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Chapter 10 - She's Unabashedly Nosy...and Sick

Sinderella

Angy Tumbleweed
Staff
Location
In Guzma's Closet
Pronouns
She/Her
Partners
  1. sylveon-shiny
  2. gothitelle
  3. froslass
  4. chandelure
  5. mimikyu
WSBS HelloYellow Commish.jpg
Chapter 10: She's Unabashedly Nosy...and Sick
Cover by @HelloYellow17 🤍
CW: Strong Language
“Do you have any sixes?” Acadia asked.

“Go fish,” Noel replied.

Acadia clicked her tongue as she dove her hand into the haphazard card pile scattered around the coffee table. She was careful as she picked up a card because Enora was curled up under the glass, sound asleep.

Odette laughed hoarsely from her spot on the couch. She sniffled as she nuzzled into her blanket, adjusting her head against her pillow. “You’ve been looking for a six this whole game.”

“Noel, there’s no way you haven’t gotten a six by now,” Acadia said.

“I don’t know what to tell you, sis,” he snickered. “Try asking around.”

On either side of him, Ange and Elton sat with their own cards in hand.

“Ask Odette, I bet she has one,” Ange declared.

“I’m trying to take a six specifically from Noel. I’m giving Odette a break because she’s sick,” Acadia announced.

“How thoughtful,” Odette said flatly.

As she spoke, thunder shook the townhouse, and everyone in the living room looked toward the window. It was absolutely pouring outside, and there was no indication that it would let up anytime soon.

“Hope nobody was planning on going anywhere today,” Noel said.

“I was hoping to go for a jog, actually,” Odette said jokingly.

“Right, right. And I'm the Queen of Galar,” Acadia shot back, a half-grin tugging at her lips. “How are you feeling?”

That was a loaded question. Ever since she’d been discharged from the hospital two days ago, she’d had so much on her mind she could barely see straight. Of course, as luck would have it, the hospital cleared her as okay to go home the day she’d arrived, but she contracted a fever that same night. She felt so ill, she couldn’t think about anything but how bad she felt.

Bernard and Marieanne, ever the worrywarts in regard to her health, insisted she stay with them, as Vienna had run out on an emergency research retreat and wouldn't be home quickly enough. So, Odette had spent the last 48 hours in their guest bedroom bed, groaning loudly and sleeping.

“The same,” she answered. “No worse, no better.”

“We’ll take that,” Noel said. “Your turn Ange.”

Before Ange could ask for his card, footsteps sounded from the hallway leading to the kitchen. Marieanne emerged, decked out in a full apron and grasping a thermometer. She was done up with a full face of makeup, even though she didn't have work today, but that wasn't necessarily out of character. She always needed to "look her best," as she insisted.

Solene was at her heels, grasping the handle of a wooden spoon, which happened to be in Isaur’s mouth. As they stopped, Solene glared at Isaur as she wiggled the spoon. The froslass didn’t budge.

“Aaaaaaalright, temperature check time, Swanna,” Marieanne said, stepping around the coffee table and over to the couch. She sat down on the edge of it and stuck the thermometer into Odette’s ear. She held it there until it beeped, then examined the result. A frown crossed her lips, and she exhaled sharply.

“This damn thing won’t break. Still a hundred and two. You poor baby.”

“Maybe soup will help,” Odette suggested, closing her eyes.

Marieanne gave a nod. “Came out to say it should be ready in 30 minutes or so, so I hope you kiddos are hungry.”

“Thaaaaaaanks Mama Marieanne,” Noel and Acadia said in unison.

“Anything for you kids,” she beamed. A thought then occurred to her, and she turned back to Odette. “Oh! By the way, before I forget. Two things. First, where's Loïc? I haven’t seen him all day.”

Ange snickered loudly and had to bury his face in his cards to keep his volume down. Odette sent him a look before rolling her eyes.

“Do you have a vent system?” she asked.

“Yeah, I thought you knew that,” Marieanne said.

Odette didn’t verbally respond. Instead, she just held her hands out to her sides. Luckily, Marieanne understood, and she just huffed.

“Should have guessed. Alright, second thing. Have you seen the kitchen phone? Can't find the stupid thing anywhere."

“Nana, this is the first time I’ve left the guest room in two days,” Odette said.

Dammit, Bernard," she groaned. "He never puts the phones back. He's in for it after that damn work call.”

Despite her brief bout of aggravation, Marieanne clapped her hands together, then stood up. “Alright, that’s all from me. Don’t let me interrupt your game. I’m gonna go…clean something. Storms like this make me antsy.”

Marieanne made her way back toward the kitchen and motioned for Solene and Isaur to follow. Solene had to yank Isaur along by the spoon, but they all soon disappeared down that hall.

“Shit, they still have a landline? Boomers,” Noel giggled, flipping through his cards.

Acadia lowered her brows and shot him an unamused glance. “I still have a landline.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a boomer in a twenty-something’s body. That’s not necessarily shocking.”

Acadia reeled her hand back and landed a sound smack on Noel’s bare shoulder. He flinched on contact, then began to rub his now-inflamed skin. “Ma’am, do you know what a damn joke is?”

While Odette was in no condition to be bantering at full energy with her friends, it was nice to have them here to keep her company. She had Marieanne and Bernard around, but being that she’d already missed a few days of rehearsal, witnessing the Noel versus Acadia spats made it feel like she wasn’t fully out of the loop.

As she thought about that, she pushed the blanket off her lap and swung her legs to the floor. Cautiously, she stood, allowing herself to regain her balance slowly.

“Oh, going on that jog?” Noel queried.

“Yes, to the bathroom. Unless you want me to pee all over the couch.”

“Well, you’re sick. You can do whatever you want when you’re sick. The world’s your cloyster.”

“I don’t think urinating on a couch is part of that,” Acadia said, cringing.

Odette shook her head before she hobbled her way toward the foyer bathroom. As she finished up her business and tiredly washed her hands, she found herself eyeing her reflection in the mirror. She really took in her pallor complexion and tired eyes.

“Gods, I look like hot garbage,” she said.

Skrtskrtskrtskrtskrtskrtskrt.

She knit her brows together, turning to look over her shoulder for the source of the noise. It sounded distant initially, but the longer she listened, the closer it got. She craned her neck to look up at the ceiling, then the wall, where her gaze caught on a vent grate. Upon seeing it, her shoulders deflated, and she pressed her lips together, forming a knowing expression.

A few seconds after she looked at the grate, it popped open, and Loïc reared his rambunctious fake head.

“Loïc,” she said, sounding stern even with the hoarseness in her voice. “Just because we’re not at home, and I’m sick, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly allowed to crawl in the fucking vents.”

“Kyyuuuu.”

He hopped out of the opening and floated down to the floor. Upon landing, he whipped around to stare up at her. There was something about him that felt different. His eyes were bright, and he was pulsing up and down in his spot. He actually looked rather excited.

“What were you even doing up there?” She felt minutely curious about what had him in such a good mood. Normally, he didn’t get like that unless he smelled pecha.

She began to feel lightheaded from standing, so she decided it’d be a good idea to get down on his level. She slowly sank to the floor and leaned against the cabinet.

“Look,” Loïc chirped.

In a small shadowy wave, his hands manifested. He reached one under his cloak and withdrew none other than the MIA kitchen phone. Odette took one look at it, then glared at him.

“Very funny,” she exhaled. “I hope you know you made Nana mad at Grandpa.”

Loïc quickly shook his head and used one of his hands to press down on the “answer” button.

Instead of a dial tone, like she was expecting to hear, she heard talking. Bernard talking.

Narrowing her eyes, she slowly picked the phone up and held it to her ear.

“I just don’t understand the sudden concern. It-it doesn't make sense to me.”

“There’s a variety of things that have happened that have caused us to become quite worried.”

Clovis.

That was Clovis’s voice.

Her breath hitched, and she cut her gaze back down to Loïc. His fake tail was wagging happily, like that of a gleeful yamper.

"You sneaky sonofabitch," she mouthed at him. And here she'd been, thinking the only things on his mind were berries and hiding the Monopoly pieces around the house.

Loïc jostled his head in response.

An abundance of thanks was in store, but she gestured for him to come over. Loïc didn’t hesitate to scurry up her torso and perch himself on her shoulder to listen in as well.

“Let me get this straight. She decided to research you, and she had a questionable run-in with a blood type. Do those things warrant Virtue Corps’ full eyes and ears?"

"Blood-type?" she mouthed, hoping that would commit the term to her wavering memory. What the hell did that mean? What even was her blood type? She hadn't bothered visiting the doctor for a while before her recent episode and that wasn't something she bothered to commit to memory. O-something, maybe...

That couldn't have been what they were talking about, though. Bernard said it like it was a Pokemon typing. Blood type. It sounded absolutely absurd until she dwelled on it a little more.

Those grotesque Pokemon. All three times she'd seen them summoned, their owners...trainers? Owners? She didn't know what to call it anymore. Their owners always bit their thumbs to draw blood. That seemed to be the thing that powered them up. Or made them spawn altogether?

Furrowing her brow, she scratched her cheek pensively. Is that what they were? Is that why she'd never heard of them? Were they just a whole new type?

More importantly, what the hell did they have to do with shinies and running them absolutely ragged? And how long had Bernard known about them?

What did that have to do with the voice she heard?

At that moment, thunder rocked the building again. She cringed at the noise and yanked the phone away from her ear to cover it with her hand. Loïc even darted his hand over, too. When she was sure it had passed, she started listening again.

“If you want my honest opinion? Yes. Given that uncanny resemblance we spoke about before, among the other things, these happenings are just a little too nefarious for us just to let slip by," Clovis had just started speaking.

"And can you confirm it had nothing to do with Enora?"

What?

"
Enora was nowhere near her when it happened. Then again, I wasn't close enough to see what happened, either. But, desmocula fled, and she just...fell. Cut her cheek too, I guess?"

"She didn't have a cut on her cheek."

Silence swelled on the line, and it made her nervous. She held her breath, even though she wanted to yell out.

WHAT?

It was eventually broken by Clovis sighing.

"I don't know. I don't know what to tell you right now," he said. "It happened so fast, and we don't have enough information. That's all I have until I can talk to her. Maybe get some of our people to talk to her."

"You told me we wouldn't get to that point if you could prove she wasn't involved in this in the way you thought."

“I really am sorry, Bernard. I honestly thought I had this laid out, but I was wrong."

“I told you she wouldn’t get involved in the trade, not Odette,” Bernard said angrily. “She loves her partners to death, and they love her.”

Yes, tell him that. Let him hear it. The thought managed to break through every other thing rattling around in her head.

“And I see that now,” Clovis replied apologetically. "But now we've uncovered something big--"

"I know it's bigger. I know you can't tell me what it is right now. What I do know is I wish you'd just left her alone."

"And let this fall unnoticed?"

More silence. A very long, drawn-out sigh followed. "No. I know you didn't have a choice. I just--"

"I understand, Bernard," Clovis said.

"She's gone through so much in the last year, and I--"

"You don't need to explain it to me, sir. I get it."

Odette shifted uncomfortably in her spot, saying an internal prayer that that conversation would drop. She felt like she would have to hang up if it didn't.

"Let's start over," Bernard said. "Tell me again, slower this time, what happened leading up to her fainting."

“I had tried to bait something out of her. That was the whole point of my warning in the first place; sow doubt and bait her into admitting what she was actually up to when and if I saw her again. But all I got was that she caught my slip and read into it, just as I feared.”

She narrowed her eyes at nothing. That fucking scoundrel. It was bait? He was baiting her? Well, she supposed she couldn't be too bitter at that. He evidently got a lot more than he bargained for in that conversation, which she decided was enough to sate her pettiness.

“That’s Odette. If she finds something that doesn’t make sense, she’ll look into it herself,” Bernard said, though it sounded more like a warning than a statement. “What does she know? How much about you does she know?"

There wasn’t an immediate answer. Clovis must have been thinking of how to respond. “She was very conservative in telling me that much. And I didn’t press because it would have been risky, and I’ve put myself in a weird spot as it is,” he started. “But it’s like I told you, she’s trying to get to the bottom of the sacrilege and shiny trade issue. She didn’t say why though. However, judging by her verbiage, she knows the connection between the two." He sighed gruffly, sounding aggravated. "See, we wouldn't fucking be here if I weren't such an idiot."

“You just panicked,” Bernard said sympathetically. “It happens to the best of us.”

“I’m not one of ‘us,’ Bernard. We talked about this. I just got a little too...overzealous talking to her.” The annoyance was clear-cut behind his words. “I fucked up."

“And that’s not like you. You’re normally on top of it, but nobody’s perfect. You’re lucky it was so small, and you have the status to combat it if need be.”

A rancorous laugh. “I don’t know what happened. Odette’s just--”

“Off-limits,” Bernard asserted. His words fired like bullets.

Odette bristled. "Odette's just what?" she mouthed as she pulled the phone away from her ear to stare at it incredulously. "Odette's. Just. Fucking. What?"

She exhaled in frustration, masking her intense desire to scream into the phone, and held it back to her ear.

“Right,” Clovis grumbled after what was most likely a long pause. “How is she? I heard that the shock wore off before they even made it to the hospital.”

Short and sweet, Grandpa, she begged internally. Please, please, please do not elaborate too much. You've done enough; spare me.

“It’s happened before,” Bernard huffed. “She’s had issues with her blood pressure since she was little. Sometimes it dips, and sometimes it gets really bad. Then, it clears up, and she’s sick for a few days afterward.”

She stifled a groan and resisted the urge to bang her already throbbing head against the cabinet. The feeling of embarrassment was building up within her at an alarming rate. Did he really need to know all of this? Did Clovis really need to be made aware of her health problems? If she'd had things her way, she probably would have never told him. It just wasn't a conversation that needed to be had.

“And you said this happens a lot?”

“I said it used to happen a lot,” Bernard recalled. “A couple of times a month when she was younger. Not always to the point where she needed to be hospitalized, but often enough to where it was concerning. It’s not as frequent now, though. This is this first bout in…months, I’d say.”

Gods, she wanted to tell Bernard to shut up. It was bad enough that she'd fainted in front of Clovis, but now he knew the extent of why it happened in the first place. Would something like that be considered a turn-off?

Her thoughts were getting out of hand, sick or not.

Focus.

“Uh huh,” Clovis said tentatively. “Noted.”

Her stomach dropped. Why did he say it like that? What was there to make a note of? "Be careful around this girl, she might pass out on me"? Forget yelling and screaming; she wanted to break the fucking phone.

She didn't really know why she felt so aggravated about the conversation. It wasn't like she had a chance with Clovis in the first place, especially with him thinking she was dating Dorien. Or, maybe he knew she was faking it? Maybe that would be something he asked her about. That had to have been a turn-off, seeing somebody so convincingly act in love when they were very much not...

Fo-cus.

Bernard gave a very gruff sigh. “She’s had enough scrutiny to last her the rest of her life. She doesn’t need anymore.”

“I understand, Chief, but this is out of fear for her safety and not out of a desire to scrutinize her,” Clovis said earnestly. “Thankfully, our hypothesis about her trying to get involved in the trade was wrong, but now, the way things have been playing out, I am extremely concerned, as is everyone else.”

“So then, what’s the next move?” Bernard asked.

“She has questions for me, and I for her,” Clovis said, his tone direct. “I’ll have to reach out sometime after she recovers from her illness to schedule a meeting, but I plan to gauge how much she’s found out and, well...answer her honestly.”

At least she heard straight from the source that she wouldn't get bogus answers when they spoke. That did something to ease her racing brain, if only for now.

“I sound like a broken record. I hate this. I didn't want her involved,” Bernard said darkly.

“It’s a little too late for that,” Clovis said, matching his mood. “She seems to be diving into this on her own accord. At least now, Virtue Corp can back her up if she needs it.”

“I cannot have her getting hurt. Not after--”

Bernard,” Clovis said, cutting him off again. “You have my word. I will do whatever is in my power to ensure nothing happens to her from here on out. And, I’m sure you know this, but Odette seems quite sharp if you don't mind me being frank,” he said, chuckling as the words came out of his mouth. “Regardless, I will be over her shoulder every step of the way, and if things start to look too risky, we’ll pull her. That’s my promise to you.”

“...make sure Noel’s with her too. It would make me feel better to know she’s not diving into these events alone. I’m sure Noel had something to do with it if she's informed. He’s savvy himself,” Bernard said reluctantly.

Clovis chuckled again. “We’re one step ahead of you on that, sir."

“And...if it can be helped, I don’t want her to know about my involvement thus far. At least, not now,” Bernard added.

“The best I can do is hope she hasn’t dug that deep, then,” Clovis noted half-jokingly.

Odette cringed.

A louder sigh from Bernard. “Right.” He cleared his throat. “Well, my wife’s almost done with dinner, so I should go.”

“Of course. We’ll keep in touch, and I’ll let you know when I plan to reach out to Odette.”

“Please do. Have a good evening, Clovis.”

“You as well, Chief.”

Click.

Odette exhaled the breath she didn’t know she was holding as she hung up. She leaned her head back against the cabinet, holding her hand to her burning forehead.

“What the fuck did I just listen to?” she whispered. “Holy shit.”

“Important,” Loïc said.

With a single nod, Odette half-laughed. She turned her head to look at the mimikyu, whose eyes shone triumphantly.

“You’re right. Extremely important,” she said. “Gods, I owe you an absurd amount of pecha berries for this.”
 
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love

Memento mori
Pronouns
he/him/it
Partners
  1. leafeon
Catnip review time

Things established in the prologue:

- We've got legendaries based on the 7 sins, and apparently Florence's heirs inherit them
- Florence is a scary bad guy
- Armel has memory issues
- Vienna's child is in some big trouble

I wanted to assume that Odette was the child because it would explain the "deep trouble" mentioned in the summary, but then I remembered that the child was a newborn at the time of the prologue, and it's unlikely that much time has passed. (Okay, reading ahead, I guess it is Odette after all)

I have a sense that Armel could turn out to be an important player. He's forced into going along with Florent's shenanigans at present, but his discomfort makes me think he might switch sides once given the chance. Just a guess, though.

I appreciate Gulattive as a sassy supernatural entity that's really just on its own side. Its design also matches the gluttony theme, so that's nice. One has to wonder what the other sin-based legendaries are going to look like. (After having read chapter 6, I wonder if the dust used on Odette is the same thing responsible for erasing Armel's memory. Wild guess, though.)

I put up some line edits here

Combing over the prose, I felt that there were some places where relying on specific verbs or concrete descriptions would create a sharper picture (for example, the "rushed" and "quivering" suggestions). There were also a few mid-scene perspective shifts. I tend to find those a bit disruptive, and in this case I think they could have been avoided. Armel's stuttering and body language would probably be enough to convey his feelings without entering his head.

Other prose edits are mostly attempts to smooth things or reduce wordiness. There were also cases where commas were placed before conjunctions even when the conjunction preceded a dependent clause.

Anyhow, I read through chapter 1 as well. To save time, I didn't do extensive suggestions on it. I really enjoyed Odette and Noel's chemistry and already love them both (and that makes me feel sad that she has to leave for Alola). I think I could stand to learn a thing or two from the dialogue and portrayal of body language.

Some line edits are here

On to chapter 2... Odette's anger problems are made very clear here. Her yelling at Noel really drove it home for me, but the violent fantasies and difficulty calming down also sell it. So I think it makes sense to tell us that she killed that guy now, rather than in chapter 1—I assume her temper is related to that. It is still a little fuzzy to what extent she did it on purpose/to what extent it was an unintended result of self-defense. She is apparently legally in the clear, so that tells us something.

I feel like rambunctious pokemon are the last thing Odette needs, now and in general. However, I think she has good taste in pokemon.

Very minimal line edits

Time for chapter 3. I was on the edge of my seat for the battle because I wanted to see rich boy get wrecked. I'm not sure how much of Odette's fear of him is just her emotions getting out of control and to what extent he's actually just being freaky. I don't think she quite knows, either.

I wish the narration were a bit more specific on why she hates the shiny trade so much, as opposed to just hating the specific people who abuse their pokemon. I guess there's the link to sacrilege, but it seems like she objected to the trade well before she knew about that.

Some line edits here

I then read up to chapter 7. The suspense is really building up, and it's interesting that a lot of the tension comes from being afraid of what Odette is going to do at any given point, being the little ball of wrath she is. I am continuing to enjoy the dialogue and continuing to have a hard time figuring Dorien out. I say more about that in the googledoc comments. Vienna is a hell of a character, even in what little screen time she's had so far.

Some suggestions and comments here

This review is weirdly paced since I read more than I had really planned. It's hard to come up with a good note to end on, since the mystery is still developing. Gotta say I'm worried for Odette, though.
 

kintsugi

golden scars | pfp by sun
Location
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. silvally-grass
  2. lapras
  3. golurk
  4. booper-kintsugi
  5. meloetta-kint-muse
  6. meloetta-kint-dancer
  7. murkrow
  8. yveltal
  9. celebi
hey hey, here for chapter 8 👀

Okay, so a lot of things start coming together here! I like the link between shiny pokemon and the sin pokemon--I was curious how those plots were going to come together, and this does feel like a neat way to resolve things. The media erasure bit from the old chapters is interesting to me as well, since iirc Odette had watched pictures/a movie or something? So those were doctored as well? (or maybe I'm just going insane and I've forgotten--but then if there weren't photos that'd be pretty surprising for a news story as well).

Odette has friends! I liked the texting segment lol. Chatfic has a special place in my heart and it's a really great way of just showing characters being goofy, which I think this chapter benefitted a lot from.

I like Noel in the second half here, where he's able to provide a bit more grounding. Odette prides herself on being the rational one but she's so horny she literally can't think straight and then she jumps straight to global-scale conspiracy theories while Noel is like "bruh what if the rich guy was just horny"--it's a fun interplay between these two, lol. I'm not entirely sold on Noel just barging into changing rooms and blurting out a ton of information that they're trying to keep secret from an unknown group of unknown size and power that, according to him, has wiped entire facts from existence--it feels very on the scale of "blackmailing Batman" as far as just begging to be overheard lol.

The conclusion that they end up reaching, which is more or less that there's a global conspiracy to erase an entire fact from existence, is pretty wild if you think about it lol. As a concept I really like it, since from a narrative standpoint it mostly just requires your characters to rush in based only off of conviction and a "man but it'd be so cool if things worked like this"--but also this is like, borderline QAnon "everyone but me has been bamboozled" levels of conspiracy, which is fucking wild to see in protagonists. In a good way, but also it's a hell of a lot to double down on the idea that the global elite have so thoroughly pushed a specific flavor of revisionist history (but then have public galas where they sort of just brag about all that info in the open? I know Odette is a guest and Dorien has Plans so that's explained, but Noel is just sort of there) that all evidence to the contrary is more or less erased from existence. That's a really horrifying force to be up against, and it sort of begs the question if any of the information they're getting can be trusted (since the working theory is that the global elite have literally done a CTRL+F/CTRL+REPLACE for anything talking about this one thing they want to hide), and like wow, that's a great way to self-gaslight a protagonist into going into an enormous distrustful conspiracy spiral lol. Odette's next thesis on the faking of the moon landing when??

This is something I won't really have better advice for until I catch up on the rest of this arc, I think, but I did find this chapter as a concept to be a little clunky ("two characters compare notes to solve the plot"). It's hard to make research seem interesting, especially in a fic where there isn't really room for a lot of direct action (and where one of the characters is actively being compelled to not research certain people via forced amnesia), but I wonder if there's a way to make the revelations here as less of a primary focus--paradoxically, those are the kinds of revelations that feel more built to. Think of most" reveal" scenes in movies/detective fic and how they're usually just one really tense scene, and the rest of the info is scattered across the rest of the movie. Tentatively I think the best fix would be the one that you're already sort of working on, which is embedding a lot of the information in earlier chapters--I think doing that with the bulk of the information with this chapter, and then lumping the key reveal here into the events of a future chapter where presumably they run back into Clovis, would be the natural conclusion of that sort of editing (but again, I'm not fully sure/would need to read more).

But overall that's more of a "it could be interesting to consider restructuring this, maaaaybe"--I like that we're finally starting to connect some dots here! This almost feels like a game of mafia, where Town has so little info compared to maf and is just trying to big brain with whatever the fuck they can find, but it's nice that they've got a little bit of info to start cobbling together now. Looking forward to catching up on the rest of this!

some line-by-lines, mostly on prose:
She’d texted him at every stoplight until she reached the center, to no response.
Odette "those fuckers could've killed someone [with their dangerous driving]" Cinq-Mars texts while driving lol
Her grip on her papers tightened as a hard grimace crossed her face. She was damn glad there was nobody else in the dressing room right now, because she didn’t need anybody to bear witness to how red her face was. The sweat that started forming on her brow caused her glasses to begin fogging, and she tore them off her face to wipe them clean on her jacket.
I might be outing myself as a robot here, but I was under the impression that blushing doesn't actually raise your body surface temperature to a notable degree, and like, you'd have to blush really, really hard for there to be steam in a notable way (I guess kinda like the meat sweats)
She then jostled the packet, as if alerting her whole body to the fact that it needed to focus.
"as if" felt a little odd in close-third narration, since she should probably know why she's doing that. I think this would read more smoothly as "She jostled the packet so that her body got the memo: focus." or s/t
Rehearsal didn’t start for another thirty minutes, Acadia hadn’t gotten in yet, and Noel decided to neglect telling her that he was leaving his flat early that morning. She’d texted him at every stoplight until she reached the center, to no response.
I didn't quite follow the logic here--how does she know that he'd left his flat early then?
Noel wasn’t one to wake up before 11, so she found it a little odd.
legit I thought Dorien had just fucking killed him for a sec here
Most of them were centered around humans and Pokemon working together humanely, to get things done in an orderly and, as they put it, “the old-fashioned green and clean way.” They dedicated their companies to making sure Pokemon were treated fairly and humanely. It was truly a noble cause.
I find it interesting that (I think?) they refer to the old-fashioned ways as the humane ones--since usually (but not always!) the norm for treating people gets more humane over time, not less. Not to say this is unrealistic or anything; just interesting/uncommon, and I'm curious what the cultural shift would've been that caused modern society to take a more regressive ethical approach. Usually it has to be a pretty big upheaval for people to a) give up being treated better while b) still remembering/being able to reference better days.

I'm also kind of curious what leads Odette to the "humanely" bits in general--since for Claire de Lune to be "truly noble" in being humane, that sort of implies that most companies aren't being humane (since otherwise it wouldn't be a big deal for CdL to be doing it). But Odette more or less sees all of the instances of pokemon labor/involvement in the fic thus far (battling, waitstaff, the dewgong dairy farm) as humane, so I had a hard time pinning down what she's viewing as the inhumane alternative here.

(and I guess this is just me being suspicious of anyone who has a company that's 400 different companies stapled together, Nestle, looking at you, but what is the status of pokemon as citizens in this universe? like I'm still hung up on the whole Loic thing, where Odette can transfer a pokemon across national borders without his consent, so she's basically got a parental/guardian relationship in this situation--but if that's the case, is there really a "humane" way to hire someone who has the legal rights of a child?)
Odette had been pleased to see that their difference in age wasn’t harsh at all.
(alternatively I was :o that this woman has spent 11 of the last 13 years pregnant lol)
Clovis, however, was peculiar. He had the highest net worth out of all of them, for his involvement in the engineering aspects of the company. Coming up with all of their technology, their databases. He was a math man.
This might also just be from Odette not doing a proper job of stalking, but I didn't really follow Clovis's role here--coming up with all of the tech for all of their companies is an inhuman amount of innovation for one dude in his mid-20's lol. Think Elon Musk, who has multiple tech companies and didn't come up with the ideas for any of them; or Mark Zuckerberg, who did come up with the tech for his company but only did it for one successful company because there's really a limit to how many revolutionary ideas you can have in your lifetime and it's probably close to 0.

Part of me thinks this is just Odette wanting to see the best in him lol--owo he's not like other rich people he worked for his money with his BRAINS--or that he went undercover and wrote a really shitty vague bio (but this just seems to draw needless attention to him)--but I think for me personally this would be a little more clear, especially since Odette calls this a stalker-level job of researching, if we understood what he actually did, like one good idea about database compression algorithms or being on the team that prototyped the first cloud storage system or something, idk.
He was blunt enough to question her height, surely he was ballsy enough to ask somebody if they were hiring expensive hookers.
I know you sorta wanted speculation so I'm going all in that this isn't the real Clovis and he's just a replacement undercover plant, and that's why he's so bad at being a sly, political rich kid with a smooth tongue lol.
He had a pull in that room that she wouldn't expect a multi-year shut-in to pick up on, even after an extended amount of time out and about.
"to pick up on" had me tripped up for a while--I think this would read better as "He had a pull in that room that she wouldn't expect a multi-year shut-in to possess"
However, none of that did anything to deter the big thing on her mind: how could he have skated competitively if he hadn’t been seen in public until just recently?
honest to god I love the idea that homeboy is doing panama papers levels of coverups to hide his alter ego ... but like it's not fighting crime, it's yuri on ice
Or, maybe it...had just been wiped? Cops could mess with public access case files, surely a billionaire could have information pulled from the world wide web. The question is, why?
I think, and this is mostly personal preference, this would be a good way to weave together some of the older plot points like Noel finding out that the papers have been covering up the shiny pokemon/sacrilege shit in the news--especially if she's going full conspiracy brain moment, it'd make sense that she'd at least pause to consider if these were related. From a narrative standpoint you can also keep some of the more relevant mystery threads a little closer to the forefront, so the story feels a bit more knit when things start coming together.
If she ever met him again, she’d have to find a polite way to press.
I know I dunk on the girl a lot but I am truly fascinated to see what her idea of politely pressing on this obviously very buried subject is going to look like
As far as these information sites were concerned, Clovis was a single man. So, Dorien really was blowing smoke. But she had to wonder why Clovis had a ‘Jocelyn’ calling him, and why he was so annoyed by it. An aggravating secretary? A bodyguard? His old nanny? Was he even raised by nannies?
I'm sort of surprised that she trusts the websites that say he's single, given that she's fairly certain he's already hiding a huge facet of his life from the general public.
“I could teach a course on Stalking 101,” she said.
This one's a bit tricky for me to believe--but I'm also coming at this from a 2021 perspective, where, like, actual stalkers take freeze frames of twitch streamers and figure out where they live based on the reflection of the subway station in their eyes or insane shit like that. But I admit I don't know what level of social media/etc this version of Kalos has (since if I wanted to stalk someone, I'd definitely end up there I think--this information mostly feels like pretty common wikipedia stuff)--Rotom phones make me think there's a lot of advanced tech floating around, but maybe they dodged the bullet we didn't lol.

