole kwazai business, okay? I really am. But… don’t you understand what we’re trying to do here?” he asked, pained frustration in his voice. “Were you even paying attention to anything I said in there other than the parts you didn’t like? We’re trying to restore lives, Solonn! And let me tell you something: once we’ve restored certain lives in particular, I promise you Esaax is gonna be so happy that he’s not gonna care that he didn’t have a say in whether or not he evolved.”

“And what if this legend you spoke of is just that—just a legend?” Solonn asked. “What if it turns out that you’ve only been chasing a damn rumor all this time? Did you consider that possibility for even a second? Did you consider what it might do to Esaax if he were told that he can bring back people whom he cares about when in reality he can’t, to find out that he was subjected to a change—one that has obviously upset him very much—for nothing?”

DeLeo only stared at him at first. Then his face twisted into as much of an anguished look as it could. “…It’s more than just a legend,” he insisted. “I’m sorry you can’t see that… and I’m not gonna let you get in the way of our proving it!”

With an inhuman speed, DeLeo’s hands swung out toward Solonn and split down the middle with a faint click, each of them simultaneously opening up like the covers of a book and exposing dark, metallic nozzles. In very nearly the same instant, jets of fire came roaring out from the newly-revealed weapons—only to dissipate harmlessly against the dark blue aura their intended target had conjured around himself just in time.

Solonn hissed and recoiled in reaction to the fiery attack despite its futility. His eyes then blazed a bright white, and a crack echoed through the hallway as he unleashed a sheer cold attack on DeLeo.

The strike hit its mark—DeLeo immediately fell unconscious and dropped to the floor. Solonn briefly looked down upon him in lingering disbelief, still shaking in primal fear for a few moments, then called out to his co-workers in the Hope Institute, uncomfortable with the notion of leaving DeLeo unguarded despite the human’s present condition.

He couldn’t undo what DeLeo had done to Esaax. But he was determined to at least see to it that the human paid for it.
 
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Chapter 15

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Chapter 15 – The Swarm


There came a point when Ntairow’s patience for Karo’s speed—or rather his lack thereof—finally ran out. Without warning, she broke away from the party at a very fast run, ignoring the others’ shouted pleas to let them catch up.

Syr might have been able to keep relatively close to Ntairow, but he wouldn’t abandon Karo. Likewise, Syr wouldn’t abandon the search for Esaax, but having lost sight of him, and now separated from Ntairow and her empathic connection to Esaax, Syr could really only hope he was still moving in the right direction.

It was by pure chance that he and Karo eventually managed to reunite with Ntairow, several minutes after she’d left them. She was standing with her back against the front doors of none other than the Hope Institute.

“Of course…” Syr rushed to Ntairow’s side. “He’s here?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she answered.

This is where it started,” Syr said, his eyes wide with realization. “Esaax got sick right after he left from here…” The arbok shook his head in disbelief and shame. “I should’ve figured it out much sooner, but I’d already made scapegoats out of the poor staff at the Haven… Looks like Esaax knew, though. And now he’s come back for answers.”

“Or blood,” Ntairow said grimly.

Syr immediately had to drive out a mental image of a massacre at Esaax’s hands. “…So how long have you been waiting out here?” he asked Ntairow.

“Too long. All the doors are locked, and I couldn’t force any of them open. Esaax opted to take a shortcut through one of the walls, but the hole’s been covered over with ice. And not normal ice, either. I was able to chip away at it somewhat, but it immediately grew back, almost as if it were alive…”

Syr shuddered, feeling his throat go dry. “Living” ice needed no further explanation—he could already imagine the sort of creatures that could be responsible for such things, could all too easily picture their hellishly glowing eyes, their massive teeth…

Nonetheless, he tried to brace himself as well as he could for what he might have to face beyond those doors. You’re doing this for Esaax, he reminded himself.

The arbok studied the doors for a moment. “I think I can help you get in,” he said. He motioned Ntairow out of the way with a jerk of his head, then spat a dark spray of full-strength acid at the metal doors. The attack caused them to soften and deform slightly and give off harsh, stinking fumes, but the poison-type technique failed to burn all the way through.

“I’m sorry,” Syr said, backing away from the doors once more. “It normally eats right through…”

“You’ve actually weakened it well,” Ntairow said. “I could certainly tear it open now if it weren’t for what the lingering acid would do to my hands in the process.”

“The acid won’t bother me.” That was all the warning that Karo gave before plowing into the doors. His large nose punched right through the softened metal, and the rest of him followed.

The others entered after him, careful to avoid the sharp, torn, acid-coated edges of their makeshift entrance. Once they were all in, Ntairow managed an impressed smile at Syr and Karo. “Great job, both of you,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Syr and Karo said, almost in unison.

As the three of them entered the building, Karo turned back briefly to look at the hole that he and his nose had just created. “Wow, that’s even bigger than the last one,” he remarked. “Awesome.”

* * *​

Purposefully, Moriel made her way through the corridors of the Hope Institute. The glalie kept a mindfully quick pace as she moved; she had a fairly important task to carry out.

Their employer apparently wasn’t quite the good guy that he’d made himself out to be. Solonn had told Moriel, as well as the rest of the glalie and the claydol and steelix among them, that DeLeo had tricked one of his clients into evolving, which was against the law in Convergence. As such, someone needed to go and alert the authorities, as well as contact the staff at the Haven so they could come to the victim’s aid.

Moriel had readily volunteered to take care of this matter. Having once been in league with their enemies, she still wasn’t entirely certain that she’d gained the full trust of the other glalie she now associated with, even after she’d fought alongside them. Any help she could provide for any of them was an opportunity she gladly seized.

As she navigated the winding halls of the building, she felt grateful that she’d been working there as long as she had. The Hope Institute’s internal layout could be a bit confusing for newcomers, but by that point, Moriel had memorized it fairly well. It also helped that the building was closed at the moment; it was easier to focus on where she was supposed to be going since it was largely empty.

Then she rounded a corner into a rather large room and found that the Hope Institute wasn’t as empty as she’d thought it was.

Moriel had stumbled upon Ntairow, Karo, and Syr. The former two looked upon her with largely unreadable expressions, but the arbok looked distinctly and increasingly afraid, his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide.

“Whoa, hey!” Moriel exclaimed. “Who are you, and wh—”

She was cut off as first a terrified shout and then a spray of acid escaped the arbok in a moment’s panic. Moriel shrieked in pain as the burning fluid struck her face, and she retaliated immediately and automatically: in an instant, the room was filled with a small army of illusory glalie, and at the same time, three loud cracks rang out in rapid succession.

All three of the sheer cold strikes hit their targets, but only Syr was affected. As he dropped to the floor, unconscious, the swarm of glalie began rushing around in circles around Ntairow and Syr—independently, at varying speeds, with some moving clockwise and others moving counterclockwise.

Then Moriel and her illusory copies all turned toward their targets just long enough to fire ice beams in unison, sending jagged, bright blue bolts of ice-type energy flying in a crisscrossing web around Ntairow, Karo, and the insensible arbok at their feet. Most of them passed inconsequentially through or around the nosepass and the kwazai, but one of them—the real one—struck Karo on the left side of the head, causing him to curse and stagger a bit.

A pale bluish-purple light filled Ntairow’s eyes as she tapped into her psywave technique. The branches of her tail were already fanned out and moving around independently, their oculons trying to pick out the telltales that would distinguish the real, living glalie from the nonliving copies, but something about the glalie was confounding her psychic senses. Unable to pick out her target directly, Ntairow instead spun on one foot, firing a quick volley of psywaves in a circle around her—but succeeding only in causing three illusory glalie to vanish before a protect aura went up around the remaining copies and their maker, foiling the rest of her attacks.

The swarm fired another web of ice beams, hitting Karo once again—Ntairow scowled, wishing she’d been able to tell where the real ice beam had come from so she could have dived in front of it. Using the glalie’s attacks to fuel mirror coat responses—and ultimately to fuel a devastating anguish attack once the kwazai had taken enough of them—seemed like the best hope for taking her out at this point. Psywaves were much slower, much easier to avoid than the instantaneous reactions that her retaliatory attacks were, and for all the help that Karo was providing in the fight, he might as well have been in the same state as Syr.

“Why aren’t you doing anything?” Ntairow demanded of the nosepass.

“I’m trying!” Karo insisted, and he was indeed trying. The trouble was that he had a very limited selection of techniques to use against their adversary, the consequence of his trainer having decided to limit the number of attacks he could learn to a mere four out of a belief that it’d make Karo hone those four to a greater potency and learn to use them more creatively.

Karo might not have minded this so much at the moment if one of the moves he’d been left with had been a nice rock-type attack, preferably one that would simply drop rocks on all of the glalie at once and thus weaken the real one enough to put an end to her double team illusions. His zap cannon was terribly difficult to aim and terribly easy to dodge, and being unable to pick out his actual target in the first place meant he couldn’t use lock-on to overcome those drawbacks.

The only hope he could see lay in his remaining two techniques, one of which he was trying to use not on the glalie but rather on Ntairow, Syr, and himself. Specifically, he was trying to impose a block field around the three of them. Blocking more than one target at the same time was never easy, and the current circumstances weren’t helping matters.

But then he saw Ntairow go completely rigid with a look of alarm, halted right in the middle of unleashing another series of psywaves. Satisfied as he could be that the field was secure around its targets, Karo focused on intensifying it so that it would not only prevent anything from breaking out of it but also prevent anything from breaking in.

A third ice beam came Karo’s way—only to dissipate harmlessly against the force field he’d summoned. Karo felt a spark of pride ignite within him—he’d succeeded. With a faint sense of relief, he let the block field withdraw from him, leaving it clinging to Ntairow and Syr as he unleashed the last of his four techniques.

All at once, the space was filled with blazing light and thunderous noise.
 
Chapter 16

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Chapter 16 – Balance


Syr awoke to a very different scene. From where he was lying, he now had a sideways view of shattered floor tiles illuminated by scattered moonlight, as well as of an irregular hole in the wall through which Ntairow was leaning partway.

There was also a sound in the air that hadn’t been there before: a very faint moaning in an unfamiliar voice. Puzzled, Syr pulled himself up from the floor. A bit of a daze still lingered in the wake of his unconsciousness, making it hard at the moment to guess whom the voice belonged to.

He made his way over to Ntairow to see if she had any clue what its source was. The sound grew louder as he approached her, though not by much. Once he was by her side, he found out exactly whom he was hearing, and the answer snapped him back to full awareness in an instant.

Just on the other side of the ruined wall lay a glalie; Syr could only assume this was the same one who’d knocked him out. Even in her current state—her right horn missing its tip, her ice armor broken off in places, and a small pool of nearly colorless blood at her side that was already turning to pale mist—her presence made him distinctly uncomfortable. His breaths began escaping in worried hisses, and he automatically began moving back away from the broken wall.

Syr shifted his gaze to Ntairow and held it there, the glalie now entirely out of his sight. In the corner of his vision, he noticed a bluish-purple light glowing briefly through the hole in the wall. When it subsided, so did the moaning.

The arbok moved ever so slightly closer to Ntairow as she ducked back out of the hole in the wall. “Did you…?”

“She’s alive,” Ntairow said, which didn’t answer the question Syr had actually had in mind. “But she won’t be giving us any trouble again anytime soon,” she then said, which did. “You have nothing to fear from her now. Although I have to say that you undoubtedly scared her every bit as much as she scared you.”

“Yeah, well…” Syr began irritably, doubting Ntairow’s claim. Then he noticed the gray-and-orange shape lying several feet away from Ntairow, back in the direction they’d come from. “Karo!” he cried. He rushed over to him, ignoring the way the broken floor and scattered debris scraped and dug into his belly—but he stopped in his tracks when he got close enough to see just what sort of condition his friend was in.

He was looking at roughly half of a nosepass.

“Oh God…” Syr whispered.

“It’s all right,” Ntairow assured him. “He’s still alive, and he’s already begun to repair himself.”

Syr just stared for a moment at what was left of Karo, his horror giving way to a strange sort of awe. “He wasn’t kidding…” he said, more to himself than anyone else. Karo had once bragged to Syr that nosepass lived indefinitely if no one or nothing else could kill them, and that killing them wasn’t easy. The nosepass had said that even if he were smashed to pieces, he’d just regenerate. Syr had always just figured that Karo must’ve been exaggerating.

“He said it’s a very slow process, though. Regenerating, I mean,” Syr said, then sighed. “He needs to go to the Haven. They can speed up his repairs with their revives and potions. Otherwise… God, from the look of him, he probably won’t see the next hundred years. At least.”

“He’s perfectly stable for the time being,” Ntairow told him. “The same can’t be said for Esaax.” And with that, she turned away from the broken wall and the glalie beyond it and set off in search of Esaax once more.

Syr didn’t start following her right away. Leaving the glalie behind struck him as a very good idea, but leaving Karo behind didn’t, no matter how indestructible the nosepass claimed he was. Syr took a moment to wrap his tail securely around Karo, then proceeded onward after Ntairow. This time he noticed and dodged every bit of debris in his path, trying not to think too hard about where some of it had come from.

His efforts were in vain, however, foiled by two things in particular. One, he was literally carrying Karo’s weight, aware that there was less of it than there should be. Two, he still wasn’t entirely certain what had left Karo in such a state in the first place. “What did this to him, anyway?” he asked.

A couple of Ntairow’s tail branches curled toward Syr. She stopped and turned around, then sighed and closed the distance between her and the arbok; dragging Karo along had prevented Syr from catching up to her.

