Pokémon Fractional: The Rules of the Game

[K_S]

Fractional: The Rules of the Game


AN: A Lillie/Gio fanfic, set in “Transversal”, basically I’m popping some notes out of point/list format and threading them into a story and am trying for a new format as well.

Summary:

Spoiler: Summary

He was Alola's only Kantoian trainer, and insane as it seemed he couldn't catch, couldn't trade, and was bound to a six 'mon limit even when kids as young as eight were tossing 'mon in and out of the system without a worry in the world.

She'd asked why and he'd told her his truth.

The LEGENDS wouldn't let him.

And it'd seemed insane, but she was used to Sakaki being a little insane. Considering she was on a quest that seemed crazy Lillie decided to be the bigger person and rolled with it.

When he decided to show her why things weren't working, she rather wished he wouldn't. But unseeing wasn't an option, she'd seen reality roil and refold itself to inconvenience him, and had he pushed, Lillie was honestly scared it might very well rise up to kill him.

Luckily he was content to stop, once sure she believed him, and he had admitted that "that was enough for now"

Enough of what? Enough to show her the first rule of the game.

Don't break the rules.

And he'd proved himself crazier than her, promising he was going to do it again, the right way at the perfect time to bring the whole game tumbling down.

Whether she tagged along or not, or fell into the disasters he'd trigger, that was for her to decide.

Introduction: Pokecenter (redacted) is having technical difficulties, please stand by...


“I want to show you something.”


So said the most unlikely trainer in the Alola region.


Of course, it wasn’t anything pretty, or near. No glorious sunrise, or pretty public statue, such showings would have been too tame for Alola’s sole Kantoian trainer. No, when he wanted to show her something, it was announced over dinner at the town’s pokecenter, and there was no moving to his bout of show and tell, at all.


He also didn’t dig out his phone to show her… whatever. Unlike every other teen in Alola, Sakaki didn’t have a phone with a camera. He’d murdered… well exorcised…. the ghost from his machine, broke the frame and sold the parts for money ages ago. The calculated destruction of the tech had been a step up from his rant of shoving the thing into a blender, and letting it get purrayed, but regardless of how it was gone his Professor gifted tech was a thing of the past.


So he wasn’t going to show her something normal like a GIF or PNG or meme.


And he wasn’t going to be prompt about it.


Giovanni Sakaki didn’t elaborate on his show and tell to be, he just went back to his meal, and she, after a moment, realized that he wasn’t going to, did the same. Experience had taught her that pushing, or nagging, would get her nothing, so she didn’t.


And that wasn’t the weirdest thing about him, him making her wait.


Sakaki was just weird, coming and going.


He wasn’t odd because he was old (at least he wasn’t outwardly old, he acted and talked ancient on his off days, but he looked fifteen no matter what he did to his clothes and hair to look more mature) and it wasn’t just that he was an off islander. She was too. Despite living in Alola most of her life, she was as much an outsider as he was and she wasn’t a fifth as weird as he was.


No, his strangeness went deeper than not being from here. It ran deeper than his dogged insistence that he never accumulated to Island life.


If asked, Lillie would say that Sakaki’s strangeness was rooted in how he treated people. He never showed interest in anyone. People weren’t a means to an end, a philosophy she was quite used to considering her own mother, and part of this journey was not living like that. To be better than Mother, as childish as that sounded.


No, Sakaki’s feelings went much farther than Machiavelli’s, or even her Mother’s work.


Or perhaps it was best to say, they ran shallower.


People, to the Kantoian trainer, were less than scenery. Humans, trainers, and ‘mon, were meant to be plowed through. They were less than living. At the core of Sakaki’s strangeness was that he acted as if the world was a stage… and he had no interest in the play on production. He was trying to storm off the set, but couldn’t find the exit, and kept getting dragged from scene to scene, very much against his will.


There were furrows that marked his path from town to town, and a trail of destruction from both the trainer and his ‘mon when anyone tried to get him to do anything.


And, while Sakaki’s actions and views were horrifying, and alluded to a mental sickness that Lillie couldn’t even begin to understand, the tamer horror of it all was that Lillie, traveling with the dark haired trainer, was starting to wonder if he wasn’t right.


Suffice to say, she wasn’t sleeping well at night and hadn’t been since the very start.