But in general sentences like these always flag to me as the author setting a character up to fail--"golly I'm so good at X" feels like it's on the same tier as "what could possibly go wrong" for things that are actively tempting fate and begging to be proven wrong.
She needed to get a handle on all of these feelings she was having..
double period oops
They were best kept bottled up with the rest of her emotions, because they had no business clouding her head when she was trying so hard to think rationally.
Odette vs Elsa lmao

I'm kind of impressed that she went to therapy for killing a dude and didn't at least have someone tell her that this isn't the healthiest way to do things (not that she'd listen/internalize that of course)
Her bag began to buzz, and she could hear the muffled voice of her RotomPhone trying to speak to her. The front pocket jostled, signaling it was trying to get out, so she reached over and unzipped it. It hovered out and flew up to her face.
oh man I could do an entire bad thesis on just the ethical ramifications of owning sentient AI if you're interested

I do feel bad for RotomPhone here--it kind of creeped me out in Alola, admittedly, since there's kind of an uncanny valley for how close they are to actual humans/thinking people in this one? Are they able to have unique thoughts, and if so, is that really the best solution for personalized IOS? There's a fascinating episode of Black Mirror called "White Christmas" that kind of goes into how horrifying it would be to be in that situation, if you're interested.

And Alola gets around it by being for kids and also having the RotomPhone as 100% happy to help whenever you want more or less, but this one is tired! Interrupted naps! So that suggests that this RotomPhone has their own wants and needs, which are being consciously ignored by Odette because she owns its body and can basically do whatever she wants, which is kind of a terrifying prospect for a user product tbh. (And like, I guess from a tech perspective I'm not sure why anyone would want an IOS that wants to take naps--both from the efficiency crowds from the "wow I'd really hate to bother anyone" crowds, that seems like a nonstarter)
Noel Massé
i hope u get crabs (´ ᴗ`✿)
The texting here was a lot of fun! solid use of emoji
Noemie Massé
Thank!! You all!! For waking me up!! FROM MY DAMN NAP!!!
This is probably something I missed in a previous chapter but are these two related?
Noemie Masse
STFU!! I also hope you get crabs!!
dropped the accent-e here

also lmao they feel very related
“I can read, very well actually,” he said, pointing at her nose.

He abruptly fell to his knees and unzipped his bag, then began to dig through it frantically.
"dig" and "frantically" feel pretty redundant here--again, personal preference but I don't think the adverb adds much. Both these words suggest rough handling though, which surprised me since later they treat the book as very delicate.
She furrowed her brows.
I think (?) "brow" is the singular term for "both eyebrows", but this could easily be a regional difference.
It was once said that these Pokemon of odd coloring had the ability to harbor and spawn Pokemon of a different power--grotesque creatures that found their abilities in the sanguinity of their hosts.
:o
“The shiny trade probably exists because traders know shinies can...make those things,” she finally said, eyes going wide. “Dorien knows that. They all. Fucking. Know that.”
Or it exists because it's wildly lucrative--I'm pretty sure you can't stick the soul of sin incarnate into an $80,000 canvas painted red that's sold for tax evasion purposes, but like, sure, let's go with the cooler reason.

jk Odette's reason definitely makes for a more interesting plot, but I love that she doesn't really consider the more mundane version of "people like money and status symbols"
She dug into the front pocket of her bag, careful not to jostle her phone, and retrieved a lone pen, which she uncapped with her teeth before beginning to scribble with it.
oh god oh baby you think that you figured out that the entire global elite has a massive conspiracy that they've literally erased from the history textbooks and your first instinct is to just write it down even though it's short enough to remember? if this book doesn't immediately get stolen/read/left somewhere I'll be pretty surprised tbh
Shiny trade exists because traders know shinies can spawn the weird Pokemon. Hoarding from the public??? Explains why it won’t be abolished despite overwhelming support for it????? Maybe.
this one also makes me chuckle--rich people wouldn't just do a thing that poor people are overwhelming in favor of them not doing!! that's not fair!!!!!
“What if they’re trying to keep all of this under wraps to lessen the possible reaction?” she asked. “There’s so much negative press around the shiny trade and Team Enigma’s possible whereabouts and involvement in the crisis. Putting the two together would cause a social explosion if people found out. Especially if my hypothesis that the wealthy are purposely hoarding those Pokemon is correct.”
I'm really glad that Noel points out that usually the people covering things up because the general public would be angry if they found out are still the bad people
“I’m sure a bunch of millionaires banding together could make something like that happen,” Noel said in a huff. “I’d bet that book's saving grace was referring to shinies as ‘odd colored Pokemon’ instead of just ‘shiny.’ Though, I would think, if they were really trying to wipe records, they’d at least be a little more thorough.”
this is not the reaction I'd have to learning that the entire society successfully wiped a fact from all history resources ever but I'm not Odette so I get it, but also, wow, this is a lot to take in
“Clovis could be an undercover party with Virtue Corp.”
There's a moment earlier where I forgot to quote where Odette is saying that she was jumping to conclusions where I felt like she was making some pretty obvious connections--and I think that line would fit better here, where she makes a pretty big jump to a conclusion (in the sense that it's a good theory but it isn't the first thing that immediately came to mind--it feels a lot more worthy of her sheepishly being like "okay this one's a little wild but what if?")
“Not everything functions at face value, Dee.” But, realistically, Clovis could just be some pretty rich man who thought you were cute and decided he didn’t want to see you get involved in...whatever this is,” he said.
extra quotation mark after "Dee" here

I do like Noel going for the smaller, less conspiracy theory solutions here--it provides some nice counterpart to Odette jumping to full on "the 1% are all in on the same joke"

(this one is fun because I'm staking it on him knowing that she's got a sin pokemon inside of her lol)
That caused her brain to catch on the idea that Clovis thought she was cute.
On the one hand I like the "othering" of Odette and Odette's brain, but I think those kind of work if they happen more frequently--otherwise it's kind of jarring to see the disassociation in narration.
“Or, he’s undercover and absolutely slipped up. And in realizing he slipped up, he decided that shooting me a warning would be a route to go.”
As a conclusion this seems a little weak--but the point is that Odette's missing something, so that tracks!
 

ShiniGojira

Multiversal Extraordinaire
Location
Stranded In The Gaps between Multiverses
Pronouns
He/him/they/her
Partners
  1. froslass
  2. zorua-gojira
  3. salandit-shiny
  4. goomy
Hi there, hope you're doing well! I'm here for Blitz and I'm giving this story a shot after hearing the things about it.

And so far, for the prologue and chapter 1.

I'm lovin' it.

The bead of red that formed on his thumb began to glow, and a stream of light shot out from it and joined the beams emanating from the Pokeball. It met with the manifestation, causing it to begin to grow in size. It grew, and grew, and grew. It didn’t appear it would stop growing, until the glowing form had nearly hit the ceiling. However, it stopped just short of it, and faded from the beams of the Pokeball and Florent’s blood into reality.

It was a towering, lanky form, with arms were as long as its seemingly legless body. This left the being floating, like a ghost. A cloak appeared to cover it, with a hood up over what should have been its head. However, there looked to be no head to speak of. Only a single, bloodshot red eye sat in place. Once formed, it loomed ominously over the four grunts.

They didn't attempt to run, knowing damn well it would be futile. Their fates were sealed. They accepted it.

"Mom, I'm coming home, pure and true," one muttered as his tears began to soak the inside of his mask. He shut his eyes and prepared for the inevitable.

“Feast,” Florent said simply.

A slit tore open in the Pokemon’s stomach, revealing rows upon rows of serrated and saliva-coated pincers. A pointed tongue, one that looked to be far too long to fit in its body, licked the pincers before curling outward into the open. The Pokemon emitted a threatening growl, before lunging at the grunts. All that could be heard was a set of high pitched squeals, followed by the sickening sound of their bones crunching, and the squelch of their flesh being bitten into. It took Gulattive no time at all to swallow down all of them.

I'm getting a Frieza-kinda vibe from Florent i.e, the whole killing their minions and their chilling, cruel personality. (Obviously there's some differences but I think I'd enjoy reading how this guy will interact with the protagonist). Also, a quick little question: Is the Pokémon of Gluttony a fakemon that's inspired by a Dusknoir or a Dusknoir with some changes? 'cause I'm seeing some similarities between the two.

Odette is an intriguing character, that with the given brief but informative history, she has trauma that'll probably be dealt with sometime in the future and I'm curious to how she'd tackled the Pokémon of Wrath and the knowledge of her having a brother that is unknown to her.

And another thing, I can't help but be curious about why shiny Pokémon were in the majority of the 'Sacrilege' OD reports, are their shiny-ness important to something or?

I'm guessing this 'Sacrilege' drug has something to do with Florent? And the deaths could be Gluttony's fault? Or is it Armel doing this?

The story and premise is rather interesting, something that I think has pretty good potential as it delves into the darker and more realistic side of the Pokémon world. It definitely got my interest and made me want to read more.

I'm curious to see more.
 
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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
  9. manectric
Hi Sind. this is going to be an impressions review covering the prologue and first 3 chapters. I'm going to cover general thoughts on the story thus far and on our main character, as well as a few other characters.

The opening was delightfully creepy. You're quick to set up our greater threat in the prologue, presenting us with a creepy, almost cultlike team - more on that thought later. The only thing that tripped me up is that I could not parse what pokemon Florent was using. That might have been intentional, as the description give it a very eldritch vibe, but I'm bringing it up in case it's not.

One quick line edit here:
It was a towering, lanky form, with arms were as long as its seemingly legless body
I think you're either missing a word or have an extra word here. Either delete were or add This might be fixed in the TR version - I pulled from ao3 for tts.

Regardless, this chapter quickly establishes the level of danger I'm expecting our heroes will face at some point. It also sets up a mystery that will need to be unraveled eventually: who is Florent's child. Will it be our protaganist, Odette? Or some other major character? It's notable that Odette's father has yet to be mentioned (unless I'm missing something) but at the same time if her mom needs to be in hiding then going around doing research doesn't seem like the best way to go about that. The fact that she only has 5 pokemon might also play into this, since there's a supposed legendary out and about.

I'm kind of surprised by how much Odette and her friends are going on about stopping Team Enigma. While I was expecting something like that to come up early, where she ends up involved, I didn’t expect her to already be somewhat involved. I haven't been able to discern whether they're trying to solve it because they want to play detective or if they're just daydreaming about solving it. I feel like it's the former, since Noel has gone as far as getting into classified information, but so far they've felt very much like "just some people playing amature detective".

Speaking of Odette, the fic is quick to establish her as a strong character. Strong as in, strongly characterized. She's a bit hotheaded and quick to anger, but she has her caring spots. And it's clear that she's hurting a lot and just trying to get by.

Something I think you do really well is how you characterize her pokemon. While it's clear that they're not the main focus, they all feel like they have unique personalities and they feel like more than just an extension of Odette. They're their own beings with their own lives.

Dorian makes my blood boil. From the moment he made that flippant comment he made about selling Enora to his… well, everything after that, I was constantly flipping between being disgusted and having my hair stand on end with worry. His vaguely religious comments line up horribly well with the vibe you established with Team Enigma in the prologue. Between that and the shiny hunting business, if he - or at least his family - aren’t involved with Team Enigma in some way, I’d be flabbergasted.

Related to the religious tones of Enigma, I feel like it’s not surprising at all that the drug they’ve been distributing is called sacrilege.

Related to the shiny hunting stuff, I think you’ve incorporated a habit of game players that’s never really been addressed in any sort of canon in an interesting, if vaguely menacing way. I get the vague feeling that someone with money and power is responsible for having all the police reports scrubbed regarding shiny pokemon. Someone obviously doesn’t want the either increased effects or instances of sacrilege usage on shiny pokemon getting out. Likely someone who stands to lose out from the bad publicity. Somebody like… Dorian’s family :absus:. It could just as easily be someone else involved in the trade… you’ve just given us this sleazeball that’s throwing up all these red flags and expect me to believe that his family is just a red herring?

Before I wrap up, I just had a couple stray thoughts. I absolutely loved the imagery you used in the scene where Odette was biking home. So much so that I wrote down a reminder to bring it up here. The other is that I really wish that a date was established for when the fic takes place early on. We know the prologue happened in 1997, but what date is it now? Time has clearly passed because rotom phones are a thing, but how much time?

Overall, I really liked what I’ve read so far. Chapter 3 felt like a good stopping point to write a review, especially the end of the chapter, but I am definitely planning on reading more. Until then.
 

kintsugi

golden scars | pfp by sun
Location
the warmth of summer in the songs you write
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. silvally-grass
  2. lapras
  3. golurk
  4. booper-kintsugi
  5. meloetta-kint-muse
  6. meloetta-kint-dancer
  7. murkrow
  8. yveltal
  9. celebi
so I was checking for a front page index and it turns out this fic is one year old tomorrow, which is a happy accident on my part all according to my master plan ofc. congrats on a solid year! 80k words published is a behemoth, and it's certainly been a fun ride.

Okay, so the most recent two chapters I read as a chunk, which made sense since they were part 1/part 2'ing, but as disclosure this means this review is even more scattered, I'm sorry. (hi me from the future and this is a line that aged like fine fucking wine)

staring with this from our convo prior to review exchange: big picture/story elements, as I understand them:
- Dorien is definitely evil
- Clovis probably isn't explicitly evil but I will continue to be sus of him for no reason. Pano can attest that there is no better pair than me dying on the hill of sus'ing town.
- Odette isn't evil.
- Loic is a good friend.

less shitposty reads:
- the shiny trade exists, in part, to circulate shiny pokemon specifically to people who want to make sin pokemon (if you take the letters H and Y out of "shiny" you get "sin". coincidence?? I THINK NOT. HY IS BEHIND THIS. FINAL ANSWER. THE REST OF THIS REVIEW IS USELESS.)
- Team Enigma is circulating sacrilege
- Virtue Corp is somehow linked to Team Enigma(*)
- Virtue Corp is working with Kalos PD and both of them are actively suppressing the link between sacrilege and shiny pokemon because ???
- look I have typed many lines about "when and why would cops hide evidence??" and none of them are forum friendly
- at some point someone advertised this fic to me as "eat the rich" and there's a pokemon in the prologue who's the embodiment of gluttony so I'm waiting patiently

(*) originally I thought they were actively combatting Enigma, but now I'm not sure! That seems to be an Odette theory. The only thing we actually know is the note, and when I checked back on that:
You and your men’s cooperation has proven most helpful. I have my best people stationed within our prime suspect's circles, as we are entirely certain they have ties to Team Enigma. Keep doing what you are doing, with your efforts and the press, and we’ll be in touch.
J.L. Ménétries
"they have ties to Team Enigma" isn't explicitly the same as "and so we must be cautious of them"--I'm fairly certain that Clovis is actually a good guy, so I doubt it, but so far the only reason I think Virtue Corp would be anti-Enigma currently is the meta knowledge that there are 7 deadly sins and 7 (adjective???) virtues.

It's a little trickier to dig at anything else because I have trouble seeing through Odette's filter. She's really good at reading people (TM) but she keeps doing things that I don't think are what a person with high perception/wisdom would do, so it's hard to tell if she thinks she's ahead or if she's getting utterly played. The people around her also don't respond in a way that I'd expect them to respond--so naturally, in big brain fashion, I mostly conclude that this is because they're actually playing one level deeper than her, and she thinks she's winning because that's what they want her to think, and she's so utterly outclassed here that she can't even tell she's being outclassed.

(it should also be noted when I type this out that I am notoriously hit/miss with actually understanding foreshadowing in a story. either the point goes way over my head and I'm completely surprised when Man Who Says He Wants to Kill Everyone wants to kill everyone, or I get really drunk at 3 am and make an elaborate shitpost that accidentally calls out major twists in the story with no rhyme or reason. there is no middle ground)

---

ooooookay, coming in from the future (and a solid five hours after we talked, please don't check timestamps on this), and it turns out I had a lot of thoughts about how things come together, how things land, etc. which I think is actually the sweet spot of "from reading the text, I think I can see the way (or ways) in which you were trying to construct this, and I think I can walk through where you mentioned you were struggling", but this is legit an essay and so I've just tried to fix the review length problem by shoving it into more and more spoilers.

And I really, really want to clarify here that I normally don't feel compelled to write essays until 2 AM for stories I'm not interested in. Honestly this for me was the most interesting arc of the story so far, both in terms of what info's being revealed and maybe some light tweaks for how those pieces could (gently) be rejiggled into a really, really compelling character/mystery combo--I really do think all the pieces are there and it's a good setup so far. The high-level world concepts are cool, the way that Odette's got a ton of personal baggage that lets her interact with all this stuff is really cool. I entirely accept why this many words about your text would read as "my god kint hated it" and tbh I don't think any amount of words saying "no but i actually had a pretty good time" will fix that, but I'll try. Please consider this my apology for not being around to beta for the past year lol.

but uh hi, hello:
I found this easier to break out into chunks. general thoughts in the sections below--they got a little out of hand, but as discussed on Discord, this is them! I was rereading this and realized they sort pretty nicely into "scene-setting/characters", "battle", and "scooby doo and the mystery crew" so I did that to have some scene breaks:

Scene-Setting/Characters
So this arc for me is mostly one of Odette trying to get info. She wants to solve the shiny pokemon/sacrilege shit, but to do so, she has to get answers. But she's punching way out of her league here, and also the answers she's getting are painting a progressively more and more fucked up version of the world she lives in, with increasingly more relevant repercussions to her specific place in the world--first we get into a glimpse into the existence of shiny trafficking, and then everyone's lying through their teeth at fancy dances, and then they're battling with these super fucked up sin pokemon, and now even the police/media are in on it and are actively covering up information. And these are all topics that I think are specifically relevant to Odette--she has Enora, she's hiding her past trauma and the impact it has on her from her friends/is pulling some hardcore this is Fine burial of emotions, she's probably one of the sin pokemon, and her grandfather's inextricably at the core of the whole police coverup. There's a lot of personal stakes intertwining here in theory, and a lot of chances for Odette to reflect on what this new situation is revealing about what she knows herself. And I think for a thriller/mystery-ish plot, where a lot of the tension revolves around revealing more information, there's a natural parallel that you can tell here--as Odette learns more about the new world she's entering, we learn more about her.

(And you've mentioned that as a whole you intend for this world to feel ethically fair to pokemon--but that's tricky, because at least in the scenarios that Odette encounters, the pokemon are getting super shafted and she's mostly okay with it? I think a fish out of water situation works really well to your favor, though: the rich people are like "lol yeah we totally traffic pokemon all the time it's chill" and this never stops being surprisingly or horrifying to Odette. But I think that's all easily fixable in the context of "these are rich assholes who do what they want" as long as Odette is notably not the rich asshole and is confused since the non-assholes of the world don't do this. Flagged some of these in the line edits.)

So for me I think the primary tension, starting with Dorien inviting her to the gala, is this onus Odette has to infiltrate high society--there's an interplay between her wanting to give in to her basic instincts of what the actual fuck is wrong with these people, they are the worst/she's got a wrath spirit inside of her and that makes her even more inclined to punch her way out of things, versus, this is a really great example of a situation that she can't actually punch her way out of. In several ways--one, this is basically a diplomacy mission; two, this is a diplomacy mission and Odette has a real shit hand. She enters the playing field with no money, no rich parents, no real understanding/metric for how to best blend in, and no information. The only thing she really has here is Dorien, and, well. That sucks. So when the chips are down, you start making questionable choices. For me the really interesting bits so far have been watching how far Odette's willing to go to keep following this--will she be Dorien's arm candy? will she smile stiffly while people try to buy Enora? She doesn't have the money, clout, or fame that the other people at these parties have, so what will she put on the line instead? And that's a really fascinating source of tension imo.

But for me where this starts to trip up is that we don't really feel that tension. Odette bumbling around high society and failing to socialize with them is perfectly normal--these guys are really fucked up. I can see why someone who lived a normal life (or on the flip side, someone who is a victim of sexual assault and as such knows what it's like to feel powerless/forced into situations where your body is being used for someone else's pleasure) would be totally disgusted by the shiny trade and sin pokemon. I get why this would elicit these kinds of emotions in her. But if she loses control and flips out, it only feels narratively meaningful if there are consequences--in this hypothetical, for the most part, she just goes around insulting Dorien and Dorien's rich friends and they just let her do it. She has the choice to play the rich people's game, and she chooses not to play it, and she loses for it.

This route would have plot consequences--Odette doesn't get the answers she needs. She's in the dark. They recognize she's powerless here, that she has no metaphorical bite even if she's literally able to bite their heads off, and they don't respond to her, and she doesn't get answers. She's a poor kid with no trust fund. They don't care if she insults them because inherently she means nothing to them and her threats are meaningless. It's like watching a chihuahua bark at a tiger, where you know there's no threat but it's kind of cute to watch. Dorien knows he can drug her whenever he wants; at this point, her brain's so fucked she can barely remember what week it is. But! In that case, I think the tension builds in a different way, since Odette-who-reads-the-human-race-like-a-book should be able to recognize this; she's used to people getting worked up when she jabs at them but why isn't anyone responding? Why does Dorien keep insisting on holding her close when she's trying to pull away? And she realizes that, as far as the people at the gala are concerned, she's just another shiny pokemon--interesting to look at, different from the rest (a Poor who hasn't learned her place??), but ultimately nothing to be taken seriously.

Or, and this is where I thought things were going initially--Odette fights her battle with her wrath and wins. She's able to quell her emotions and act the part of a dewy-eyed girl who adores what Dorien has to show her. Maybe she makes a few trip-ups but in general when the rich people ask when the wedding is, she flutters her eyelashes and says "oh, it could never be soon enough." This fucking disgusts her, but she's just an actress, and she reminds herself that this is for the greater good. She has the choice to play the rich people's game, she chooses to play it, and winning makes her angry at herself because it's gradually eroding what she wants to stand for.

“I didn’t even want to bring you out at all because I know it’s dangerous. They swarm you. That’s why I didn’t bring you last week, but Dorien started telling people I have a shiny, and…” she trailed off as she realized she was starting to ramble. With a huff, she got herself back on track.

“As my coveted shiny, you’re the ‘in’ I need. I’ll look less like a suspicious clueless commoner and more like a commoner who wants what they have.”

At that point, Enora’s ears had gone totally slack. She was no longer looking at the others, but rather at the ground. “Sylv…” she muttered.

That snapped Odette awake really fast. With an inward gasp, she bristled. Tension filled her shoulders, and she recoiled backward.

“This isn’t...like that,” Odette said. Her heartbeat picked up speed, and she could hear it in her ears.
it's scenes like these where I think that the second route is the one you wanted to go for (also because for the first plot to carry interest for more than four chapters, where the conceit is "no plot happens because the character makes the wrong choices", I'm not sure what you'd do). But how much is Odette willing to sacrifice here? This is a genuinely heartbreaking decision for Enora imo; if I had to choose between walking into a room of people who literally want to sell, drug, and breed me -or- risk my best friend getting sexually assaulted, it would be a tough choice but I hope I'd find the courage to walk into that room. But for Odette to ask this of her? When the reason Odette doesn't have an 'in' is because she's been historically shit at socializing with the rich people because she keeps making fun of them to their faces? (See: Noel, who's able to get in's with rich people at the gala through charm/without a shiny pokemon) That's a genuinely fucked thing to ask of a friend, but at the same time, I could see why Odette would think it's necessary.

This route would have character consequences, similar to the ones we already see here--she has to deal with Dorien touching her, and provoking her, and making fun of her eating, and talking casually about her backstory in a way that makes her rage. She has to ignore all of that and let him do this to her, even though she'd much rather gun her motorcycle through the streets and run him over, because Wrath won't fix her problems here; passivity will or so she thinks. And it gets progressively worse and gradually she has to sacrifice more and more. Enora gets involved, and Odette has to rationalize with herself that it's okay for her friend to suffer in an even more visceral way, because it'll all be worth it once they save the day. Even when she wins, she's losing.

And I think you could do bit of column A, bit of column B here with these two options; there's definitely interesting groundwork in either direction. I think for me the struggle was the stakes of the game here--in the way that the story is currently set up, she has the choice to play the rich people's game, she doesn't choose to play it, and she still ends up getting the information she wants, so she wins. Even when she should be losing, she wins. There's a lot of conflict in the world that gets sidestepped more or less because Clovis or Noel navigate these situations for her, and Clovis ends up divulging information for her, so her actual agency on the plot feels stripped away and her actions don't really seem like they have meaningful consequences.

Line edits for this section. I had a bit of fun tweaking some scenarios in a way that I think might help merge the worldbuilding/characters, and then the rest is misc phrasing questions.

“What a darling Sylveon! We don’t see a lot of the Eevee’s around here,” a woman said. “They’re extremely rare, and that always fetches top dollar. I’m surprised you haven’t hosted a bid for her yet!”
I was curious about the mechanics here--surely at some point the rich people have to stop swapping pokemon around and have one they want to keep, right? It can't be a constant cycle of auctioning off pokemon; surely at some point they have one or two they get to keep as trophies?

Two/three minds here--one, you want to show that she/the people at this party are shitty and materialistic, and are objectifying Enora in a way that horrifies Odette. I think this would phrase better as something like "What a darling Sylveon! We don't see a lot of the Eevee's around here. Is she for sale?" and then jump into the bidding--this would better convey that this woman wants to purchase a shiny sylveon, not that everyone who walks around with a shiny pokemon is trying to sell them.
[maybe have her mention it's even harder to find sylveon because it's so hard to get them to evolve into the "finnicky" ones for some reason the reason is that sylveon/espeon/umbreon have to fucking like you. a stone is much cheaper than kindness. what trainer did she use to coerce this eevee to evolve; can she have their number?]

Two, everyone who walks around with a shiny pokemon is trying to sell them. Odette notices this as the last party with people setting up impromptu auctions as she's walking around the dance floor or something. She notices that Isaur and Talonflame are more or less out of place as the only pokemon who are wandering around the party and aren't for sale.

Three, the rich people actually are constantly trying to sell their shiny pokemon because it turns out you need a specific shiny pokemon to become a legendary sin pokemon, but for some reason they don't exactly know which one for sure so you have to keep cycling through them. This could play nicely into Odette accidentally fucking over Enora here--she thinks they'll be fine because Odette was planning on using the "oh, my darling Enora? I could never sell her, the coloration is just so exquisite" since Odette thinks that they're just collecting shiny pokemon for being rare, and then all the rich people are confused because their actual goal is to get through as many shiny pokemon as possible. Odette either doesn't make the connection there (because it's a pretty big stretch), or she actually gets new information (as a reward! for sucking up to rich people! actions have consequences)

She was much too snappy at the last gettogether, and while Dorien was apparently none the wiser to her distaste, she had to make sure she was still playing her part effectively...as much as it continued to trigger her gag reflex.
character growth!

*get together

(I think the one thing that would make this more complete for me is a bit of realization that there's consequences for failing to act the part, or rewards for playing along. Like maybe Dorien's obsessed with her and will creepily dote no matter how many times she throws him to the side (this is an assumption based on what he's sad; I'm not sure if it's true about him tbh), but she manages to swallow down the bile and schmooze up to him for four seconds and he lets some very important detail slip/invites her somewhere/shows her off to an inner circle and she realizes that she can get more info out of him effectively if he's happy, not just physically near her. it's really gross though so I get why she wouldn't do that--the converse though would be that she pisses off Dorien one too many times and isn't able to get the info she wants or something. Consequences for her choice here, good or bad, that lead her to make this decision, would go a long way in selling this character choice to me!)
Instead, she averted her gaze down toward his grey shirt sleeve. She focused on a faint and patchy blue stain just on the inside of the cuff, suppressing her own growl as Dorien leaned down and nuzzled his face into hers. She distracted herself by wondering what poor maid he fired for allowing such a stain to form.
I liked the foreshadowing setup here.
“No, I just didn’t like any of them and wanted to go with my friends,” Odette said sternly.

Dorien chuckled again. “She really just has high standards, so of course she decided that I was worth the time!”
In general I think this is my main sticking point with Odette-and-the-rich--I can't tell if she actually wants to schmooze up to them or not. In narration she says she does, and they keep going to these things with the goal of trying to get info out of them, but every time she's got the chance she's pretty aggro about reminding them how assholeish they are and she hates them, and then Dorien or Clovis smooths things over for her. So the agency feels a bit lost, I think.

And there's a lot of ways this could go, especially in light of her background. I think her theater background would be really helpful for getting her to lie here--deep breaths; she reminds herself she's just playing another part, and that part requires her not to make a snarky comment in this exact moment. Or, as someone who's holding in a Lot of repressed trauma--it's pretty clear that she's got a lot of experience pretending like things are Fine, and she channels that.