“He used an explosion,” Ntairow answered him as she went over to take hold of Karo. She saw a look of astonishment on Syr’s face—the arbok had craned his neck to watch what she’d been doing—and gave him a nod that silently said, It’s true, as well as a forward wave of one hand that silently said, Now let’s move along, please.

Syr followed her unspoken directions, slithering somewhat faster now that Ntairow was helping him carry the unconscious nosepass, still in disbelief at what he’d just been told. “God… what possessed him to resort to that?” he asked as they left the room for the corridor beyond.

“That glalie seemed to have a particular talent for using double team,” Ntairow said. “There were just too many copies, and they were indistinguishable from their maker. He decided to just take them all out at once, I suppose.” She smiled very faintly. “I do have to commend him for managing to do that—or to come close, anyway—without taking us out, as well. I’m still not completely sure how he did it.”

“I’m not sure either, but wow…” Syr said. I have got to make this up to him someday, he thought.

Meanwhile, something else Ntairow had said was striking him as a little odd. “…You said you couldn’t tell the real one from the copies, right?” he asked her.

“Yes, that’s right. I think her dark subtype may have been overdeveloped; it was deflecting my psychic perception.”

“Oh,” Syr said at first. Then, “Wait, what do you mean, ‘subtype’?”

“An elemental factor that’s strong enough to have an effect on its owner but not strong enough to figure into their actual type. All pokémon have—”

She fell abruptly silent, and Syr didn’t wonder why—he could see the reason for himself. It was another glalie encounter, but this time there were four of them, all of whom looked at least somewhat alarmed. On top of that, Solonn was one of those four; Syr immediately wished he’d been able to go through life without learning that glalie could get that large. There was also a claydol in the glalie’s midst, to whom Syr gave almost no real attention despite the creature’s typing; the arbok was aware of almost nothing beyond the glowing blue eyes that were quickly approaching and the frantic pounding of his own heart.

Distantly, he felt the weight he was helping to carry sink to the ground, then saw Ntairow move into his peripheral vision. “Stay put,” she hissed as she swiftly made her way around to stand beside him, “and try to stay calm. Please.”

Syr gave neither a word nor a motion in response. Her words had managed to get through to him over his urges to attack or flee or do something, but while he was managing to keep stock still for the time being, he was sure he could break at any moment.

“What are you people doing here?” one of the glalie demanded as he and the rest of his group came to a stop a few feet away from Ntairow, Syr, and Karo. He shifted slightly to look past Syr, his eyes finding the partially-destroyed nosepass still held in Syr’s coils. “Actually, never mind that. I think we’ve already got our answer,” he said, nodding toward the unconscious rock-type.

“You were responsible for that explosion?” Solonn asked Ntairow and Syr.

“Yes,” Ntairow began to answer evenly, at which Syr immediately threw her a sanity-questioning look, “but we hadn’t intended to. It was all just a misunderstanding. We ran into one of your people unexpectedly; he—” She gestured toward Syr. “—attacked her out of panic; and things just sort of escalated, unfortunately. Don’t worry—she’s still alive, although she does need to get some medical attention soon.”

The glalie who’d spoken first swore at this, and all of the glowing blue eyes that regarded the intruders widened. “Where is she?” he demanded.

Ntairow pointed back toward the room behind her. Two of the glalie rushed off in that direction at once, as did the claydol. “You will need to come along with us,” said one of the remaining glalie, at which Ntairow nodded and gave Syr a nudge, then went back to help carry Karo once more.

Syr felt a tug on the end of his tail, a signal from Ntairow that he needed to get moving. He was anything but enthusiastic about spending more time in the company of that many glalie, but the notion of offending them further by disobeying them scared him even more. Still, it was with considerable reluctance that he turned around and headed back to the site of the explosion; his body tried to fight him the entire way there.

As he and Ntairow carried Karo into the room, with two of the glalie following them, the two who’d gone in ahead of them turned to regard them from the spot by the broken wall where they and the claydol hovered. One of them stayed there with Moriel, while Solonn and the claydol approached the intruders. One of the glalie who’d just come in moved forward past Solonn and the claydol, pausing very briefly to assess Moriel’s condition before heading off toward an exit.

“Why did you come here?” Solonn asked of Ntairow and Syr, his tone heavy.

“Because someone here desperately needs help,” Ntairow said. “I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but there’s a pokémon here who’s been forced to evolve. He’s elementally unstable—he needs a psychic-type of his own kind to serve as a vessel for his excess darkness. Please… you’ve got to give me a chance to try and balance him out. He won’t survive otherwise.”

“Do you mean Esaax?” Solonn asked her.

“Yes, I do. You’ve got to let me see him,” Ntairow said urgently.

“She could still be lying,” the glalie over by the broken wall pointed out.

Solonn sent him a brief glance, then sighed and turned his gaze back toward Ntairow. “Would you consent to a psychic scan in order to prove that you’re telling the truth?”

Ntairow didn’t quite bother to keep herself from scowling. “Will it be quick?”

<Yes,> the claydol assured her, speaking telepathically while what Syr could only assume was their actual voice rattled on incomprehensibly, <and it will be painless.>

“Fine, then,” Ntairow said.

Without hesitation, the claydol moved to hover right in front of her, lowered their head, and closed all but the foremost of their eyes. Soon afterward, <She is completely truthful in her claims,> the claydol confirmed.

“All right, then,” Solonn said quietly. “If you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to where Esaax is being kept.” He made his way back toward the hallway that Ntairow, Syr, and Karo had tried to pass through before. “I hope for his sake that you succeed in saving him,” he said as first Ntairow and Syr—carrying Karo once more—followed him out of the room and then one of the other glalie did likewise. “He’s already been through enough that he didn’t deserve.”

“I hope I succeed, too,” Ntairow said quietly. Syr, still too uncomfortable in the presence of the glalie to speak, only nodded in agreement.

* * *​

Not very far away from his would-be savior, Esaax stirred in his containment field, his eyes widening. Two words, nearly voiceless, escaped on a breath exhaled as if he’d been holding it all his life.

She’s here…”
 

RJR Basimilus

Arceus is nice I suppose...
Location
the Lovely Planet
Partners
  1. arceus-fighting
  2. lurantis
  3. arceus-poison
  4. haxorus
Last time someone died. This time someone lives. That’s a preemptive guess, but I’m fairly confident for once.

12 - A lot of pokemon die

I’m going to ignore any potential irony in my saying that right before the hunting affair. That being said, good job Esaax for returning to the hunter gatherer roots of the Wobbuffet species. He might not really be one per say anymore, but old habits die hard, even if this habit just came into being an hour ago.

Literary juxtaposition or something. So much for Esaax being a healer, so far he’s not very good at it. Impaling people and such. He’s trying though! Alone, he’s no good at stopping himself, but at least he wants to. Esaax has friends to support him! Worry about the murder thing later.

13 - *Law and Order gavel sound*

In a starkly despairing conversation with a dead guy who was alive for all of three paragraphs before, Esaax learns he got the raw end of the deal from the free heroin injection a few chapters back. While generally unsurprising, one would wonder why this new dark force would choose to take the form of a nearby dead Smeargle. I mean, it showed Esaax that it was a Kawaii *_^ too, so why not just lead with that? Melodramatic evil I guess. Just put the whole scene in black and white and you got Sin City.

The darkness can’t be that bad though. The first thing it does when it controls Esaax is to commit grand theft auto. We’ll use that as a starting metric for how bad it can be. The possession part doesn’t count because Esaax let it happen.

So much for search and rescue when everyone sees Esaax speeding away in a car. That, and Karo’s serious voice do lighten the mood a bit (at least I think so, I’m not very cognizant of atmosphere).

Chapter 14 : Previous scenes in the anime would show the character like he had real eyes, so when it was revealed he was a robot, it was kind of an error of internal consistency. But like, if you showed his eyes being that blank, it would clue everyone in right? This is the problem with hidden robots, you either gotta have 22XX realism tech or just assume everyone is too busy looking at their shoes.


A bit of exposition here and there. Ancient kingdoms always cause problems. But problems are not ancient history, because there are present problems too. DeLeo is revealed to be a naruto puppet (or more precisely, robot) which makes sense because if the world ended there is no chance a person with a name like that would survive.

Funny ice ball gets angry at non-consensual change, who would’ve seen that one coming? Those kinds of lines are the best though, ones with contextual and non-contextual meaning. DeLeo commits the sin of promises, with grandiose ideals of a better world coupled with a suspicious lack of detail as to what it actually entails or how it’s accomplished. As usual with these kind of things, everyone else is not on board, even the narration takes a few pot shots with the descriptors. Maybe this kind of stuff would go over better if he explained himself. But then again, that’s what we always say in retrospect. But like, Esaax is still possessed by darkness. Did he get any of that? Might want to say it again.

C15 - Something something african or european Nosepass

Breaking and entering. There’s the concept. Now next time, try not to get in a big fight.

Ch16 - Why have the parts magnetically reattach when you can just regenerate 2 different rocks!

Luckily everyone gets out ok. Psychic types are great.


In an overall sense, the struggle continues. People are revealed to not be people, pokemon are killing other pokemon, and no one’s even worried about that alien stuff from earlier. Priorities first though, Esaax has to deal with being a super predator *and* an evil force. Maybe it’s Xaase (Za-sey). Hopefully his girlfriend can set everything right. If not, then this has been a very special episode of SVU.

The judge granted parole, thanks for asking.

Bits and bobs
Ever wonder if Smeargle just draw the short end of the stick and get a shitty color like brown? Not to diss on brown, but at the very least, the “implication” is there that Smeargle are born with a color for life. Now that would be a branch of plastic surgery, tail color replacement. Platinum blonde or bust renaissance wannabes!

For a king with such a glorious reign, Asotura really must not have had that much goodwill. I can see resurrection being a very scary thing in the world proper, hence why they didn’t crucify a guy twice, but this is pokemon land. At the least, some people could have viewed it as more of a miracle than a curse. In the end though, it’s a tale of yore, and it’s better to deal in absolutes when it comes to ancient history to get the point across without having to address the devil’s advocate. Then you have the bible. How many people do you know that have actually read the whole thing?
 

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Raggy: Dear holy frick I wish you could've heard the noise I made at "kawaii" being substituted for "kwazai". Or the one brought out by DeLeo being called a "naruto puppet". Or the dumbass faces that accompanied each of the noises.

People tend to be super spooked about resurrection/immortality in general, I've found, especially in fiction. There's a number of reasons why this sort of mindset emerges. In the case of Asotura's people, the reaction probably came from superstition more than anything else.

Smeargle who produce brown ink and are mocked for it frost cakes with their tails out of revenge and get a dark sense of satisfaction out of people's reaction to the horrible paint taste, probably.

Thanks lots for the read 'n' reply! :D
 

WildBoots

Don’t underestimate seeds.
Pronouns
She/Her
Partners
  1. moka-mark
  2. solrock
Hey Sike -- responding to chapter 1!

You don't see wobuffet as a protagonist too often! Will be interesting to see what you do with his unique skillset.

The dream sequence at the beginning tripped me up. I'm okay with being unclear about what happened to the trainer, but I wanted to be less confused about what was literally happening. At this point, I don't know whether Esaax was imagining himself as her because of the dream or because that was the human-pokemon bond they had -- was that the same way he'd experienced it in life or not? I think getting more clear (and more in Esaax's body) would amp up the emotional impact too. Does he think she's dead or only sleeping? Is he worried or something else? Can't quite tell.

Something sky-blue appeared over the pale hand—his own, much simpler, fused hand, surrounded by a soft, multicolored glow. He looked into her eyes, though he knew he didn’t need to
Like, I thought this was literally the sky on first read.

The interactions with Teresa the chansey gave me pause in a couple places too. Felt like a violation of patient privacy to tell Esaax that a relicanth was currently being seen. And I was fine with the idea that Madeline the Mr. Mime has a crush, but I didn't like the implication that she'd been left alone with him to... feel him up? Also didn't feel professional, which took away some of the atmosphere that this is a medical facility of some kind.

I can't tell how long he's been there or what's being healed -- body, mind, or both? -- but it's an unusual place to start and an unusual setup. Esaax doesn't seem too upset right now about the loss of his trainer or about the prospect of rejoining the world -- will be interesting to see what does rattle him and what that looks like.

Some nitpicks:

He lay down upon a cold, wet patch of grass, though it may as well have been a bed fit for a queen.
Suggestion: The grass was cold and wet, but he was as grateful to lay down in as if it were a bed made for a queen. (And maybe even--) He had never been so tired.

“Still working out, I see. Bet we’ll fill this place twice over after you get out with all the women you’ll drive crazy, you handsome blue devil.”
Long sentence here and a little tricky to follow. Could just be, "Still working out, I see. You'll drive all the women out there crazy, you handsome blue devil.”

feeling awfully puzzled for someone who was supposed to have achieved clarity at last.
What unclear about what the clarity was. Might be that I don't know what state he was in before.
 

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
OldschoolJohto: I think I meant the dream to be screwy and detached in general, but... maybe not to that extent. Whoops! The blurring of perspectives between Esaax and his trainer was a result of involuntary psychic shenanigans on his part--which, in retrospect, might have been clearer had I not insisted, for whatever reason, on waiting until after he woke up to actually bother mentioning what he is (and, by extension, why he'd be experiencing anything psychic and why he'd have blue hands).