It’d taken her weeks to convince him that she was as real as he was. And when he finally stopped acting like she was a figment of his imagination, he’d opened up. Tolerated her “journeying” with him, saying “her reasons were her own” and being patiently apathetic towards her motives.


As long as she kept up it was fine, and if she chipped in towards living expenses and gave him information, all the better.


It’d taken time but eventually, he’d staggered from indifference to a thin veneer of compassion, capped off in full the first time she’d gotten sick. And he’d stayed by her side, nursing her to health with the bitter patience of a man having done this many times before.


And so their co-“journey” went. And his strangeness grew and grew.


He had six pokeballs on his belt and was allowed only six ‘mon by a power Lillie Aether didn’t understand. She’d pooh-poohed it when he explained it when she hadn’t believed, and with a shrug, he had agreed.


“I know I sound like a lunatic” and that’d been that.


There were resources for catching and training ‘mon, easy-peasy things she could use if she had things to catch. The technology was meant to be universal, and thus usable by those younger than ten…


And all catching and storage tech crashed in masse, the second Sakaki breathed near a keyboard or touchscreen.


At first, it was understandable. The mainframe was down for repairs, someone had dropped water on the machine and the Center was waiting for a replacement…. And the first few times, it’d made sense, but come center five… and Lillie was having her doubts.


Then come pokecenter number six, 'center six changed the tenor of all of those earlier “inconveniences” and “misunderstandings” casting each “accident” into a whole new, horrifying light.


They’d had dinner, show and tell forgotten almost as soon as it was brought up, they’d been at the town’s center since right before sunset and the view outside was wild and a breath surreal. She ate across from him; her with her chopsticks, him with his dogged insistent of using more civilized utensils of a fork and spoon. Their meal was as tasteless as was the ‘Center’s norm, and was only made edible with stolen seasonings, those they’d set between them, taking what they wanted from the pile. Both noted what was low and planned to hit up a nearby restaurant to stock up before running their errands after breakfast.


As for how they ate, it was an old argument they’d worn down over the weeks they traveled together.


Once he was sure she was real.


It had started with impassioned speeches about cultural differences. Or rather, he’d bragged about how superior Kanto was, and taunted her until she’d stuttered denials. The shock had faded in repetition, his abrasiveness in those moments had rubbed her shyness raw, and she’d startled both of them the first time she’d met fire with fire.


That’d taken weeks, and he’d liked her more… slightly more… confrontational side. Teasing and tweaking her until they’d run the subject down. Sure she felt reasonably comfortable talking to him after that he dared to broach other topics. Sometimes leading the conversation, and, now knowing what to look for, Lillie recognized when he wanted her to lead instead.


Utensils were now a closed topic, except when they had ramen. Then, to spite her quiet self, Lillie’d scraped up enough familiarity to tease him. Poking and prodding him with a pair of ‘sticks until he snapped, taking the utensils and chucking them at the first opportunity. He’d come back from throwing out the most recent pair, the hunch of his shoulders as he settled and the not-so-subtle tip to his posture (away from her, towards something behind) told Lillie today was a “neither of them talk day”.


Which was fine by her.


They’d walked a lot. She’d done a ton of research at the local library and found nothing useful, and from his grumbles when they got their dinner she knew that the Island’s Trail Captain had proven elusive yet again.


Sometimes when things were bad it was best not to talk, so Lille was content to not bring anything up at all. Swirling in another packet of soy sauce, Lillie consoled herself that tomorrow was another day.


“What time is it?”


A glance at her wrist watch, a sporty sleek thing “commandeered” from some sports shop two towns back, lit at her tap. A pretty sky blue bracketed by a sleek green frame. She read the numbers off after she finished her bite, having been raised better than to talk with her mouth full.


“So it’s been two hours?”


Having not paid attention when they came in Lillie shrugged, and left him to the complicated things, like math.


“You’re infuriating sometimes, did you at least notice if the brain-dead trainer attached to the Center’s computer has actually moved since we got in here?”


Having been interested in finding a seat to enjoy the pretty view of out. No, Lillie had not noticed much of anything. Hadn’t cared. Not that she was going to confess that.


So Lilie stood, pushing her meal aside to get up. Though it took getting on her tiptoes, she managed to get a peek at the line. The boy and his awful blue and green striped shirt might not have been there when they came in, but she’d noticed the ugly shirt at the front of the line when she last went to the bathroom… and that’d been ages ago. He hadn’t moved a hair since he’d gotten to the front.