(And this could feet a little into how/why she admires Clovis so much--Dorien's such a POSER, he's always SMILING and POSTURING and PREENING because his family is full of LAME SOCIAL CLIMBERS like she's pretending to be, and she hates that she has to channel it and that she's not terrible at it either, but Clovis is over here saying all the things she wishes she could say, but doesn't have the power/social standing to. Plus, her conversations with him just feel so much more REAL because she can finally speak her mind and this makes her swuwuwuwuooon)

I also get the feeling that you want her to try lying and then be really bad at it because she's so short-tempered/anggy all the time, which is the other angle you could go for. But I think that comes in two flavors as well--she never really seems to try, and the narration fails to punish her for it. She's clearly not from money/power, so I don't really get why people at these galas would give a shit about her if all she does is keep pissing them off (Dorien's obsessed with her because Plot and I get that part). But in general if the point is that she's good at reading people but bad at manipulating them because she can't lie convincingly, only see through them--then structurally it'd be helpful if her trying and failing to do these things had actual bad repercussions, like the people at the table start to ignore her because she's literally this random poor nobody from nowhere and this is literally a crowd of people who buy and sell people.
“Enora doesn’t have a taste for alcohol,” Odette said.
I thought this would be a good place to set up the Solene/memories returning thing--"Enora doesn't have a taste for alcohol. None of my pokemon do, actually, [except for maybe some do??? up to you]"--but this way there's a little seed planted for when she starts to question Dorien's story in the next part--Solene had been drunk?? That didn't make any sense; Solene hated alcohol--and then maybe that can be used to get Noel to realize there's something up that might be deeper than head trauma.
He held his Vullaby in a baby harness, strapped to his stomach. The bird was in the middle of downing what looked to be a cupcake.
amazing. very glad the bird care route is going full circle.
“Do you know where I could find some water?” she asked. Dorien stopped in his sip, before nodding his head toward the bar that had been setup under one of the larger white gazebos. “They’ll certainly have some at the bar,” he said. “Is the wine too much, sweetheart?”
It'd be helpful to split the paragraphs here so that Odette/Dorien are on separate paragraphs.
If there was ever a time for Enora and her to be on the same page, it was now. She needed her to understand.
poor Enora :(

I think it's kind of rough that it's never really a question about understanding what Enora thinks here, and just being blatantly certain that Odette's decision is the correct one and she's entirely safe to do this (especially since, as we've seen with the whole Dorien in chapter 7 thing, she's definitely not!). It seems like the compromise/"on the same page" here is just, "we have to do it my way".

(sidebar, the "she needed her to understand" is a little tricky to parse as far as who's who)
A majority of them looked tired. Maybe not as tired as that Malamar and that Scizor had looked, but a lot of them walked with noticeably sluggish weight in their step. More noticeably, most exuded an aura of reluctance. They trailed behind their “trainers” with gaits that made it clear they wanted to be anywhere else but there. Smiles were sparse, and cheerful mannerisms were even sparser.

Odette wondered how she never noticed it at that gala. Or, maybe she had, it just didn’t register with her as abnormal until she saw that battle.
I struggled to relate this "she hadn't noticed it was abnormal" with the idea that Odette is hyper-observant and notices everything, to the point that this has been voiced by pretty much every member of the cast. This as a reader telegraphs as either:
- Odette isn't actually hyper-observant and misses key details even when she's actively looking for things. She's good at observing things, and definitely above average, but not to the point that people are like "she reads the world like a BOOK"
- Odette is hyper-observant. But she's seen pokemon who don't want to be where they are a lot, so this doesn't telegraph as unusual to her.

And I don't really think you want the second one (since that implies a dramatically more cruel world for pokemon than I think you're going for), so I think the first option is a little better? I also think it's okay for a character to be good at something without being the best, since then there's some room for failure and the narrative gets tension back.

(there's also ways to stretch this I think--
- there were fewer pokemon at the gala because it wasn't an auction gala; it was more of a socializing gala and the rich people didn't want to be bothered by their dumb POKEMON. the tea party here is for selling pokemon so there are way more of them around
- darkness/environmental differences at the gala. or there's a whole section of the gala that has a ton of shiny pokemon, but Dorien is actively keeping her away from that
- she does notice but thinks that it's just rich people being dicks. this would double better if they're also dicks to her, or the waitstaff, or something--easy for her to be like, oh, they just run everyone ragged, and then later she realizes, no, this is more than just exhaustion. it puts a middle ground between not noticing "this pokemon is behaving as I normally expect it to"/"this pokemon are literally on drugs" and "damn, that pokemon looks pretty sad and unenthused about the party"/"this pokemon is literally on drugs" that would be easier for Odette to exist in. She's correctly identified the symptom here but presents the wrong cause, which is fair, because it's a stretch to assume that the rich people would want to drug their very expensive trafficked trophies without also knowing the connection between shiny pokemon/sacrilege/sin pokemon.)
Odette could see Enora’s ears sinking lower and lower the more she spoke. Whether that meant she was getting to her, only time would tell. She yawned loudly, but wouldn’t let that break her streak.
I think Odette was yawning here but it's really hard to tell since the her could also be Enora.
“You know damn well that if you weren’t with me, going through whatever hell those ‘mon are going through, you’d want somebody to do something about it.” She sucked in a deep breath in order to level the haze that had started to cloud her vision.
I think this would land more easily with me if it was coming from Enora, instead of Odette--Enora's uncertain, but her eye catches on a shiny [pokemon] passing by that looks absolutely miserable, she and Odette stare at it, and Enora starts to shift her mind a little. This puts the ball more in Enora's court than just a lecture from Odette that's basically "look if you were a victim of trafficking you'd be upset, so go pretend to be a victim of trafficking for me."

The anger she’d managed to wade through previously was starting to flare back up again. She wasn’t quite sure why, though. She knew where his head was, and it of course made sense. She supposed she was getting so upset, because she couldn’t bear the thought of this man she liked so much viewing her in such a negative light. Right?
Knowing the reveal from the next chapter, I'm actually not sure why Clovis thinks she purchased Enora? He knows Bernard well enough to know that there's no way Odette could actually afford this, and it seems like he/Bernard have discussed Odette long enough for Bernard to reveal that Odette's interested in the sacrilege stuff + already had a shiny pokemon. I think if you want it to look like Clovis thinks she's trying to sell Enora (instead of "then how did you" / "[caught her] the old fashioned way"), he'd be asking sarcastically about her bids, what kind of price she's setting, to get a feel for that--but the shock here is that she has a shiny, which doesn't make sense to me in light of what we find out later.
A nasty glare fell over her features as she looked back over at him. Her angered lips detached from her brain, and began to run before she could think it over. “I could ask you the same thing, Clovis. What’s a shut-in like you doing figure skate--”
oh no oh rip this is not the subtle plan she'd made last chapter lol
“Take the handkerchief,” he said in a whisper. But, what struck her is that he said it in Galarian. She considered it, before doing as he instructed. He sighed in what sounded to be relief as he removed his other hand and sat back down.
I thought this was a clever moment!
“How’d you even research without a last name?” she asked.

“I could ask you that,” he said.
Except he's Clovis LeClair, eldest son of megacorp mc megacorp, and she's not--I don't see why he's so impressed that she figured out his last name when literally everyone at this party knows him and it's just a matter of asking.
“If it’s any consolation, I don’t know enough concrete evidence to blow your cover. I just know you fucked up.”
I'm unsure how cagey you want to convey Odette as being around him--if she doesn't fully trust him, why disclose how little she actually knows?
“Either you’re a fantastic actress, or you don’t despise your trainer.”
This is horrifying to me because it implies that Clovis sees a lot of pokemon who are fantastic actresses, and that they specifically act as if they love their trainers even if they consciously don't, which in turn kind of collapses the whole "pokemon have an equal say here and we'd be able to tell if they're unhappy" because 1) trainers can't tell if they're unhappy because pokemon can lie about it and 2) they choose to lie about it as opposed to doing anything else.

1) is horrifying because like, the implication that this is common casts all of the other pokemon interactions in a kind of ugly light--is Ange actually happy to be here or is he just acting? who knows??? has loic had a genuine change of heart or is he just acting this way so that Odette feeds him??? Odette sort of acting like this is the norm makes a lot of her interactions seem a lot less trustworthy.
2) suggests that there's nothing else the pokemon can do, to the point that acting like they like their trainers is the best option, which is pretty bleak. This in turn suggests that pokemon who don't like their trainers can't leave and have no options for leaving (because there's arguably very few situations in which it's fair that you'd need to choose to act like you like someone you actually "despise"), which again, makes things look a lot uglier than I think you want in this world.

Which, again, maybe what you want? I think we discussed back in the beta read for 3 how a lot of worldbuilding and character perception is intertwined--people do horrible things. Protagonists can do horrible things too. Or, there's a lot of directions to take this that don't necessarily have to end in "wow the real villain in this fic is literally anyone who owns a pokemon":

- Odette is horrified at the implication that pokemon would ever have to act like they like their trainers, for the reasons above, because in the society that she's from, pokemon can leave whenever they want and there's no pressure for them to act happy--being friends with someone means you're open to their opinions. She voices this in disgust and Clovis shrugs, takes a dreamy drag from his cancer stick, and points out that she's been acting like she likes the people at this party even though she clearly despises them; he wouldn't judge if Enora was a better actress than she was ("Sprinkle's got a real cool poker face that I could never hope to match tbh"). Odette has Thoughts about how you can be coerced into doing things that you don't want to do without actual threats of violence, and Odette sympathizes even more with the shiny pokemon because she can see her own behavior reflected in them--but she can afford to slip up a few times and piss off some rich people because Dorien/Clovis will cover for her; the shiny pokemon have to be 100% acting all the time, and the alternative? being turned into the snake from before? that's so fucked, she realizes. That's what's on the line for them though. And maybe this inspires her to be more careful in her acting now.
- Clovis doesn't say this. He is confused by Enora and glances around the garden. Odette notices another shiny pokemon looking crestfallen while two rich people shake hands. Clovis glances back and exhales, and says he believes Odette. Odette's confused but grateful--really, he believes her so easily uwu? And Clovis looks back at the shiny pokemon, who is now actively sobbing or something as it's being ushered away by a new owner--"the people here don't actually care about their pokemon. if they did, none of them would be here." Odette realizes that this must be how Clovis saw through her as well, and realizes that it's not too hard to tell if someone's sad--but you have to look for it, and no one at the garden is looking.

Or something! There's a lot of options here, but I think as with the initial draft of the shiny trade, Odette sort of nodding and taking it into stride implies that it's normal to her, when the fucked-up implications there might not be the ones you want to incorporate into your world.
“Do you have your phone on you?” As Clovis spoke he was digging into his pocket again. He withdrew the same Applin phone he’d dunked in the vase at the gala. The thing had to have been waterproof, because he clicked it on, and it appeared to still be working like nothing was wrong.
I love that the idea of him just having a billion dollars and as such buying a new phone doesn't occur to her here.
Odette frowned, then began to scratch her behind her left ear. “It’s okay. Thank you for helping me argue with him. You really tipped the scale.”
her/her stack was tricky
She briefly wondered if anybody had ever been attacked by a Gyarados while they were attending a fancy gettogether like this one. Perhaps it did happen, and it made the signs necessary. She wondered why there were even Gyarados in the lake in the first place, only to remember that Magikarp eventually evolved.
This setup is hard for me to follow--why woudn't they have a tame pretty pokemon that doesn't evolve into a killer monster, like goldeen or finneon?

From a meta perspective, I get why you want gyarados in the lake, but I don't understand why the rich people would but then would have signs for 'Beware of Gyarados'--which implies they know the danger and are willing to put themselves at risk for no real reason than that they like magikarp but can't stop them from evolving (which is silly--rich people defang tigers and shit. it'd be so easy for them to slap everstones on them, or just kill them and get new ones; these guys are literally drugging their super expensive pokemon to death). I think a different angle you could take that would still let you have the lake full of gyarados for later would be to make it a huge spectacle--there's a fancy fountain in the middle; Odette approaches and is horrified to see that there's not one but two gyarados in the lake, holy shit, that's so dangerous, what the fuck? But no one else is afraid; someone even tosses a stone at the gyarados or something--something to establish that the rich people a) think that the gyarados are an empty threat and b) know that this isn't the norm. She looks closer and she's able to see that the gyarados are drugged, or there's a super powerful force field at the top, or they've got shock collars on (these are things that the adrenaline orb can negate later), and Odette is disgusted. But it's just another display of these asshole rich people doing something needlessly cruel and dehumanizing because they can, and the exoticness of being able to flex on what would normally be a force of nature is just too appealing to them.

(And if you really want to drive the point home, Dorien pulls her away from the lake with a skeevy grin, touches her shoulder, makes jokes about marrying her, whatever. Odette's temper flares up. In the background, someone tosses a stone at the gyarados again or starts pulling on its whiskers. She sees the rage in its eyes but the collar around its neck fizzles dangerously. Dorien follows her gaze and remarks that it's no fun once they've become so broken that they stop fighting back. Then he pulls on her again, and Odette has to make a choice.)

Battle
So in general, I find that battles work better when you establish some or all of the following:
- what both sides can do
- what both sides have to lose
- what both sides have to gain

Starting with the first one--"what both sides can do" is often tied to setting. I like how you use the environment here, how Clovis turns the water into a tool. The gyarados are more or less water-locked and Enora/Vullaby/Sprinkle are more or less land-locked; this creates a series of limitations on them that can be exploited/stretched during the course of the battle.
That’s what they were calling this one, a tea party. Before it was a gala, and now it was a tea party. Instead of a grand ballroom, they were now conversing in a vast, and exquisitely kept garden. Fountains were buried among rows and rows of expertly trimmed flower bushes and towering trees. Of course this place looked picturesque; according to what Odette had read about it, it was kept almost entirely by Roserades, Roselias, and Budews.

The gathering itself was being held right on the banks of the giant, yet very charming lake, sitting smack in the middle of the flora. Stark white gazebos were set up among the shady weeping willows and gravel paths. It truly looked like the scene had been pulled from A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte, down to the socialites in their vintage tea dresses and suits, and stupid little parasols and fancy hats. Of course, a majority of them had a shiny of some sort in tow.
I did think that the setup for this was a little hazy. I liked the in media res for both this and the other gala, but it was a little hard to even understand where they were--I was picturing a similar nighttime ballroom setup and didn't realize they were at an outdoor tea party until this paragraph, which is pretty far into the chapter.

Especially with a battle chapter, I think it's important to set up the sense of place a little, and maybe spread it out. Odette rolls her eyes at a dumb comment and stares off into the distance at an immaculate rosebush being tended by a Roselia while the rich lady is talking; Dorien weaves his way through the crowd, passing under a stark white gazebo and nodding to an old man with a comically undersized parasol as he does so or something. But when we start getting the details all at once, especially in the middle, I get two major takeaways--1) it's really clear how disjointed/out of place the previous sections felt and how much I was imagining people just chatting in a void; 2) it feels kind of like when you walk into a very large chamber in a videogame with a lot of ammo crates and pillars to hide behind and a big glowing circle in the middle of the room--smells like a fight's about to happen. Once the gyarados showed up with a sign that said 'Do Not Disturb', it was pretty obvious to me that the gyarados were, in fact, going to be disturbed.

I think the most difficult part of a battle is managing the tension, which comes in part from understanding the limitations on both sides. In a longfic like this you can use multiple battles to set up stakes/abilities, gradually grow them across the fic, etc. Enora had a light role in what I remember of the Dorien fight, but in general I think that fight was a good job of establishing rough power limits for Odette's team, and trainers in general. And the gyarados are intimidating, but I didn't feel like they were completely impossible to fight.

What both sides have to lose: I also love when battles start to introduce more personal stakes than "who would win"--that's why I think the switch from Muroka/Metagross to Dorien/Excadrill in chapter 3 works a lot better; there's more at stake now. And I liked the setup of the garden battle on paper, where Odette loses her glasses and sustains a massive head injury; the stakes are a lot more difficult now than just "hit things" because Odette is impaired both visually and mentally. It adds a lot of danger but also lets you tell the fight more creatively.

Where I struggled to see this actually reflected in the battle is twofold: in Odette, and in the people around her. For Odette I think the soft variables with the head trauma and the broken glasses get lost--her narration for this battle doesn't feel particularly more blind or less focused than the previous pokemon battle she's been in. She describes the shape of the moon for Enora's Moonblast; her commands are sharp and normal; she doesn't do anything that really screams traumatic head injury.

(And again, could be a plot point here--she gets bonked so hard that Venira's the one in this fight. That's why she's unaffected by not having her glasses; Odette might be nearsighted (heh), but Venira transcends your stupid human body. But the fight should still feel different, I think, and the decisions that they make should feel different. I don't really have a handle on Venira's character so it's hard to tell, but if you wanted to go this angle I think it'd be important to show that this just isn't Odette fighting at all).

The other place where it was hard to see the stakes was how Clovis and Noel see the risk. Girl's got a hole in her head that requires 5 stitched; that's a lot of blood. And even if she wasn't in danger of outright dying, I'm not sure if Clovis and Noel know this--but when they start bantering, or when Noel takes the time to ask "are you sure you want to use the Gucci handkerchief on her", it feels like they've already decided she's fine. Which, maybe she is, and this is a lower-stakes fight, akin to mopping up a nosebleed. But then the extended hospital scene feels unnecessary, since she wasn't in any danger.

The setting/crowd sort of falls out until the end as well. Are they freaked out? Running? Screaming, calling for help? Does Odette care?

What both sides have to gain: this one is roughly equivalent to the previous once, since "Odette gains not losing" is sort of an answer here, but it works imo. Not every battle needs to have tangible victory points, and this one doesn't.

The smile she formed was bitter, as she lazily returned it.
I was mostly on big picture edits instead of prose edits this evening, but this would read smoother as "She lazily returned his wave. Her smile was bitter, not that he could see from a distance."
“My knight and shining armour,” she said, feigning a shrill voice. He chuckled and took that as an invite to wrap his arm around her shoulders.
I think the traditional phrase is "my knight in shining armor"
Floating on the surface was half of what she recognized as some sort of sphere. It was blue...like a Dive Ball? No, Dive Balls didn’t have faces on them. Or a little black string hanging off of them. She watched it for a long while as it disintegrated into dust on the surface, and as that dust sank. Like, some sort of bath bomb? Who would toss a bath bomb into a lake at a tea party? Something for the Pokemon in the water, maybe?
I like the sequencing here. I'm not sure why they'd draw silly faces on adrenaline orbs though--what's the actual purpose of this that merits it having a little funny face?
They both towered over her by no less than 12 feet, at minimum.
"no less than", the exact numbering for "12" and "at a minimum" all seem to contradict--this would read more clearly imo as:
- they both towered over her. [she's short but she's not that short; rely on "towering" + the rest of the events to sell the sheer size here]
- they both towered over her by at least twelve feet.
Odette’s trainer instincts jumped into action, and she looked to Enora as her lips formed around the call of an attack. She didn’t get the chance to shout them out before one of the Gyarados whipped its massive tail at her. The fin made contact with the side of her head, and the force of the hit sent both her glasses and sunhat flying. She sank to the grass, a blinding pain surging down her body.
I think, especially in fights, you can break the rules a little. Descriptions don't have to make sense. Complete sentences aren't necessary. When shit literally goes sideways for Odette, the narration can get a little lost as well.

I think if you want to go the route that she's actually got head trauma from this, it might help to not have the injury be the fight opener. She's able to call the shots competently, we get a re-grounding of her/Enora's abilities and a way to frame this fight from a lucid perspective (so we get a sense of place/how big the area is, where everyone else is, who potential allies/risk points could be)--and then she gets bonked in the head and shit starts slipping sideways, she can't see, she's bleeding everywhere ...

(And there's a lot of creative directions to go once that's established, especially with partial blindness--she has to locate Enora by sound? It's harder to tell what's doing damage; it's tempting to lure the gyarados closer to her so that she can get better ideas of what's happening, but it's also really tempting not to have the gyarados closer to her because they're fucking gyarados.)
As she held her hand to the wound, she knew for certain that the liquid streaming down her arm wasn’t sweat. Sweat didn’t have that consistency, and it didn’t smell like rust. A shrill ringing filled her ears, so deafening that she could barely hear the concerned yells of some of the patrons, nor the frantic cries of Enora. What finally took her out of the pained haze was the Gyarados pair wailing again.
"wailing" makes them seem in pain, and weaker--which, maybe good/what you wanted, but then they proceed to be very intimidating but then Odette cuts them down without remorse, so maybe not.
“Enora, Moonblast!”

She’d barely finished the command before the Sylveon darted in front of her.

“Sylveeeeeeee,” Enora hollered. A veil of magical energy enveloped her, and a translucent shape of the moon appeared over the Gyarados. As soon as it appeared, a blinding beam shot down, knocking both of them and sending them backwards in a slight haze.
It was easy for me to lose track of Odette's haziness/blindness/general limitations here--these descriptions are pretty detailed for someone who can't see very well, so that limitation fell out of the fight for me. "Enora, Moonblast!" without a description also sounds generally triumphant/at the very least normal (stripping the exclamation mark and something like "croaked" might help emphasize the physical pain here if you wanted that route).
“Up and at ‘em, no going down yet!” Noel said as he stood her up. Odette instinctively reached out to grab hold of his shoulder. Her anger faded as quickly as it appeared as a wave of dizziness caused her brain to swim.
I get that Noel could be trying to put on a brave face, but this mostly just reads that he's cheerfully yanking the bleeding head trauma patient up (when usually the answer is "don't move them"). If they've got to move because of the encroaching gyarados, I'd expect more panic ("Odie, c'mon, we gotta move!"). If Noel's trying to keep her calm because he's afraid that if she panics she'll just fucking bleed to death, I think setting him up with some more information to make that realization would help ("Are you okay?" / "sldkfjslfkjasdifohas" / *Noel realizes this is really bad*).
He was the first one to turn in the direction that the call came from, and she heard him gasp inwardly. She decided to take a look herself, to see what had him so shocked.
This flowed a little awkwardly for me. "He was the first one" is rough when there's just two of them, "gasp inwardly" doesn't really parse as an action to me (gasps are inherently outward ig, and if it's inward it's weird that it's being noticed), and in general it's a drawn out/calm (she "decided" to look feels very casual if we're going the high-stakes route) moment that I don't think really needs to be:
> Noel turned towards the call, and she heard him gasp. At that, Odette spun around as well.
“Vullaby, match with Dark Pulse!”” Noel added.
double quotation mark
Both Pokemon moved into attack again, continuing to send the Gyarados’ backward. It was when they both had their back ends fully submerged, that Clovis changed his strategy.
This one also feels a little methodical, and the double back/both makes it feel repetitive even though a lot of action is being covered here:
> Both Pokemon moved in to attack again, forcing the Gyarados backward. Once they were submerged up to their necks, Clovis shouted, "Freeze Dry on the water!"
Their heads had been frozen above the surface, willing them unable to dunk back underto escape the attack of opposing three Pokemon.
I think this is supposed to be:
> Their heads had been frozen above the surface, rendering them unable to dunk back under to escape.
“Damn, this is a fucking Gucci kercheif,” Noel said in awe. “Are you sure--”

Yes,” Clovis snapped, snatching the thing away from him. “For how much these damn things cost, they can handle some blood.”
Banter's fun! Whedon does this in fights a lot. But he also does this in fights with notable superhumans who are able to shrug off most wounds and as such can take quips, and even then he gets a lot of shit for it--but coming from two regular people talking about their (assumed) regular friend, this reads as super callous.
He leaned back down so he was at eye level with Odette, and held his free hand out to her tentatively. “Can I see, just for a second?” he asked tenderly.
tentatively/tenderly felt like a bit too much of an adjective stackup
She might be able to narrow that down. She had a good idea of who the suspects were, one more obvious than the other. That was the easy one. But the second question...that one she could not answer.

Why?
The closer is good, but it doesn't really feel like she's got head trauma here either. The first sentence seems unnecessary since she immediately narrows it down to two suspects. I'd also streamline a little:
> Two suspects. One more obvious than the other. That was the easy part.
> But the second question...that one was harder.
> Why?

And, mmm, it's a cool closer in theory but it doesn't jive super well with what we know about Odette--she's supposed to be super rational/observant with these things, and able to figure out people's motives because she can read them really well. But this is the exact reverse of that; she's formed an accusation with no actual evidence, and she's very certain of it, but she has nothing to back it up and she can't even begin to speculate a motive. And she does end up right in her guess, but it doesn't really feel earned, I guess, since I don't know why she was sus of them to begin with, just that one is a dick and she wants the other dick?
“This might be a very bad time to ask, but do you happen to know what your glasses prescription is?” he asked. It was an odd conversation starter, but she supposed it was one that would keep her brain working as she thought about it.

“Uh,” she started, trying to get the gears to turn. She knew she’d memorized it long ago, mostly to combat people who commented about her eyesight back in high school. It was somewhere in the brain fog.

“I think…my right is plus 5, and my left is plus 5.50,” she said,
"She supposed" and such sound really casual--again, difficult to peg her mental state here, and also difficult to understand why Clovis is asking this at all. Ultimately his endgoal seems to be to get her new glasses, which, sweet, but she's bleeding a lot lol. I think it would work better if Odette makes up/provides the reason (she could be super wrong here, just that she has one):

AU where she's got head trauma:

"Odette. Odette? Hey." The sound of fingers snapping in front of her face. Hazily, she focused on Clovis's hand on her shoulder. His knuckles were white.

"Whassup."

"Odette, listen to me. Do you happen to know what your glasses prescription is?"

"Uh." The gears weren't turning. She knew she'd memorized it long ago, mostly to combat people who asked why her glasses were so big in high school. It was somewhere in the brain fog ...

"Odette?"

"I think...my right...plus 5, and my left is plus 5.50?" she finally managed.


As Clovis began to nod, some other patrons of the tea party began to descend upon the scene. Odette could distantly hear some flabbergasted gasps, and was able to clearly make out somebody screaming "Oh my gosh, is she bleeding?"
It was hard to figure out where they went, and why they bothered coming back--if they ran, they'd probably just yeet and not go to a safe/observable distance only to come back and check on the Poors they abandoned in the gyarados lake, right? Unless this was Part of a Plan?

(Having Odette distantly keep track of the patrons prior to glasses-bonking would help a little here, I think)

Scooby Dooby Doo and the Mystery Crew

Odette knew she’d always had a fantastic read on liars. Even better liars had a very difficult time making it past her bullshit radar. With Clovis sitting here, staring her in the eye and speaking with such levelheaded intensity, she could say with almost full certainty that he was telling the truth. Almost.
If the two of them were in some sort of weird “kill Odette” duo, there was almost no doubt that panic would be shining in those blue eyes again as he calmly spoke about Dorien’s incompetence. The way he looked so positively unruffled at the idea that Dorien could have slipped up, without a single hint of frustration peeking through on that flawless face, led her to fully believe he was being sincere.
“She reads the human race like a book,” Bernard said, though it sounded more like a warning than a statement. “What does she know?”
this also feels like Odette's being set up to fail, that she's wrong about her deduction--but I don't think, from a meta standpoint, she is? It's just the literary equivalent of "what could possibly go wrong" so I'm waiting for her to be wrong here.

From a pacing perspective it's hard to have a thriller/mystery where your protag's skill is "can't be lied to". A lot of situations get boiled down trivially easy, and the only way to avoid them is by stripping agency from the protagonist and not having them ask obvious questions. Grandpa, are you in cahoots with the media to cover up the drugs? Dorien, did you throw the orb? Dorien, did you drug me? It makes the mystery reliant on protagonist incompetence/not thinking of asking the questions they're currently feeling--usually in a mystery they don't ask these questions because the answer is "because people lie", but if that's out the window, there's really nothing to stop them from solving this.

And I don't really know if I'm sold on this idea that Odette is s-tier reader of human emotions. She fucks up a lot of reads so far, gets fed information in a way that I think is really sus, and generally believes/distrusts people in a logic that I can't quite follow. Similar to the stalking moment in the previous chapter, where she's super proud of what felt like basic stalking, for me it was hard to tell if this is Odette overhyping herself, or if she's actually just clowning these fools because their microexpressions give them away.

It also makes it difficult for people who seem to know this about her to try to lie around her. If she can pull fast ones on grandpa and is able to analyze eye twitches between Clovis and Bernard as they exit the room, and Bernard knows this but wants to withhold information from her, why have a secret meeting with his secret agent in the room right down the hall from her? Why not go literally anywhere else? Seeing through lies is useful but the obvious counterplay is just "don't be around to lie"--so if he's trying to keep her out of it and knows she might pick up on this, why even take the risk?

(The easiest solution here I think is to have her not be 1000% flawless, and not to have everyone say that she is. She's good, sure, and even moreso for her age, but she's not a polygraph machine. Grandpa thinks she might be great one day, but she's got a lot to learn; he's not saying she can read the human race like a book and therefore isn't as concerned about having a quick debrief with his reporting dude to explain why the fuck his granddaughter has stitches. This also lets you follow the deductive reasoning to a logical extent without boxing yourself into corners, and still having the narrative tension of "but what if X is lying"? And besides, she's ... had her trust violated before. Maybe she's more paranoid now, but simultaneously more confident--she knows this fucker is lying to her (he's not) and this gets her in deep shit because she's constantly pushing him away even though he's actually genuine.)

“No stitches, it’s not that bad,”
"No stitches. It's not that bad." (in general this same comma splice thing from previous reviews cropped up in this section as well)

“You’re useless even with your Pokemon,” Clovis raged. “At the very least, you had some sense to bring her some water.”

There was something about the way they were arguing here. At the gala, their exchanges had a malicious undertone, but they were both able to mask that with some fake smiles that didn’t reach their eyes and well-timed laughs that sounded a tad too forced.

But here...she wasn’t sure if it was the force of the blow messing with her perception of things, but Clovis both looked and sounded legitimately upset, like he was making no effort whatsoever to hide his hate. His eyebrows were knit tightly, causing the right one to twitch every now and then, and his teeth were bared ever so slightly. Every time he spoke, he seemed to lean closer to Dorien, as if he were subconsciously on the offense.
I didn't follow why this was really a difficult deduction--at the gala, they're laughing, but here, Clovis is "raging", and also, no one was bleeding at the gala.
Dorien cocked his head slightly; questioningly.
Strictly I don't think semicolons work like this and it should be: "Dorien cocked his head slightly, questioningly." or "Dorien cocked his head slightly questioningly."