Teresa gives me pause, too, absolutely. There are certainly real-world analogs out there--people who turn a blind (or worse, approving) eye to co-workers' inappropriate behavior, but that doesn't make it less unpleasant to read about. (If anything, it makes it even moreso.) It's possible that I originally intended for there to be something psychic in the mix, something of Madeline's doing, as an explanation for why Teresa puts up with said mime being a creep--but even that wouldn't explain the confidentiality breach re: the relicanth. All that's certain in the end is that Teresa's not altogether a great person.

Madeline makes me cringe, as well. Like, even more than she did when I wrote her, as a matter of fact.

The good news: some of the questions about Esaax's condition do get answered down the road, at least, though some of those take their dear sweet time about it.

Thanks lots for the read 'n' reply! :D
 

windskull

Bidoof Fan
Staff
Partners
  1. sneasel-nip
  2. bidoof
  3. absol
  4. kirlia
  5. windskull-bidoof
  6. little-guy-windskull
  7. purugly
  8. mawile
Hey there! Only taking a look at chapter 1 for the moment, but what you have so far intrigues me, so hopefully I'll be back sooner rather than later.

Your opening sets up a lot of intrigue, in a way that makes me wonder just what the heck happened. I can safely make the assumption that someone, likely Essax's trainer, died and that Essax has some sort of trauma due to the event, but the details are still hazy for me. Guess I'll find out later. It definitely feels intentionally hazy.

Also, very much enjoying the choice of protag. I don't think I've seen wobbuffet used before, and it was really amusing imagining a wobuffet getting buff. There was also the entire interaction with Madeline. Can't blame him for being uncomfortable lol.

I do want to point out a typo.

As he got to his feet, the lights came on slowly, gently, a feature for which he was quite grateful. It allowed eyes like his, accustomed to near-total darkness, to more gracefully adjust to the brightness on the other side of the door, which would only open the light-adjustment process was finished.
Missing a word between "open" and "the"

Anyways, the only critique I have about this chapter is, well, that it ended! It felt just a wee bit abrupt. But on the other hand, I guess it feels more like a chapter I'd read out of a book instead of something I read out of a fanfic, if that makes sense? It ends sooner than I usually expect chapters in something serialized like fics usually are. Just something minor that caught my attention.

Anyways, overall you've got an interesting hook, and hopefully I'll have time to look back again soon.
 

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
windskull: It may never cease to amaze (and amuse) me, how there'll be words that I fully intended to type that just did not materialize. And how I can reread the affected passages many, many times yet completely fail to see the missing words. Or rather, fail to not see them. I think a lot of brains like to fill in blanks when it comes to these things. They're like, "Relax, eyes. I got this." Great for reading. Not so great for proofreading, heh.

This one's definitely got short chapters in general. To what extent that works, I can't say, and is probably wholly subjective anyhow, but yeah. My third chapterfic (which has yet to be posted here and won't be for quite a while) has shorter chapters, too, but Communication's might be a bit meatier.

Thanks lots for the read 'n' reply! :D
 
Chapter 17

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Chapter 17 – Lifeforce


It was like resurrection.

His spirit rose up from the depths of the nothingness that had been occupying him. His voice rose, as well, in a crescendo that kept growing with each repetition of the truth that had brought him back to his senses:

“She’s here! She’s here!”

She was here. Even after all these years, to his great surprise and even greater delight, she still remembered him… and, he hoped, still loved him. And at long last, she was back in his life. Any moment now, she might enter the room where he was being held, rescue him, and take him back into her embrace…

You fool.

The hollow voice droned from deep within his mind. Its strength and the way that it addressed Esaax so directly, completely unbidden, made its true nature horribly clear to Esaax. The cold and empty voice that had just spoken to him represented none other than the warped and malignant darkness residing within him. That darkness was no longer merely a part of him—they’d become a separate entity lurking within him, a parasite trying to take his life for their own.

Your senses lie. Your joy is an illusion.

That’s not true! Esaax argued internally. He felt and recognized the distinct psychic signature of Ntairow’s presence and couldn’t deny that he did. What that signature represented had changed, but who it signified was unmistakable.

You delude yourself. You will not have her.

You’re wrong! Esaax said, silently and firmly. She’s here for me—

But she will not stay. She abandoned you before and will only abandon you again. Forget her.

“No!” Esaax shouted, speaking aloud now. “She’ll be here soon, and we will be together forever. She’s gonna save me!”

No one will save you. Nothing is left for you. Forget her. Forget yourself.

No! You’re wrong!” Esaax shouted, trying to defy and destroy the darkness through sheer force of will.

But the living darkness wouldn’t be denied. They literally rose to the surface, manifesting in thin streaks of black energy that snaked over his skin like dark vines. The streaks crept out over his entire body and then merged together, leaving every square inch of his skin emitting the black glow of the parasitic darkness.

I am this body now, not you, they said. Your time is long past over. Give up.

“No, I refuse to!”

The darkness erupted into a seething, black aura around Esaax. Give up, they pressed.

I REFUSE!”

As the kwazai’s defiant roar faded, the darkness found themself possessed of a cold, absolute hatred, a feeling stronger than anything they’d felt in their hours-long existence. In the face of what seemed like real hope for salvation, Esaax had become too strong to simply erase—this wouldn’t do, the darkness determined with a vicious resolve.

There will be no hope, no strength, no life for you, they declared hatefully. I will make you accept this. I will make you pray for oblivion!

The darkness unleashed a massive, hollow roar within Esaax’s head. They seemed to retreat back into the corners of his mind, the dark aura vanishing and revealing his blue skin once more—but then the darkness sent a bolt of their power shooting down Esaax’s spine. There was a burst of pain in the end of his tail, temporarily distorting the perception of his oculons.

A split-second later, there was a bright, orange flash that shocked Esaax out of breath and onto his knees.

* * *​

As Syr slithered along behind Solonn, trying very hard but with little success not to think about just what he was following, he felt something pull sharply on his tail and heard a loud thud. He looked back and saw that Ntairow had dropped Karo and gone totally rigid.

“What is it?” Syr asked.

“Esaax,” Ntairow said, pain and fear both present in her tone. “He’s returned to my perception—and he’s in pain…”

What? How bad is it?” Syr demanded worriedly.

“It’s horrible… Dear Night, it’s like his own body is rejecting him…”

“We’re almost there,” Solonn tried to assure her from where he now hovered in place, but his tone and the look on his face suggested that he’d become fairly worried himself.

His assurance was unnecessary, however—no sooner had he spoken than Ntairow rushed out in front of him, staggering slightly and clutching her head in pain but still managing to move fairly quickly, using her fully restored perception of Esaax to guide her.

Now that Ntairow was no longer helping him carry Karo, Syr couldn’t hope to keep up with her. Still, he tried, not wanting at all to be left behind with the glalie—but before he could move an inch, he felt something lift the nosepass in his grip off the ground. He looked back and saw Karo rising on a pillar of ice, which then deposited him on top of a glalie’s head, with the end of Syr’s tail still wrapped around the unconscious nosepass.

With most of his body now off the ground, Syr was forced to either try to convince the glalie to put Karo back down or else release his own hold on him. The former hardly felt like an option, however; the glalie simply intimidated him too much for him to challenge what she’d done… and besides which, underneath it all, he did recognize that she was sincerely trying to help. As much as he would have preferred not to need the help of any of her kind, he fell short of ingratitude.

“…Thanks,” he managed, his voice coming out as little more than a squeak.

“No problem,” the glalie said, securing the nosepass to her head with ice as she spoke, and then she took off after Solonn and Ntairow. Syr hastened to follow her, still not altogether comfortable with the notion of leaving Karo unsupervised with one of them and spurred on further still by the sound of Ntairow screaming.

Soon, they caught up with Ntairow and Solonn, who’d just halted before a large pair of metal doors, the former leaning against the latter. Ntairow was silent now but grimacing in pain, one hand still holding her head.

Once everyone had come to a stop there, “This is Sylvester DeLeo, requesting entry,” Solonn said, at which Syr’s eyes widened in surprise—not because of what the glalie had said but how he’d said it. He’d sounded nothing like he had before; the voice he’d just used was quite a bit higher. But what really caught Syr’s attention was that Solonn had just spoken in a human language—some corner of his mind fleetingly wondered if Solonn was just mimicking the words or if, like someone whom Syr had known so many years ago, this glalie actually spoke the language fluently.

“Voice recognition confirmed,” said a computerized voice from an unseen source. “Please state password.”

“Password,” Solonn responded, still using the higher voice and the human language.

“Password valid,” said the computerized voice. “Access granted.”

The doors slid open, and with the unconscious nosepass in tow, the four entered a moderately-sized room that was more brightly lit than the rest of the Hope Institute. The scene now surrounding them was like a gallery of pre- and post-Extinction high technology.

And in the center of it all was Esaax, slumped in his containment field. He was all too plainly suffering, panting and groaning with his tail lashing and his hands gripping his head.

Ntairow rushed to him at once, pressing all four of her hands against the wall of energy as tears streamed from her widened eyes. The need to help this creature whose agony she shared burned within her, made all the more urgent and painful by the fact that this was the suffering of someone she loved. Right before her eyes, not to mention her more potent senses, Esaax was careening toward a highly volatile state. He direly needed her… but she couldn’t get to him.

“How do you get him out of this thing?” she demanded.

“Over here!” Solonn called, and he led Ntairow over to a control panel.

“I don’t know how to use this!” Ntairow told him.

“It’s all right; I do. Just do exactly as I tell you, and we’ll have him right out in no time,” Solonn said.

Syr very briefly watched Ntairow and Solonn work, hoping they would indeed free Esaax as quickly as Solonn had claimed. He then looked back at Esaax with some difficulty, swallowing against a lump in his throat. “You’re… you’re going to be all right,” he told Esaax as consolingly as he could manage, moving closer to the kwazai as he spoke.

Esaax shook his head and raised a hand as if in warning, at which Syr halted. The kwazai’s jaws parted as though he were about to say something, but his voice was cut off before he could form a single word when a burst of searing, orange light suddenly blazed into being around him. He then cried out yet again as a enormous spasm tore through his body.

At that same instant, Ntairow convulsed likewise, echoing Esaax’s scream in her empathy. She staggered, and Solonn moved quickly to break her fall.

“Dear Holy Night, he’s tearing himself apart!” Ntairow cried.

“You’re almost finished!” Solonn assured her.

Sure enough, the containment field soon vanished with a faint humming sound. Ntairow ran back to Esaax, dropping into something like a kneeling position and throwing all of her arms around him, crying against his chest as she embraced the newly-freed kwazai tightly.

Esaax lowered his forehead against hers and held it there as steadily as he could given that he was now shaking uncontrollably, his own tears sliding swiftly down his muzzle and falling to the floor. “Ntairow…” he said, his voice hoarse and quavering. “I’m—” He broke off briefly, giving another pained groan, at which Ntairow embraced him even tighter. “I’m glad you’re here. I’d… given up on us ever finding each other again,” he admitted, closing his eyes in shame.

“I should’ve found you sooner…” Ntairow lamented in a pained voice, nearly whispering. “Dear Night, look at you… you’re so broken…” Esaax had gone into autoempathic crisis. That was something she couldn’t repair—it was something no one could repair until he was elementally stabilized. He just had so terribly little time…

“I don’t think you can fix me now,” Esaax said quietly. “I’m… I’m not gonna make it.”

“No,” Ntairow said fiercely, resolutely. “You will survive this… and your son will finally get to know the father he’s been missing all these years.”

Esaax just stared at Ntairow for a moment, his eyes filled with disbelief and wonder. Then a smile spread along his muzzle in spite of his pain. “…You’re serious?”

Ntairow nodded. “He is called Zerzekai. And unless I’m mistaken, he’s just begun his life as a wobbuffet,” she informed Esaax proudly.

Esaax managed a faint but joyous laugh, then wrapped his arms around Ntairow, squeezing her as hard as his rapidly-waning strength would allow.

Though Esaax’s body was growing steadily weaker, his spirit seemed to have grown much stronger. Ntairow knew that made this an especially good time to try and help him shed his excess darkness. Concentrating deeply, she tapped into her psychic element, aggravating and intensifying its susceptibility to psybane in the hopes of drawing the darkness in like a gravitational force.

She immediately found that something wasn’t right. Esaax had a massive surplus of dark energy, one that seemed to be growing by the second, but the excess of elemental power wasn’t responding correctly. Instead of spilling over into the receptive psychic who’d opened her element so readily, the darkness remained stubbornly in place, continuing to build up inside of Esaax.

Then the darkness chose to respond in their own way.

With no warning, a black aura flared around Esaax. In virtually the same instant, under the control of the darkness, Esaax roared in a voice as vast and hollow as the depths of space and fired a reflux attack at Ntairow. Her aura immediately flashed bright pink in an involuntary and futile mirror coat response as she collapsed, scattered black patches forming on her skin as she hit the ground.

The recoil from the reflux blast was enormous and instantaneous, and as it struck Esaax, he was simultaneously assaulted from within by a massive autoempathic shock. The dark aura that surrounded him then suddenly tore free and took to the air with a hollow-sounding howl, revealing an erratically-flashing, orange counter aura around the now screaming kwazai they’d left behind.

An ice beam and a volley of poison sting needles were launched in an attempt to arrest the shadow’s flight, while the sharp sound of a sheer cold attack fired off with the same intent rang out at the same time. The disembodied darkness evaded all of the attacks effortlessly as they rushed swiftly through the air, destroying equipment and killing the lights as they swept in a circle around the room. They finally smashed into the wall and burned a hole through it and the walls beyond to the outside, where they seemed to dissipate and vanish completely.