And it’d been long enough that the kid’s beady-eyed wingul was napping on his shoulder, and what the younger trainer was doing was weird. She had to hop a little, but even from here she could see the screen was flicking back and forth… between two screens… and doing nothing else besides flipping between those two screens.


And the people behind the wingul trainer weren’t doing anything about it, just staring blankly at the air in front of them, like breathing, unblnking, manikins.


Sitting with a heavy thump, Lillie nodded. And it was a wonder that Sakaki could see it, as he’d slumped into the table in some mute motion of utter misery as she described… everything.


“You think he’s broke... like the professor?”


Poor Kukui who’s very personality had devolved, from a vibrant borderline madman of enthusiasm to… a posturing sham that said inspirational lines, trained new hatched rockruff, and did nothing else.


“Let’s find out.”


With that Sakaki stood, marched to the desk, and shoved the kid out of the way. Tucking the portable computer close he hauled the clunky grey laptop and its pokeball transporter attachment to their table. Lillie wasn’t quite done eating, but on returning Sakaki shoveled everything off the edge, abusing the world’s perchance for ignoring him and ruining her last nibble of dinner.


Lillie furrowed her brows and glared at him. It wasn’t much but he’d known she was mad, even without her saying a word.


“They’ll pick it up, it’s why they have help.”


Not the point, so she told him because he was stupid like that sometimes and didn’t get simple things, like not being mean, or how to make reparations.


“You owe me dessert.”


Sometimes you had to give the dark-haired trainer a firm hint.


“I spared you an oversaturation of sal-“


“Dessert.”


Sakaki sighed, and nodded. Point received if not understood, he’d do as she said if only to make her get off his case.


“Was he almost done?” Lillie wondered, not quite protesting, but not quite going along with him, because doing that would have been wrong.


Sakaki’s black eyes flicked at her, considered her and her moralizing, and with a huff, he unwound the bound cord that he’d looped around the tech, and hunted up a power socket to plug the thing in.


“Don’t know, don’t care.”


And considering the kid was still standing at the front of the line, wingul napping, staring blankly at nothing, fingers flicking over a screen that wasn’t there, Lillie decided that for her sanities sake she probably shouldn’t look at the desk, line, or anyone else for the rest of the night.


Flicking the purloined tech open, she watched it light up when Sakaki plugged it in. And, curiously, instead of the familiar, sweet, chime, it made a low clunk as it came to life. He came up, the plug in a table leg of all the silly things, to see her brushing off crumbs from its audio ports.


Sakaki cracked a near benign smirk at her housekeeping and set his personal, folding phone from the dark ages besides the laptop.


Settling back in his chair, Sakaki turned the device so it was between the two of them, so clearly this was going to be the “thing she had to see”. And knowing him it wasn’t going to be something as benign as a skitty video. Still, she settled in and waited while he twiddled the wire one last time, then, with a melodramatic crick of his knuckles, set his hands to the keyboard to type.


That’s when reality decided to “nope” out of the pokecenter.


The keypad turned intangible under Sakaki’s hands. Shifting from solid to mist in a blink, it stayed in its familiar frame, even in the same shape, but the whole of it, from keys to base to wires, had somehow slipped from the third dimension to second with no one the wiser.


And no one noticed, the keyboard, her shriek, or Sakaki’s fingers getting cut off by the solid seeming metal…


That wasn’t… solid?


She’d recoiled from the table as if burnt. Knocking her chair back even. And again, no one noticed.


Except Sakaki. He looked up from fighting with the impossibility that was the pokecenter tech, fingertips grey tinted and sinking into solid electronics, acting for all the world as if she were overreacting.


One moment passed, became two, then seeing she wasn’t coming back, he rolled his eyes, then called her over.


The little pat on the table was a mite… insulting.. and she glared at him, dropping the hand over her chest to better glower at him.


His smirk and follow-up pat pat of the table’s edge left Lillie with the overwhelming urge to bite him, or maybe talk Beedrill into biting him, and she hadn’t bit anyone since she was three years old.


Lillie returned to her seat, shaking a little, and Sakaki, insufferable trainer he was, was underreacting because he could.


There were words for that type of… ung… Lillie didn’t have the words, just irritation, and a very firm glare… That he ignored, though he was merciful and lifted his fingers out of the metal mist with a wince.


“This isn’t new, just a recent reoccurrence.”