[there's a lot of head cocking in these two chapters, which, heh, but also, is an odd enough word that it starts to stand out, especially when different characters use the same mannerism]
Red began to cloud her already wavering vision, as she tore up two handfuls of grass in the fit of her rage. Some panic began to seep in there too, as she tried to make sense of her changing memories.
This also feels pretty clinical/detached, and "two handfuls of grass" doesn't really feel rage, I guess.

That somehow made him more trustworthy, but not by much. He was still a suspect in her hunt for who had thrown that orb. However, his possible involvement was being almost entirely overshadowed by her focus on Dorien.
"somehow" feels weird here when like, it's just basic things that would be trustworthy. I'm still not really sure why he's a suspect in her eyes other than he's a named character in the cast. "was being almost entirely overshadowed by dorien" feels like a generally removed statement--something you'd use to describe an action to someone else, not how a narrator would describe it to themself. I'd maybe reframe as:

> At least he hadn't lied about the stitches. Even if he was hiding other stuff, and even if...even if he'd thrown that orb.
> But hypotheticals didn't matter right now. Dorien. That glass. Her memories.
Saying it outloud made her cringe, and she could make out Noel leaning in closer to her.
* out loud
She stopped to allow herself to breathe, raising her hands to flex her fingers while she did. “I wasn’t drunk. Neither was Solene. He lied. He locked me in the car, and-and did something.”
circling back from that suggestion waaaaay long ago to plant the seeeds that Solene doesn't drink so that she can be like "I wasn't drunk. Neither was Solene--she doesn't even drink. He locked me in the car, and-and did something. And then he lied."
Noel frowned. “I know. But you also have to consider that your silver Delphox might have also done it to shut you up.”
I get that Odette's fixated on Clovis here, and that's odd but reasonable--characters can be wrong. But for both of them to have drawn this really odd conclusion doesn't make super much sense to me.
Enora had the tendency to fall for pretty men either way, so could they have been in the same boat?
Pokemon having crushes on humans in a story centered around pokemon trafficking is kind of hard for me to wrap my head around tbh. Back to the whole snom-fucker thing--if they're people and treated equally to humans, it's okay, but in a story that's centered around their lack of agency and specifically their exploitation by humans, the romance becomes a lot less cute and a lot more concerning.
But, given how against this escapade Enora had been from the beginning, seeing her try to defend a third party was also comforting, in a way.
Enora's always had your back Odette :( she literally went to the gala for you
It swung open, and a light blue humanoid figure walked in.
This was the first reference to Odette having difficulty seeing in this entire section, so it sort of fell off the radar for me
“I have thread in my head and I can’t see,” she said in a sigh.

“I do apologize for that, dear. We’re working on getting you a temporary pair from the optometrist in the other building. For now, I just came to let you know that you have a visitor.”
"in a sigh" is kind of odd--I'd just do "sighed". also, rip, I get that this is a joke but I'm also not sure what she expects the nurse to do with this information lol.
Odette groaned. Dorien had texted her while she was in the ambulance and said he was running late to meet her at the hospital. The Pokemon rangers that were called to the scene blocked his car in its spot, and they’d become too preoccupied with dealing with the fainted Gyarados to move it at the time.
This is a good example of me not being sure if I should trust Odette's deductive logic or not--she thinks this is an annoying but believable excuse, but I'm over here wondering why rich boy Dorien doesn't have six backup lambos, or an uber, or in general he definitely seems up to something and it's odd that she's so paranoid about what he was doing before the adrenaline orb was thrown but not after it.
“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t coming at a bad time. You seemed really overwhelmed in the garden, and I felt awful about it.”
"really overwhelmed" is rough. I might be overreacting but the amount of stitches in her head felt like it was meant to telegraph more danger than "overwhelmed"
The absolute clearness was startling. The lenses were perfect.
I'm not sure how this would work--either he copies her prescription that she gave him, which would mean that the clarity is exactly what she's known (and as such not startling), or he managed to somehow guess her prescription better than she's had it, which just seems unlikely.
Another chuckle fell out of him. “Well, if you think that was a little blood, color me impressed by your pain tolerance.”
"fell out" feels weird to describe chuckling

"impressed by your pain tolerance" suggests that he thinks she should've been in pain, which then makes a lot of his actions previously kind of confusing
“Please, dancers only know blood and pain,” Noel cracked.
And I'm really not sure why Noel is okay with any of this? Is this a common occurrence for them? (which, maybe it is, and he can talk about how there was a high school field trip and they got attacked by some ursaring, this shit happens all the time, Clovis, you wouldn't know though, would you? silver spoons amirite)

(but also like, a world where it's common to be attacked by wild pokemon and to put them down (fainting ofc) without remorse feels pretty bleak as well--if they're used to the idea of rampaging gyarados attacking them, it suggests that wild pokemon and humans are at odds, which makes it harder to gauge how trained pokemon and humans get along)
“So, what do you think of the room?” he asked. “I didn’t want to spare any expense having you put somewhere nicer.”

Odette couldn’t help just how wide her eyes got. “You did this?”

“I held a Gucci cloth to your head to keep you from bleeding out, and got you a new pair of glasses, so I figured, why stop there?”
I feel bad because I'm pretty sure we're supposed to like him but this is a great way to build to financial manipulation lol.
She still held up her stoic front, even though every inch of her body was starting to heat up. “How do I know you didn’t have those Gyarados attack me to keep my mouth shut?”

“Don’t insult me,” Clovis snapped through a harsh laugh. “If I were really trying to keep you quiet, attacking you, in any sense, wouldn’t be the move. It’s far too obvious.”
this feels a lot like watching TR mafia lol--but more in the D1 sense that everyone is floundering. Not sure why she'd tip her hand that she suspects him instead of playing along and seeing what his angle is first?
“And what is your side?” she asked pointedly.

“Not the time,” he replied in a low voice. “I’ll answer that when I’m sure your brain isn’t scattered.”
This would land better if it were more obvious that her brain is scattered throughout the text. Otherwise, it feels like we're just being blocked out of info because the plot wants it.
“Not even. It’s because they’re chalky and get dust everywhere,” he scoffed. “You’re pretty much guaranteed a stain on your clothes, even if you’re careful. Ruined a few good polos with those things.”
The setup for this reveal is clever, but I got a little lost for who was providing info/why they were doing it:

O: Have you ever held an adrenaline orb before?
C: Of course; I can't stand them.
O: Why, because they attract aggressive Pokemon?
C: Not even. It’s because they’re chalky and get dust everywhere. You’re pretty much guaranteed a stain on your clothes, even if you’re careful. Ruined a few good polos with those things.
C: Oh, here. You want to see my sleeves? They’re stained with blood, but you won’t find any blue.
O: omg it's Dorien
C: omg it's dorien! crazy how that works out!

Odette asks about holding the adrenaline orb, but why? It doesn't really seem like she's got a line of reasoning planned out. But then Clovis takes the conversation in a different direction. This feels like Clovis is leading Odette to the information that will clear him--and wow gosh he's cleared under the evidence that he presented and knew about, and could've been careful about, and Odette happens to trust this info and use it to hard accuse the other guy instead. It actually feels incredibly suspicious for him to have done this, and it feels weird for high-deductive-reasoning-lie-detecting Odette not to find this odd.

(especially because the inciting incident of this plot is a bunch of criminals handling powder/drugs in a way that's "too careful" and leaving no visual trace of the handling, which Odette finds unbelievable in the sense that no one could do it, but believable in the sense that it had to have happened, and is quite strange)

(if the goal is that Clovis is S-tier manipulating Odette, I'm okay with this and it's a good example. Maybe tone down the references to how good she is at mysteries then. But I don't quite think this is where you're going.)

I'd reframe this so that the information is spread out across multiple people--use Noel! That way, he can have the knowledge that adrenaline orbs ruin your clothes, Clovis can have the knowledge that his clothes aren't ruined, and Odette can have the knowledge that Dorien's clothes are ruined--that way no one's needlessly withholding info or presenting it at convenient times; they just genuinely didn't have time to talk.

N: Have you ever held an adrenaline orb before?
C: Of course; I can't stand them.
O: Why, because they attract aggressive Pokemon?
N: Can I see your sleeves, Clovis? [to Odette] It’s because they’re chalky and get dust everywhere. You’re pretty much guaranteed a stain on your clothes, even if you’re careful.
C: Oh, here. You want to see my sleeves? They’re stained with blood, but you won’t find any blue.
O: blue ... it's Dorien. that motherfucker
“You were legitimately mad at him because you saw him throw the orb,” she said. “So you couldn’t hide your disdain in the moment.”

Clovis didn’t respond immediately. In fact, he was quiet for quite a while, as he rubbed his chin mindlessly.

“Huh,” he huffed. “You could tell that much?” he finally asked.
this also doens't seem like a huge deduction to make, I guess? like the big bang laugh track--when people are super impressed by things that don't seem super impressive, they seem kinda silly by extension
“Kyu,” Loïc greeted politely. She stared him down, before smirking.

“Hi, Loïc,” she greeted. “You’re very light, but my head’s not the best place to be standing right now.”

He was quiet for a moment, before he floated down to her chest. However, even after he had vacated the crown of her head, she could still feel a slight weight there. She reached up, and became perplexed when she felt not one, but several objects. Somewhat sharp, and…plastic? She grabbed them all in one go, and upon looking, found that they were Monopoly hotel pieces.
baby :o
She patted him a couple times, and she heard him sigh in content. She decided to just leave her hand on him, and he didn’t protest.
"sigh in contentment"
“I’m so sorry I didn’t get here faster, I was in the lab and missed the emergency call.”
"I'm sorry I didn't get here faster. I was in the lab and missed the emergency call."
Odette suddenly wished Noel had called the nurse to bring the bedpan back, because she certainly felt like she was going to be sick yet again, and this round wasn’t one she could nurse. Why did this guy seem to have such an effect on Cinq-Mars women?
personal preference here, but I think it's kind of weird when the entire cast has the hots for one person--it makes it seem like Odette's mostly in it because he's just so HOT, it makes the grandma seem desperate, mom can have bad choice in men tbh that one checks out 100%--but overall it's like, oh, he's so desirable even my mom wants him, and that reads super weird to me lol. Either way someone's getting creeped on.

In fact, from the way the look in his eye glazed over, it seemed like he was trying very hard to not let it change.
I'd just shorten this to "In fact, from the way his eyes glazed over"
She could hear the muffled remnants of her grandfather's voice. It was somewhat raised, and he was talking fast, but she couldn’t make out any clear words. She clenched her teeth as she leaned closer toward the gap at the bottom of the door, but realized that she could be caught that way if he was paying attention. So, she scrambled back away from the door and behind the wall instead, mouthing a stream of curse words to herself.
I'd make it more clear that "she could be caught" means like, she realizes that her shadow is visible beneath the door gap or something
“You’re a genius,” she praised, taking the tool off from around his fake neck and putting it in her ears. “There’s plenty of pecha berries where this came from if you can keep quiet.”
I lost track of where her head wound is but tbh I feel like a stethoscope would hurt her immensely here with all the head trauma (it's a clever idea though)
“But it’s like I told you, she’s trying to get to the bottom of the sacrilege and shiny trade issue. She didn’t say why though. However, judging by her verbiage she knows the connection between the two. She might have looked into me for multiple reasons, namely that battle. But I’d also say it’s mostly because I’m a fucking imbecile.”
what battle?
“You just panicked,” Bernard said sympathetically. “It happens.”

“I’m not a cop, Bernard, we know this. I got a little too...overzealous talking to her.”
"I'm not a cop" feels a bit too much like it's feeding info--I'd do
B: You just panicked. It happens to the best of us.
C: I'm not 'one of us.' We've been over this. I just ...
“And that’s not like you. You’re normally on top of it, but nobody’s perfect. You’re lucky it was so small, and you have the status to combat it if need be.”
lolol police chief grandpa casually being like "you're rich just bully them"--if it turns out that the media/cops are corrupt, I really hope Odette has to confront this.
Another faint sigh sounded, and Odette couldn’t tell who it was from. However, Clovis was the one to speak.
I'd just cut to "another faint sigh. Odette couldn't tell who it was from."
“I understand, Chief, but this is out of fear for her safety and not out of a desire to scrutinize her,” Clovis said earnestly. “Thankfully, our hypothesis about her trying to get involved in the trade was wrong, but now Dorien’s made a move that we can’t turn a blind eye to. There was a reason he had her attacked, and I don’t know it for certain. The one idea I do have is half-baked, at best. So, considering his borderline obsession, I am extremely concerned, as is everyone else.”
I'm not sure why his idea is half-baked, but I'm also not sure how much he knows. Either:

VC knows about the sin pokemon and is interested in Odette specifically because they know she has Venira. The half-baked idea is that Dorien also knows she has Venira. This is a fully-baked idea.

VC knows about the sin pokemon but are interested in Odette's safety/actions because?? Dorien's there too. They're more interested in Dorien because Dorien has done a thing, and they're looking into him closely but don't understand his motives still. I'm not sure what idea Clovis has at all for this one.

VC doesn't know about the sin pokemon--this just seems like they'd be too in the dark to be doing anything, their name is virtue corp, let's scrap this one lol.
Clovis cut him off. “Yeah, well. That’s just an observation. The resemblance is just extremely uncanny and I’m trying to cover bases. All things considered, this development doesn’t necessarily help that idea at all, but as you know, we Ménétries’ are just very thorough. We’re still, uh...looking into it. That one’s tricky.”
This also felt a little like it was feeding too much info--"we menetries" and "as you know" is just a lot of dialogue to cram into a person's mouth in a way that I don't think they'd ever really say it.

it's getting a little late so I'm not sure exactly what I'd have him say instead, but I'm down to brainstorm!
“You have my word. I will do whatever is in my power to make sure nothing happens to her.
this is a pretty ballsy line to say after she just got hit by a gyarados
“She might not even need me.
I get that he respects her but this is also a pretty ballsy line to say after he saved her from a gyarados
 

slamdunkrai

bing.com
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Partners
  1. darkrai
  2. snom
Yo! Here for chapters three through six, because I'd been meaning to continue this fic after those intriguing opening chapters... and what better time than Blitz? I doubt this'll be the last time I come back to this one during the month, though, because things are very slowly starting to come together for the overall plot here — Odette's Dorien troubles and the mysterious letter cropping up within so little time is at least a little suspicious. It's coming together at just the right pace that I wanna find out more, dammit; even if these two things ultimately don't end up being related, there's still the strange case of J. L. Menétries and the correspondence between Virtue Corp. and the police which makes me think there's a conspiracy going on here, and I simply have to see where this is going. (Which is to say, I think the strongest part of this run of chapters was the amount of intrigue dripping from all of this! And also, curse you, I'm officially hooked on this now. >:V)

Speaking of Dorien, I think you do a good job of setting him up to be a skeevy guy fairly quickly — but a skeevy guy who our protagonist has a past with, which is a whole other element of it that you pull off well. I'm usually thrown off by the whole "girl falls over, guy scoops her up, Commence Romance" trope, mostly because it seems like a really weird and slightly creepy place to get to know someone when played straight (in this case, all over again; the vibe I got from their meeting was that, beyond them being lab partners and also mutually having crushes on each other when they were both dumb teenagers, and I think my original statement still stands here — as adults they barely know each other). I liked that this seems to play into that, then; you quickly introduce Dorien's wealth and confidence stemming from having a family that got rich off morally dubious behaviour, and you do a good job of making him obnoxious about it. Two bits related to this:

Dorien came from a family of shiny hunters, and they were active members in the shiny trade--reminiscent of the stock market, but highly centered around the buying and selling of shiny Pokemon.
The stock market comparison has interesting connotations! It feels odd to imagine living creatures as having fluctuating, speculative value in the same way as stocks do; it took me out of the realism slightly, trying to imagine the mechanics of this. At the same time, though, I didn't mind it that much because a) it does get the point across that this is a dehumanising trade which turns creatures into assets to be bid on, and b) it's funny. It reminded me of this sketch, which is always a good thing.

She watched as Dorien rolled his eyes. “Come on, you sound like the rest of the world.”
I have spoken to at least one guy who has tried to sell me on crypto like this. He's relatably skeevy, which is the best kind.

Admittedly, I wasn't 100% sure about the way in which Odette starts to doubt whether he and his team are entirely sober — I think, for me, what did it for me was the specific point of comparison that makes her think oh no, sacrilege? (the coalossal and the vaporeon anecdote) felt a little too... obscure; it's mentioned as a piece of exposition two chapters back. While I do think you do a good job of making Dorien feel off throughout the battle, it felt odd that it was specifically one of his taunts being said in an off-handed way that made her react like that on the grounds of that throwaway thing mentioned previously. Feels like you could solve this by making her deduction here a bit more gradual, possibly playing up how intense and off-putting he is throughout the battle, but also, it didn't affect my enjoyment of things too much (and this could be intentional — maybe she is leaping to the wrong conclusion, though finding out that the Bonhomme name has ties to sacrilege in chapter four made me unsure). I do like that you go ahead and build the strange, vaguely off-putting convenience of their meeting here into something where Odette, not unreasonably, responds "hey, actually, what is the deal with that?" because it helps with the odd vibes of this whole situation.

And then there's chapter six, where he continues to come off like a weird and creepy asshole who does not know when to stop pressing the issue of "that time you killed your rapist" and then only realises this is maybe not ideal during the long car ride home and after she gets a bloody hand injury out of the ordeal, except not really, that's just a front to get an opening for pepper spray that also makes you forget where you are. He clearly has something planned here with that invite, and it sucks, but even then, the way he acts here is just skin-crawling in the way that it needs to be. I'm intrigued to see what happens in chapter seven, going off the patch notes, because given that the little kiss is predicated on her being made to forget a whole bunch of stuff, I think this kinda does qualify as non-con. At the very least, Vienna is just a delight, but Odette's right. An obnoxious day indeed! For her sake I hope she can get away from This Guy Who Sucks ASAP.

I like the implication that respectable grandpa/Totally Moral Police Chief Bernard is possibly in cahoots with an Extremely Not Shady and 100% Transparent Corporation. I mean, they're even called Virtue Corp., this is definitely fine I think. It's an interesting contrast with how he comes off in the rest of the fic, where everyone seems to only have respect for him as the reputable lawman and overprotective grandpa. Very curious to see where this arc is headed, too; as I said earlier, there's a proper conspiracy brewing over here with all these plot threads. Team Enigma? Sacrilege? Dorien? Virtue Corp.? The Worst Dad In The World? A lot to juggle here, given our protag is just about to move to Alola, a land that is fortunately known for hot guys who do have their shit together and are uninvolved in doing crime.

A couple of miscellaneous comments under the cut (it's just two things from chapter four that threw me off a little; I tried to keep this to a minimum given the author's note):

It was only then that she realized the master plan behind him bringing her along to his work as often as he did, and she supposed it made sense. Overprotective cop has to make sure his granddaughter is equipped to handle anything nefarious.
The second sentence here read oddly to me. It reads like a thought that got mixed up with the rest of the narration; I think it's the tense and the quick-fire way the sentence reads.

It was the same thing every time she visited, no matter how long it’d been; Bombardment of greetings from her grandpas coworkers and their Pokemon
Because only a real psychopath would get their 'mon to do that, and I see world where he was aiming for something similar."
Think these were just two cases that were missing the "a".

Good stuff, on the whole! I'm invested in where all these plot threads are going, because there's one hell of a bigger picture here; at the same time, the little interpersonal drama between Odette, Noel and Dorien is tantalising. Definitely going to have to return to this before the end of the month. Cheers for writing this, as ever! :>
 

Panoramic_Vacuum

Hoenn around
Partners
  1. aggron
  2. lairon
Hello hello! It's about time I got my grubby little mitts into WSBS. It's funny, for everything I've heard about the fic via Discord chat and through the Mafia games, I don't think I knew what to expect going in (which is just the way I like it). This review will cover the prologue and Chapter 1.

Right off the bat, we're thrown into the action, which I very much appreciate. Chaos and sirens aboard a ship in the middle of the open ocean is, uh, quite the predicament. I really like that we're starting the fic from the villain's perspective, here. There's a nice bit of vulnerability here with things very obviously not going to plan. This isn't some shadowy organization looming over our protagonists, shrouded in mystery and intrigue. We get the first and last name of the bad guy slapped right there on the page, and told very up front that, yeah, he's this big bad but he doesn't have his shit together. It's messy and there's enough uncertainty here that it takes a wildcard from the deck and turns it face up, like "here's the wildcard, it's in play, but I'm not going to tell you when" There's this feeling that shit can go wrong at any time, and neither the good guys nor the bad guys will know what to do. Good stuff!

Aside from the plot implications of this opening (gee, wonder who this whoopsie child is going to be?) I really enjoy the characterization of both Florent and Armel. At first I was like "lol who brings their 11 year old with them into the bowels of a ship that's in immediate peril" but then I realized the oh ho okay Armel's not any regular old 11 year old. Biiiig FMA:B vibes from this, which I very much love. Florent is controlling, maniuplative, and self-centered to the point where if the universe isn't revolving around him, it should be destroyed. As I mentioned earlier, the fact that we start out with not one, but two, whoopsies from Florent is just icing on top of this bastard cupcake of a man.

Armel himself is really interesting because he's clearly special and also
the vessel for another one of these crazy sin pokemon you've cooked up
(which holy shit that's so hella cool). The use of his journal and the mention of him having existed for a lot longer than 11 years is really intriguing, and this line later in the fic also gets a big ol 👀 from me because boy, doesn't that sound an awful lot like the powers of the two sin-mon we know??
In one police report she had read, an young woman had to be checked into hospice, because she'd ingested so much sacrilege that she lost all of her memories, and her brain functions reverted to that of a newborn baby. Another case mentioned a trainer being arrested when they instructed their drugged-up Coalossal to eat the opposing trainer’s Vaporeon during a battle tournament.

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, but the set up of the prologue tying in directly with these psychotic side effects of the sacrilege drug that's sweeping the nation, and apparently coming from the villainous team themselves? Yeah you've got a killer mystery on your hands, and I am thrilled to keep reading to see what will unfold. Especially with how bonkers crazy these sin-pokemon are. I get very Ultra Beast vibes from them in the fact that they're pokemon, but nothing like anything we've seen before.

For the rest, I really like the timeskip and introduction we get to Odette herself, and the cast of characters that she's surrounded by. Noel is the obvious stand-out here, given that they're a dynamic duo of crime solving theater kids. Reminds me a lot of my irl friends who listen to serial killer and unsolved mysteries podcasts. I like the way that you build the world around them without infodumping. The context of the theater, the weather (Castform mating season got a solid laugh out of me), and exactly how or why they're so embroiled in this mystery despite having no real reason to be so involved.

Speaking of mystery, what an interesting bit about the shiny pokemon being involved. I'm trying to put my head around this as to how this could be linked to anything our dastardly Enigma leader is up to, but I guess I'll just have to be patient. I did gasp aloud when it was revealed Enora was a shiny Sylveon, and ruh-roh as if Odette didn't already have a big enough target on her back (though Florent hasn't figured that one out yet apparently). I will say, though, that aside from Enora herself, if there was anything a bit lacking in this chapter it would be the pokemon themselves. There was that little bit with the other theater people on stage talking about their partners and who is the best pokemon actor, but it felt a bit contrived and stilted. I didn't really find myself caring about any of those character or their 'mons, so it fell a bit flat. Another line that felt a bit forced was this one:
Thinking of Pokemon caused her to remember the rest of her team, whom she’d left home to start packing.
It felt very "the author suddenly remembered the rest of her team and put this line in here to show the reader they hadn't really forgotten about them!" lol I know that's not the case, and though I don't have a suggestion in mind, I get the feeling there's probably a better way to segue to the rest of Odette's lovely team. Maybe she sees something and it reminds her of what they're doing at home packing? Like is one of them folding clothes? Or taping up boxes? A more concrete example would have me more invested in Odette as a trainer with a full team vs a stagehand with one very cute very cuddly shiny Sylveon (b/c up to this point it feels like most people have one pokemon partner and that's about it).

As for getting invested in characters, you do a good job of introducing some personal mystery into the story as well. There's a lot going on under the surface for Odette, though it's all very vague here in Chapter 1. Makes me curious about the incident that, at this point, has stolen her dream from her, not allowing her to be on stage with Noel and the others in the spotlight. That being said, I have to wonder what's so compelling for her to move to Alola so suddenly? Is it a job opportunity? Something else? She does seem awfully invested in the things going on here in Kalos, including her friends and her own attempt at immersion therapy, so what could be forcing her hand for such a drastic move? I have a feeling we'll learn more about that soon, but for now, consider me intrigued.

Definitely a great start to the fic, and exactly what I hope to find in the first few chapters of a story. Looking forward to diving back in and finding out more.
 

Dragonfree

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An actual review for the prologue, after I read it and did some art for Smeargle Swap! Way too long because I cannot shut up but I hope it's illuminating.

Armel’s face was a little more blank, but there was an obvious glint of childish apprehension in his own gaze.
I'm a little confused by the "his own". Usually the "own" in a situation like this would be added to clarify which character is being referred to, but here as far as I can tell "his own gaze" is referring to Armel's here, which is the same as would be implied if it were just "his"? The "own" made me think it somehow referred to Florent instead, since the disambiguation wouldn't be needed if it was Armel. (You could also sidestep this potential confusion entirely by just using "...in the boy's gaze" or whatever.)

The four grunts on guard in the keep whirled around at the loud bang of the doors. Although their faces were entirely covered by their uniform gas masks, Florent could tell that they were frightened by his arrival.

As they should be.
I kind of wanted to see why Florent could tell here - think it'd make the passage more visceral to show their body language. Standing dead still and rigid, barely breathing, etc.

The "As they should be" is a fun punchy way of establishing his villainy, though.

“Your majesty!” one greeted. He was stoic in his words, but there was a clear air of distress in the way he spoke.
I'm having a hard time picturing this - his words are stoic but there's also a clear air of distress in the way he spoke? Wouldn't that make him sound anything but stoic? What do you mean by a clear air of distress - does he sound tense, his voice shaking, is he stammering?

He pushed past the line of terrified grunts, and quickly approached the center of the keep.
On the one hand I can kind of hear a pause here, but technically there shouldn't be a comma there, since what comes after the "and" couldn't stand as a full sentence on its own.

“I have to ask, just to be sure,” Florent cut him off. “Did one of you take it?”
The "I have to ask, just to be sure" has me kind of curious - the overall sense of Florent I'd been getting is that he wants to command an intimidating presence and does not suffer fools lightly, but that particular line feels almost apologetic. As if he wants to make sure they don't think he really thinks they might have taken it, he just has to ask as a matter of principle. Unsure if that's what you were going for.

Florent took a deep sigh and straightened his back.
Is "taking a sigh" a thing? Wondering if you altered this from "took a deep breath" or something like that.

His expression wasn’t angry anymore, as it had grown just as stoic as Armel’s.
When you described Armel's expression, though, he wasn't stoic - there was an obvious glint of childish apprehension in his gaze. Wonder about this comparison.

“You say that, and yet...why is it that my most powerful Blood Legendary has gone missing while you were the ones on duty?” he asked sternly. Like a teacher questioning misbehaving students.
I enjoy that comparison.

“Isn’t the whole point of guards in the keep to assure none of my relics go missing?” Florent inquired. He lightly cocked his head to the side for good measure. “So you’re either going to tell me that one of you has taken it, or you failed to do your job. Both are equally as bad.”
I think you want ensure rather than assure there; you assure a person of something, while if you're just making sure of a thing, you're ensuring it.

I like the threatening nature of this line, though. Very clear the guards are in deep shit no matter what they do.

The silence that filled the room proved to be more deafening than the alarm that still sounded over them. The panic wafting off of the grunts thickened the air of the room and caused a smirk to tilt Florent’s lips.
I like the phrasing of a smirk tilting his lips.

I think it's a little strange/contradictory to say a deafening silence filled the room right before reminding us that there's still an alarm blaring - that's clearly not silence! Would probably rephrase somehow.

Unsure if Florent can literally smell the guards' fear or if that's more figurative; I would have assumed the latter, but the specific phrasing of saying that it wafted off them makes it sound otherwise. Might be worth making it more obvious either way which you mean?

(Also, the repetition of "the room" jarred me a little.)

He didn’t bother to interrupt, he didn’t bother to antagonize them further.
The use of "antagonize" surprised me here - that suggests he was provoking them, which I don't think is the case at all, given they're totally submissive and terrified of him and he seems to like it that way. Were you looking for some other word? Intimidate or terrorize, maybe?

Grammatically that's also a comma splice and you'd want something like a semicolon instead, although I think you can get away with this okay.

Florent pursed his lips, then turned his head slightly to grab a look at Armel, who had kept quiet through the whole altercation. He had moved off to the side, away from the door, to stand near a table of empty beakers and test tubes. He stood stiff and straight, still clutching that little book of his. That same glint of trepidation still lingered in his eyes.
I like the body language here, showing Armel's pretty scared and intimidated by this. Also says a lot how Florent doesn't care at all, not that that's surprising.

“So much so, that I am willing to forgive your transgression against Team Enigma and I.”
Don't think you want this comma either; generally you never want one before "that", unless you happen to have something like an insertion immediately before it.

It's interesting to see some of the mechanics of how these blood legendaries work - can talk to you with a tickle in your ear even while held in a Pokéball, must draw blood to materialize. I wonder if that's something Florent has done as a necessary sacrifice to keep them contained, or if it's just part of their basic nature, one way or another.

The Pokemon emitted a threatening growl, before lunging at the grunts.
Another comma you don't want - don't think you basically ever want a comma before "before" either.

“Tell me. Were any of them lying?” he asked.

Gulattive slurped to itself, before turning to face its host.

“No, master,” it said slyly, speaking out loud this time. “They tasted pure. No trace of Venira.”
I like that it eating the guards has a simple practical purpose as well in telling if they were lying, and how casually Florent asks this.