With the shroud of living darkness lifted from him, Esaax was left as a regular, ruined kwazai. A final few sparks of orange energy flashed around him, and then the autoempathic attack ceased. Esaax then toppled over onto his side, panting arrhythmically, blood flowing freely from his eyes and mouth.

As if in slow motion, Syr was only just beginning to feel the tears escaping his eyes as he stared at the two kwazai before him. “…Esaax?” he spoke up tentatively, his voice barely coming to his summons. He heard Solonn say something in the background about checking to see if the paramedics had arrived yet, but the words didn’t quite register in Syr’s brain as they might have otherwise. All he could really focus on was the sight of Esaax before him, who gave not a single word in response. “Esaax!” Syr cried out, fearing the worst.

There was a slight movement before Syr’s eyes. Esaax raised his head, albeit just barely. Syr called out to him again, but Esaax seemed not to notice, and the arbok quickly realized why.

Esaax had found Ntairow, and he gave a very faint, pained sound at the sight of her. With an immense effort, he rolled onto his belly and pulled himself up to lie beside her. As he lifted a shaking hand and extended it toward her, he prayed that he had enough lifeforce for what he intended to do.

Esaax laid his hand upon Ntairow’s greater right arm, upon a patch of skin that hadn’t been scorched by the dark attack. A soft, multicolored glow surrounded him, then spread from the point where his hand rested upon her until it radiated from every square inch of her skin, as well.

Syr stared at him with fear, his breath hitching in his chest. He felt a strong urge to rush over to Esaax and stop him—if Esaax succeeded in what he was doing, he’d be giving up some of his lifeforce, and Syr was all too sure that the kwazai had terribly little to spare.

Before Syr could even begin to act on that urge, the light surrounding the two kwazai suddenly grew to such an intensity that he recoiled from it involuntarily, his eyes shutting tight. Unseen by any in attendance, the shared aura swelled into a small, bright dome around Esaax and Ntairow as the lifeforce of the former flowed into the latter. The aura then burst into a cloud of tiny, colorful sparks, which fell in a brief, luminous shower over the two kwazai.

As the last sparks fell, Esaax looked down upon Ntairow, who was now fully restored. He smiled gently and kissed her forehead. Then he lay down next to her and quietly exhaled his last breath.

Ntairow drew a sudden, sharp breath, awake in an instant. She sat up abruptly, then immediately rolled over onto her hands and folded legs, her shoulders heaving as she coughed and sputtered uncontrollably.

Once her body relaxed, she began looking about frantically in confusion. Her eyes fell upon Esaax, who was surrounded now by no colors other than the deep blue of his own shed blood. She instantly recognized what had just happened.

Her cry of sorrow rang out for a very, very long moment.

Meanwhile, Syr could only stare at the scene before him at first. He began to slowly approach the two kwazai as Ntairow’s cry faded out, still dragging Karo behind him. He finally reached them, and for a moment he just looked down at Esaax through blurred vision. Then he looked at Ntairow and saw her burying her face in two of her hands while the other two cradled Esaax’s head, her whole body shaking as she wept.

Without really thinking, Syr released his hold on Karo and draped the end of his tail across Ntairow’s shoulders. She turned to face him, and at first she looked as though she wanted to tell him to go away… but then that expression faded, and she only looked weary and broken. Her head sank, and she extended an arm to embrace Syr, and as the minutes passed, the two of them mourned Esaax without a single word.

* * *​

From the bus, Syr watched street sign after street sign go by, the distance between him and the cemetery closing fast. As many times as he’d gone there since the burial, it still felt strange, far from routine.

Doing nothing at all to help things seem less surreal was what he’d learned about one of the ones responsible for Esaax’s evolution, specifically Sylvester DeLeo. DeLeo was currently being tried for his crimes against the former wobbuffet alone; both the one he’d claimed to have worked with toward bringing about Esaax’s evolution and the strange, dark entity that had detached themself from Esaax had yet to be found—though Syr did have theories as to what had become of them. And if he was right, neither would be a threat to anyone any longer.

DeLeo’s fate had yet to be decided, and under different circumstances, Syr would’ve simply hoped for him to be locked away for a good long while. But after he’d seen the footage of that mechanized human disguise opening up and recognized the meowth within it… Between the genuine pity he’d felt for DeLeo upon learning why he’d made Esaax evolve and the sickening, heartbreaking recognition that DeLeo had betrayed some of the meowth’s best friends, Syr hadn’t been altogether sure what he wanted to befall DeLeo, and still wasn’t. All Syr knew for certain regarding that whole matter was that he might never be able to bring himself to speak to that meowth again.

There was, at least, one of his friends who’d taken a turn for the better in recent times. Karo had recovered swiftly in the wake of his explosion, having been given ample encouragement to heal by the staff at the Haven. Syr had also been informed that the glalie who’d been injured as the result of Karo’s attack had survived and made a full recovery.

Syr had tried for the most part to focus on the things that were going well. More than ever, he felt an obligation to show strength for Jen’s sake, especially with the Hope Institute still closed and the fact that Jen hadn’t reacted well to the news of what DeLeo had done there.

Still, Syr neither could nor truly wanted to pretend the recent sorrows away, even though he couldn’t always give audience to those matters without letting it show. He continued to visit the graves of his fallen friends even though he still tended to return to the bus visibly upset.

The bus arrived its destination, and Syr made his way out. In silence, the arbok went down the street a short distance, crossed the graveyard, and soon reached the place where Esaax had been laid to rest.

Syr coiled there, drawing a deep breath as he looked down upon the plaque before him. There were three names engraved there in unown-script; in addition to marking Esaax’s grave, the plaque also memorialized Faurur and Drasigon, at Syr’s request. This way, he’d reckoned, the family could be together again in this way, at least, if no other.

Not long after he’d arrived at the grave site, he noticed footsteps approaching. Turning toward their source, he found a kwazai standing a short distance away—Ntairow, he recognized a beat later—with an unfamiliar wobbuffet at her side.

Ntairow and the wobbuffet had stopped in their tracks the moment Syr had looked up at them, and the former now looked as though she’d decided to leave and come back another time, laying a hand upon the wobbuffet’s shoulder as if to shepherd him off and beginning to turn away herself.

“No, it’s all right,” Syr called out to them. “You don’t have to go… Come on over if you’d like.”

The other two pokémon hesitated to take him up on his offer, but only very briefly. Soon, they were both standing at the arbok’s side. Syr moved aside a bit in order to give them a better view of the grave. Almost as soon as he did, Ntairow knelt down before it, then extended and opened a hand over it, allowing a small, gray stone to fall onto the grass before her. As Ntairow stood once more, the wobbuffet placed a stone upon the grave, as well.

So that’s where they’ve been coming from, Syr thought, having found similar gray rocks lying upon the grave on some of his previous visits. He’d considered clearing them away on a couple of those occasions and was now glad that he hadn’t.

Syr was curious about the ritual he’d just witnessed, but he felt somewhat less than comfortable asking about it somehow. He decided instead to ask another of the questions that had formed in his mind upon the arrival of the other two visitors to this grave.

“Is he…?” he spoke up, nodding toward the wobbuffet, letting the question hang.

“Yes,” Ntairow said, “this is Zerzekai, my son and Esaax’s. Zerzekai, this is… I’m sorry, I never did get your name.”

“Syr,” the arbok supplied. “I’m Syr.”

Ntairow nodded in acknowledgment. “Syr was one of your father’s friends,” she told Zerzekai. Her gaze then shifted back to Syr. “…I would like to thank you for that,” she said to him. “For being there for him when and where you could. I could tell during our time together that you genuinely cared about him and wanted him to be well.”

Syr lowered his head, averting his gaze slightly as he felt tears beginning to sting his eyes. “Yeah,” he said solemnly. “Yeah, I did.” And… and I still do, he added silently, and he meant it. He didn’t know for certain what lay beyond life, if anything… but he hoped that somewhere, in some way, Esaax and everyone else he’d ever cared for and lost were happy and well, with all their troubles left behind forever.

It didn’t ease the pain completely, didn’t quite stop him altogether from wishing they were still with him. But it was some comfort, at least, however small, and as the minutes passed in silence, he hoped that the two who stood sharing those minutes with him had found, or would find, at least some small comfort of their own.


FIN
 

Adamhuarts

Mew specialist
Partners
  1. mew-adam
  2. celebi-shiny
  3. roserade-adam
Okay, so after having not read this fic since I think 2017, I've decided to finally give it a look over again. Due the chapters being relatively short, this will be a review of chapters 1 and 2.

For the first chapter, I want to say I really love how you opened up this story. Normally dream sequences at the start of stories can be a source of ire because they're an overused trope, but I can forgive this story for that since it's practically ancient at this point. The first time you posted this chapter anywhere was probably back when I was four years old or something lol.

But I digress, the out of body experience Esaax got was pretty surreal. I can't imagine what it'd be like to possess someone's consciousness while they die, and how terrifying of an experience that must have been. It's hardly a surprise it scarred him for life really.

The rest of that chapter wasn't all that noteworthy, though one point that piqued my interest a lot was the whole spontaneous extinction of humans. I'm very curious about how that happened and just why it happened. Maybe a large global pandemic occurred. Who knows?

Chapter 2 was also pretty good. We got to meet an old friend of Esaax's and fun things happened. I'm honestly still trying to picture a snorunt driving, and how that will even work. Do they just have long lanky hidden legs not normally seen? Now that will be a mental image to behold.

I also wonder just how far back Esaax and Syr go. How long had they known each other? And how will their dynamic evolve from this point? Given the fact that Esaax is moving in with them, they'll probably have to come to terms with issues and or compromises as a result of that. Then again, they could also get along smoothly with no problem.

In any case, there's very little we are shown about what this story's overarching plot might be, or where it might be leading to. I for one am eager to see that regardless, and I won't have to wait because thankfully it's an already finished story.
 

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Adamhuarts: Yeah, when it all comes down to it, Esaax essentially has a memory of dying, albeit weird sort of vicarious ones. And said memory is distorted by mismatched senses to boot. I kind of had the sense that a lot of people--of numerous species--would not really be equipped to handle that sort of thing comfortably. At the very least, Esaax indeed was not!

I am now picturing a snorunt with long, spindly darkrai legs, meanwhile. It's a magical image and I thank you for it.

Thanks lots for the read 'n' reply, too! :D
 
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Spiteful Murkrow

Busy Writing Stories I Want to Read
Pronouns
He/Him/His
Partners
  1. nidoran-f
  2. druddigon
  3. swellow
  4. quilava-fobbie
  5. sneasel-kate
Heya, so my hitlist this year is basically just going around and trying to give as many people who have given me reviews in the past, and especially the past year reciprocating reviews as possible. Which when you’ve given quite a few for Fledglings for literal years on Serebii without me seeming to recall a situation where I ever shot you one back…
:copyka2~1:


Well, better late than never. So let’s go ahead and try and fix that state of affairs by jumping right into one of your more well-known stories and see where the cards wind up landing afterwards:

Chapter 1

He lay down upon a cold, wet patch of grass, though it may as well have been a bed fit for a queen. It was soft and enveloping, like the sudden drowse that was pleasantly consuming him. He yawned, covering his mouth with his hand—her hand, pale-skinned and branching out into five separate fingers.

This was not his hand. This was not his point of view.

… Wait, am I reading a PMD fic here, or…? Since I could’ve sworn TOoS wasn’t PMD.

Something sky-blue appeared over the pale hand—his own, much simpler, fused hand, surrounded by a soft, multicolored glow. He looked into her eyes, though he knew he didn’t need to. He knew they were closed, knew that their owner slept. On some level, so did he, yet he remained awake. After all, it was only her sleep, which he happened to be experiencing vicariously. A second-hand sensation.

Her last.

Oh, it’s just two Pokémon waking up staring into each other’s eyes. I think.

He recoiled from the sudden, stark vacuum where her lifeforce had been. Part of his own went with it, and the torn edges burned white-hot with pain. Disarray exploded in his mind—his cumbersome nervous system hadn’t unsynched in time, and now he couldn’t tell for certain whether he was living or dead, whether he was himself or the lifeless figure lying before him. Overwhelmed, he staggered backward until something caught under one of his pods and nearly tripped him.

Well it’s not just the protagonist who’s disoriented here, since I admittedly am tripping up a bit trying to make sense of what on earth just happened. Can’t tell if that’s deliberate or not as a design choice.

His perception, all of his many senses, abruptly froze. For a moment, reality returned. Then he saw the object he’d just stepped on—red, white, and round—and the distinction between himself and the friend he’d just lost blurred even further. This poké ball was his—but also hers

… What on earth are these two Pokémon anyways?

The poké ball rattled as he lifted it in his shaking hands. The vestigial joints at his knuckles constricted around it, and with a final, caterwauling scream tearing its way through his throat, both the poké ball and his psyche broke into shards…

Well that’s an opening scene if I ever saw one. I’m not fully sure what just went down there, though I suppose the other scenes will help fill things in. Probably. Maybe.
The crack of the poké ball’s implosion blasted him out of the dream, just as it had every time before. He groaned feebly, wishing it had done so sooner. An ordinary nightmare was bad enough. He didn’t need to suffer it from two different perspectives at the same time.

But now, at least, the dreams really were only dreams, no matter how twisted. The pain wasn’t really present; it was only a shadow of the feeling, somewhere between remembered and imagined, and it was finally confined to those nightmares. For too long, it had followed him into his waking life, too.