It was a lame assurance, but she settled into the chair beside him, trying to steal herself.


Because if he wasn’t screaming, or freaking out, well she wouldn’t either.


Which was a lie because just couldn’t stop shaking. But at least she didn’t shake out of the chair, or run off, or scream again.


“You try.”


Lillie’s resolve to not scream was tested by the idea of touching that computer abomination. She opened her mouth, to say “wah- No!” but she was a horrible horrible sap for any request to help. Even one delivered so tersely by a man whose spirit ‘mon was something prickly, and poisonous and… And perhaps seeing the refusal from the pallor of her face, the shake to her frame, Sakaki added a please and Lillie groaned.


Because she was a sucker, and he had her pegged since day one.


Folding to her nature, seriously scan her with some trainer’s pokedex she had a nature, and that nature was Gullible, she wrapped her hand in a napkin and gripped the computer on the upper corner. Dragging the tech towards her by the screen.


It didn’t sink into the table, or turn off, or snarl, or do anything odd. Rather it scraped along as if there was nothing wrong, and though cringing with every inch she drew it closer, she wheeled it to herself and borrowing one of his forks, poked the keyboard.


It clicked.


It was a normal click, even.


And she was getting weird looks from the people around her for poking tech with a fork but she ignored that. She was learning when to ignore people when traveling with Sakaki, and this moment fell under the “ignore” category. She poked again, harder, and the Nurse behind the pokecenter’s counter barked.


“You break it you buy it!”


And since they couldn’t see, hadn’t seen, Sakaki’s fingers sinking into metal and plastic like it wasn’t there, Lillie couldn’t really explain why she was being so… weird… right then. So she didn’t.


She just unfurled her pinky finger from her off-hand and decided to sacrifice the very tippity tip to science.


In short, she did the wussiest poke ever, and the thing clicked and was solid.


If unresponsive.


She slid it back to Sakaki. Science done, for a lifetime, thanks. And she wanted to wash her hands, so bad. But doing so meant leaving, and it was like one of those horror movies where you couldn’t look away or get up even though you had to go.


Sakaki spun the device about from the top, mirroring her grip…


Or at least he meant to.


Watching glass fracture and flow away like water, losing substance and reforming as lines… that never got less creepy. There was one second before you had to blink, where you could see the electronics peal back into non-existence and the electricity snapping between the pieces turned to a hissing mist to devolve into smears to color…


She flinched into her chair after one loud crackle, while Sakkai, reached up to slam the thing closed.


And he couldn’t.


His hand passed through it, and with a frustrated gesture, asked… well ordered… her to do close the horror show of a computer.


Mainly to keep the creepy thing from happening again, Lillie obeyed.


She used the fork, because she was not touching this computer, or any computer, for anything, ever again.


“This happened before?” Because pretending like this wasn’t happening was what everyone else was doing, and Lillie’d come to accept she wasn’t like everyone else..


“It’s like sticking your hands in a ghastly.” He rasped, flexing his fingers. “Cold and burning without fire and you can feel it sloshing about you, there’s a sense of where it’s form and frame are, but there’s nothing really there…”


Then, insanely he slammed his hands through it. Not in the breaking it into pieces sort of slam, though if the laptop had been real and he’d really connected there’d of been a big dent…


His palm slammed the table; she could hear the palm slap down against the faux wood. His fingers scraped as he felt for wires, connectors, and chips. The tech sloshed in its dimensions like… like a jiggling plate of jelly, roiling between existing and not, recoiling and encasing the trainers’ calloused hands, but mercifully not actually cutting them off.


And Lillie swallowed, tied her hardest not to puke, and compromised by staring at the ceiling while staying. She couldn’t give him much. Just her company for this moment, that while happening in public, seemed deeply private. It was an illusion of privacy, an illusion of safety, solidarity, while reality broke before them in such a small way.


And it was all she could do after all.

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

Heya, sorry for keeping you in limbo so long on Review Tag. Things have not been terribly kind to my review schedule recently, and it took a while to get the time to go through one of your submissions properly.

Anyhow, onto the feature of the day:

Fractional

Introduction: Pokecenter (redacted) is having technical difficulties, please stand by...

“I want to show you something.”

So said the most unlikely trainer in the Alola region.

Of course, it wasn’t anything pretty, or near. No glorious sunrise, nor pretty public statue. Such showings would have been too tame for Alola’s sole Kantoian trainer. No, when he wanted to show her something, it was announced over dinner at the town’s pokecenter, and there was no moving to his bout of show and tell, at all.