“It seems,” Gulattive began. “Venira has selected a host. It willed an escape, enough to break any bindings."
Since you're continuing the same sentence after the dialogue tag (the full sentence is "It seems Venira has selected a host"), you actually want a comma after "Gulattive began", rather than a period.

Establishing more mechanics with the blood legendaries attaching themselves to anyone of his bloodline. Appreciate how because of the blood connection that's already there, and the fact one of them's connected to Armel already, this just feels like it makes sense.

Florent moved his gaze over to Armel, who was frozen in his spot. Sheer terror had grabbed hold of his body, and had no plans to let go any time soon. His eyes were locked on the place where the grunts had been standing. All there was left of them now was a puddle of blood.

“F-father, you…” Armel stammered.

Florent scoffed to himself. “Wipe the look off your face, boy. That’s how things are handled around here."
Poor kid.

With his face now out of Armel's sight, he took that small second to cringe to himself, as a wash of minute regret came over him.
You don't want the latter comma here either; similar thing with "as".

I do like him regretting it and thinking it was kind of a dumb thing to do to casually murder four of his own loyal underlings. Gulattive has its own agenda and just wants to eat some guys, and he can't quite resist it and is all too aware of that afterwards. I think this is new since I last read, and it's a good addition that adds intrigue.

With a single, very aggressive shake of his head, he pulled a key card from his pocket and swiped it into the reader strip that was placed just next to the button. It released, and he shot a look back over at Armel, who was still quivering like a pathetic Magikarp out of water in his spot.

"You'll forget it by tomorrow anyway, my dear boy."
There's something I enjoy about the dynamic of Armel having memory issues here; Florent can kind of justify anything on the basis that it's not like he'll remember anyway. Not that he seems to care too much either way; after all, he is calling him a pathetic Magikarp in the same breath.

Florent turned back to Gulattive. “And you couldn’t have told me that me expanding my bloodline, even unwillingly, would cause me to lose these Pokemon of mine?” he queried.

“You didn’t ask.”
I'm sure Gulattive has nothing but the best of intentions and would never hide things or serve its own ends, nope

“Judging the speed by which Venira left, I am to assume a child of your blood has just been born.”
I think that should be "Judging by the speed at which Venira left"? You don't leave by a certain speed.

“How could I have another child born at this point?” He asked himself.
Since you have a speech verb in there (asked), the dialogue tag is part of the same sentence with the dialogue, so the he should be uncapitalized.

“Quite strange that master cannot remember who he has lusted after.”
I enjoy this dynamic of Gulattive being so clearly kind of contemptuous of him. Florent loves to act like the guy in charge but he definitely isn't.

As his father conversed with Gulattive, Armel was wracking his brain for ideas on what he should do. If he were to avoid the same fate as those grunts, he had to be of some use. He hoped, somewhere in his previous lives, he’d written some useful information down.
Huh. I certainly haven't seen any sign that Armel is in any danger from him; mostly Florent just ignores and is very acidly dismissive of him, but he doesn't seem like he'd kill him. Wonder if Armel has more reason to think so or if he's just irrationally scared after what he witnessed.

I like him referring to it as previous lives, though.

I'm pretty intrigued by Armel generally, and how he uses the journal to make notes to himself when he won't remember anything. I wonder if his predicament has anything to do with his own blood legendary (though greed doesn't fit super well with it) or if he just happens to have memory problems. You also portray his fear and body language clearly; I like him clinging to the knowledge that the trauma he just witnessed will be gone by tomorrow.

However, with remembering Vienna, came remembering why he’d decided to cast her out of his mental space in the first place.
You don't want the latter comma here either.

I'm not sure I entirely buy that he'd just forget about Vienna, particularly if he fell especially hard for her; it's only been eight months. People willfully forgetting things is a thing, but entire relationships? Maybe through heavy alcohol/drug use, but that's not really the impression I get of him; he seems so meticulous. Of course, maybe it's another blood legendary thing; I can definitely buy that they'd want him to conveniently forget about the woman he knocked up until the baby is born.

It wasn't necessarily far-fetched to assume she could have been with a child in the weeks before.
I thiiiink the phrase is "to be with child", not "a child", when you're referring to being pregnant?

I'm kind of curious about Venira being the Pokémon of wrath - given "Gulattive" and "Avareed" I expected the legendaries' names to be based on their associated sins, but on that basis I initially guessed Venira was envy (with a similar garbling of the word as in gluttony -> Gulattive), not wrath. The name Venira doesn't seem to relate to wrath at all, unless I've missed something?

That was a no-brainer. A newborn couldn’t willingly give up the possession, so the demise of it would have to do.
I like how coldly and casually he puts this.

“Thank you fath-father,” Armel gulped.

“Come. We must go to the surveillance rooms at once.”

“Ye-es father,” Armel agreed.
Something feels kind of off about the stuttering here - intuitively my brain really wants him to stumble over the f in father and the y in yes, rather than the th in father and e in yes. I have a hard time properly picturing the latter? Is it just me?

I got strong anime vibes from this generally; could easily picture it all in animated form. Something about Florent's bombastic villainy definitely feels like it'd be in an anime. I'm kind of fascinated that I feel like I haven't heard much of anything about Florent on Discord; hard to know how big of a part he even plays in the main body of the fic! Maybe when he tried to attack Odette Venira just ate him. That'd be hilarious. (Unfortunately the same applies to Armel. I don't expect there's any chance he's been eaten, though! Want to know more about him.)

I think you do a lot of pretty successful setup here. Florent is a major asshole, but also clearly being manipulated by this legendary entity who's clearly bad news and has its own agenda. The child is presumably Odette, which raises further meta questions; clearly one way or another he fails to have Gulattive devour her, however that plays out. Armel's probably my favorite bit here, though; his predicament is fascinating and adds more intrigue, it's very easy to feel sorry for him immediately, and he's bound to be important to the later plot in some way but I can't at all predict how. Presumably he'll be an adult by the time of the main body of the story; he might be a villain who's suppressed all his discomfort and internalized How Things Are Done, or he might have overcome his father (maybe his blood legendary ate Florent, that'd be great), or he might have escaped somehow and built his own life, as the one other person with insight into what's going on with Florent and the blood legendaries generally.

There were some punctuation/phrasing issues that I tried to poke at above, but also some fun turns of phrase sprinkled throughout. All in all, an intriguing opening!
 
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Pen

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Hey, Sind! I started off where I'd left off, at Chapter 3, but I quickly realized you'd made some big edits since I last read, so I gave Chapters 1 and 2 a quick reread first.

Chapters One and Two

Chapter one gets off to a much snappier start than I remembered. The sacrilege and shiny trade are foregrounded in a way that makes it clear that they are going to be an important part of the story. It really changes the vibe of these early chapters to make more clear that this story isn’t just going to be about Odette’s personal journey, but a larger mystery.

While I approve of us diving in right away, I was a bit skeptical of Noal, amateur detective. I'm not sure I bought that an online friend of his would just hand him an admin password to the police’s entire database (that would be a job-ending thing to do, and for what?), and I don't see a random theater kid going to these lengths either to acquire that info or to sit down and analyze it enough to find that discrepancy. It feels especially odd to me since Odette is the one with the clear police connection. If she was a side character who'd acquired data through her family, that would make some sense, but it's a little baffling to me that the character with a police chief grandfather is getting shown secret police data by her friend who has no reason to have it. I like that Noel’s doing more as a character than just bantering and offering up Sassy Gay Friend ™ jokes, but this stretched my suspension of disbelief pretty far.

Now, seeing this new take on the issue was sending her into a faster tailspin. What was the reason for keeping that information from the public? Hell, why was the majority of affected Pokemon shiny? To keep that damn trade institution going? She grit her teeth at the thought.

I didn't follow Odette's reasoning here. How would the majority of pokemon affected by the drugs being shiny help keep the shiny trade going? Her grandfather runs the police department and would presumably be approving this censoring, so it seems odd that her instinctual jump is that the police are protecting the shiny trade. Odette seems to respect her grandfather, so it seems like her first instinct would be to try to find a good reason for the reports to have been altered like that.

Lot of new content at the end of chapter two introducing her pokemon. That's helpful, especially with such a big team. I definitely lost track of who was who in chapter three at times, though Loic stood out thanks to getting additional characterization. I was surprised that the pokemon play monopoly and that Odette expected them to be able to pack on their own--this seems to be a verse where pokemon has sapience and intellect that's pretty indistinguishable from human, then.

Meat vs Fluff

Chapter three is a long chapter and there were some parts of it that felt long. For me, the chapter really picked up steam at Odette's confrontation with Dorien and their subsequent battle. I think the bits that come before could be condensed a fair bit. For example, the opening scene with Odette stretching and watching television stretched on (no pun intended) for quite a while, without much narrative payoff. The point of the scene seems to be to have Odette get the latest news on the sacrilege and observe her grandfather. I think we could have easily opened with Odette, stretching and tuning out the TV, being startled by her grandfather's voice and looking up to catch the story--one or two sentences max of lead-in. If establishing Loic being mischievous is important, maybe he steals the remote and changes channels before Odette is ready.

The second place that dragged a bit for me was the segment in the first class. The points of this scene seemed to be establishing that Odette's stil troubled by the news she watched, which I don't think takes a scene to establish, and that Odette is good at training/strategy. The issue with the latter part is that this scene did that a lot less effectively than the scene where Odette actually fights and wins a battle 3-0. I'm only casually into competitive battling and don't do any laddering, but everything Odette was saying felt like 101 to me. When your audience is pokenerds, a character reciting facts or tactics that are pretty established doesn't do much to increase their cred in those areas, because we could all do the same. Her actually battling, on the other hand, and having to act under pressure in a real situation, gets that across. I don't think we'd lose much by opening later in the school-day, with Odette on her way to battling class.

Odette's Anger

Odette is angry a lot during this chapter--it's an integral part of her character. But something about it wasn't fully landing with me after a while and I think it's that her anger doesn't seem to actually impact her actions much here. In chapter two, Odette gets furious and nearly does some crazy road rage shenanigans. That's the kind of rash thing extreme anger drives us to. But here, the anger didn't feel like it had bad consequences. The narration keeps telling us she's beyond furious, but when it matters most, in the battle, she seems able to switch it off. A battle feels like a perfect instance to show Odette's anger getting the better of her and causing some mistakes--that doesn't mean her losing, but having her make a bad call due to her anger would make it feel a lot more real to me. It's true that she snaps at Dorien a fair amount, but since he completely ignores this and had no bad reaction to it, it's hard to call that a consequence.

Dorien

Dude's gross, what can I say. He gets a surprisingly glowing introduction, with Odette staring worshipfully at his designer tags and gushing about how he's both handsome and rich. It felt like a bit of a rapid turn when she begins to get on him for the very qualities she seemed to admire a few minutes ago--she's disdainful that he takes the expensive gym in stride, but not that he wears crazy expensive clothes? I liked the broad beats on her interactions with Dorien this chapter--initial interest, some repulsion, anger, and then fear. I did feel like the repulsion segment went on longer than felt realistic. How long is a rich dude like Dorien who seems to attract sycophants with ease going to stick around someone who is angrily snarking at him? Narratively, it also got a bit repetitive--there's only so many times a person can grin and chuckle while Odette insults them. I think a lighter touch with this would have still set up tension for the battle, especially with his creepy personal space invasion. I guess an alternate way it could have gone would have been for Odette's insults to be an active choice to try and repel him after a certain point, and then some internal space given to getting increasingly weirded out that he's not going away.

I really liked Odette's freak-out mid-battle and the way that Dorien transitioned in her mind from an annoying asshole to someone frightening. I was a little confusing by the hook to the freak-out though. He released a fighting-type against her Chandlure, a ghost type. How exactly does a fighting-type pokemon eat a ghost? Of all the type combos out there, that seems the one least likely to make a remark about eating a pokemon sound like a realistic threat. I'm a bit torn on Odette's 'just hit it!!!!' strategy paying off. It creates a nice moment of deflation after how amped up she was that she wins so easily, but as I said in the above section, I do think Odette making a mistake in the fight would make the battle more tense. For this beat to hit harder, I wonder if you want to ease off the pedal a little on Dorien pre-fight. He's already starting to feel freaky to me before the battle, and so there's less of a sense of shift than there would otherwise be.

Overall, the battle scene felt like it had some real stakes, coming as it did after Dorien's increasing creepiness. It made for a fast-paced and engaging end to the chapter.

The Shiny Trade

I’m having a bit of trouble understanding what makes the shiny trade uniquely bad in Odette’s eyes. Shiny hunters, as far I can tell, go out and capture shiny pokemon and then sell them. Capturing pokemon is pretty much the norm in pokemon canon, and I haven’t seen any sign so far that capturing pokemon in general is frowned upon in this world. Is it the selling that’s the problem? That doesn’t seem like something that would be limited to shinies—in a world where pokemon can be owned, they can be sold, and shinies can’t be the only kind of pokemon in demand. Dorein’s remark suggests that Odette has the authority to sell her pokemon if she wanted to. What’s upsetting there is the idea that Odette can auction off another sapient being to the highest bidder. That’s a terrible thing, but it’s nothing inherent in shinies. And it’s not clear to me that abolishing the shiny trade would remove what seems to be the larger issue—that Odette and everyone else in this world has that kind of control over their pokemon’s autonomy. Pokemon seem to be quite sophisticated in this verse. We’ve got machoke stage-hands, Odette’s gothitelle preparing food, monopoly-playing pokemon. Pokemon seem to be able to understand humans and be able to perform work, yet can be owned. This is definitely a major fridge-horror world-building question that a lot of pokefic is able to cleanly skate by, but when something like the shiny trade is being called out as particularly heinous, it does draw attention to the larger system that enables something like that.

The shiny trade was rumored to send Pokemon off to people who were, in polite terms, not fit to own them. Big names in the trade always made huge efforts to debunk the rumors, but Odette wouldn’t trust it. Money made people greedy, and greed could make people do some terrible things. Like, say, force-feeding a synthetic drug to a Pokemon.

I’m curious what exactly it means to be not fit to own pokemon? What exactly do these people do to them? Odette has casual asides about battles potentially sending her pokemon to the emergency room, which doesn’t sound like a super ideal position to be in as an owned person. She also has a pokemon that seems to do all her cooking for her, which is cute between friends and roommates, but hits different for me when the person doing the service is owned by the one being served.

.
.

This all got a bit longer than I was expecting so I'll leave off here and be back for chapters 4-8. Great work on the chapter 1 and 2 edits--the chapters feel like they get into the meat of the story a lot more quickly and set up some intriguing plotlines. Chapter three, from the Dorien encounter onwards had a lot of tension and did a great job entwining the battle with plot and character stakes. Dorien is the worst. I hope that horrible things happen to him 😁


Another case mentioned a trainer being arrested when they instructed their drugged-up Coalossal to eat the opposing trainer’s Vaporeon during a battle tournament.
Did it actually get eaten?

She was starting to wonder if she should trust any of the reports she'd been reading at all. If they were willing to mess with that sort of observation, what other falsities could there be?

It planted a weird seed in the pit of her stomach. Why would her grandfather let that happen?
Surprised she didn't think about this more in chapter three.

She remembered how he’d responded to a call about five fatal OD cases in a residential flat. The bodies, three trainers and two Pokemon, sat there for about a week before the smell of their collective decomposition alerted the other residents. Of course, nothing on them indicated where they might have gotten the drug from. He had been so disturbed that he didn’t talk to anybody for almost a week following the incident.
I like this anecdote, but not talking to anybody at all for a week seems untenable for a police chief--presumably he talked to his coworkers, he kind of has to. If his reaction was that extreme, I feel like he'd be put on leave or maybe gently shuffled out. Maybe you could tone this down to him not saying a word during their family dinner that week, when usually he commands the center of attention, or something like that.

She supposed that was another reason this weird little discrepancy was starting to bother her so much. As a shiny owner herself, she didn't like to bear the thought of her own Pokemon falling victim to such a drug.
Is there any evidence that pokemon are going out and taking the drugs themselves? I had gotten the impression that their trainers fed/injected them with it.

It’d been almost a year since she last stepped out on stage as a performer. She thought picking up a job as a crew worker would help her edge back into it; make her realize she missed it. But every time she thought about it, she thought about that thing that happened. She thought about those words, and where his hands went.

She thought too hard about him. She hated it.
I really like how you introduced this here.

Odette’s forehead hit the floor as she pointed her toes. She exhaled deeply, feeling the effects of her straddle wash over her.
I found this opening line a bit confusing. Hitting the floor sounds violent, but then the rest of this is about her stretching. I didn't get much of a mental picture of what she's doing here.

A loud sizzling noise rang from the kitchen, and Odette pushed herself upright, keeping her legs straddled.
I'm not sure a sizzle can really ring. It, well, sizzles. A loud sizzling came from the kitchen, perhaps.

The smell of vegetable omelets started to waft through the apartment, and she felt her stomach rumble. Instinctively, her hand traveled to rest on it.
The second sentence felt unnecessary here.

Also, and I apologize that I can't cite the grammatical reason for this, I think it should be "the smell of omelet" not omelets.

A hiss rang from behind her, somewhere near the table.
Again, I'm not sure hisses really ring. It's the second time this formulation has come up in a short span--ring isn't a synonym that spices up prose every time you want to describe a sound.

A hiss rang from behind her, somewhere near the table. She heard something slide across the floor, and it struck the back of her leg. She shot a look at it, only to see it was the missing remote. She narrowed her eyes before looking over her shoulder. Loïc was sitting under one of the chairs, staring back innocently.
This whole sequence seemed a bit over-in-depth to me.

The screen flipped over to it, prompting some annoyed grumbles to rise out of Isaur.
Active might work better here: prompting Isaur to let out an annoyed grumble.

The familiar jingle played over the speakers as she hovered over to the couch, and plopped herself down between Ange and Enora.
When it's the same subject doing both actions, you generally don't need a comma.

She sat the remote on the coffee table, next to her idle phone, before lowering her chest back to the floor. She exhaled, concentrating on her stretch while partially tuned in to the sound of the TV.
Again, I'm not sure we need all this. There's very little narrative significance in where she puts her remote down.

Odette’s head snapped up at the sound of her grandfather’s name.

Sure enough, his familiar face popped into view:
"Sure enough" struck me as a strange transition. Perhaps "A moment later, . . ."

Nonetheless, he held himself confidently, and spoke with an air of determination that could only be found in somebody as passionate in their job as he was.
The last bit of this felt a bit tell-y to me. And I'm not sure I agree that determination has to come from passion, particularly when your job is to crack down on drug-dealing and crime. There are reasons to be determined that have nothing to do with passion.

“Can you confirm that this stash belongs to a Team Enigma?” asked the reporter behind the camera.

Bernard’s face fell ever so slightly as he contemplated the question, and finally he shrugged. “We’re unsure,” he replied.
His hesitation here was odd to me. I feel like when an experienced police officer goes on the news, he has a pretty good idea of what questions will be asked and how he'll answer them, and this seems like a question he'd surely expect.

There was a cut back to the reporter, who continued rambling through her report. However, Odette heard none of it, and her head had begun to buzz: first, with relief that her grandpa hadn’t been hurt, and still seemed in good spirits. And then, with some concern: she’d scrolled through her news app for fifteen minutes yesterday on her lunch break, and only found the one repetitive OD story. Now, there was a new discovery. Fifteen hundred kilos worth of a discovery.
I'm not sure I follow Odette's emotions here. As the police chief, is her grandfather likely to hurt in a situation like this? I can't imagine that he's personally leading drug raids. I didn't follow the connection between her concern and her scrolling through her news app for fifteen minutes at lunch. I think she's supposed to be concerned here because more drugs have been found (though that would seem to be a good thing, since that's fifteen hundred kilos that will not be used), but the way it's sequenced makes it sound like she's concerned because there hadn't been any new stories at lunch.

Maybe: The program cut back to the reporter, but Odette had stopped listening. It was a relief to see her grandpa still in good spirits, but [insert universe appropriate exclamation], fifteen hundred kilos?

She began to scratch her cheek thoughtfully. “I should probably call--”

The words had barely left her before her phone began to ring from the coffee table.
* left her mouth

“Are you watching the news?” Marieanne gasped on the other end.

Odette blinked rapidly, but couldn’t help the slight smile that began to form. “Good morning to you too, Nana,” she greeted hesitantly.

Marieanne laughed. “Oh silly me. Good morning, little Swanna,” she said.
Not sure why Odette's greeting is hesitant--the general vibe I was getting is that she finds Marieanne's lack of greeting amusing?

Marieanne muttered something incoherently. “This is news to me. She knows I hate her climbing mountains,” she eventually said, more clearly.
“That’s probably why she didn’t tell you she was climbing a mountain.”
Missing line-break. The mother-daughter energy felt strong here.

“What are you doing today? It’s trainer school day right?” Marieanne inquired, deciding to initiate a subject change.

“Look at you, paying attention to my schedule,” Odette teased.

“Hey, I’m keeping up!” Marieanne sputtered.
I'd keep an eye on doing so many unusual speech modifiers in a row like this. It can make the dialogue feel a bit stilted and artificial.

Nothing new to add on to that, ot what her grandma had said.
* to

“Grandpa’s probably just super frustrated. Though I guess it’s relieving that there wasn’t anybody dead there, either...”
* a relief

It wasn’t her damn fault she’d never properly learned how to cook. With school, dance, and singing lessons taking up her days as she grew up, the last thing she was doing in her spare time was standing in the kitchen watching Marieanne mince garlic.
I wonder if that reflects different priorities between her parents and her grandparents.

No matter how much she tried to shake it off, it was like her brain had magnetized to thinking about it.
I like the image, but I think the prose needs to be smoothed out a bit more for it to come through.

She had to resist the urge to pull her phone out and see if there were any updates. But she doubted it would be that simple, and that was what made her so eager to delve more into it.
That simple, as in . . ?

“I’d switch into her in a case of out-speeding. I’d swap her in while the opposing Pokemon was distracted, on account of whoever was in before, or charging up.”
I found this sentence kind of hard to parse. "On account of whoever was in before" sounds strange in spoken dialogue.

Mr. Songmin nodded along slowly. He didn’t say anything for a short moment. “Fair, but what if the opposing Pokemon again out-speeds her? Froslass most certainly aren’t the fastest competitive Pokemon, and surely there are ways for your foe to knock her out in one hit?”

Odette pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Isaur’s been training with a Focus Sash since she was a Snorunt. She can take a powerful hit,” she said. “In which case, she uses Destiny Bond. Now my foe is stuck between switching out themselves or losing another Pokemon and being down two.”
This isn't doing much for me as an Odette shows off her skillz moment.

It was quite jarring to feel like she was back on a university campus, only to occasionally find herself sitting next to a middle school aged kid.
That would be quite a feeling. It makes sense that the ages at a pokemon school are more mixed, considering canon, though do kids who go to a school like this young forfeit their chances at higher education?

She was usually okay battling it out in her smaller classes, but...in Mrs. Chuquet’s class of twenty-five students, that was quite the crowd to be performing in front of.
Right, Odette has performance anxiety.

Suddenly, her shoulder made contact with somebody’s arm. Somebody’s very buff arm.
Can you really tell you're specifically bumping into a buff arm without having seen it?

He pulled her up to stand, slipping an arm around her back in a protective manner.
well that's gross

Suddenly, her shoulder made contact with somebody’s arm. Somebody’s very buff arm. The person she’d bumped into was at least a foot taller than her, and was moving quite fast, so they sent her stumbling back. She would have very much fallen on her butt, had they not reeled around and caught her by her arm.

“Whoa!” he yelped as he grabbed her. He pulled her up to stand, slipping an arm around her back in a protective manner. “I am so sorry,” he sputtered once Odette was still.

She stood stiff, staring straight ahead and blinking as she tried to swallow the bout of rage that had shot up through her back.
There's a bit of a disconnect here, I think. We get the whole scene described before we get Odette being angry about it.

“Dorien? Dorien Bonhomme?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.

His smile grew more excited with each passing second. “Oh my god, no way!” he gasped.
Gasping feels like an instant, quick reaction, whereas a smile growing more excited with every passing section is something that takes place over a span of time. The pairing is odd.

The prestigious logos embedded into his clothes seemed to shine like the diamonds they were probably worth. Praltz, Louis Vibrava, Roll-X...
Odette is really into rich people stuff, I guess.

“Big throwback to Rodin’s chemistry class,” she said, flashing something of a grin.
I wonder if you could be more specific here about how her grin is failing to be a full grin. An awkward grin?

Where she sucked at math, she made up for with her fantastic presentation and powerpoint making skills. His strong suit was the numbers, and wooing the teachers with his gene-instilled charm.
Is wooing teachers really necessary in chemistry class?

But it didn’t seem to matter now, because she felt some heat starting to travel to her face. It startled her, but she figured that not acknowledging it would be the best bet.
I wasn't sure what acknowledging it would mean, short of "Oh, Dorien, I'm blushing."

She scratched her cheek, deciding to ask the age old question. “What are you doing here?”
Not sure that's the "age-old question."

Dorien raised his shoulder gleefully, then flashed a piece of paper that depicted a class schedule.
Raised his shoulder? Do you mean his arm? Why not just say that he flashed the paper?

Dorien’s face lit up, brighter than it already was. “Lucky me for sure,” he said eagerly. Almost too eagerly. He was always easily excitable, but she didn’t remember it being this excessive. She raised her brow dubiously.

He must have seen her arched brow, because he rubbed the side of his neck bashfully. “Sorry, like I said. Excited that I know somebody.”
might transition more smoothly as
Dorien’s face lit up, brighter than it already was. “Lucky me for sure,” he said eagerly. Almost too eagerly. He was always easily excitable, but she didn’t remember it being this excessive.

Some of Odette's skepticism must have shown in her eyes, because he rubbed the side of his neck bashfully. “Sorry, like I said. Excited that I know somebody.”

“Sorry, like I said. Excited that I know somebody.”

Odette shook her head, deciding to brush it off.
Again, what would not brushing it off look like here?

She walked ahead, and decided to keep up with the small talk.
This is the third time she's been characterized as deciding to do something that's pretty reflexive.

She walked ahead, keeping up a determined stream of small talk. How had he been, what did he think of the thunderstorms. He had no issue talking her ear off. Normally she would have minded, but it saved her from answering any questions about herself. etc.

She walked ahead, and decided to keep up with the small talk. Asking how he’d been, how he was faring the weather, small stuff. He had no issue talking her ear off, and frankly, she didn’t mind. She’d rather ask him about himself than vice versa, lest she end up in that bad place again.
"Lest" is a pretty archaic construction and feels out of place here.

Those Steel moves would send Enora, Loïc, and Isaur to the emergency room at a Pokecenter if she wasn’t careful.
Oof. Battling's fairly brutal in this verse, then.

“Well, I was going to say,” he chuckled. “A shiny Sylveon would bring in enough money to last you a lifetime if you sold it at an auction. But, maybe not the best idea if you’re only running five.”

Odette’s eyes went wide. What an absolutely audacious thing to say.

“Excuse me?” she said. A mix of intense anger and an undying urge to laugh stirred in her chest. She started to let some of those laughs go, but she stopped herself upon remembering just how the Bonhomme family got their fortune.

Dorien came from a family of shiny hunters, and they were active members in the shiny trade--reminiscent of the stock market, but highly centered around the buying and selling of shiny Pokemon. Hunters searched day in and day out for the coveted shiny Pokemon, and would sell them to willing buyers for ridiculous amounts of money.

Now she remembered why she stopped having a crush on him. She had decided somebody so involved in the trade wasn’t somebody she should be kissing on.
Even if his family initially got its money that way, in my experience really wealthy people don't tend to think from a selling perspective, because selling is something you do when you need money, and you don't. So him instantly going to how much money she can make feels like non-wealthy behavior. Maybe his family are just super nouveau riche tryhards.

She pushed the heavy double doors open, and was met with the sight of some of her classmates sitting on the bleachers. The gym itself wasn’t what a standard school gym would look like. No basketball hoops, no volleyball nets--just a practice battle arena. The walls and ceiling were even padded with protection for stray projectiles. The bleachers themselves also had a protective barrier that could be activated whenever a showdown was going to occur. Truly, no expense was spared by the academy.

“Huh. Seems standard,” Dorien commented. There was an air of poshness in his voice, and it made Odette’s nerves prickle in disdain. Maybe getting a little riled up wouldn’t hurt.
Earlier she seemed pretty impressed by all his signs of poshness, like the designer labels.

“Must be nice to be so rich that ‘state of the art’ is just ‘standard’ to you,” she cracked, her tone wavering on the line between reserved and downright biting. He appeared oblivious to her less-than-friendly demeanor, because he let out a small chuckle.
He seems pretty tolerant of this treatment for a rich popular kid.

“Are you sure you’re not just a spoiled brat?” she queried as they walked across the vast space. This prompted another chuckle, this one a little louder.
Yeah, I'm not sure why he's still here.

She flinched. His voice had suddenly grown louder and...closer. As if it were right next to her ear.

With her brows furrowed and a deep frown on her face, she turned toward him again, only to find that he’d leaned in close to her. Too close to her. Her cheek was mere centimeters from brushing his nose as she turned her head. Green eyes were narrowed in an all-too sultry fashion, and his toothy smile had shrunk down to a smirk.
Gross, okay.

She watched him cock his head to the side, his expression growing sad. But, it wasn’t any sort of sincere sadness. It was a mocking sadness. Like one somebody might give a Farfetch’d for throwing a tantrum over their leek losing a leaf. A fire lit in her veins, and she grasped the strap of her backpack to refrain from backhanding him outright.
Ick.

“What?” he said, feigning a pout. “You’ve never had a guy get close to you before? I’m surprised.” He exhaled deeply and leaned back into the bench behind him again. “Every guy I knew in high school wanted to get in your bed, myself included. So that’s kind of baffling.”
Ew, ew, ew.