Wait, that was a nightmare? I guess it would explain a thing or two about how “acid trip” that whole sequence felt like.

Peace had been hard-won through the efforts of many over years in the Haven. Lazily, still yet to fully awaken, he opened his eyes and let their inner membranes slide back for one last view of his room there. It was a simple, small space, shut away from the outside world and its rude sun, perpetually shadowed in his preferred darkness.

You have my attention there. A ‘Haven’ huh? That certainly sounds different from any canon continuity I’m aware of, so this’ll be interesting to see.

He flexed his spine and his limbs, detaching his jaws in a massive yawn. There was a series of faint snaps as his joints relocated, followed by another sound: the trilling of the door alarm.

As he got to his feet, the lights came on slowly, gently, a feature for which he was quite grateful. It allowed eyes like his, accustomed to near-total darkness, to more gracefully adjust to the brightness on the other side of the door, which would only open once the light-adjustment process was finished.

… Wait, who on earth built this place anyways? Since that sounds like one hell of a digs for a haven to live in.

He’d have personally preferred for the lights to not come on at all, but most of the Haven’s staff were chansey. Their kind had nothing like the night-vision of his own; they required light to be active and able to perform their sometimes critical work. He’d often wondered why they didn’t just employ some nocturnal species to tend to the dark-sighted, but he’d always let the matter slide.

Two words. “Soft. Boiled.” Nobody else can do it anywhere near as well.

At any rate, he could tolerate light rather well for one of his kind, for he was used to it. Living with humans (and the hours those humans kept) for part of his life had caused him to develop diurnal habits. He suspected that he’d probably end up half-blind before his first century and wholly so halfway through his second, but it would be worth it. He’d loved those years he’d spent with the humans, and outside of the occasional nightmare, he could now recall them with more joy than sorrow.

:copyka2~1:


Though I suppose it’d make sense that being forced to live outside natural rhythms would have knock-on effects for Pokémon. Though ‘now recall them with more joy than sorrow’? As in implying this guy no longer lives with humans? I’ll be keeping an eye out there.

The door slid open, and in stepped a chansey, beaming proudly. A nametag clipped to her fur identified her as Teresa. She carried a form attached to a clipboard; somewhat awkwardly, she turned it around so that the paper faced him.

That’s the world’s weirdest-looking Boo there, just saying. Though hey, at least it’s less on the nose than ‘Lucky’.
:loltias:


Wobbuffet, male, the form read in unown-script. Designation: Esaax Evergray. He’d been denying that name and the history that came with it ever since his new life among the humans had begun. But now, in his “second new life”, he embraced it once more.

After all, once one gets over a thing like a spontaneous extinction, a little adolescent heartbreak is nothing…

Well, that would certainly explain the past-tense reference to ‘time with humans’ a little earlier on. Though I knew those “felt like PMD” vibes were coming from somewhere.

He shook his head clear of such thoughts, determined to stay in the present, and returned his attention to the form. His eyes scanned its surface quickly, skimming over several more lines of personal data until he found he was looking for: 4/15/14…

… Wait, what is the full date on their calendar system? Like did they just roll a new one after humans keeled over or crib the epoch they were using at the time?

“Well, this is it!” Teresa said cheerfully, matching Esaax’s thoughts at the moment almost word-for-word. Today, he would leave. Today, at last, he could. “Are you ready for your final tests?” the chansey asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Esaax answered, careful as always to prevent the automatic door from closing on his tail as he followed the chansey out of the room.

… How long ago was this extinction such that they’ve managed to keep the lights on in this place all this time? Since this means either they successfully kept the industrial base humanity left alive humming, or the extinction was recent enough that they’re able to coast off of scavenged spares.

“Now, you do realize this means you’ll have to go see Adn just one last time.”

“I’m not scared of Adn,” the wobbuffet said, and for the most part he wasn’t. A measure of dread snuck into his voice all the same.

Narrator: “He’s absolutely scared of Adn.”

“Never said you were, but still, I know his method isn’t the most comfortable…”

“…But it’s what it takes and you’re gonna do it anyway, so…” Esaax shrugged in mock surrender.

“Right. Anyway,” Teresa said as she led Esaax down the hall, “we’ll be saving him for last, which is fine since we have other things to take care of anyway. We’ll just get you in when he’s finished; he’s with another patient at the moment.”

… Wait, what on earth sort of doctor is Adn anyways such that his patients are afraid of him? .-.

Another door opened to admit the two of them. Therein were all the necessary resources for a basic physical exam, including a living resource: a pokémon who served as Teresa’s assistant—or, more precisely, as her hands. Specifically, this was a mr. mime by the name of Madeline. Her large and agile hands were well-suited for tools and equipment made for the very similar hands of humans, the sort of things for which the tiny, nearly-featureless paws of a chansey tended to be inadequate.

Oh, so no magical anime suction powers like Eevee paws apparently have, huh? :V

“Why, look at you!” Madeline said. “We don’t really need to look him over, do we, Terry? He’s the very incarnation of health right here, I’d say.”

Lol, you’re not getting out of things that easily, Esaax. >:V

She came up to stand before him and studied him with an eyebrow raised and a finger resting on her lips in a way that one might gaze at a work of art. Then she smiled and said, “Still working out, I see. Bet we’ll fill this place twice over after you get out with all the women you’ll drive crazy, you handsome blue devil.”

inb4 it’s not in a figurative sense since Wobbuffet… can be pretty annoying to fight as opponents if you go in unprepared.

Esaax averted his gaze. Flirting and teasing from Madeline wasn’t exactly anything new, but it put an unpleasant taste in his mouth regardless. He sincerely hoped she was just joking around, but if she wasn’t… Esaax tried very, very hard not to think about that possibility.

Oh, so Esaax is just casually
:squirpuke~1:
-ing in his mind right now, huh?

At any rate, her observation was correct—or the part about him working out was, anyway. Esaax had indeed been on a devout physical training regimen for quite some time now. Though Madeline liked to make him out to be some kind of beefcake, such wasn’t the case at all. The effects of his training, though visible, weren’t dramatic. Esaax was no bodybuilder; the point of his training was simply to help him harness and become aware of the strength that he already possessed.

… Wait, what on earth happened to Esaax such that he needs this anyways?

The idea to start him on such a program had originally arisen from the poké ball incident that had inspired so many nightmares. As was common among his kind, Esaax hadn’t known the full magnitude of his own physical strength on account of being unable to use it against another living creature. As such, Esaax had been told that it might do him some good to become conscious of his “idle power”, lest anything else fall victim to it.

Oh, so that’s this story’s explanation for why Wobbuffet are so annoying to fight in-game. Though I wonder if that’s a thing common to Wobbuffet at large or if it’s just Esaax who has problems with this.

He’d agreed to this instantly. All his life, he’d broken things by accident; the chance to learn how to leave his klutzy side in the past was irresistible. On top of that, he’d soon discovered that the workouts also had the benefit of keeping his mind as busy and strong as the rest of him.

I’m not convinced that he’s already over this so soon. This whole setup just screams “lingering problem Esaax is going to have to deal with”.

While he no longer needed the exercise in the therapeutic sense, he still enjoyed it as a hobby. He’d often wondered where he might train once he was released and had ultimately decided on the old human gym down the street, which fighting-types frequented.

Haven is a repurposed human town, isn’t it? Since I see that mention of an ‘old human gym’ there.

He imagined that if he did go there, some machamp or maybe a hitmon of some kind might pick a fight with him—he figured they’d be unable to resist the allure of a psychic they could whale on without fear of eating psybeam. One or another of them would just let loose with the mega punches and seismic tosses, only to have those attacks thrown right back in their face, doubled in power…

Yup, that’s Counter for ya. ^^;

The thought of such a thing was just too funny. Esaax started chuckling aloud, but stopped when something cold pressed itself against his chest. He looked down at the stethoscope for a moment, then met the gaze of the mr. mime who’d put it there.

“Uh… Teresa? Are you okay?” Esaax asked. “You’ve never had to have her do this part before.”

“She insisted,” said the chansey.

Lol, Madeline’s deliberately doing this to try and hit on Esaax, isn’t she? o<o

Madeline just stood there with a smile suggesting that she had more on her mind than anything Esaax’s heart was doing.

Namely getting a big, impish grin as she hears it racing at a pace that would make a Ninjask blush.

“In fact,” Teresa went on, “Madeline asked if she could handle the entire examination herself. And I told her she could.”

Esaax’s mouth opened to protest, but something made his voice die in his throat. All he managed was a sigh. Just get it over with…

Madeline:
bdd.jpg

Esaax: “Look, can we just cut ahead to the part where she’s not dragging this out to hit on me?” >.<

Minutes later, Esaax left the room alongside Teresa, trying not to think about what had just transpired. More than ever, he was grateful that his time at the Haven was nearing an end.

… Wait, where is Esaax going to be going after this anyways? .-.

“…So now what?” he asked, hoping the answer was something other than just waiting around. A distraction sounded like a very good idea right about now.

“Well, you could have your RE test now, or would you rather have something to eat first?”

An easy question. “I think you know.”

“I do,” Teresa said with a chuckle.

That acronym’s going to become important in the future, isn’t it?

The two stopped in their tracks as another chansey stepped into their path from around the corner. “He’s here,” the newcomer said.

“Oh good,” Teresa responded. “Tell him to wait in the cafeteria, okay?” She turned to Esaax. “I forgot to tell you, Esaax. A friend of yours has come to pick you up. You can chat with him over breakfast.”

… I just realized, but where are these two right now anyways? A hallway? Outside on the street/in a courtyard? Since I don’t think that the prose really makes it explicit at the moment.

The news took a second to click. “Wait, really? Who?”

“Go and find out for yourself! I’m going to check up on Adn again and see if he’s anywhere near ready. See you later!”

Esaax watched Teresa waddle off, then made his way to the cafeteria, feeling awfully puzzled for someone who was supposed to have achieved clarity at last.

Translation: “Esaax hasn’t achieved clarity yet.”

Alright, so it admittedly took me a while to figure out what was going on since that first scene really threw me into a loop, but if what I think I read just went down, then I can already tell that this is going to be a story very unlike others that I’ve read before in the past and I’m all here for it.

To start out with the strengths, but kudos on rolling Esaax as a Wobbuffet. It’s a really rare species casting to the point where I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a Wobbuffet protagonist that wasn’t TR’s before but you seem to have gotten some decent mileage from it. You did a good job emphasizing that Esaax, while relatable, isn’t human and accordingly has certain mannerisms and biological quirks that wouldn’t occur to humans such as his whole spiel. It’s a nice Xenofiction angle that tends to get glossed in Pokémon fiction on both sides of the trainerverse vs. PMD divide, so it’s nice to see you not only taking it head-on, but in a way that feels both imaginative while like it makes sense for the sort of Pokémon Esaax is.

I also liked how there were tantalizing hints of a bigger world which has had some things™ happen to it from that casual mention of there being an abrupt extinction of humans. I’ve always been a sucker for worldbuilding, and you sure have my interest for where things are going since Pokémon attempting to live to some extent like humans as we would know it in modern life is a rare bird in this fandom. Especially since I’m really curious as to how long ago all of this was and how on earth everyone has been managing to keep the lights on in the Haven in the wake of humans abruptly being gone.

As for cons, I honestly don’t have too many to gripe about. My main one is that it took a while to figure out what on earth was going on from the first scene with the nightmare. Though that might have very well been the point since we’re seeing things through a lens that isn’t human, and hey, it is a nightmare. Those are always a bit trippy. Beyond that, there were a couple of moments that could’ve used a little more description, with the very last scene being the main moment that came to mind as one where things felt a bit bare. That said, it felt more like individual spots had this issue, and it wasn’t serious or recurring enough for me to see it as a more systemic issue with the chapter.

I honestly feel kinda guilty for not having read this story back when it was being released on Serebii, let alone before you moved on from writing in general. Since from what I can see, it’s really different from most other Pokémon stories and seems to have a lot of imagination behind trying to depict how Esaax and Pokémon writ large tick. Though I suppose remedying that late is better than never. I’ll be keeping an eye on this story @Sike Saner , and if I can help it, I’ll be back to review more of it later on in RB4.
 
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Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Spiteful Murkrow: Omg hi! Always a fun little thrill to get a reply.

Yep, the nightmare sequence is meant to be a bit boggly! It's a dream, after all, which can be screwy enough without being the product of a psychic brain. And since it was the product of a psychic brain, I got to mess around with the perspective in a way that... probably would have been possible regardless. But would it have occurred to me to be that particular kind of boggly otherwise, that's the question.

The current in-universe calendar (or the one that a significant number people in the part of the world most relevant to the story tends to use, anyway) does indeed have the extinction of humanity as its starting point. Though not necessarily to the precise day, I'd imagine...

At this point in the story, the characters are in a hospital of sorts. Esaax has been residing there for quite some time--more about that in chapters to come.

I freaking love the reactions to the quoted bits, especially here:
Oh, so Esaax is just casually
:squirpuke~1:
-ing in his mind right now, huh?
because this is 1000% accurate, both for Esaax and for myself. Madeline is unironically just the worst.