I’m not sure if I follow the bit in underlined. Is the idea that mystery trainer didn’t get a chance to do show and tell? Or that he just did it right then and there.

He also didn’t dig out his phone to show her… whatever. Unlike every other teen in Alola, Sakaki didn’t have a phone with a camera. He’d murdered… well exorcised…. the ghost from his machine, broke the frame and sold the parts for money ages ago. The calculated destruction of the tech had been a step up from his rant of shoving the thing into a blender, and letting it get pureéd, but regardless of how it was gone disposed of, his Professor-gifted tech was a thing of the past.

… Wait, but if Gio just wants to disable the camera on his phone, why not just wreck the optic? Also, if he’s worried about stuff like tracking, just yeet the modern phone out a window and pick up a barebones flip phone.

Like unless I’m missing something, this feels awfully dramatic for a backstory to why Gio is rocking outdated tech here.

So he wasn’t going to show her something normal like a GIF or PNG or meme.

And he wasn’t going to be prompt about it.

Giovanni Sakaki didn’t elaborate on his show and tell to be, he just went back to his meal, and she, after a moment, realized that he wasn’t going to, did the same. Experience had taught her that pushing, or nagging, would get her nothing, so she didn’t.

IMO, your bit in underlined would probably sound better as something like “future show and tell”

And that wasn’t the weirdest thing about him, him making her wait.

Sakaki was just weird, coming and going.

… Wait, whose perspective is this written from? Gio’s? This girl’s? Or an omniscient narrator’s? It’s a little hard to tell sometimes.

He wasn’t odd because he wasn’t old (at least he wasn’t outwardly old, he acted and talked ancient on his off days, but he looked fifteen no matter what he did to his clothes and hair to look more mature) and it wasn’t just that he was an off islander. She was too. Despite living in Alola most of her life, she was as much an outsider as he was and she wasn’t a fifth as weird as he was.

I think you have a typo, since your bit about Gio being old directly contradicts the stuff in parens right afterwards.

No, his strangeness went deeper than not being from here being a foreigner. It ran deeper than his dogged insistence that he never acclimated to Island life.

If asked, Lillie would say that Sakaki’s strangeness was rooted in how he treated people. He never showed interest in anyone. People weren’t a means to an end, a philosophy she was quite used to considering from her own mother, and part of this journey was not living like that. To be better than Mother, as childish as that sounded.

Oh right, this is from that same story where Gio got bodyswapped with the Alola protag. It’s certainly interesting to see how things are playing out from Lillie’s perspective.

No, Sakaki’s feelings went much further than Machiavelli’s, or even her Mother’s work.

Wait, Machiavelli as in the author? Or is there a character called Machiavelli in this setting? I’m assuming it’s the former, but I admittedly got thrown for a moment.

Or perhaps it was best to say, they ran shallower.

People, to the Kantoian trainer, were less little more than scenery. Humans, trainers, and ‘mon, were meant to be plowed through. They were less than obstacles, not living beings. At the core of Sakaki’s strangeness was that he acted as if the world was a stage… and he had no interest in the play on production. He was trying to storm off the set, but couldn’t find the exit, and kept getting dragged from scene to scene, very much against his will.

I’m not sure if “shallower” is the right descriptor there, though you know you’re quite a character when others can tell just by hanging around you that you see everybody else in the world as a tool to use to your ends.

There were furrows that marked his path from town to town, and a trail of destruction from both the trainer and his ‘mon when anyone tried to get him to do anything.

I wonder if this would’ve worked more effectively to bring up examples of what that looked like. Since I’m wondering what Lillie would characterize as a ‘trail of destruction’ that wouldn’t realistically get the cops called on him.

And, while Sakaki’s actions and views were horrifying, and alluded to a mental sickness that Lillie couldn’t even begin to understand, the tamer horror of it all was that Lillie, traveling with the dark haired trainer, was starting to wonder if he wasn’t right.

Suffice to say, she wasn’t sleeping well at night and hadn’t been since the very this all started.

I’m not sure if it makes sense to call that a “tamer” horror, like isn’t this the bigger horror? Like the one that you don’t recognize, but stands out on reflection? Something to consider, anyways.