Odette exhaled the shallow breath she was holding, almost feeling relieved that the start of class would save her from this absolute trainwreck of a conversation. It would also save her from the probable expulsion that would come with absolutely pummeling a new student half to death.
“Huh, class starting?” Dorien commented, like he was trying to fill the tense silence that had swelled between them.
* missing line break

For the love of fucking gods, she thought bitterly.

“I’ll go!” she heard Dorien’s voice say.
Rip, of course.

She heard Mrs. Chuquete chuckle. “Flattery will get you nowhere, but I like your enthusiasm.” Despite the words she spoke, she sounded bashful. There was an almost unnoticeable waver in her voice, but Odette picked up easily. That seemed to be the same response he got every time.
Seriously? Ugh. How old is he anyway? This is student flirting with college professor territory.

She really had to think this over, because she was realizing, in the haze of her rage, that she was in a precarious situation.

One of the pluses of fighting a classmate was that she’d had the chance to observe them in previous classes. She could confidently say that she’d started to pick up on at least half the class's mannerisms whenever they battled, just from standing by and watching them work. She’d figured that by the time she was called for this exhibition, she’d be lucky enough to get paired with somebody she’d watched.
This set up her unease nicely and with good reason.

She’d been lucky enough thus far to have only run into the steel-types among rounded teams, but an almost-specialized steel trainer was rough terrain she actively tried to avoid, at least until she could find a counter that would fit her team.
Doesn't she have a chandlure? Fire's a pretty good counter.

A soft glow took hold of it’s claws as it did so.
* its

Ange manifested just before Excadrill made contact. It cried out in pain as its head touched fire and scrambling backwards. A blue flame took hold of its head, and no matter how much it tried to fan it out, it was no use.

Chandeeeeeeeeeeeeeelure!” Ange cried. He puffed out his cheeks, engulfing himself in a periwinkle flame that built and built and built, until it shot forward and made direct contact with Excadrill’s face. It flew backwards, and hit the ground with a loud thud.
This was a cool moment. Think you might want a little bit of additional connection, see the bold.

“Conkeldurr, I have a battle snack for you,” he said darkly as the large Pokemon manifested from its ball. It looked to have the same exact smirk Dorien was wearing just moments before. But that’s not what Odette was hung on at this moment.

What? she thought frantically.

Something about the way he said it sent a chill up her back. Did nobody catch that? Did nobody find that concerning? She thought back to the case she’d read about the drugged out Coalossal eating a Vaporeon mid-battle. She thought back to Noel's finding, and her immediate thought.

Was Dorien joking?

...or was there a chance he was being serious?
This was a really great moment. Something horrifying about being flat-up told a thing you think is a threat, and realizing no one else is percieving it that way or will step in to help you.

The wealthy, plus shinies...sounds like some shiny trade bullshit.

If Dorien truly was involved in sacrilege as a part of the shiny trade, there's no doubt he'd give it to his regular Pokemon too, right?

Ange floated back up in front of Odette. He was hurt, but still up for battle. But she didn’t care.

“Return, Ange,” she said. Ange dissolved back into his ball, and Odette threw Solene back out.
I don't get why the psychic type is a better choice than the ghost if she's worried about an unusual offense. Psychic is strong against fighting, but ghost is immune.

Also confused by her certainty that he'd give his pokemon the drug. Is it supposed to have effects that boost pokemon in battle (if that's been mentioned in the edits and I missed it, ignore this.)

“Attack,” she commanded. Solene’s eyes widened briefly. Odette understood why, as this was wildly out of typical strategy for them.
Out of typical isn't a thing--you want out of the ordinary or atypical. Or something like wildly unlike her.

It didn’t make any sense to her. Why would he send a pure Fighting type out knowing she had a pure Psychic type on hand? It wasn’t like he didn’t know she was using Solene at all, that’s who she led with! That had to have meant he had something else in mind, that perhaps his words weren’t a joke. Or, maybe he was just stupid, and figured she wouldn’t bring Solene back out? She’d battled some trainers who were that brainless in the past. It was a relatively common thing.
And not just knowing she had a psychic type, but against a ghost-type.

Odette pulled Ange back into his ball at the same time Dorien returned his Corviknight. She hesitantly moved her eyes back to his, expecting to see him giving her that same malicious look. But no. He was back to being all smiles.

He approached her, that same teeth-showing smile reemerging. “Great battle, Odette!” he said. “I thought I’d had it in the bag given my typings, but I guess you’re just a stronger trainer overall.”

He held his hand out to shake, but she didn’t accept it. Instead, she stared him in the face. Scanning, hunting for remnants of that hostility. But it was gone. He was back to cocky, spoiled smiles. Acting like everything was okay. Back to thinking they were probably still flirting.
So creepy. Stab him, Odette.
 
Last edited:

Panoramic_Vacuum

Hoenn around
Partners
  1. aggron
  2. lairon
Hello hello! I'm back for more because I crave that mystery plot-juice. Straight into my veins, if you please. I dove into chapters 2 and 3 this time to see where we end up after the introductory chapters.

I'll admit, I have mixed feelings about these two chapters in particular. On one hand, I love them because we're introduced to even more new and exciting stuff, like Odette's totally-normal anger management problem, her team of absolute hooligans, and a new character in the form of an old flame who is secretly (but not so secretly) a giant douchebag. Yes, I love all these things!

But I think as much as I loved reading about all these things, they also kind of got muddied a bit, tripped over themselves in an effort to vie for my attention. This is probably a bit strong of a qualifying statement, as the order in which things unfold follows a clear and logical storytelling path. It's funny, because I'm thinking of your comments on TLR about how a number of scenes felt like they were summarized and could have been expanded on, whereas here in chapters 2 and 3 (probably 2 moreso than 3) I was thinking some of the scenes felt like they were too long and could have been summarized more to keep things moving.

Perhaps the example that stood out the most to me was the opening of chapter 2, with Odette on her motorcycle. The scene itself is great and adds to her characterization (a bit of an adrenaline junkie, a bit of a control freak) but it did lose the pep for me when she started getting after that safe driving discount, and talking about hair care products with Noel (who, I'm sure is a wonderful individual but I wasn't sure what his purpose in this scene was, exactly, other than getting a ride back home to the apartment building where they both lived. Which surprised me for some reason. My takeaway from chapter 1 was that they were coworkers who were a bit friendlier than just coworkers, but I didn't expect them to be living in the same building. At first I was even like "wait, Noel lives with Odette and her mom in the same flat???? Why have I not heard about this throuple yet???)

I've gotten on a bit of a tangent here, but it felt for the beats the opening scene wanted to hit, it took a lot of wading through extra things to get to the root of the scene. For as quiet of a chapter that chapter 2 is (compared to the first two chapters) it felt a little too quiet, a little too mired in the minutia when there's so much I'm yearning to know about Odette and her current situation. An impromptu dance number in a parking garage wasn't doing it for me with so many unanswered questions lingering from chapter 1, especially on the tail end of knowing Odette has this odd uncontrollable anger problem that is definitely not related to the sin pokemon of wrath being in the body of an individual who is related to the major antagonist of the story, no sir. (Also, she did a murder???? Um, what???)

Perhaps the other reason the pace of the first half stood out was because of just how bonkers the second half of the chapter was. My wish to get to know more of Odette, pokemon trainer, has been granted with an entrance into her apartment looking a little something like this. The whole squad is there, and it's chaos, and it's glorious. I love that her pokemon all live in the apartment with her like bonafide roommates, causing slightly different kinds of havoc that regular human roommates might. Her poor neighbors, though! Only the thickest, most soundproof walls in Lumiose apartment buildings, apparently. All her pokemon are a delight with extremely different personalities from The Responsible One:tm: to the gremlin menace, and everything in between. I immediately loved her pokemon team from just this one scene alone.

Chapter 3 flows nicely from the end of chapter 2, picking up right where the action left off in Odette's apartment. I enjoy the breath of calm that comes with this chapter opening despite it being full of more information (namely the police raid bringing us back into the sacrilege mystery). I did have to laugh a little bit at the CSI bias sneaking into Odette's thought process:
Team Enigma was a whole group of people. Surely somebody would have a mishap--shed some hair, accidentally grab something without gloves, leave behind a footprint. Hell, even one of their Pokemon could have left a trace of something behind.
Geez, grandpa, you can't find a single incriminating hair in an entire warehouse?? smh my head

After a short call from momma Cinq-Mars (adorable), we jump right into the other side of Odette's life: trainer school. I thought it was interesting that trainer school isn't just for beginning trainers still learning the basics of battling, but trainers of any caliber can attend. First off, this is pretty unique from what I've seen of other journey-style fics, and secondly it's very clever because it allows you to skip right to the higher-caliber battles with evolved pokemon, a deeper move pool, and more experienced and overall powerful combatants. The battle lecture and hands on later in the chapter illustrate this point very well. Trainers have full teams, not just a single unevolved starter and lessons on the type weaknesses. This line in particular, though, is a mood and a half for my own irl situation with my apprenticeship classes.
It was quite jarring to feel like she was back on a university campus, only to occasionally find herself sitting next to a middle school aged kid.

Speaking of worldbuilding, I found this pretty interesting, too:
She rolled her shoulders. She wasn’t sure what was making her stomach hurt the most. The thought of losing or the thought of battling in front of such a large group.
Are league battles not publicly televised things in Kalos? (like they probably are in say, Galar) It's curious that for all of Odette's stage performance chops, she'd be nervous about performing in front of a crowd in a battle, but dancing and singing is fine. Not a bad thing, just a little tidbit I noticed about her character. Curious if it will come up later in the fic.

I'll admit there were a few parts of this school daze chapter that felt a little like Chapter 2's opening: a little slower than I'd prefer, but after reading the whole thing I appreciate them setting the table in showing Odette's competence and maybe some roaming eyes for a few of the fellows she's surrounded by. I'll be real with you, I will not remember any of the teacher's names at any point, but I won't be forgetting Dorian's any time soon.

Again, I'm torn here with his introduction and subsequent dismantling. For one, yes. Old flame comes back into Odette's life and he's just completely insufferable? Yeah, good stuff. On the other hand, when he first shows up, I'm rather surprised that she was able to entirely forget about him despite spending an entire school year partnered with him, and having such a strong visceral reaction to the reasons she dislikes him once she finally remembers. I feel like for a character as distinct as Dorian is and how bold Odette is, it's a bit of a stretch to believe his smile could undo all the utter contempt she had for him (at least for a hot minute). I'll file him in the "hot, but punchable" category for now. (Ngl tho, steel type specialist, my DMs are open)

At least her pokemon got to do some punching for her in the battle of the chapter. I enjoyed the air of strangeness that came from Dorian, especially with how on edge things are with the sacrilege and shiny related shenanigans that are running through the background of this fic. It certainly piqued my interest with not only Dorian's convenient appearance, but his odd behavior.

Perhaps the only thing that left me confused was what Odette's strategy was with Solene taking blow after blow and only setting up a Reflect for all her punishment. I kept expecting some kind of skill swap or ability or pain split or endeavor or some kind of strat that relied on taking damage, but I think it all was Odette simply observing her opponent? In that sense, I wonder why she'd have Solene tank all the hits and not try to dodge or block to minimize damage while maximizing her observation time. (Since it seems that both her and Dorian are on the more advanced side of trainer school, I feel comfortable talking strategy here in the very first battle of the fic).

All in all, I like where things are headed so far, and I'm sure a lot of my musings here will be answered in due time. Patience, Pano, patience. Keep calm and read on.
 

Sinderella

Angy Tumbleweed
Staff
Location
In Guzma's Closet
Pronouns
She/Her
Partners
  1. sylveon-shiny
  2. gothitelle
  3. froslass
  4. chandelure
  5. mimikyu
This is...REPLY TIME.

uA
I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but I certainly didn't realise this was what your Odette poly hot men angst fic opened with, my goodness.
I really do neglect to make it clear that the polyamorous romance is not the focal point for a looooooooooong time LOL.

I had some minor quibbles about the plausibility of Florent's leadership style, but I imagine that the nature and strength of Gullative is to credit for both his brutality and his hold on power.
Mmmmmm, the general consensus here is that Gulattive is the Pokemon of Gluttony, and being possessed by Gluttony causes Florent to act impulsively. So if anything he's doing seems questionable to you, you're absolutely right in raising a brow, and blame Gulattive.

Even so, it seemed odd that his kid felt like he might be sacrificed so offhandedly after surviving this long and being bequeathed a sin legendary of his own. Still, it made the kid sympathetic and I'm rooting for him to bifurcate his dad's skull, so it clearly worked!
Believe me, that won't stop Florent :copyka:

Umbra
I did notice the stuff Odette kind of thought or muttered about killing someone - is this something I missed from an earlier chapter or an omen of things to come?
Nope, she definitely killed somebody.

I would complain the chapter is frontloaded with a segment not featuring any Pokemon at all, but it is basically made up for by that ending. I love Odette's disaster team. Especially Lovic, Bane To All :Life
That's lil' Loic for ya! Loveable little shit.

Blue
Odette and Noel: I love them. They feel like a clearer defined and older version of Hana and Leon and I celebrate that so much! Almost to the tee, holy shit! But with enough differences to make for perfect chaos. AU crossover WSBS/26y here I come!
26Y👏WSBS👏CROSSOVER👏WHEN👏

The pokemon battles. They never break the scene. The one vs Dorien I didn’t even realise until I went over the story again. Like, I knew they had a fight, but you somehow managed to keep the narration between Dorien and Odette.
This means a lot to me because I am extremely self conscious of my battles. So, thank you!

I never felt like it got uninteresting. I don’t want to use the term page-turner, because it feels cheap, but there was always a new thing to keep my attention when juggling from one scene to the next.
🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 BLUE UR GONNA MAKE ME CRY

I always thought Odette and Noel met at dance-school, but it turns out they also went to the same high school together, and that Dorien also visited? Maybe a lot of coincidences in such a big city? Or is this just me being overanalytical?
Yeah so Odette and Noel did meet in dance school, but also went to regular school together. Dorien was also a student at said high school.

One time, when Odette thinks about how she’ll miss Kalos, she thinks about how nice it is to drive over to Noel, when it’s established that he lives two floors beneath her flat
Wow, did not realize that. Big typo!

Odette’s team is very distinct (also, I love the type combo), and all her pokemon have a clear character. Except for Enora. All I know about her is that she likes Noel and is a shiny.
Enora does get a lot of characterization in later chapters!

Yellow
Okay, but what about Enora? I only know how Odette got Enora thanks to our discord chats. If I hadn’t known that, I’d be really wondering about her and Odette’s history. Also, why didn’t Odette bring Enora? Wouldn’t that help her blend in more? Strike up conversations about the very trade she is trying to investigate?
I think we talked about this at one point, but basically it's just Odette playing safe. That all goes out the damn window in chapter 9, so buckle up buckaroo.

Clovis, honey, I don’t think you’re okay.
Oh, he's not.

The first sentence her is phrased a little strangely. I’d change it to “only to be immediately shot down to hell”. Also the comma in the second sentence is not needed.
Yeah that's a very clunky sentence, will revise!

Oh good lord. ExCUSE me while I go vomit in the nearest trash can.
Oh honey, read the rewrite, you'll lose your whole digestive track :copyka:

I meaaaaan, that’s not even close to the same thing as a married man twice your age, but hey ho. Semantics, amirite?
Always semantics!

ISAUR IS THE ABSOLUTE MVP OF THIS CHAPTER.
SHE REALLY IS THOOOOO.

You made a mistake here, sis.

“She knew who she wanted to do.”
Ah yes, thank you. The most important correction in the chapter.

ALSO WHO IS JOCELYN, IS SHE A THOT THAT NEEDS TO BEGONE
ABSOLUTELY.

If it was anyone other than Clovis, I’d say it’s weird that he’s so willing to reveal all these secrets to her, a “commoner” and total stranger. But, from what I’ve gathered about Clovis so far, he seems to enjoy taking every chance he can to spit in the eye of high society—or at least, the pompous snobs that occupy that sphere.
You kinda hit the nail on the head. He absolutely cannot stand the people he's around so he has no problem being like "You want secrets? I got secrets."

Also I have some theories….perhaps these “new” and grotesque Pokémon are developed from a normal Pokémon that’s been pushed past its limit in some way? And perhaps these monsters feed off of the energy of the Pokémon around them, which would explain why the first two were so exhausted?? HMMMMM THE PLOT THICKENS
👀

Bench
Oh dear.

With just one sentence, you revealed so much about Odette. Well done.
Yeah, she's uh...goin' through it. Thank you!

This transition is fantastic.
Thank you, again!!

Oh boy, Dorien. Only seen him for one chapter and I'm already dreading ever seeing him again. I'm getting extremely bad vibes from him, from how he won't leave Odette alone, to how close he's getting to her, to acting so casually about his involvement in the shiny trade, to that battle.
Dorien's....something.

Oh boy, looks like Odette's grandpa has some secrets too. I like him from what I've seen of how he acts, and I think he does have good intentions, but that letter...something is up. Shady things are happening.
Bernard is a good bean. But he do kinda be actin' sus.

Random Theory: Virtue Corp is an organization dedicated to hunting down team Enigma, and it seems like a counterpart to it, given its name, "Virtue Corp", and how Team Enigma has legendaries based on the seven deadly sins.
👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

Virtue Corp seems to have noble intentions, but they still seem shady. They're against the shiny trade, but that letter from chapter 4 shows they have a connection to Team Enigma, albeit being against them.
👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

First off, Dorien what the fuck. What the actual fuck. I am terrified for Odette. I am getting really, really, really bad vibes from the stuff after the red dust. Not that the stuff before the red dust wasn't already giving off a million red flags, but it gets even worse afterwards.
Oh yeah you should be really worried. This is an ongoing problem.

Initially, I thought the red dust was sacrilege, but after talking with my best friend and finding that it doesn't really line up with previous sacrilege cases, we came to the conclusion that it was some other drug.
I will say that it is in a similar vein, but not quite the same. It's MADE the same as sacrilege, I'll say that much.

We also discussed what a horrible person Dorien is and why he met with Odette, and came to the conclusion that he was sent from Team Enigma.
👀 sweats

Canis
This is the first mention of Noel riding with her if I read right, and to me it's pretty late on - the start really painted a picture where I thought Odette was riding solo, so when Noel was mentioned after it was kind of jarring to have to retroactively amend that whole sequence in my head.
Hmmmm might go back and rearrange that, then!

OH GOD ODETTE YOURE TAKING DAMAGE FROM SOMETHING MOVE MOVE
I WHEEZED SO LOUD LOL

knowing your neighbors? unrealistic, stopped reading
Yeah that's the one kill of this whole fic kekw

i actually hate noel am i supposed to
I'm sad you do :(((( Him and Odette are really close so like, his sarcastic quips at her, even when he's angry, aren't meant to be rude--they're just really close, lol.

what is woosah is that weed god im so square
Honestly, it might be LOL.

Woosah-ing is just a breathing exercise I used to do in drama. You take a deep breath and say "WOOOOOSAAAAAAH" as you exhale.

yoooo whoa so i dont know if this is metaphorical or hyperbolic yet but
It's neither, queen.

Is... there a typo here or is this just a phrase I'm just unfamiliar with?
Uhhhhh might be the latter, I didn't catch any typos there.

I don't remember what last made me think oh, this moment is uniquely special and I am going to remember it. That is something to be very proud about.
EYYYYYYY I FINALLY GOT THROUGH TO YOU, FUCK YEAH

Slamdunkrai
I love the idea of Florent (who I cannot unhear as having a Matt Berry voice) sitting around with all this money he somehow has, in this office in a big high-rise or on a boat or something, and being like:
This made me UGLY cackle, goddammit jeep.

The description you provide of Gulattive is charming and weird, both in its appearance (mouth-stomachs! One of my favourite monster design tropes) and mannerisms; it's willing to go along with Florent and be obedient, but I'm under no illusion that this is anything other than a selfish creature. Florent just deciding to kill and have Gulattive eat the grunts for doing nothing wrong is... interesting, and I would admittedly like to know more about what this purification he speaks of is, but it's something I'll have to read on for, I suppose. :P (Also? Poor Armel, lmfao.)
Oh yeah, Gulattive has plans.

Also, all you need to know is Team Enigma is literally a cult. Like, Drink the Kool-Aid(TM) cult. I hope that gives you a tad more insight.

On the one hand, I like that the morality in this world doesn't seem to be so black swan and white swan.
I hate you as much as I love you, good riddance.

On the other, I can't help but feel that her killing this asshole guy we don't know was girlboss behaviour -- this, I'm eager to know more about, because it's a hell of a juxtaposition to what she's got going on now.
AHHHHH...not girlboss, definitely more self-defense. Very needed self defense.

And I appreciate Noel! He's a fun guy to read about.
Awwwww I'm glad you like him! He's baby <3

- I couldn't shake Purrloins being literally just Cats, right down to Mr. Mistoffelees being there. This implies the presence of a Pokémon world Andrew Lloyd Webber who adapted poems by the Pokémon world T.S. Eliot into a musical, and in the developmental process had the infamous "Hal, it's about Purrloins" conversation with his theatrical director. Dying to know more about this.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head.

The Walrein
Prologue: I noticed in your response to Canisaries' review, you mentioned that Florent's decision to sacrifice his subordinates to Gulattive was influenced by him being possessed by the manifestation of Gluttony, causing him to be more impulsive, and that he'd regret it later. I think maybe doing something to show this in the same chapter - perhaps having Florent suddenly change his mind and try to call Gulattive off but it being too late - would do a lot to counteract readers pattern-matching to "oh, it's just the evil villain sacrificing their own men for petty reasons cliche, how unrealistic".
I did actually add some exposition on this, so thank you!

Also, I wished we got more of a hint at what Gulattive's special powers might be, given that "can overpower four unarmed humans" isn't terribly impressive in a world with typical Pokemon power-levels. (I'm assuming Gulattive must be able to do something special for Florent to justify keeping them around, given all the apparent inconveniences associated with the seven deadly sin Pokemon.) It seems like Gulattive might have some ability to extract information from the subjects it eats based on it saying the grunts "tasted pure", but I was unsure if this wasn't simply a mundane instance of Gulattive not having picked up Venira's scent off them.
So the only reason I didn't get into that yet is because that's a later story reveal. Kinda when everything comes to a boil. We'll get there!

Chapter 1: Shinies being disproportionately affected by sacrilege definitely seems weird! You'd expect the people who have them to be careful to protect their very-expensive Pokemon from such things, so my current guess is that for some reason they expect there's a low chance of sacrilege interacting with a shiny Pokemon in some extremely beneficial way, enough to justify sacrificing many of them. My crack theory is that this is the "black swan" in the title, since "black swan" can be used to mean a highly-negative, low-probability event. (Presumably if it's good for the sacrilege users, it's bad for everyone else).
Mmmmmm, I will say there's a reason it's shinies being affected more than regular mon!

Also, I'd think machamp would be quite overqualified for this stage-hand job! Admittedly I don't know much about theatre, but I wouldn't think being a stage hand would necessarily require much in the way of super-human strength. I could buy the vagaries of fate leading to one machamp doing this, maybe, but two seems like a bit much.
I mean, sometimes props are heavy. Sometimes we need a whole crew to push them!

It does seem a bit odd that Odette wouldn't have remembered this sooner - high school isn't that far away for someone who just turned twenty-two.
Trust me, there's a reason her memory's foggy here :copyka:

Having no barrier between the trainers and their Pokemon, such that a Pokemon can actually be thrown right back into their trainer, seems almost suicidally reckless!
This is actually a very good point, and one I didn't consider.

Is 'interesting things' a euphemism for "horrible tactics"?
Ah, yep.

: You were definitely successful at making Dorien come across as very slimy here! I was unsure what he was trying to accomplish in this chapter; my guess is that he expected Odette might be under the influence of one of the seven deadly sin Pokemon, and was intentionally trying to rile her up, to try to probe for this.
👀

I guess one big thing driving this for me is that I felt like you pulled your punch with Odette's first major outburst of anger (killing her rapist) in that it was done in a sympathetic situation, and seemingly caused no lasting consequences for Odette (she has a prestigious job, multiple friends, and a team of friendly Pokemon.) Yes, she has anxiety issues, but they seemed more connected to the rape rather than to her response to it. The missing ingredient, I think, is fear - no one's afraid of Odette, and she isn't explicitly mentioned as being afraid she'll hurt someone, unless I missed this. Given that this first punch was pulled, I therefore expect that any subsequent punches will be pulled as well. (Note that I'm not actually suggesting that you change anything about Odette's backstory, given how major a change it would be. Just explaining where my feeling's coming from. The possible remedy I do suggest is getting to an 'unpulled punch' sooner rather than later.)
So I guess my goal here was to show that all of that has passed. The rape/self defense murder happened over a year ago, and as the story goes on I plan to drop a little more bits and pieces of it. But essentially, Odette's put herself into a sphere where nobody knew who she was prior to that event, or don't even really know of the event at all, so nobody is really going to direct any fear at her. The only people she frequently speaks to are Noel, Acadia, her mother, her grandfather, and her grandmother, and they all know what happened. Her coworkers at the theater, and her classmates in battle school either know the post-trial story, or don't know about it at all (because people definitely live under rocks) so there's no real fear to showcase at her. However, if we were back at the college where the rape took place, it'd be a whole different ball game.

love
I wanted to assume that Odette was the child because it would explain the "deep trouble" mentioned in the summary, but then I remembered that the child was a newborn at the time of the prologue, and it's unlikely that much time has passed. (Okay, reading ahead, I guess it is Odette after all)
A LOT of time has passed, and I guess I should indicate somewhere in that chapter that that's the case. My bad!

I have a sense that Armel could turn out to be an important player.
You have sensed right.

I really enjoyed Odette and Noel's chemistry and already love them both (and that makes me feel sad that she has to leave for Alola). I think I could stand to learn a thing or two from the dialogue and portrayal of body language.
Thank you so much, that means a lot!!

On to chapter 2... Odette's anger problems are made very clear here. Her yelling at Noel really drove it home for me, but the violent fantasies and difficulty calming down also sell it. So I think it makes sense to tell us that she killed that guy now, rather than in chapter 1—I assume her temper is related to that. It is still a little fuzzy to what extent she did it on purpose/to what extent it was an unintended result of self-defense. She is apparently legally in the clear, so that tells us something.
So this comes out in later chapters, but I will say it was a self-defense killing.

Time for chapter 3. I was on the edge of my seat for the battle because I wanted to see rich boy get wrecked. I'm not sure how much of Odette's fear of him is just her emotions getting out of control and to what extent he's actually just being freaky. I don't think she quite knows, either.

I wish the narration were a bit more specific on why she hates the shiny trade so much, as opposed to just hating the specific people who abuse their pokemon. I guess there's the link to sacrilege, but it seems like she objected to the trade well before she knew about that.
So the thing about the shiny trade is that it's rumored to treat Pokemon very poorly. Many oppose it existing and it still manages to stick around, which is why she's so "ew" about it.

Vienna is a hell of a character, even in what little screen time she's had so far.
We love an out-of-pocket mother figure.

Torchic 1
lol in all seriousness, how did you choose the name "Venira"?
"Ven" from Vengeance and "Ira" from the Latin name for Wrath, which is literally "Ira."

THIS LINE! I FUCKING LOVE THIS LINE! HOLY SHIT WORDS CANNOT DESCRIBE HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS LINE!
THANK! YOU! SO! MUCH!

Oh so he's a playboy
That's an understatement.

I mean babies can be born premature, dude.
...you know what, true.

BOARDING SCHOOL????? WAS SHE A MINOR???????
NO NO NO SHE WAS OVER 18. Changed that to be college LOL.

Kint 1
Odette has friends! I liked the texting segment lol. Chatfic has a special place in my heart and it's a really great way of just showing characters being goofy, which I think this chapter benefitted a lot from.
I'm glad you enjoyed that, that was the best part to write. Her other friends are barely going to get screen time but I wanted to somehow still show she has a close knit group that have all just moved other places.

The media erasure bit from the old chapters is interesting to me as well, since iirc Odette had watched pictures/a movie or something? So those were doctored as well? (or maybe I'm just going insane and I've forgotten--but then if there weren't photos that'd be pretty surprising for a news story as well).
Honestly I don't remember, my brain deletes everything that was before a major edit. However, I can say she didn't see a movie or pictures. She'd looked at some case files, but not much more.

Odette prides herself on being the rational one but she's so horny she literally can't think straight and then she jumps straight to global-scale conspiracy theories while Noel is like "bruh what if the rich guy was just horny"--it's a fun interplay between these two, lol.
This about sums up the chapter honestly.

I'm not entirely sold on Noel just barging into changing rooms and blurting out a ton of information that they're trying to keep secret from an unknown group of unknown size and power that, according to him, has wiped entire facts from existence--it feels very on the scale of "blackmailing Batman" as far as just begging to be overheard lol.
Yeeaaaah I could understand that, and I sort of made some edits to like make it clear the dressing rooms were empty.

As a concept I really like it, since from a narrative standpoint it mostly just requires your characters to rush in based only off of conviction and a "man but it'd be so cool if things worked like this"--but also this is like, borderline QAnon "everyone but me has been bamboozled"
Yes, this was the point, so thank you LOLOLOLOL

Odette's next thesis on the faking of the moon landing when??
Oh it's COMING

This almost feels like a game of mafia, where Town has so little info compared to maf and is just trying to big brain with whatever the fuck they can find, but it's nice that they've got a little bit of info to start cobbling together now.
Also the point! The concept of this chapter was literally just mafia, and showing how thorough Odette can be when she gets into something.

This is probably something I missed in a previous chapter but are these two related?
Absolutely. Noel briefly mentions his sister moving away in chapter 1, but that's it. They're actually twins!