Your review made me smile like a doofus and just made my evening in general. Thanks lots! :quag:
 
Partners
  1. skiddo-steplively
  2. skiddo-px2
  3. skiddo-px3
  4. skiddo-iametrine
  5. skiddo-coolshades
  6. skiddo-rudolph
  7. skiddo-sleepytime
  8. snowskiddo
  9. skiddotina
  10. skiddengo
  11. skiddoyena
God, how long have I been meaning to get around to reading these? Maybe since the time Communication was still being written/initially posted???? Ack. I only know bits and pieces about your overall work, something something the end of the world and so on, no big deal I'm sure, but it'll be nice to finally sort out what happens were and get some proper context! Awesome post-apocalyptic poké-POV less goooooo

Ah, a very visceral, unusual dream sequence, raises a lot of questions. I know from general chat osmosis that this is a wobbuffet, and it's interesting to start grounded in a perspective where, for example, a fused hand is normal while the five-fingered one is different.

I assume "she" is a human? Possibly a trainer? (His trainer? Would explain the source of the confusion between "his" ball and "also hers".)

Wobb gotta have that darkness and ease into the light. "Door alarm" (presumably being a sound just to let him know it's time for the door to open, on some kind of schedule?) sounds like something I'd associate with a prison or some other kind of scary-sounding institution, though, not so much a "haven"! I wonder what this place will really end up being like.

Wobbuffet, male, the form read in unown-script. Designation: Esaax Evergray. He’d been denying that name and the history that came with it ever since his new life among the humans had begun. But now, in his “second new life”, he embraced it once more.

After all, once one gets over a thing like a spontaneous extinction, a little adolescent heartbreak is nothing…

:eyes: Ohoho, looking forward to learning more about both this "history" and the spontaneous extinction of the humans. I guess I was wondering why the human in the dream just seemed to die suddenly, with no obvious evidence of cause of death that Esaax made note of—could be plenty of other reasons for that, his dream-focus understandably being elsewhere, but just stopping with no apparent reason would make sense.

(Also, I'm curious whether unown-script was something pokémon could always use to communicate, or whether this is something that happened post-extinction?)

Oh, dear, Madeline. On the one hand it's nice to see some pokémon that commonly get mocked for being dorky and weird get some flirting in! On the other, not so nice when that flirting (and the kind of contact that comes with medical eval, eep) is entirely unwanted. :( Teresa seems kind but it'd be nicer if she could maybe take a hint and not okay this sort of thing!

Esaax watched Teresa waddle off, then made his way to the cafeteria, feeling awfully puzzled for someone who was supposed to have achieved clarity at last.

Clarity at last, hm. This does seem to be some manner of healthcare facility, and I guess one that focuses on mental health since it seems like Esaax has been primarily suffering from these post-extinction nightmares? Seems like he's been treated reasonably well from what we've seen so far, aside from Madeline being too pushy and whatever Adn's deal is. ...

“Syr? What in the world are you doing way out here?” Esaax rose and gave his old friend a massive hug as the arbok came to a stop beside the table. A bowl of oatmeal seemed to fall out of thin air, spilling all over Syr’s chest. Esaax had been balancing it on his head and had forgotten about it. “Oops…”

Syr! I am vaguely aware that he's the protagonist of The Worldslayers, so it's interesting to see him appearing this early. (...early? I have no idea of the chronological order of these stories, lol.)

I feel like I remember having glimpsed somewhere that these are actually Team Rocket's pokémon??? So presumably Esaax is Jessie's wobbuffet and Syr her old arbok. Which would make the deceased person Esaax has nightmares about... ohoho. This ought to be a really fun angle, if that's the case. For all that they were a bunch of incompetent "evil" goofballs all too easy to make fun of, Jessie and especially James really were good to their pokémon, at least for the most part. Seeing how their pokémon dealt with their loss, maybe learning a bit more about their opinions of what they'd done in the past...

(Granted, this may have been a revelation intended for later in the fic/a different fic and thus I was inadvertently spoiled however long ago that was, whoops! I might also be completely incorrect/confusing this with something, in which case lol. Feel free to point and laugh, I'll be doing it as well!)

Uh, anyway, don't worry, Syr, I'm sure hot oatmeal is great for the scales, helps with molting or something. Probably.

Neat that Syr adopted a snorunt! I wonder how common adoption is in general around here/after the extinction event. Thinking about it, I wonder if it'd be more likely for formerly trained pokémon to be open to adopting other species; they'd be a lot more used to living in mixed groups, after all. Maybe not relevant at all, idk! Just my usual train-of-thought review rambling, ig.

“He’s in the shade, Esaax. It’s his car; he drives it, and he gets to decide where to park it.”

A snorunt driving a car. No, nothing funny about that image… With a faint snicker, Esaax turned away from the topic of Jen and back to his gluttony.

Nope, nothing funny at all! What's also definitely not funny is the implication that somehow an arbok driving the car would have made more sense. Not laughing about that even a tiny bit. Nope.

Anyway, a good bit of fun banter between friends! The bit about Esaax moving in seemed a bit fast, but that probably just speaks to how close their relationship is—or at least, assume it is, given that it's been a while and I'd be surprised if no tension ever came of that gap in time.

“We need to make sure his retaliatory abilities are in good shape. To do this, they must be triggered. That’s where you’ll come in,” the chansey said.

c'mon, syr, do your man esaax a solid and get counterpunched. syr how will he dunk on the machamp at the gym if he's in crisis, syr. help ur frend it's fine

“Autoempathic crisis is a vicious cycle caused by damage to a wobbuffet’s tail—or more specifically, to the pseudobrain in the tail, which is the source of their ability to use retaliatory attacks,” Teresa began to explain. “In crisis, the pseudobrain fails to distinguish pain with an internal cause from pain caused by an attacking enemy. It retaliates, involuntarily, by inflicting twice the pain on its source as usual—but with the source being the wobbuffet itself, it only creates a new, greater pain that it must also counter. The cycle continues repeating, doubling the pain again and again, until the agony reaches a level that the wobbuffet’s body just can’t bear any longer.

aww yeah, git that gud wobbuffet worldbuilding (also known as wobbuilding) in there. Poor Esaax, though...

“Yikes,” Teresa said, grimacing. “Well, anyway… the damage to his RE centers can never be fully repaired. He’ll never be entirely out of the woods. We may be forced to… well, to remove his tail if it gets out of hand again. So hopefully you see why it’s important that we’re made aware of any continuing problems he might have—we need to be able to take care of them before they get a chance to blow up in his face again. Will you help us?”

Well, I'm sure that won't be relevant again!

It does sound like this is a condition that needs continued management, though. So I guess Esaax won't be saying goodbye to the Haven entirely; he's just stable enough that he can reside elsewhere but will probably need to come in for checkups occasionally?

“What the…” Syr’s voice faltered as he struggled somewhat to pick himself back up off of the ground, panting slightly. “I’m holding back. I swear I’m holding back.”

“I’m sure you are, but you’re still hittting a psychic pokémon with a dark attack,” Teresa said. “Now bite him again.”

i'm sure that's all it is

There's just something deeply satisfying about pokémon helping each other out by battling, even without humans in the picture. Even if there's clearing something else going on underneath all this :V

Backstory time, woo! likely traumatic backstory time, given Esaax's general aversion to Adn :copyka: Sounds like some painful stuff gets dredged up sometimes...

Esaax lived this way for three years, and he loved it. He would’ve liked things to remain just as they were forever. But in Palmpona, it was inevitable for every pokémon to ultimately become fodder for the town’s trading obsession. Though Esaax didn’t understand Benny’s desire to trade him, he agreed to respect the young human’s wishes, allowing himself to be put up for trade out of gratitude for the kindness Benny had shown him.

Man but that was a weird episode. Such a strange thought, "oh you've been so nice to me for all these years, sure I'll gladly go off to live with some totally new human while you replace me with someone else!"

Thus it was that he accidentally became a member of Team Rocket.

Oh, phew, turns out we find this out pretty quick. I'm not too horribly spoiled (or wrong lol), yay!

The early poké ball aversion is a great way to allude to all the times he broke out of the ball during the anime, heh.

In particular, he sought his pokémon partners from Team Rocket. Ultimately, his quest yielded six no-shows, one rejection, and one successful reunion. That reunion was very promising in the beginning, but ultimately led to tragedy.

Uh-oh :eyes: who was that last one? Which of those lovable Rocketmon dorks did you kill off??? No!

Eventually, he found himself in the city of Convergence. It had once been a fully-integrated community, in which pokémon had lived, worked, and learned in many of the same ways the humans did. Following the Extinction, many of the pokémon there continued to live the lifestyles the humans had taught them, perhaps as an act of remembrance.

Ah, so by "integrated community" that means there were humans actually living alongside them at the time?

A convenient way to get most of Esaax's backstory across! A bit infodumpy, admittedly; I suppose it might've been nice to deliver it more as snippets of his actual experience, maybe a bit more like the dream sequence at the beginning of the story. I guess I'd kind of expected something a bit more like that, given Adn is presumably trying to make him relive that? But if just getting the general highlights/a clearer overview across was more important, I can understand that.

At least this final session was less overall traumatic for Essax than others seem to have been! Always good to acknowledge that feeling sadness and loss is normal, and get an overall clean bill of health for that.

And then out into the wider world at last! Where I'm sure there will be no further complications whatsoever. :V Good job, Esaax!

I'm definitely intrigued so far! Wobbuffet perspective and biology is a fun ride, and I'm eager to see how more and more of that comes into things in the future (including those evolutions :eyes:). And I'm assuming we'll get to learn more about this mysterious sudden "fatal sleep" as we go along, too. Honestly, I think I enjoy that sort of "quiet apocalypse" a great deal more than the more common all-out war or monster plagues or other disasters. It includes the aforementioned mysteriousness, of course, but I think there's a lot of neat stuff to explore when there's no widespread destruction but the world still undergoes such a dramatic and fundamental change. Eagerly looking forward to coming back for more of this!
 

Sike Saner

fundead
Location
*aurorus noise*
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. glalie
Phoenixsong: Hi! :D

Unown-script has been comprehensible to most things with eyes for as long as it's existed. Now, whether it's existed as long as the unown have is another question, and one I don't think I ever actually had an answer for. At some point in the series a character mentions unown having specifically transformed themselves in the name of interspecies communication, but it's in an "it's been said" sort of context. Just hearsay/legend, in other words.

Teresa absolutely should've noticed and done something about Madeline! Especially since the behavior was practically under her invisible-but-present nose. Sometimes characters can be terribly frustrating, especially in hindsight.

There is absolutely nothing whatsoever funny about a snake car. Or, as it would hopefully also be known, a snar.

Chapter 3 of this really is THE infodump chapter to end all infodump chapters. :mewlulz: Or at the very least, iirc it is the most infodumpy of my chapters. (Help, I'm suddenly realizing what a funny word "infodumpy" is.) Can't speak for anyone else's, so I have to keep my grubby mitts off the Most Infodumpy of All Time trophy on principle.

Wobbuffet are so, so very weird, and hell yes have I enjoyed thinking about that weirdness over the years. And the years, and the years. Gold and Silver came out decades ago, holy pants. But yeah, this story offered avenues to play with the weirdness that I definitely had fun with. :D

It was a delight as always to find new feedback on something of my making. Thanks for the smiles! :quag:
 

Spiteful Murkrow

Busy Writing Stories I Want to Read
Pronouns
He/Him/His
Partners
  1. nidoran-f
  2. druddigon
  3. swellow
  4. quilava-fobbie
  5. sneasel-kate
Heya, here to knock out some of my last reviews prior to calling it a wrap for RB4. Though I figured that I’d prioritize The Origin of Storms since I did like my first taste of it quite a bit, and with how many reviews you’ve thrown at my stuff over the years, I figured it was a good enough reason to throw some extras back your way.

Chapter 2

With a large amount of food in tow, Esaax scanned the cafeteria for the mystery visitor but found no sign of him. So he opted to stop at a table, set his tray down, and let this friend—whoever he wascome to him.

Not sure that’s the smartest idea in the world, but let’s see where this is going…

Before long, he spotted an arbok entering the room, at which his mouth fell open in surprise. Is that… he wonderedonly to realize just as quickly that yes, his visitor was exactly who he appeared to be. For the first time that day, Esaax smiled.

Oh wait, this is that Arbok from your signature banner on Serebii, isn’t it?

The arbok had noticed Esaax in the same instant and rushed to greet him without hesitation, failing to notice both the skiploom he ran over in the process and the sound of her squeaky voice cursing him out immediately afterward.

Great situational awareness there, Arbok.
:loltias:


“Syr? What in the world are you doing way out here?” Esaax rose and gave his old friend a massive hug as the arbok came to a stop beside the table. A bowl of oatmeal seemed to fall out of thin air, spilling all over Syr’s chest. Esaax had been balancing it on his head and had forgotten about it. “Oops…”

“Syr” huh? Well that feels like a decently snake-y name. Even if Esaax clearly needs to take a couple courses on how to pull off heartfelt reunions. :V

“That’s okay,” Syr said through gritted teeth, shaking off the hot oatmeal (which thankfully didn’t land on anyone else).

Narrator: “It was not okay for Syr.”

“Man, I haven’t seen you in years,” Esaax said before taking his seat once more and devouring an entire watmel berry in one bite. “Thought I’d never see you again—what are you even doing all the way out here?” he asked again.

>Esaax just inhales a berry that’s 10” in diameter whole

Somehow I should be less surprised that one of his closest friends is a snake with feeding habits like those.

“I live here now,” the arbok replied. “I found a pretty decent place. In fact, you can stay there for a while if you’d like. Would you?”

Well that’s certainly out of the blue from Syr’s end. Though I wonder what the backdrop is for all of this such that Syr doesn’t assume that Esaax has a place in town already.