I do feel bad for RotomPhone here--it kind of creeped me out in Alola, admittedly, since there's kind of an uncanny valley for how close they are to actual humans/thinking people in this one?
So my whole backing here is the Rotom in the RotomPhone is being rehabilitated because it was found sick in the wild or something of the sort. Basically it's just powering the phone as a form of rehab, and it's free to leave whenever it decides it's ready to.

Or it exists because it's wildly lucrative--I'm pretty sure you can't stick the soul of sin incarnate into an $80,000 canvas painted red that's sold for tax evasion purposes, but like, sure, let's go with the cooler reason.

jk Odette's reason definitely makes for a more interesting plot, but I love that she doesn't really consider the more mundane version of "people like money and status symbols"
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL I def revised that to include "wait is that why the mons are so fucking expensive, BRUH"

this is not the reaction I'd have to learning that the entire society successfully wiped a fact from all history resources ever but I'm not Odette so I get it, but also, wow, this is a lot to take in
She's just tired at this point, idk what to tell you :ROFLMAO:

There's a moment earlier where I forgot to quote where Odette is saying that she was jumping to conclusions where I felt like she was making some pretty obvious connections--and I think that line would fit better here, where she makes a pretty big jump to a conclusion (in the sense that it's a good theory but it isn't the first thing that immediately came to mind--it feels a lot more worthy of her sheepishly being like "okay this one's a little wild but what if?")
Fair point, made a revision around that

Shini
Odette is an intriguing character, that with the given brief but informative history, she has trauma that'll probably be dealt with sometime in the future and I'm curious to how she'd tackled the Pokémon of Wrath and the knowledge of her having a brother that is unknown to her.
honestly same

And another thing, I can't help but be curious about why shiny Pokémon were in the majority of the 'Sacrilege' OD reports, are their shiny-ness important to something or?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is ALL WILL BE REVEALED IN TIME, DEAR SHINI.

I'm guessing this 'Sacrilege' drug has something to do with Florent? And the deaths could be Gluttony's fault? Or is it Armel doing this?
👀

Torchic 2
Cursed sentence. Thank you.
You're so welcome.

Shiny Pokémon are doing drugs?????>?
Smoke weed every day.

Also off topic but I would love to discuss the logistics of drugs in the Pokémon world with you (for worldbuilding, of course). Like how do drug dealings work? Do Pokémon do drugs? Can you smoke Oddish leaves?
PULL UP I GOT YOU.

Oooooh her grandpa is in the police force???
Chief of it, actually!

Speaking of which, I like the implementation of Shiny Pokémon in this as, like, a plot thing. It doesn't feel like Odette has a Shiny to make her seem special-er; it actually ties her to the conflict. I like that. I like that thing where fics use Shiny Pokémon as an important part of the plot/world/characters.
Oh, they're plot things alright :copyka:

Theory: Odette is possessed(?) by the 'mon of Wrath.
👀👀👀👀

Windskull
presenting us with a creepy, almost cultlike team
They are quite cultlike, unfortunately 🥲

The only thing that tripped me up is that I could not parse what pokemon Florent was using. That might have been intentional, as the description give it a very eldritch vibe, but I'm bringing it up in case it's not.
It's actually a fakemon! Made it up myself.

I'm kind of surprised by how much Odette and her friends are going on about stopping Team Enigma. While I was expecting something like that to come up early, where she ends up involved, I didn’t expect her to already be somewhat involved. I haven't been able to discern whether they're trying to solve it because they want to play detective or if they're just daydreaming about solving it. I feel like it's the former, since Noel has gone as far as getting into classified information, but so far they've felt very much like "just some people playing amature detective".
So it's more a mix of Noel wanting to play detective (because being an internet sleuth and hacker is like his side hobby that he really enjoys), and Odette being concerned for her grandfather, who is head first in the crisis.

Speaking of Odette, the fic is quick to establish her as a strong character. Strong as in, strongly characterized. She's a bit hotheaded and quick to anger, but she has her caring spots. And it's clear that she's hurting a lot and just trying to get by.
Thank you!!! I'm so glad you find her characterization strong, that's something I always worry about 🥲

She's going through it and just needs a spa day and a break.

Dorian makes my blood boil. From the moment he made that flippant comment he made about selling Enora to his… well, everything after that, I was constantly flipping between being disgusted and having my hair stand on end with worry. His vaguely religious comments line up horribly well with the vibe you established with Team Enigma in the prologue. Between that and the shiny hunting business, if he - or at least his family - aren’t involved with Team Enigma in some way, I’d be flabbergasted.
Keep this energy because you're gonna need it later!

Related to the shiny hunting stuff, I think you’ve incorporated a habit of game players that’s never really been addressed in any sort of canon in an interesting, if vaguely menacing way. I get the vague feeling that someone with money and power is responsible for having all the police reports scrubbed regarding shiny pokemon.
👀👀👀👀

Somebody like… Dorian’s family :absus:.
👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

I absolutely loved the imagery you used in the scene where Odette was biking home. So much so that I wrote down a reminder to bring it up here. The other is that I really wish that a date was established for when the fic takes place early on. We know the prologue happened in 1997, but what date is it now? Time has clearly passed because rotom phones are a thing, but how much time?
Thank you so much!

Also, yeah, got that critique once before. I plan to go back in somewhere and indicate it's 2020.

Kint 2
but uh hi, hello:
Not going to get into a huge reply because we talked about all of this stuff on discord, number 1. Number 2, everything you commented on got scrapped or rewritten, so...YES YOU'RE BASED, ILY KINT.

Slamdunkrai 2
(Which is to say, I think the strongest part of this run of chapters was the amount of intrigue dripping from all of this! And also, curse you, I'm officially hooked on this now. >:V)
I'M V GLAD TO HEAR THIS AHHHH

It feels odd to imagine living creatures as having fluctuating, speculative value in the same way as stocks do; it took me out of the realism slightly, trying to imagine the mechanics of this. At the same time, though, I didn't mind it that much because a) it does get the point across that this is a dehumanising trade which turns creatures into assets to be bid on, and b) it's funny.
I can see how it would take you out of the realism, but the whole point is that it's meant to be dehumanizing, and you're supposed to wonder why the fuck it's around at all.

I have spoken to at least one guy who has tried to sell me on crypto like this. He's relatably skeevy, which is the best kind.
I LAUGHED SO FUCKING LOUD OH MY GOD. Dorien trying to sell people on crypto sounds like something right up his alley, ugh, gross.

I think, for me, what did it for me was the specific point of comparison that makes her think oh no, sacrilege? (the coalossal and the vaporeon anecdote) felt a little too... obscure; i
Hmmmm this is a good point. In a previous version, that whole case was a little more prominently talked about, but it got scaled back in rewrites and I guess I never redid that. Marking for a redo.

He clearly has something planned here with that invite, and it sucks, but even then, the way he acts here is just skin-crawling in the way that it needs to be.
Dorien's....something.

Team Enigma? Sacrilege? Dorien? Virtue Corp.? The Worst Dad In The World? A lot to juggle here, given our protag is just about to move to Alola, a land that is fortunately known for hot guys who do have their shit together and are uninvolved in doing crime.
Yes, everyone in Alola is Fine(TM), she will have good times there too.

Pano 1
I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here, but the set up of the prologue tying in directly with these psychotic side effects of the sacrilege drug that's sweeping the nation, and apparently coming from the villainous team themselves? Yeah you've got a killer mystery on your hands, and I am thrilled to keep reading to see what will unfold. Especially with how bonkers crazy these sin-pokemon are. I get very Ultra Beast vibes from them in the fact that they're pokemon, but nothing like anything we've seen before.
I'm glad you're into the mystery, and I hope you enjoy what's to come!

Noel is the obvious stand-out here, given that they're a dynamic duo of crime solving theater kids. Reminds me a lot of my irl friends who listen to serial killer and unsolved mysteries podcasts. I like the way that you build the world around them without infodumping. The context of the theater, the weather (Castform mating season got a solid laugh out of me), and exactly how or why they're so embroiled in this mystery despite having no real reason to be so involved.
Thank you so much! I'm glad you like the idea of these amateurs being a crime fighting duo LOL

I'm trying to put my head around this as to how this could be linked to anything our dastardly Enigma leader is up to, but I guess I'll just have to be patient. I did gasp aloud when it was revealed Enora was a shiny Sylveon, and ruh-roh as if Odette didn't already have a big enough target on her back (though Florent hasn't figured that one out yet apparently).
Odette has some fucking issues going on, let's just say that.

It felt very "the author suddenly remembered the rest of her team and put this line in here to show the reader they hadn't really forgotten about them!"
Yeeeaaaaaaaah little dumb thing to segue into the idea she has a full team. Dumb rewrite I gotta do.

That being said, I have to wonder what's so compelling for her to move to Alola so suddenly? Is it a job opportunity? Something else? She does seem awfully invested in the things going on here in Kalos, including her friends and her own attempt at immersion therapy, so what could be forcing her hand for such a drastic move? I have a feeling we'll learn more about that soon, but for now, consider me intrigued.
So she's moving with her mom. It's not really a spoiler, but her mom's a Pokemon Professor, and she was moved to Alola as a new "home base," so Odette's going with her.

Dragonfree
An actual review for the prologue, after I read it and did some art for Smeargle Swap! Way too long because I cannot shut up but I hope it's illuminating.
Very illuminating! Pointed out a lot of my consistent typos that I was able to go back and revise, so thank you!

I do like him regretting it and thinking it was kind of a dumb thing to do to casually murder four of his own loyal underlings. Gulattive has its own agenda and just wants to eat some guys, and he can't quite resist it and is all too aware of that afterwards. I think this is new since I last read, and it's a good addition that adds intrigue.
Yep, little change in there that more shows a lot of what he does is not rational, for reason.

I'm sure Gulattive has nothing but the best of intentions and would never hide things or serve its own ends, nope
Nope, he's all sunshine and rainbows and is absolutely not up to anything nefarious, ever.

I like him referring to it as previous lives, though.

I'm pretty intrigued by Armel generally, and how he uses the journal to make notes to himself when he won't remember anything. I wonder if his predicament has anything to do with his own blood legendary (though greed doesn't fit super well with it) or if he just happens to have memory problems. You also portray his fear and body language clearly; I like him clinging to the knowledge that the trauma he just witnessed will be gone by tomorrow.
Yeeeaaaaah put a pin in that :copyka:

I'm not sure I entirely buy that he'd just forget about Vienna, particularly if he fell especially hard for her; it's only been eight months. People willfully forgetting things is a thing, but entire relationships? Maybe through heavy alcohol/drug use, but that's not really the impression I get of him; he seems so meticulous. Of course, maybe it's another blood legendary thing; I can definitely buy that they'd want him to conveniently forget about the woman he knocked up until the baby is born
So I'm more trying to establish that Florent has Hoes For Days(TM), and even when he really likes one, he has ten more to replace it. Kinda tweaked it to be more like "Damn I thought I was careful with the protection, I really liked her though. But the bitch UP AND LEFT ME, TIME TO DIE."

Armel's probably my favorite bit here, though; his predicament is fascinating and adds more intrigue, it's very easy to feel sorry for him immediately, and he's bound to be important to the later plot in some way but I can't at all predict how.
He's....something.

Pen
Chapter one gets off to a much snappier start than I remembered. The sacrilege and shiny trade are foregrounded in a way that makes it clear that they are going to be an important part of the story. It really changes the vibe of these early chapters to make more clear that this story isn’t just going to be about Odette’s personal journey, but a larger mystery.
Yep, made some big tweaks to get to that meat sooner!

While I approve of us diving in right away, I was a bit skeptical of Noal, amateur detective. I'm not sure I bought that an online friend of his would just hand him an admin password to the police’s entire database (that would be a job-ending thing to do, and for what?), and I don't see a random theater kid going to these lengths either to acquire that info or to sit down and analyze it enough to find that discrepancy.
Yeah, kinda tweaked that a little bit to this friend of his being somebody he knew well in an in-person class in school. Also, in essence, Noel is a musical theater star by day and a meticulous internet sleuth by night--this is like one of his main loves, so he goes out of his way to try to figure it out.

How would the majority of pokemon affected by the drugs being shiny help keep the shiny trade going?
That's...a damn typo. Why am I Like This(TM) LOL

I think we could have easily opened with Odette, stretching and tuning out the TV, being startled by her grandfather's voice and looking up to catch the story--one or two sentences max of lead-in. If establishing Loic being mischievous is important, maybe he steals the remote and changes channels before Odette is ready.
Yeah, took this into account and had that chapter shorted a bit.

It's true that she snaps at Dorien a fair amount, but since he completely ignores this and had no bad reaction to it, it's hard to call that a consequence.
I guess Dorien ignores it because that's what he wants to happen 👀

I’m having a bit of trouble understanding what makes the shiny trade uniquely bad in Odette’s eyes. Shiny hunters, as far I can tell, go out and capture shiny pokemon and then sell them. Capturing pokemon is pretty much the norm in pokemon canon, and I haven’t seen any sign so far that capturing pokemon in general is frowned upon in this world. Is it the selling that’s the problem?
It's more the idea that the shiny trade is inhumane--people abusing them, bouncing them around without their consent, and the fact that so many people want is abolished and it's still around (a point discussed in a later chapter)

I’m curious what exactly it means to be not fit to own pokemon? What exactly do these people do to them?
Bad things :D

Pano 2
I was thinking some of the scenes felt like they were too long and could have been summarized more to keep things moving.
Yeah this was a common consensus in these two chapters. I recently shortened the beginning of chapter 3, and chapter 2's a bit of a slower edit because there's still aspects of it that I feel are somewhat important to what's going on, even if they slow the ball a little.

(who, I'm sure is a wonderful individual but I wasn't sure what his purpose in this scene was, exactly, other than getting a ride back home to the apartment building where they both lived. Which surprised me for some reason. My takeaway from chapter 1 was that they were coworkers who were a bit friendlier than just coworkers, but I didn't expect them to be living in the same building. At first I was even like "wait, Noel lives with Odette and her mom in the same flat???? Why have I not heard about this throuple yet???)
So in chapter 1 when they're all at lunch, there's a little bit of dialogue and exposition that's meant to establish a little more that Odette and Noel are good friends. The scene is meant to establish Noel as a constant character, not just somebody she randomly goes to work with. Somebody who's going to be around, and knows more than the reader in terms of what's going on with Odette.

The exposition and dialogue I'm referring to!

“Oh I wasn’t going to say much,” Noel answered. “I was just going to bitch that all my friends are moving away.” He sniffled and ran his finger under his eye, as if wiping away tears. “First Claude, then Basile, then my sister, now you. Who am I going to hide behind when Acadia yells at me for drinking too much wine?”

“Hey!” Acadia groused.

“You have the group chat. Just complain there like you always do,” Odette suggested, raising her RotomPhone for emphasis.

“It won’t be the same, though.”

Odette had to nod in agreement, it wouldn’t be the same. While she was somewhat looking forward to the hefty change, something about leaving behind the place she grew up was only adding to her daily anxiety load. She didn’t know what it would be like not being able to walk three floors down to Noel’s flat when she needed to get out of her head. Or, not being able to meet Acadia for lunch when she was bored and needed female interaction. Or, possibly worst of all, not being able to ride across the city to her grandparent’s townhouse just because.

Are league battles not publicly televised things in Kalos? (like they probably are in say, Galar) It's curious that for all of Odette's stage performance chops, she'd be nervous about performing in front of a crowd in a battle, but dancing and singing is fine. Not a bad thing, just a little tidbit I noticed about her character. Curious if it will come up later in the fic.
So she's nervous because she's equated performing in front of a crowd and whatnot to the thing she suffered through, of which I won't say too much about yet. That starts to translate into battling in front of others as well.

On the other hand, when he first shows up, I'm rather surprised that she was able to entirely forget about him despite spending an entire school year partnered with him, and having such a strong visceral reaction to the reasons she dislikes him once she finally remembers. I feel like for a character as distinct as Dorian is and how bold Odette is, it's a bit of a stretch to believe his smile could undo all the utter contempt she had for him (at least for a hot minute). I'll file him in the "hot, but punchable" category for now. (Ngl tho, steel type specialist, my DMs are open)
There's a whooooole reason she forgot about how much she hated him. That's all I'll say.

Perhaps the only thing that left me confused was what Odette's strategy was with Solene taking blow after blow and only setting up a Reflect for all her punishment. I kept expecting some kind of skill swap or ability or pain split or endeavor or some kind of strat that relied on taking damage, but I think it all was Odette simply observing her opponent? In that sense, I wonder why she'd have Solene tank all the hits and not try to dodge or block to minimize damage while maximizing her observation time. (Since it seems that both her and Dorian are on the more advanced side of trainer school, I feel comfortable talking strategy here in the very first battle of the fic).
I truncated Pokemon stats together basically--Gothitelle has a high Sp.Def so in my head that translated into "high defense? punching bag." Odette basically uses her as a live wall while she observes the other Pokemon, if that makes sense lol. Battles are not my strong suit.
 

SparklingEspeon

Back on Her Bullshit
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Review of Chapters 3 – 8

Hello!

When I read the prologue and first two chapters, I wasn’t really sure what to think. It seemed I stopped literally before the good part, because this really took off! Enough so that I sleep deprived myself to read it, something that not too many fics pull me to do nowadays.

I know you’ve said in the discord you’ve got plans to turn this either into a TV show or a novel help I can’t remember which, and I can definitely see that! It’s very page turning, and while the chapters feel a little inconsistently balanced by professional novel standards, I think this would totally slap as a TV show (and as a professional book, with some pacing adjustments)! Perhaps because of that, it feels like the pokemon factor isn’t entirely as present as it could be, but I’ll get into that a bit later.

I think a lot of what makes it so page turning is the prose. As someone who can barely tell bad prose from good prose unless it’s REALLY bad prose I didn’t think I’d ever be here commenting about prose, but here I am! You do a really good job of using the prose to put us into Odette’s head, almost such that we see everything she sees, and feel it too. This really shines in her interactions with Dorian, where you utilize physical descriptions and all the little coping mechanisms Odette uses to keep herself from flying off the handle to really get across what a creep this guy is and how much she vehemently dislikes him. It’s also really good at describing things that go on in the background, so we never feel like the characters are just standing in a foggy room or a white void and acting out their lines.

And speaking of Dorian, wow this guy is Bad News! I dunno if I covered his first appearance or not last time, but I’m covering him now and… wow. Big yikes. And honestly, I can say that to all the Rich People in here. You do a really good job of showing how terrible these parties and people are, from emphasizing all the weird little standards and assumptions they make (going to dine at a restaurant where a bowl of soup costs Too Much Money, a woman asking Odette where her lips got filled), to their treatment of their pokemon. The way you describe their pokemon, from the scyther to the plusle and minun is… haunting. And then they were immediately bidding on Enora like she was an auction lot and I was just like whAT horror_emote

But yes, back to Dorian. I appreciate that you haven’t (yet) made him like Actually Abusive or an Axe Murderer just to show how evil he is—he’s just… a creep. Mysogonistic, possessive, rude, likes to make comments that are very obnoxious and demeaning but skirting the line just enough that he can socially scoot by. Add that to his huge fortune, sense of entitlement, and the fact that he’s so clearly involved in Weird Shit… sells it more than much else could.

So one comment I had last time was that while the world ~had~ pokemon, I didn’t really feel like they were well integrated. And to some extent, I think I still have that criticism. I mean sure, they’re there. Quags in vests. First aid chansey. The whole shiny thing. Odette and Noel’s pokemon are riots. But I do still feel like they’re not really… there most of the time? 95% of the focus is on Odette and her circle of contacts as she digs into this conspiracy, but for a world where pokemon are a thing it often feels like they’re not really there until they need to be. The Elite’s shiny party is the most we actually see of pokemon in this world, and I feel like that’s a little strange Imo. BUT, I can also write it off as a style thing. I know you have plans to make this original, and like I said above I can easily see this becoming that. With that in mind, maybe it’s for the best to keep the legally dubious magical animals in the background :v

I will say that the ones we do see (mainly Odette’s) were very expressive and felt like well-rounded characters, even if they don’t talk. Isaur likes to eat a lot and fiddles with things. Enora is cute but clumsy. Solene is dignified and responsible. Loic likes keep to himself, steal game pieces, and scuttle around in dark places because that’s His Thing. (Odette causally telling him to stop horror movie monster crawling in the vents is a thing of beauty)

Oh and also Powdered Sugar, I didn’t know I needed this as a snom name but I really do

The other thing I should point out in terms of criticism is that sometimes your chapter lengths get really out of whack. I can definitely see why this was done—they feel as long as they need to be, and none of them feel like they rush or draw everything out. But when “long as it needs to be” means there’s a spectrum of 14K to 2K for chapter lengths and it seems to fluctuate, I wonder if that doesn’t mean there’s some worth in pacing the chapters to be a bit more consistent lengthwise.

One more criticism I had, though this one’s more a legitimate question than anything—what separates the rotom phone from all Odette’s other pokemon? (if this was covered earlier then I apologize, it’s been a long while since I’ve read those) There clearly seems to be a rotom in there, so it’s kinda odd that all the others roam free but rotom is just stuck in there, being a sentient computer forced to do Odette’s social media bidding forever. I know it’s canon tech and maybe rotom is comfy in there or something, but that’s always stuck out to me as weird ground.

There’s definitely something whack going on with Dorian, re: his memory-erasing watch powder that makes me believe he’s a little more than just a rich creep with his fingers in Weird Shit. Unless he like, uses that powder to calm down dates he pisses off. Which! I would not put past him! But his interest in Odette’s past, plus the fact that there is very clearly something lurking within Odette that’s probably responsible for her latent anger issues, makes me think otherwise. It seems a lot like he’s playing her too, perhaps because he’s connected to Team Enigma and knows exactly what Venira is and what it’s doing inside Odette.

On the other side of the spectrum, though, I’m not quite sure what to make of Clovis. His sarcasm and humility was a nice break from everyone else in that room, though I’m not sure what’s up with him dodging the questions about figure skating. Something to do with that contact he wouldn’t call? I was prepared not to take his first appearance at face value since we got a lot of it through Odette and Odette basically spent that chapter UwUing for him, so I thiiiink her perception of him was inflated just a bit there. Seems pretty clear he’s a lot more self-conscious than anyone else in that room, and seems to be on Odette’s side… or more accurately, her gramps’ side. I’m guessing from that phone exchange that he owns the police department Bernard had that letter exchange with, or at least has stake there. I suppose that’s not the worst position for Odette to end up in, though dang there’s a lotta deception going on here. I feel like Noel’s been the most honest person so far :unquag:

Noel is a hoot, by the way. He’s very, uhhhhh… open. And not afraid to use that to his advantage. I think he might actually have more audacity than Odette and I’m not complaining because that makes him a very entertaining character

I think that’s the extent of my reads for now! I’ll probably wait for a buffer of chapters to build up before I get back to this one, but safe to say I’m definitely invested now. My main hopes going forward are that (a) we get to see more of Venira, since it seems to a reason that Dorian is so keen on Odette, and (b) that everyone just levels with Odette pretty soon. The cat’s already kinda out of the bag, so I don’t know if there’s a good reason for her to hide it too much longer. Maybe long enough to get answers out of Clovis.

Otherwise, great job, and I’ll be back in five chapters or so!

~SparklingEspeon

Listening to: The Sore Feet Song - Mushishi
 

windskull

Bidoof Fan
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Hi Sind. This is your catnip review! I’m only covering chapter 4 right now, but hope to pick up a couple more later this week.

This chapter doesn’t have a lot of action - which makes sense, since it provides a breather after the slightly intense previous chapter. It gives us a cute little character moment between Odette and her grandfather (heck yeah, Oreos), but also introduces us to a couple other concepts.

The first is the fact that Odette has diagnosed anger management issues. It’s more than being just a bit of a hothead, it’s something that affects her everyday life. Good on her for being a responsible gun owner though.

Secondly, it presents us with a mystery in the form of the letter her grandfather has. It gives me the vibe that there’s even more to the situation than the police let on - if I interpreted it correctly, they have some form of informant. So, on top of the already preexisting mystery of why the reports are getting scrubbed (still standing by my suspicion that someone with power and/or money is responsible), we now have the mystery of the informant. Seems like a great way for Odette to get herself into trouble.

I love that the rotom in her phone pipes up and starts chatting when she takes the photo. But man, she should have just waited to send it until after she left. It would have saved her from that close call. Oh well, at least things worked out in the end. Probably 8P.

Overall, this was another enjoyable chapter. It does a good job of establishing character traits and relationships, provides a bit of worldbuilding, and also moves the plot along. It was another enjoyable read, as to be expected. With that, I’ll head out until next time.
 

Dragonfree

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All right, I'm back for chapter one!

The victim, 25-year-old Gervais Morel, was found unconscious in his car. His Pokemon, a Simisear, attempted to take a firearm from one of the first responders, and was subsequently gunned down. The Simisear was later found to have lethal amounts of sacrilege in his system. The Lumiose City PD declined to--
I know sacrilege is a drug in this fic but "lethal amounts of sacrilege in his system" still sounds pretty hilarious :P

She began to shake her head, when a tap on her shoulder caused her to jump.
No comma before when. But also, I thiiink you want to phrase this differently? I believe what you mean is she began to shake her head and then a tap on her shoulder caused her to jump, not that she began to shake her head when the tap caused her to jump, which would suggest she wasn't shaking her head until after he tapped her.

“Shouldn’t you be paying attention, Miss Stage Manager?” Noel whispered.

She scoffed. “Shouldn’t you be listening for your cue, Mister Mistoffelees?”

Noel returned the scoff and crossed his arms. “To think, after years of acting classes, you don’t have that faith in me? Purrloins is my favorite musical of all time, you think I don’t know it like the back of my hand?”
Oh dear. Enjoy this banter.

Odette impatiently scrolled through the rest of the article, before clicking the phone off and shoving it into her pocket.
And no comma before "before" either.

“Castform mating season,” Odette chided. “So why don’t you ask one of them?”

To that, Noel chuckled. “Rainy one day, sunny the next, snowy the third.”

“Welcome to January in Kalos,” Odette said.
Don't they live here? This feels like a bit of an odd thing for them to say to each other if this is actually perfectly mundane for them.

I enjoy this opening generally, though. The theater setting is unusual, you get some characterization across with some lively interaction, and there's a bit of worldbuilding as well showing the role of Pokémon here - the Machoke moving props, the Simisear who was shot while trying to take someone's gun.

Noel smirked. "Did I mention that the press is conveniently leaving out the fact a decent majority of the Pokemon being affected by sacrilege are shiny?"
Huh. That definitely wouldn't be a coincidence.

The trade--very loosely reminiscent of the stock market--was centered around the buying and selling of shiny Pokemon. Hunters searched day in and day out for the coveted shiny Pokemon, and would sell them to willing buyers for ridiculous amounts of money. When Odette had learned about it at face value, it didn't sound inherently awful. That is, until she looked deeper into it.

Reports of mistreatment, unethical catching practices, selling the Pokemon off without their consent, among other despicable rumors were constantly coming out. Last Odette had looked, there was overwhelming support for having it abolished altogether. Despite that, it still stood, loud and proud.

Big names in the trade, of course, always made huge efforts to debunk the rumors, but she wouldn’t trust it. Money made people greedy, and greed could make people do some terrible things. Like, say, force-feeding a synthetic drug to a Pokemon.
So this is our A-plot, I take it! The juxtaposition of Pokémon being bought and sold and there apparently being recognition that selling them without their consent is bad jarred me a bit, but thinking about it, maybe it's more like sports players getting bought and sold between different teams than anything else? (Not sure exactly what the stock market comparison is, though, beyond things being bought and sold.)

I guess sacrilege is performance-enhancing, if they're forcefeeding it to Pokémon?

In one police report she had read, an young woman had to be checked into hospice
Typo: "an young woman"

But, all attempts to uncover the group so far had been unsuccessful.
You don't generally want a comma after but unless something else dictates it.

So much so, that it was hard to believe Team Enigma was even real.
The whole ordeal was absolutely mind-boggling to her.
There's a single line break here - presumably you want either no break or a double?

It planted a weird seed in the pit of her stomach. Why would her grandfather let that happen?
Ohoho. Setting up for some more personal stakes as well.

Presumably he's her maternal grandfather, so it's not like he's Florent's dad, but nonetheless, I expect what he has to do with it will be significant.

She immediately regretted allowing her brain to travel there, and shook off the thought as quickly as she could. She knew damn well what it was like to bear witness to death like that.
👀 Some nice intrigue there.

It was there that the sound of scurrying paws approached behind her.
Wouldn't it be "then"? They've been in the same location this whole time.

The strings section of the orchestra began to groove, as Noel took off into his thirty fouettes.
No comma before as.

It all sounded dreamy, until she was rudely reminded why it wasn’t.

You’ll never get anywhere unless you do things like this, Odette...

She recoiled back behind the curtain, anxiety gripping her chest. It caused her heartbeat to start ringing in her ears.

Stop, stop, stop, she told herself. Shut up. Shut up.

It’d been almost a year since she last stepped out on stage as a performer. She thought picking up a job as a crew worker would help her edge back into it; make her realize she missed it. But every time she thought about it, she thought about that thing that happened. She thought about those words, and where his hands went.

She thought too hard about him. She hated it.
Ooof, understandable.

I wondered about the sexual assault content warning, but I think this is tastefully handled and adds a dimension to Odette's character - not so much the assault itself as the fact this trauma halted her performance career and keeps making her sick thinking of it, but she's still doggedly trying to work at the theater and recover her drive, unwilling to actually give up on it.

“Veeeeeeon?” Enora queried, perking her head up as Noel began to chew. He stared at her questioningly before his eyes widened in realization.
“Oh right, you like these things,” he said. He picked a berry up from the bed of lettuce, and fed it to the Sylveon, who purred in thanks. Noel started to pet her, but Odette smacked him on the shoulder. He flinched, thus causing Enora to flinch too.
Another single line break.

“Okay, but Electric types can literally bring a house down. My Luxray has a voice to end all other singers. He’s something,” another responded. Her Luxray was laid out next to her, enjoying his own lunch. He seemed bashful at the idea of his trainer boasting about him, so he hid his head behind a paw.
Aww, cute.

Odette had to nod in agreement, it wouldn’t be the same.
A comma splice! Would pass in dialogue but in narration it'd be better to use a period or semicolon.

“As sad as I am that you’re leaving,” Acadia spoke solemnly, snapping her out of her thought. “I do think that’s what you need. A change of scenery and a clean slate.”

There were implications to that sentence that made Odette feel both blessed to have a friend so concerned about her mental state, and disgusted that anything even needed to be hinted at in the first place.

Why couldn’t she just be okay?
I like how you're showing Odette's issues a lot, generally. She is not okay and she hates it and that's always something I like in a character.

I also like Odette's relationships with her friends. Acadia just caring, Noel wanting to make the most of their time together before she moves. They just feel like good real friends.

Odette couldn’t help the dubious tilt that took over her lips. The idea of a clean slate was great, she wasn’t denying that. But all of those suggestions made her stomach perform aerials. She thought back to how she’d imagined herself center stage on opening night, and...no. The fear began to gnaw at her again.

“Sounds like a good idea,” she said, making sure her voice didn’t waver. They didn’t need to really know how bad her head was spinning. “I’ll look into it.”
Odette is Fine(tm)

Honestly enjoyed this chapter a lot! You do a lot of good plot and characterization setup right off the bat to make us get Odette and be invested in her as more than just the obligatory main character, the stakes at hand, and the oncoming plot, with an amusing Cats backdrop and some cute Pokémon. It's all breezy and reads well, save some minor typos, punctuation issues, etc.

I'm curious if Odette knows anything at all about Florent and Team Enigma and that's why the sacrilege thing caught her interest - it's pretty ambiguous here, and may well be meant to be. If not, still curious what happened after the prologue - clearly Florent failed to kill her, but there's also no sign of Venira. Will be interesting to see how that all comes into it.
 

bluesidra

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Hello!

And here I thought I had caught up with WSBS, just to find out you don't update your AO3 any more... Time to rectify that mistake on my end.

Chapter 8: Reading is essential

The chapter where Noel and Odette do their armchair detective work to come to some new conclusions, which I assume we will be working under now. Some of them have been kinda obvious to me, like Shinies being especially vulnerable to Sacrilege and stuff. But the thing about the weird-mons already being referenced in an old book and being specifically tied to shinies is very cool. I would never ever have guessed that. My working theory was, that they needed shinies to get these weird-mons, and that the shinies die in the process. But now we learn that shinies "hold" these other forms. Which would mean there is a system behind what mon can spawn what weird-mon and how. Super interesting.

The reasoning here was solid, especially in the first half of Odette sleuthing Clovis and in the part where they pieced the weird-mon from shiny thing together.

Though, there were some issues I had with their chain of reasoning:

1. Odette obsessing over Clovis's figure-skating when she does her research. It's been a while since I read the last chapter, and to me it was very clear that Clovis embellished a sport he did in his teens to impress a professional dancer. Only later, when Odette brought up that he seemed to almost panic when he noticed his slip-up did I believe that it was not just some show to impress her. Maybe that could be brought up earlier?
2. Both Odette and Noel never questioning the intentions of Virtue Corp. Virtue Corp is an organisation run by the rich with tangles to the police and that tries to cover up the shiny involvement. With a suspiciously non-descriptive website and zero public presence. Virtue Corp basically SCREAMS fishy. But Noel and Odette are of the firm opinion that those are the good guys, even though they second guess every other thing and quickly link Enigma to the shiny trade with nothing more than a gut-feeling.
3. Clovis being a shut-in. There is, in hindsight, a huge mismatch between the statement that Clovis is a shut-in and his behaviour at the party. But when Odette did her research, it felt to me like she was assuming a lot about him. Just because someone is a number-cruncher or big in engineering doesn't mean they can't be socially outgoing. Later, when she explained it to Noel, she expressed herself a lot clearer, when she said "the newspapers paint him as this shut-in" (or sth like that). Maybe if she found an article about how people- and press-shy he is or sth during her research, that would have driven her point home better than his work field. Also, the old version with the algorithm worked a bit better, maybe?
4. The jump to Clovis being an undercover agent. They seem to get there purely by part of his backstory not adding up plus the fact that he hates that shiny stuff while simultaneously attending it. A rich guy having his records pulled would in my books ring a few more alarms. I'd assume some sort of sex-scandal was involved, maybe rape-allegations, before daddy bought his son out and put him under house-arrest. Especially given Odette's background, I'd assume that would be on the forefront of her mind. And being at a party you don't want to be at because daddy is big in the business is more probable than being an undercover agent. (That and add to that that I don't buy into Virtue Corp at all)

But yes. Those were some nitpicks I have with this. I don't at all have any issues with the conclusions and the chapter itself. I know full well what they found out and what the new assumptions are going forward.
Most of them were centered around humans and Pokemon working together humanely, to get things done in an orderly and, as they put it, “the old-fashioned green and clean way.” They dedicated their companies to making sure Pokemon were treated fairly and humanely. It was truly a noble cause.

Charles had a large family. Married once to the love of his life, and they had eleven fucking kids.
That sounds waaaaaaaaay too good to be true. There's got to be a huge basket of dirty laundry and at least one skeleton in their closet.
He spoke to who he could, maybe eavesdropped here and there, maybe even asked point blank.
You know, not all engineers are socially awkward nerds. (That's the IT-engineers)
She’d scrounged the internet, trying to find some record of his competitions--score sheets, videos, anything, and came up with nothing. So, was it a lie? Or, maybe it...had just been wiped?
Or, maybe... he tried to impress you and made it up on the spot?
That posed another question, too. If he wanted to hide it so badly, why bring it up at all?

She was starting to think it was a slip-up on his end.
Or, maaaaaybe... he was really trying his best to get into your pants that evening...
So, Dorien really was blowing smoke.
Heh. Dorien totally wished he'd be blowing something else instead.
They were best kept bottled up with the rest of her emotions, because they had no business clouding her head when she was trying so hard to think rationally.
Solid advice. 10/10 please keep up.
Noel held up his hands, almost defensively. “Then again, we could also equally consider the fact that they’re keeping it under wraps because they’re also clueless.”
Then again, we could also equally consider that they're keeping it under wraps BECAUSE THEY ARE INVOLVED!

Hm... deadline drawing to a close...
I'm afraid I have to cut the review in half and snatch the 0.5 points on both weeks...
Am already halfway through Ch9, just you wait!
 
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Crosspost because I said so and because it's more updated here so I may have to come here anyway.
Okay C8 now. And I see you're updating here again so.

- tfw thinking about boys messes your mind up. But it is not like she likes him or anything
- Good thing she never heard about the Duggars. Actually she would have an epic rant about them.
- Lots of talk about Clovis here. Intruige. Mystery. But Odette seems trying to talk herself out of it. Maybe rightfully so?
- Being a Rotom shoved into a machine is suffering
- They all go by their actual names, huh? I assume it was a corporate chat thing
- Missing period as he lowers his voice to ask that
- The forbidden part of the library!!
- Did Noel find the fkn Necronomicon in the library?
- Well I was not expecting this to go in that direction for shinies.
- We got a real mystery on our hands
- FUCK THE ONE PERCENT
- And the mystery of Clovis deepens

The plot continues to thicken as lore gets dumped. I was not expecting this fic to go in this direction at all though, lol. But I can dig it, so until I get the mojo for the next chapter. Which I kinda did then distractions hit.
 

bluesidra

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Hello, here I am again, back to finally and actually catch up.

For your info: Don't obsess over anything I point out. I'm really into mystery stuff, and if you give me one, I will try to dissect it. Your story is perfectly fine, I'm just going along with the characters and riddling too. And sharing my thoughts so you can maybe benefit from them, too. But don't be discouraged, please!

Chapter 9: Are you actually in control?

What a behemoth of a chapter. So, the gang is at an auction, Dorien is creepy, Odette and Enora interact, Clovis is creepy (kinda), Noel and Odette catch up, a gyarados and a weird-mon duke it out, Odette becomes... something else, and then the scene ends to Odette fainting into the arms of her various knights in shining armor :D

So, Dorien in this is a curious one. In the beginning, he's perfectly assholerish. His responses are almost engineered to be the worst thing possible. At one point, I kinda expected Odie to go "gotta get some dating advice from Noel, because as soon as I hang on Clovis's arm, I can ditch this idiot." But in the end, when he was so frantic about what Odette did to Draculamon, I really kinda 'liked' him. Like, damn, desperation suits him.

The reveal that Odette is sharing her body with something else is quite good, I think... Because, well, I knew that whole "vessel" thing from discord already, so I don't know how big of a "WHAAAAAT?" moment that is for uninitiated readers. But seeing how I almost dropped whatever I was holding when her mother's name was mentioned 5 chapters after the intro, I think it's quite a big one.
Though. When Dorien got uncomfy close to her after she woke up again and her fight-or-flight kicked in, I'm surprised her anger didn't reignite again. Same when she was confronted with Draculamon. She was actually afraid (which is a completely normal and logical thing to be), but I figured from the way her temper has been built up so far, that she gets complete tunnelvision in these instances. Like, she doesn't even think about her own safety if she gets to kick this thing's ass because she is so angry.

There are multiple occasions in this chapter where Odette's relationship to her pokemon is discussed. And it kinda rubbed me as a little off? I might have been exposed to kint for too long and stuff like that. Normally, I glance over the pokemon-human power-dynamic perfectly fine. I'm firmly in the "they are pets" corner when it comes to the agency of pokemon themselves.
But here, I have a feeling the narrative is kinda biased towards Odette? Hm... it's hard to pin down... There's this one part, where any and all resistance the pokemon have gets "handwaved" away saying "Oh, they are so worried about me", making the entire discomfort of the team about Odette herself.
Then the fact that Odette and Enora had that "see, I was right to bring you here" talk in the first place. Later, Clovis mentions that Odette sees them as equals, but I really doubt that you would drag your friend to a party they do Not want to attend, to tell them there that you were right all along.
From what I gathered so far, pokemon in this universe and especially the relationship Odette has with hers is more akin to a parent-child relationship. Pokemon are definitely smarter than pets, but they are still very much dependent on their human for shelter etc. Which is deffo not a bad take, at all. But it makes the narration a bit too "Odette is the perfect trainer" like when Clovis praises her for how she handles them, and especially that she treats them as equals.
Again, I'm totally not the right person to talk about that. If you want to dive deeper into this issue, I suggest handing this chapter to either kint or persephone. They have very based takes on these issues.
But. I have no clue how you replace pokemon in the original version, but I please PLEASE make them children with disabilities. Like, down-syndrome or something like that. Because that is SO fucked up. Also, the implication that you can trade disabled kids around and nobody really bats an eye because they are difficult to care for and broader society would rather ignore them is fucking harsh!

Also, re Enora. The pokedex has this line: "It sends a soothing aura from its ribbonlike feelers to calm fights." Wouldn't that make Enora the perfect anti-anger-issue machine? She should have been able to calm Odette down on many occasions, especially when she was down and out after the confrontation. Or do something against Dorien other than hiss at him.
Totally not a thing you need to incorporate. I was just thinking about pokemon a little too hard in this chapter and happened to remember that cool ability of Sylveons.

But ye, now, after I complained about a lot of things, I'll come out of left field saying that I really enjoyed this chapter! A lot of strings came together, the main cast was in one place and a big reveal also took place. Not to mention Noel being a champ all the way through. He is simply the best guy around! I love how selflessly he cares for Odette and how unobtrusively he handles Dorien. Also, big kudos on for the "We marry for the tax benefits before he gets you" line, which had me screeching. I'll definitely write that down to reuse at a later stage. And the "are we alright?" line just broke me. Because damn man, that's how you deescalate and I would not had the spoons in that moment!
His words worked like Hydro Pump on a poor use of Will-O-Wisp.
The mention of two moves feels kinda out of place here? A bit forced imo, but by no means a dealbreaker
. “Sylv…” she muttered. "Veee, eeeon. Vee."
There is a rogue ". " at the beginning of the line
...what the fuck is happ--
"what the happ is fuckening" is the right term here :D
He held his Vullaby in a baby harness, strapped to his stomach. The bird was in the middle of downing what looked to be a cupcake.
O H G O D. I think a guy with a baby harness triggers every primal instinct in a woman. After that show, there is no woman in Paris that will be able to resist him.
Behind them, some cheers rang out. Odette and Enora turned around to see two people, a man and a woman, shaking hands. At the woman's feet were a shiny Plusle and Minun, both holding onto each other. Those two didn't look sad, though. They looked scared.

The man gestured to them, and the Minun shook its head. The woman spoke, and that time, they both shook their heads. The man rolled his eyes, and the woman handed him a Pokeball. He called the Minun back into the ball, pocketed it as he waved to the woman, then turned and walked off like he'd just bought a jug of milk. The Plusle began to hobble after the man, before it was also called back to its ball by the woman.

Odette wasn't a crier, but fuck...that sobered her up from her anger haze really fast.
That is indeed heartbreaking.
He looked over toward a man who happened to be walking by, and smiled. “No worries, she just cut her lip a little bit,” he assured. The guy seemed to accept that explanation, because he walked off.
Ahm, Sir? SIR???!
Her thoughts and the ringing were abruptly interrupted by her own voice.

B̴̨̭̓̋̃Ī̸̱̮̙̝̘͂̚͜Ţ̸̮̱̽̊C̴͖̭̙̱̓̏͠H̸̠̑͝,̷̤͍̈͊̒̓̏͝ ̶͖̭̝̺̖̒̅̐͜Į̸̖̣͍̞̩̓͗̓̅͠ ̸̦̬͂H̸͕̙̓͑̓̉̒͝Ö̵̧̩́͝P̵̤̎̓͆̆È̴̡̲̻̰̼ ̷̰͍̠͔̝̻̏̃̓͐͑̚T̵̟͚̞͌̽͌Ḩ̸͔̭̗̺̂̽̒̓͝E̵̛̹͂ ̷͕̣̥̀͒̏͝ͅF̶̥̳͕̆͊̿̑͛̌Ų̷̤̭̏̊̉̚͜͝Ç̶̼̦̱͈͈̆̋̋K̸͔̺͚̦͚̯̋̆͗̇ ̶͔̬̮͓̊̏̊͛̉Y̷̩͚͛̊̎͒͝Ò̴̱ͅƯ̴̠̐́̽̉ ̸̬̬̻̼͈̉͂D̷̯͍͍̜͇̐̍͑̆͜͠O̷̗̒̈́̈́!̷̪̯͒͛́ ̶̧͇̭͖͌͐̅B̷̢̧̺̣̟̓͂̋̈̋͘I̸̞͍͍̔T̵͚̖̅E̴̢͉͕̭̯͌̉͝ ̵̦͓͚̬̉͂͜M̸̢̛̭̮̲̟͒̿̂Y̷͕͎͘͜ ̶̡͎͔̖̝̪͗͌̌̒̋V̴̧̘̩̙̑͛̊͛͝Ĕ̵̲̝̩̫̮̈̂̓̾̊S̵̮̜̉̒͒̈́̓̀͜͜Ṡ̷͎̥͕Ę̶̀̈́̈́͋̾L̷̜͈͇̩̗̱͋̌̅̋̚,̴̨̠̦͛̄̑̽͐͜ ̷̦͚̩̪̙͐͊̎S̷̡͕͕̟̋̆Ȩ̴͕̪͙́̾̕E̶̞͚̙̓͛͛̚ͅ ̸̘͇́̇̈́̍̐̀W̶͖̏́̒͋̍Ḣ̴̡̘̭̓͆́̏̚ͅA̷̪̝͋T̷̡̲̤͎͌́ ̷̢̪̗̏͊̓͒ͅͅF̸̺̜̋̒U̵̡̧̘̟͋̈́̓͊̾͘C̵̡̗̰̘̫͛͜K̸̦̉̆͘I̸̘͈͋N̷̬̲̬̅̍̋̃͑͝G̴͈̙̤̲̊̃͘ ̴̢̝͔̘͉̣̑̑͝H̵̪̙͙͓͖̍͋̓͗̃A̵͓̬͔͕͌͐̌P̶̺͂͌͐̓̊̕P̷̧̻̎̽͛͊̍Ę̶̥̦̲̠̦̀N̵̻̖̮͌̂̊͘̚S̷̝͖̖͋̿!̴̛̩͍
Lololol My TTS had no issues reading this line and I originally wanted to comment how fucking badass laconic that demon thing is. But, well, with that font, I'm definitely not able to read that. I think I wouldn't even have tried deciphering it, just writing it off as "you are not supposed to understand that" and thereby missing out on a banger line.
"Don't lie to me. I saw what you did," he said. "I won't tell anybody. You just need to talk to me about it."
You know what would be the coolest of the cool things? If Dorien was a deadly sin too, and desperately tried to get control over it. I will not adopt this headcanon and obsess over Dorien being secretly tormented and will definitely not build a "I can fix him" narrative around him :D

Chapter 10: She's unabashedly nosey... and sick

There's a saying in german that I recently learned has no equivalent in english that is basically the essence of this chapter. A rough translation would be "The eavesdropper on the other side of the wall hears their own shame." It even rhymes!

But yeah. What a twimst! Clovis and Grandpa were in cahoots the whole time! Not only that, Clovis seems to be adopted by grandpa, which would make him Odette's step-brother. And I've seen enough anime to know where this is going.
Hearing Clovis talk openly and without his smug mask was really heartwarming. He really seems to trust Bernard quite a lot. And of course Bernard had to snoop and sleuth around what Odette was doing.
And bonus points for Bernard categorically forbidding any and all possible interest in his granddaughter.
Though, I didn't quite get why Odette was so ashamed of her blood pressure being discussed. She acts like it's an STD and could possibly end her entire life, when, at least to me, it just seems like a minor inconvenience that's pretty controllable.

In retrospect a pretty wholesome chapter, all things considered. Even if I felt kinda like Odette going "WHAAAATTTTT?"
Needless to say, Loic is the best. He has a resting copyka-expression. Here's an image for his wanted poster, should he escape next time:
1642433439797.png
Skrtskrtskrtskrtskrtskrtskrt.
The sound of Menace
Don't answer that, grandpa, she begged internally. Please, please, please do not answer that. You've done enough; just spare me.
Just wait till he pulls out the embarrassing baby pictures of her in a sparkling pink overall puking all over the dinner table

So that makes me officially up to date on WSBS! Please don't be discouraged, because you absolutely NEED to update soon! Lovely story, intriguing mystery. Straight into veins, pls!
 

Dragonfree

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Chapter 2

Odette had never felt the urge to trade her motorcycle in for a flying-type pokemon. Noel, when he wasn’t going on and on about how his Braviary didn’t listen to him, always claimed flying was a truly exhilarating experience, but for Odette, nothing trumped a motorcycle. She was in full control, weaving in and out of traffic and between buildings at mach speed; she decided where to go, and how fast she went. Flyers didn’t know what they were missing.
I enjoy this opening. It's characterization, but it's strong worldbuilding too: the idea that trading in a motorcycle for a Flying-type is even a thing for Odette to have never had the urge to do says a lot about the ubiquity of people traveling via Flying-type Pokémon.

Odette tightened her grip on the handlebars as a breeze stirred her bangs, cool against her uncovered head. She’d have to be extra careful tonight, what with the roads still being soaked from the downpour. The last thing she needed was to have Acadia screaming “I told you so!” at her hospital bedside.

Or worse, over her grave.
The fact she thinks of this not in terms of "I don't want to get injured" but "I don't want to have Acadia judge me" also says a lot, doesn't it. Acadia's worried about her for a reason.

She quickly reached up a hand and rubbed at it, as she switched into the middle lane of the road.
No comma before 'as'. There are more of these, not going to comment on every single one because that'd get pretty tedious.

Watch the van, they’re lane hopping...that hatchback’s driving under the speed limit, driver looks like they’re texting, steer clear…why is this stupid sedan on my ass? And there’s the stoplight. Shit, it’s turning. Not going to even try to run it with Noel on here.
I had a little double-take at hearing Noel was on there with her - I'd been picturing her alone on the bike, especially since in the opening sentences her love of the motorcycle was explicitly being contrasted against how Noel prefers flying, with no mention that this time he'd acquiesced to riding with her.

Odette felt an all-too-familiar tingling sensation start to form in the small of her back. Her lips curled back over her teeth. The corners of her vision began to go red.

“Those fucking lowlives,” she spat. She violently revved her bike. “I’m gonna--”
W r a t h l e g e n d a r y :quag:

“Hey!” Noel snapped. He smacked her lightly on the crown of her head. “Simmer down, Hothead!”

Odette whipped around in her seat, one fist raised. She couldn’t hear anything above the rush of blood in her head.

“Do you want my goddamn fist down your throat?” she shouted.

Noel flinched back. His hands came up defensively in front of his face. “I want you to drive before the guys behind us shove their fists down both our throats!” he yelled back.

She stared. The red began to clear, as the aggravated honks behind her began to register. She lowered her fist, turned around, and propelled the bike forward. Her heart was pounding as fast as her mind was moving.

“God,” Noel breathed when they were well away from the intersection. “Leave it to you to go psycho over some stupid racers. Keep it together, Dee.”
Harsh words, but not unwarranted. Noel first reacts in a sort of playful, casual way, but then Odette escalates to physically threatening him for it, and at that point I'm not surprised he's harsher.

Still, it's clear from this interaction that this is not the first time this has happened. He calls her Hothead as a casual nickname he's obviously called her before, Leave it to you to go psycho over some stupid racers. Odette having bouts of unnatural rage is just a Thing, presumably because wrath legendary, and he's well used to having to snap her out of it, even if threatening him over it isn't usual.

I think having added the bit to the prologue setting up Florent experiencing these out-of-control rash emotions too is good for this - makes it just immediately rhyme that it's happening to Odette too.

So, she began to recite the Purrloins! script instead, starting with the opening song.

“Are you blind when you’re born, can you see in the dark, can you look at a king, would you sit on his throne…” she sang to herself. She focused on remembering how the orchestra sounded when they played along with the singers in rehearsal. The harmonies, the rests, the subtle grooves, the way they were never quite together on the sudden rests, no matter how much the conductor scolded them.

She kept on driving toward her building. The more she focused on picturing the stage as she sang the lyrics, the less she focused on the idea of hunting the drivers down, and making them pay for their bullshit.
Top-notch use of the lyrics of Cats

I did kind of want the second paragraph there to be a little more visceral, more show and less tell - you've been describing the physical effects this anger has on her really nicely, but then don't describe those effects receding, just that "the less she focused on the idea of hunting the drivers down". Feel like it'd be more evocative to say as she pictured the stage the tingle in her back began to fade into a dull throb, the awful tension in her lungs loosened a little, etc.

Also, since you did just describe how she feels like she's not getting enough air, it occurs to me that going straight from that to singing long continuous sentences feels somewhat out of line with that. I know I'm picking the smallest of nits here but I'm doing it because I like this scene.

His grin didn’t falter, despite the intensity of her glare. All she wanted to do now was get up to her apartment and stretch all the anger out of her system with her Pokemon team, provided nobody was up to anything foolish. But no, Noel had to be a good friend and make sure she calmed down before any of that happened. The babying lunatic.
<3

Honestly I went into this story expecting all this big poly romance but instead I'm just veeloving at Odette's friends. I'm sure the big poly romance is coming too and all but look at her knowing he's doing this because he's a good friend who cares about her even while feeling frustrated by it.

“Jellicles do, and jellicles can,” she sang, her voice echoing through the brightly lit garage.

Somehow, Noel's smile widened even further. “Jellicle purrloins sing jellicle chants,” he belted.

As they continued through the verse, Noel dropped his things and began to do his own choreography for the song, as if he were back on the stage at the center. Although she tried to keep herself from doing so, she was soon smiling at the ridiculousness of it. But, the subdued performer part of her was aching to dance along with him. She’d spent enough time on the stage’s wings, watching the dancers run through their steps again and again and again, that she felt as if she knew the choreography as well as she knew the timings of the scene changes.

As Noel danced, she began to move along with him. Not with the same pep, but with just enough gusto to show she had an idea of what she was doing. A couple of steps in, and the tingle in her back faded almost entirely, leaving behind a bout of exhaustion.
Friends!! Look at them! Honestly top-tier cute, I friendship it.

She stopped what she was doing, arching over and placing her hands on her knees. Her vision began to cloud with sleepiness, and her insides felt like they’d melted into jelly. It suddenly pained her to be standing upright.

God, I hate this part, she thought regretfully.

Nonetheless, she made herself breathe through it. She began to smack her lips together, now longing for a big sip of water. That usually ended the dizzy spell.
So this happens every time, huh? I like how much you make her 'legendary power' just kind of suck for her.

“Maybe if you diverted more energy into smiling, you wouldn’t always get so winded every time you got pissed off,” Noel teased.
I know this is just banter but I'm having trouble following the internal logic of it - if she hypothetically "diverted more energy" into smiling, surely she'd have less energy left and be even more winded after getting pissed off?

She pursed her lips as she wrestled the half -empty bottle back into her bag.
Weird space before the hyphen there.

“It just pisses me off,” she finished flatly. She paused. "And that's not funny."

Noel sucked his teeth again, then placed his free hand back on her head. “Sorry, sorry, my bad," he apologized. "But gods, you have so much rage in that tiny body. You must hide it all in your hair.”
Like him apologizing when she's genuinely annoyed with him, but also lightening it up with another joke. (Though do you really need "he apologized" as a speech tag to tell us he's apologizing when the dialogue itself is literally just three separate apologies?)

The elevator soon stopped, and opened into the complex’s main floor.
You don't need the comma here, since "opened into the complex's main floor" isn't a full independent sentence of its own.

She hadn’t gotten anything from her former university for a while. She’d thought for sure they’d removed her from the mailing list. Her, her mother, her grandfather, and their lawyer had told the school’s higher ups where to shove it, and she figured that was that.
Think you want "higher-ups", and "she'd figured", since she figured that in the past, prior to the past in which the story takes place - she doesn't figure it anymore, presumably, since they just sent her something more.

He forced himself on you, and you killed him for it…

You killed him.
Oh, shit. Wasn't expecting that, but after all the setup about her bouts of uncontrolled rage this chapter I think the reader instantly comprehends how that happened, which I think is a good structural choice - revealing this last chapter would've had an entirely different effect. Wonder if it's something that was handled as justified self-defense or if she got away with it and is living with that.

Enjoy the sheer chaos of the final scene. Having a team of Pokémon in this universe, apparently, is kind of like having several unruly children who don't like being each other's babysitters. Where has her mother been in all this, if she lives with her?

Her bedroom was a bit messier than she normally tolerated. The contents of her closet spilled out all over the floor, reaching as far as her desk chair and bed. Most of the drawers on her dresser stood open, also threatening to dump its contents. With the preparations to move underway, she had a lot of organizing she needed to do. What could be packed away until the March move, and what she needed to keep out until then. A pile of flattened boxes were leaned up against her wire bed frame, ready for use. There was only one box in the room that had been packed and taped, but she’d had that box together for nearly a year--long before this move to Alola was even finalized.

Her eyes instinctively traveled to her wall of empty shelves, catching on the amount of dust that had started to accumulate on them. Despite the fact she’d shoved every last one of her trophies and photos from her performance days into that one box, she still found herself glancing at the shelves every time she entered her room. They used to fill her with joy and a sense of accomplishment and worth. But now, they just existed, hoping to maybe one day hold something else that filled her with those same feelings.
Oooof.

It's a nice detail that as much as she's annoyed with her Pokémon for the lack of packing that's gotten done, she hasn't even started packing her stuff. Clearly something she's just kind of dragging her feet on, and possibly she just isn't great on the executive functioning these days.

All in all, fic's still doing some fairly quiet setup, but I think you did a good job of introducing her anger issues and making it obvious they're not quite natural, and then introducing that delicious little tidbit of intrigue that she killed the man who assaulted her. Mostly, though, I really enjoyed Odette and Noel and their interactions and what we can glean from them. She can get vicious with these little rages, and he's obviously used to dealing with it and helping her deal with it, even while knowing when she's truly out of line. Him coaxing her into recovering from it with this silly little performance in the parking garage, in this semi-private space with a friend she trusts where she can actually feel safe indulging in her passion in the smallest of ways again even after it became such a massive trauma trigger for her that she even packed up all the awards in her room, was just beautiful. I love them and I am invested.
 

CinderArts

Bug Catcher
Location
Sandgem Town
Pronouns
He!
Partners
  1. cinderace
Okay! Now I know this is an overdue catnip review, but alas! You know what they say, better to be late than never, right? Without further ado!

While reading the prologue, I had to look up the names and whatnot because I have never played Pokemon X/Y before and realising a bit too late that they're all original characters! On top of that, search results for Team Enigma led me to PokeFanon, something about a fan game where the main villain team is of the same name!

As for the story, I love the premise of it! The menacing nature of Florent and his Gullavite certainly gives me feelings of fear and suspense, the way he treats his men, as well as his son is fitting for a man with lust for power. The description of Gullavite is terrifying as well! From what I can understand though, this story takes place in the 90's up to modern times? I've read Chapter 1 for a short brief before resting my sleepy head :quag:

The mystery about him and his heirs though, as well as his son gives me the impression that they're people from the past who are basically immortal! Or maybe, they're people who lives on in new bodies? And I have the impression that some of the original pokemon like Gullavite represents the six deadly sins, which adds more mystery and suspense to the story! So far, I'm excited and I'm definitely looking forward with what comes next in the next chapters, as I will read them soon!

For the prose in general, I love it! It's certainly something that could make a novice fanfic writer would take inspiration from! Overall, it feels and looks like it's certainly refined! The choice of words that you use for your story fits the overall mood!

With that said, I hope my review would help you a lot! I will certainly leave more reviews as I keep reading the next chapters! Keep it up!
 
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