[ ]

“Don’t really have anywhere else to go, so yeah, sure. Hey, I’ll even move in with you. Wouldn’t want you to be all alone, after all…”

If Esaax had any moment to pause or do anything other than give a reflexive answer, it might have made sense to describe it beforehand, even if in a chunk of inline description. Since something about the phrasing of Esaax’s line feels very abrupt coming right off the heels of Syr’s “hey, wanna move in with me?” offer.

Esaax: “Seriously, Syr, how on earth did you even know-?” .-.
Syr: “Lucky guess, really.”

“But I’m not alone. I adopted a son.”

Somehow Esaax hadn’t seen that one coming. He nearly choked on a brownie. “Okay… so I’m gonna be sharing a house with a giant, venomous serpent and his bitey little snakeling?” he joked.

Narrator: “Syr’s son will not be a bitey little snakeling.”

Syr gave him an odd look. “He’s not a snakeling, he’s a snorunt. His name is Jeneth, but we just call him Jen. And yes, he knows bite, but he doesn’t just randomly use that on people.”

Yup, I had a feeling there. I blame the Glalie in your forum avatar, but I frankly would’ve been more surprised if Syr’s adoptive child was a fellow snakemon.

[ ]

“Snorunt? This is the wrong climate for those.”

Another spot where it’d probably have been nice to get some description of Esaax’s reaction to this, since I assume that he was not expecting to hear that.

“Tell his kind that. Supposedly, a bunch of glalie decided to settle in these parts, though I can’t imagine why they would’ve wanted to, and most of the people I know say that they’ve seen at least one around, too.” He shuddered. “Brrr. I get the creeps just thinking about them…”

Oh there are all sorts of
:copyka2~1:
undertones to this moment, since that has some implications for what on earth brought them to a place that for them is a super-uncomfortable place to settle, and how they’re getting along with the locals at the moment.

“Huh. So where is he?”

“Waiting in the car.”

violet-spit-water-the-incredibles2.gif


They have working cars in this setting?

“You left a baby outside in a car?”

“He’s not a baby. He’s a young man,” Syr said.

Ah yes, quality snake parenting on display there. I’d expect nothing less from creatures that with a small handful of species exceptions, check out from parenthood almost immediately after their eggs hatch.

“Whatever. You still shouldn’t have left an ice-type out there under the sun.”

“He’s in the shade, Esaax. It’s his car; he drives it, and he gets to decide where to park it.”

… Wait, just how old is Jen? Since I had some radically different assumptions about how old he’d be after hearing he was adopted. .-.

A snorunt driving a car. No, nothing funny about that image… With a faint snicker, Esaax turned away from the topic of Jen and back to his gluttony.

So how many phonebooks does Jen have to sit on to see over the dashboard anyways? And do I want to know what his rig to properly turn the steering wheel looks like? ^^;

“You still haven’t explained how someone your size could possibly need to eat a third of his own weight every day,” Syr teased.

“You still haven’t explained how someone your size can only need to eat once a month,” Esaax retorted. “But who cares? What I really wanna know about is—” Esaax saw Teresa heading their way. “Whoops, looks like we’ll have to talk about it later.” He shoved the remainder of his breakfast down his throat at once and waved at the chansey.

The answer to both of these is ‘metabolism’. Since otters IRL have roughly the same dietary needs as Esaax for that exact reason.

“What’s going on?” Syr asked.

“RE test. It’s just this exercise to make sure that some of my more… uh, complicated systems are working all right. They might let you watch if you want.”

Syr: “O… kay? I mean, I guess it can’t hurt-”

“You can do more than just watch,” said a voice from beside Syr.

It’s going to be Madeline, isn’t it?

Syr hadn’t bothered to look and see whom Esaax had waved at; as such, Teresa’s unexpected voice nearly scared him right out of his skin. “Waaugh!” he shouted.

Never mind, it’s Not-Boo there. Not that Madeline coming in and hitting on Esaax in front of Syr wouldn’t have been all sorts of amazing for cringe comedy.

“Daria could seriously use a break,” Teresa told Esaax, unfazed by the arbok’s outburst. “You could participate in her place,” she then added to Syr.

Syr: “Esaax, should I be concerned here?” o_o;
Esaax: “What, Teresa? Nah, she just does that sometimes.”
:joltyshrug~1:


Syr gained a somewhat worried expression, still unsure what the chansey and wobbuffet were actually talking about, let alone if it was anything he should want to have any part of.

Kek, I was joking with that last cutaway gag.

“It’s pretty easy,” Esaax said. “And it doesn’t take long.” He hoped Syr would agree to help out. Otherwise there was no telling who might end up substituting for Daria instead.

If there was any chance Madeline might get called in…

Esaax: “Okay, yeah, you’re coming along, Syr!”
:ohnowen:


Syr sighed. “Well…”

Esaax: “Thank goodness, dodged a bullet there.”
:sweats:


Next thing Syr knew, they’d brought him into a very large and entirely empty room. It didn’t look at all equipped for any sort of medical testing.

I still don’t get it,” he admitted to Teresa. “What are we going to be doing here, exactly?”

Something about this paragraph looks like it’d flow better presented with the description and dialogue separated from each other.

“We need to make sure his retaliatory abilities are in good shape. To do this, they must be triggered. That’s where you’ll come in,” the chansey said.

Syr: “Okay, I’m turning around and leaving now-”
:riOMEGAlu:

Esaax: “Syr, don’t you dare! I am not getting stuck doing these exercises with Madeline of all Pokémon!”
:seviAAAAAAAAAAA:


Syr blinked nervously, nearly certain now that he knew what was being asked of him and hoping he was wrong. Reluctantly, he reached for confirmation. “Esaax, what do I have to do to trigger these… abilities?”

“Attack me.”

Esaax: “Syr, it’s testing retaliatory abilities. What did you think I was going to be retaliating against? Snark?”
:eltywtf:

Syr: “It just didn’t occur to me that there would be medical tests involving attacking others inside a hospital.” ._.;

“Oh no.” The arbok looked to Teresa with a hint of desperation in his eyes. “…Are sure there’s no one else who could do this?”

Syr: “Esaax, I did not sign up to get Countered in the face by you repeatedly! Seriously, have someone who’s a proper tank do this with you!”
:grohno~1:


Teresa sighed. “I’m afraid not,” she told him. She then ushered Syr aside, motioning for him to lean in toward her.

It will smart, yes,” she said, her voice lowered. “But it’s crucial that we do this. It’s to make sure his tail’s all right. He’s sustained some kind of trauma to it before, and very serious complications can arise from a tail injury in his species—and already have, in his case. We do not want him going into crisis again… do you know what that is?”

I’m tripping up a bit over a definitive location to suggest, but IMO this paragraph ought to get broken up into two, since it’s a lot to be reading in one breath, and Teresa is effectively taking a pause between speaking anyways. Might as well lean into it in terms of paragraph structure.

Syr shook his head.

“Autoempathic crisis is a vicious cycle caused by damage to a wobbuffet’s tail—or more specifically, to the pseudobrain in the tail, which is the source of their ability to use retaliatory attacks,” Teresa began to explain. “In crisis, the pseudobrain fails to distinguish pain with an internal cause from pain caused by an attacking enemy. It retaliates, involuntarily, by inflicting twice the pain on its source as usual.”

[ ]

“But with the source being the wobbuffet itself, it only creates a new, greater pain that it must also counter. The cycle continues repeating, doubling the pain again and again, until the agony reaches a level that the wobbuffet’s body just can’t bear any longer.

This feels like a line of dialogue that’s long enough that it might make sense to hack it up and show Syr’s reaction to things, especially if this is all Greek to him and he’s not really understanding what he’s hearing from Teresa there.

“I was there when he suffered his last crisis—it was awful. The convulsions, the screaming… God, how he screamed…” she whispered, sounding lost in the memory for a moment. “He was almost too far gone by the time we managed to stabilize him, and the dosage of painkillers it took to break the cycle nearly killed him in and of itself.”

Syr: “I’m sorry, and why do I want to get involved with this again when I’m not a trained physician by any stretch of the imagination?” ._.;

“My God…” Syr said almost voicelessly, both amazed and alarmed. “You know… just for the record, I think the ‘trauma’ to his tail you mentioned was someone stepping on it,” he said, not naming that someone out of respect for the dearly departed. “More than once. Accidentally,” he added quickly.

It was absolutely not by accident.
:copyka:


I suppose I ought to be more surprised that it was something this small in the grand scheme would mess Esaax up this much, but TOoS has had a sort of comedic undertone to things such that it just fits somehow.

“Yikes,” Teresa said, grimacing. “Well, anyway… the damage to his RE centers can never be fully repaired. He’ll never be entirely out of the woods. We may be forced to… well, to remove his tail if it gets out of hand again. So hopefully you see why it’s important that we’re made aware of any continuing problems he might have—we need to be able to take care of them before they get a chance to blow up in his face again. Will you help us?”

Who on earth stomped Esaax’s tail such that it damaged him that much? An Aggron?
:wtfuckle:


[ ]

“Of course,” Syr said. “Still, I don’t really want to hurt him too much…”

Would recommend throwing in some description on Syr’s part of his reaction to things, especially if he’s in that “okay, fine, I’ll do it” sort of state of mind.

“Just one acid and one bite,” Teresa said. “One special attack and one physical attack so we can gauge both responses.”

“You’re not testing his destiny bond?”

“Luckily for both of you, no.”

Syr: “... Yeah, on second thought, sticking with his Mirror Coat and Counter sounds good to me, too.”
:uhhh:


“Okay… okay, I can do that.” Syr turned toward Esaax and slithered somewhat closer to him, still nervous but knowing that he had to go through with this for Esaax’s sake. He called upon his acid technique, trying to keep it relatively weak so as not to hurt his friend—and by extension, himself—more than was necessary. The acid swiftly filled his mouth, and he spat it in a forceful spray toward Esaax.

dis-gon-b-gud-lawn-chair.gif


Esaax was ready. His tail rose, its oculons collecting a broad spectrum of data about his opponent and any incoming attacks. Focusing hard, he opened the pathways to his retaliatory empathy centers. Doing this so consciously and deliberately was difficult for any wobbuffet, but years of practice had finally allowed him to master this ability.

A bright pink aura flared around him as the acid hit its mark and seared the skin of his left arm, sending an amplified echo of the pain that the poison-type attack had caused back unto the arbok.

Oh, so that’s what ‘RE’ stands for. I do wonder if this paragraph would’ve worked better as two smaller ones, though.

Syr shouted in pain and recoiled, surprised by the force of Esaax’s mirror coat—it seemed he hadn’t weakened his acid attack as much as he’d intended.

Sorry…” he said, at which Esaax made a dismissive gesture despite the pain in his expression.

Oh yeah, that Bite’s going to go well™ after this given that that’s a super-effective move and by nature going to hurt Esaax, and by extension Syr like hell.

Syr: “Actually, on second thought, can we test Esaax’s Counter with a Tackle? Since I’m really starting to think that I should test it with a Tackle-” O.O;
Teresa: “Quit shedding your scales, you’ll be fine, Arbok.” >_>;

“Very good,” Teresa said to Esaax. “Now this time, try to suppress it. Hit him a little harder, Syr,” she added, earning a rather uneasy look from the arbok.

Syr: “... Aren’t you at least going to give me Oran Berries between these? Since this hurts me too, you know?”
Teresa: “What, are you going to ask for a lollipop after this, too? It’s just simple RE exercises, Arbok. Everything is being conducted in a controlled manner and we’ll intervene if anything gets too out of hand.”
:eltywtf:


This time, Esaax braced himself. His efforts to develop his abilities had enhanced them to a point where it took very little to set them off. As he took Syr’s second acid attack in the other arm, he had to fight hard to suppress his body’s urge to retaliate. Luckily for Syr, Esaax succeeded.

“Excellent! Syr, change attacks,” Teresa commanded.

de7.png


Syr lunged forward in a bite attack, his fangs taking on the violet-black glow of dark-type energy as they connected with Esaax’s side—but he made a very conscious effort not to let them sink in too deeply. An orange flash heralded what was nonetheless a very strong counter attack, and the arbok was sent reeling back with a cry.

Well, that was a very fast something there.

Syr: “O-Ow…” @.@

“What the…” Syr’s voice faltered as he struggled somewhat to pick himself back up off of the ground, panting slightly. “I’m holding back. I swear I’m holding back.”

Syr: “We just had to do this with a Super Effective move and not Tackle, huh?” >_>;

“I’m sure you are, but you’re still hitting a psychic pokémon with a dark attack,” Teresa said. “Now bite him again.”

Syr: “I’m sorry, but he literally just-”
:uhhh:

Teresa: “Oi, I don’t have all day for this, Arbok! Just Bite him already!”
:REElithe:


Syr opened his mouth… but then closed it. His brows were drawn together with worry.

“He’ll suppress it this time. You ought to be fine,” Teresa assured him.

bender-laughing.gif


Syr hesitated for another moment, then gave a quick nod and approached the wobbuffet again. He stopped in front of him, then gave one of his hands a very weak little nibble, with a negligible amount of dark energy accompanying the attack.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Esaax said.

Syr bit him harder. Barely harder.

inb4 this turns out to go through a few cycles of this before Syr just snaps and goes all out.

“That one didn’t really count, either.”

“Do it, Syr,” Teresa said rather sternly.

“Okay, okay!” In his haste, Syr’s jaws snapped shut on their target with full force. Esaax cried out, and the sound echoed in the room for several seconds. The arbok quickly let go of him and cringed, but there was no orange flash and no painful retaliation.

Wow, it actually worked out, for Syr. I wasn’t expecting that one.

There was, however, an irregular semicircle of deep punctures around Esaax’s chest and left shoulder. The wobbuffet panted as he stared, quite astonished, at the wounds. Syr stared at the damage as well, looking equally surprised and deeply apologetic.

Syr: “Esaax, I just want to emphasize that I wanted to do Tackle here and it was the nurse’s idea to do Bite.”
:ohnowen:


Teresa managed a proud smile at Esaax. “Congratulations,” she said. “If your tail can resist that, it can probably resist anything.” Her frown swiftly returned as she watched the rivulets of cobalt-colored blood now seeping from Esaax’s wounds. “Looks like your prize for passing the test is going to be a healthy dose of hyper potion…”

Oh, so Wobbuffet bleed blue in this setting, huh? I guess that’d explain a few things about their coloration. Though hyper potions, huh? I suppose I should be less surprised given that the Pokémon in this setting apparently still have cars that they still use on a daily basis.

Chapter 3

Esaax’s wounds were cleaned and repaired, leaving only a faint series of scars where the stronger bite had connected and nothing at all of his lesser injuries. Soon afterward, Teresa informed him that Adn was ready for him. Esaax told Syr to find somewhere comfortable to wait, then headed for Adn’s office. With a deep, steadying breath, he walked in of his own accord where once he’d have had to be pushed.

Oh, so medical treatment usually can’t pull off a “clean” fix of wounds. Wonder if that’s something that the Pokéball-based machines would’ve been able to do prior to the Dehumaning in the past, or if they’d have similar limitations to these.

Behind that door stood a blue-haired gardevoir, who served as the Haven’s psychic regression therapist. His method was to make patients relive various moments in their pasts and gauge their present states of mind by their conscious and subconscious emotional reactions to their induced recollections. Despite the marathon session that he was reported to have just endured, he still looked as far from exhaustion as one could possibly be.

Ohai, Shiny Gardevoir. Though I think that I have an emote of his face right about now:

:gardexhausted:


As always, not a word was spoken and no signal was made as Adn and his patient took their places. The scene of the office blurred and warped, swiftly replaced by very different surroundings. Once again, Esaax found himself thrust into a perfectly vivid replica of a scene from his memory. Now standing in this bygone time and place like a tourist in his own past, his regression began…

Given that Adn didn’t exactly seem to be running at full strength, I’m not really sure how good of an idea this was. Though then again, maybe Adn’s just used to this sort of stuff. ^^;

Esaax was born fifty-four years ago to the Evergray clan of the caves south of Blackthorn. His childhood was quiet and uneventful; not much changed from night to night until Esaax reached his mid-thirties. It was there and then, at the dawn of his adult life, that one evening brought something new—something that would alter the course of his life forever.

Oh, so the Dehumaning happened something within 44 years prior to the events of TOoS, huh? That’s actually gotten me curious as to how much of the technology they’re using is actually still freshly made or just scavenged and trucking along until it winds up wearing out / getting depleted. I’m assuming it’s freshly made, buuuut…

From faraway Hoenn, a nomadic branch of a clan called the Fade somehow journeyed across the sea and into Evergray territory. The foreigners were readily welcomed and allowed to stay as honorary members of the community while in the area.

This was thanks to the Johto Safari Zone, wasn’t it?

Among the visitors was a wobbuffet by the name of Ntairow. She and Esaax began spending time together and soon bonded, first as friends, then as lovers.

… Oh yeah, the mention of Ntairow in past tense is totally a good sign for what wound up happening to her.
:copyka2~1:


Then, only a few months after arriving, the Fade moved on. Though Ntairow demanded to stay, and Esaax offered up his own pleas for her to remain with the Evergray clan, the elders of the Fade wouldn’t allow it. Ntairow was forced to depart with the rest of her clan, held and carried away in the arms of her people, leaving Esaax behind.

:sadwott~2:


Yeah, I knew that something bad would wind up happening between the two. Just wasn’t expecting it to come this soon.

Esaax refused to accept this. He left the caves and tried to follow the Fade through the mountains, but he failed to catch up with them. The nomads were relatively swift, hardy, and used to traveling, whereas Esaax was out of shape. He collapsed there on the mountain trail under his very first sunrise.

Oh, and this is the story of how Esaax came into Haven, huh?

He lay there for hours, breathless, heartsick, hungry, sunburned, and alone. Then some peculiar creatures came up the mountain trail and discovered him. They were humans, and they’d come in search of unusual and uncommon pokémon to give away as prizes at the Goldenrod Game Corner. Drained as he was, Esaax could do nothing to resist the red beam that pulled him into a very strange state of not-quite-being.

:copyber:


I’m surprised that Esaax has nostalgia for the world-that-was considering that that happened to him.

Week after week went by, spent largely in the confines of what the humans called a “poké ball”. He was let out only to be fed, and the portions given to him were much too small and too infrequent for his liking. As time passed, he began to lose hope of ever finding Ntairow again. Learning that he was the first and only wobbuffet acquired thus far by the Game Corner, with a price in game tokens no one was likely to win, made him all the more certain he wouldn’t.

He never did catch up with Ntairow, or else if he did, she moved on from him, didn’t she?

Then one day, quite literally against the odds, a man from Palmpona cashed in enough tokens to take him home. Esaax was more than a little surprised to materialize not in the Game Corner’s back room but rather in the midst of a birthday party as a present for the man’s son, Benny.

So on a scale of 1 to 10, how
:judgement~1:
was Esaax’s face at that birthday party?

Now in the hands of different humans, Esaax lived a very different life. Benny liked his new pokémon a great deal, and a strong friendship between the two formed quickly. Wherever the human boy went, Esaax went with him, and Esaax never had to go back into the poké ball once he’d made it clear that he disliked it.

Oh, so that’s how Esaax wound up developing nostalgia for the world-that-was, even if I kinda suspect that Ntairow was always the dark cloud lingering over this in the background even if there came a point where Esaax gave up and moved on from her.

Esaax lived this way for three years, and he loved it. He would’ve liked things to remain just as they were forever. But in Palmpona, it was inevitable for every pokémon to ultimately become fodder for the town’s trading obsession. Though Esaax didn’t understand Benny’s desire to trade him, he agreed to respect the young human’s wishes, allowing himself to be put up for trade out of gratitude for the kindness Benny had shown him.

I see Pokémon didn’t exactly have a ton of agency back when humans walked the earth. Since I’m pretty sure that Esaax’s next trainer is going to be a hard downgrade from Benny. .-.

As it so happened, the year Esaax was involved in the trade expo was the first year in its history in which things went awry. Thus it was that he accidentally became a member of Team Rocket. His partners consisted of two humans and four pokémon, one of the latter of which was able to speak the humans’ language. Though the Team Rocket way of existence was riddled with misadventures, Esaax came to find it amusing in a strange way. Fun, even.

violet-spit-water-the-incredibles2.gif


Wait a minute, Esaax is that Wobbuffet? I’ll admit that I never saw that one coming.

Esaax’s new owner, Jessie, didn’t really understand much of anything about him, though—not his language, his needs, or his proper use in battle. She also failed to understand his feelings about being kept in a poké ball, but by that time he’d learned how to break out of one, much to her vexation.

Boy does that cast a dark light on those ‘Wobbuffet breaks out of his Pokéball’ gags from the anime.
:copyka2~1:


While in her possession, the problems with his tail first began to rear their heads. One day found him going into autoempathic crisis and very nearly dying from it. Nearly losing him awakened a much greater appreciation for him in Jessie, and she soon became the best human friend that he’d ever had.

Wait, did something like this actually happen in an anime episode? Or is this an event invented for TOoS’ chronology?

Unfortunately, not long after they’d finally connected in earnest, the world changed for pokémon—and ended for humans. A plague of fatal sleep mysteriously struck the entire human population all over the globe, bringing extinction to the species in just a matter of hours.

:copyber:


Oh, so that’s how humans just dropped off from the face of the planet. So wait, does that mean that Syr is Jessie’s Arbok, then?

With Jessie gone and something of himself lost with her, Esaax fled the scene of her demise and wandered for days in shock. Sometime later, once his spirit had begun to mend itself, he began seeking out old friends, hoping they’d provide a foundation on which to rebuild his life. In particular, he sought his pokémon partners from Team Rocket. Ultimately, his quest yielded six no-shows, one rejection, and one successful reunion. That reunion was very promising in the beginning, but ultimately led to tragedy.

Oh, so Syr really is Jessie’s Arbok. Even if I wonder what became of all these other partners he sought out (and it makes me wonder when season-wise these events occurred).

That was the last straw—Esaax’s stability was dealt the killing blow. Once again, he tried to run from his sorrow. Eventually, he found himself in the city of Convergence. It had once been a fully-integrated community, in which pokémon had lived, worked, and learned in many of the same ways the humans did. Following the Extinction, many of the pokémon there continued to live the lifestyles the humans had taught them, perhaps as an act of remembrance.

And also social stability, since if Pokémon take after some of their game Pokédex lore in this continuity, that sounds like a recipe for things rapidly becoming dog-eat-dog in dynamic without some sort of agreement to “stick to what was working for us”.
:fearfullaugh~1:


But Esaax had no more luck in finding serenity there than he’d had in any of the other places he’d searched. He fell into a spiral of sickness and despair that finally culminated with him trying to provoke a mightyena into killing him. She instead took pity on Esaax, delivering him to the Haven and thus to salvation…

A little surprised that Esaax would’ve attempted such a roundabout suicide method instead of just jumping off a bridge, but I suppose the mental wiring of Wobbuffet might be such that that would be a reflexive choice for a route to try.

With a quick yet gentle severing of mental connections, the session ended. It was still hard to believe that over half of a century could be compressed into less than five minutes. As far as Esaax was concerned, though, how it was possible wasn’t important. It was what it determined that mattered.

Adn: “I mean, we went over things at a really high level, so there might have been a few details that got lost in the mix.”
:gardeshrug~1:

Esaax: “A few.”
:judgement~1:


Usually, Adn would dismiss Esaax with a simple, psychic signal, not saying a single word. This time, much to Esaax’s surprise, was different.

“I see that the sorrows of your past can still evoke pain in you, Esaax,” the gardevoir said.

Esaax: “Yes, and? Are they not supposed to?” :|

Esaax pondered that for a moment. Then he wilted. “You mean I failed the test?”

That is one really messed-up test if so.
:grohno~1:


Adn burst into laughter so suddenly and unexpectedly that Esaax flinched.

No, no!” the gardevoir said warmly. “You’ve passed! If the memories of your grief and despair hadn’t hurt, then you would have failed. You ache where it is appropriate, and you rejoice where that is appropriate. For you, that’s what’s healthy. Numbness is not.”

Oh thank goodness, I was starting to get worried there.
:sweats:


“…So I can go, then?”

“Yes, you certainly may,” the gardevoir said, smiling proudly. “Farewell, and good luck to you!”

Esaax: “Thank goodness, can’t wait to get out of this dump and away from Madeline.” >_>;

The time to return to the world at large had finally come. As Esaax stood before the exit next to Syr, he bade farewell to the people who’d taken such good care of him. Teresa made him smile, Madeline made him feel slightly ill, and a skiploom he didn’t even know just baffled him by doing something very rude with her tiny arms (which Esaax didn’t realize wasn’t intended for him). Adn was absent, apparently already engrossed in another session, but he sent his kind regards with Teresa.

>this hospital farewell

Honestly, if you ever get back into writing one day, you ought to write some stuff about what Esaax’s time here was like, since I can tell from that Skiploom that it was quite something.
:hoodLUL:


On the verge of tears, yet beaming like the sun, Esaax thanked everyone for their support and waved one last goodbye. Then he passed through the doors as they opened, emerging into the outside world for what felt like the first time in eons.

Esaax: “Whelp, here goes nothing…”

Well, I wasn’t expecting things to wind up going in that direction, but those were a fun couple of chapters. I take it that this is the point of the story where things really start kicking off since Esaax is getting out into the world, we’ve gotten his and the world’s backstory laid bare, and some initial direction of where to go next.

To your credit, I think that you delivered on the premise of “what do things look like from the other side of someone who’s a supporting character that’s normally a punchline, but in a radically different world” pretty well, and you do a good job of getting us to root for Esaax while making sure that he doesn’t come off as “human” in perspective. I honestly am not really sure how to describe the tone of this story, since it’s at once funny like the sequence about Jen driving a car, got moments that are downright [tearycabot] like Esaax’s life recall of how he came to live among humans, and others that start out one way and then become something else after you stop and think of them like the reveal that Esaax’s condition stems from his tail getting stepped on (presumably by Jessie from Syr’s thoughts). It’s a very unique vibe that at once doesn’t take itself too seriously while not shying away from darker topics that isn’t super common in the fandom.

As for criticisms… I don’t have too much to harp on other than that there were a couple parts that would’ve been a bit easier to “visualize” if they were written out with a bit more description, especially to show character reactions or internal thoughts. There were also a couple paragraphs that felt like they were very long in presentation, to the point where they likely would’ve flowed better as two or more smaller ones. But at the same time, I don’t think they detracted too much from the experience since I was too busy getting into the story to really notice them more than briefly.

Good work @Sike Saner , and I’m really glad I was able to come back to this story before RB4 ended. I’ll be looking forward to coming back for more at some time in the future. ^^
 
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