It’d taken her weeks to convince him that she was as real as he was. And when he finally stopped acting like she was a figment of his imagination, he’d opened up. Tolerated her “journeying” with him, saying “her reasons were her own” and being patiently apathetic towards her motives.

As long as she kept up, it was fine, and if she chipped in towards living expenses and gave him information, all the better.

It’d taken time but eventually, he’d staggered evolved from indifference to a thin veneer of compassion, capped off in full the first time she’d gotten sick. And he’d stayed by her side, nursing her to health with the bitter patience of a man having done the same many times before.

Is that meant to be implying that Gio has done this for Silver? Otherwise not sure what that’s alluding to there.

And so their co-“journey” went. And his strangeness grew and grew.

He had six pokeballs on his belt and was allowed only six ‘mon by a power Lillie Aether didn’t understand. She’d pooh-poohed it out of disbelief when he explained it when she hadn’t believed, and with a shrug, he had agreed.

“I know. I sound like a lunatic” and that’d been that. [ ]

Something about the second paragraph feels a bit incomplete. Maybe it’d make sense like say something that Gio didn’t bother to bring up the topic again afterwards?

There were resources for catching and training ‘mon, easy-peasy things she could use if she had things came across Pokémon to catch. The technology was meant to be universal intuitive to understand, and thus usable by those younger than ten…

And Except all catching and storage tech crashed in masse, the second Sakaki breathed near a keyboard or touchscreen.

I certainly didn’t remember that from Transversal. Let’s see where this is going, since I never pegged Gio as being the walking techbane type.

At first, it was understandable. The mainframe was down for repairs, someone had dropped water on the machine and the Center was waiting for a replacement…. And the first few times, it’d made sense, but come the fifth Center five… and Lillie was having her doubts.

Oh, so Gio is just a walking techbane in this story. Wonder if that is somehow related to his bodyswap at all.

Then came pokecenter number six, 'center six changed the tenor of all of those earlier “inconveniences” and “misunderstandings”, casting each “accident” into a whole new, horrifying light.

They’d had dinner, show and tell was forgotten almost as soon as it was brought up, they’d been at the town’s center since right before sunset and the view outside was wild and a breath surreal. She ate across from him; her with her chopsticks, him with his dogged insistence of using more civilized utensils of a fork and spoon. Their meal was as tasteless as was the norm for the ‘Center’s norm fare, and was only made edible with stolen seasonings. Those, they’d set between them, taking what they wanted from the pile. Both noted what was seasonings were running low and planned to hit up a nearby restaurant to stock up before running their errands after breakfast.

I… feel like I’m missing something here for what went down at Pokécenter #6. Since it sounds like it’s supposed to be a serious incident, but there’s no real hint as to what it entailed. Even if this is a companion piece to Transversal, you probably want to give more of a hint to readers if this story is meant to be able to be read in a standalone fashion.

As for how they ate, it was an old argument they’d worn down over the weeks they traveled together.

Once he was sure she was real.

Is that supposed to be “old routine”? Since something about an “old argument” that got worn down doesn’t quite feel right to me.

It had started with impassioned speeches about cultural differences. Or rather, he’d bragged about how superior Kanto was, and taunted her until she’d stuttered denials. The shock had faded in repetition, his abrasiveness in those moments had rubbed her shyness raw, and she’d startled both of them the first time she’d met his fire with fire her own.

That’d taken weeks, and he’d liked her more… slightly more… confrontational side. Teasing and tweaking needling her until they’d run the subject down. Sure she felt reasonably comfortable talking to him after that and he began dared to broach other topics. Sometimes leading the conversation, and, now knowing what cues of his to look for, Lillie recognized when he wanted her to lead instead.

That… feels like a terrible role model to be journeying with, but okay there, Lillie.

Utensils were now a closed settled topic, except when they had ramen. Then, to spite her quiet self, Lillie had scraped up enough familiarity to tease him. Poking and prodding him with a pair of ‘sticks until he snapped, and then took the utensils and chucked them at the first opportunity. He’d come back from throwing out the most recent pair, the hunch of his shoulders as he settled and the not-so-subtle tip of his posture (away from her, towards something behind) told Lillie today was a “neither of them talk day”.

Which was fine by her.

… Quality traveling partner there!

They’d walked a lot. She’d done a ton of research at the local library and found nothing useful, and from his grumbles when they got their dinner she knew that the Island’s Trail Captain had proven elusive yet again.

Sometimes when things were bad, it was best not to talk, so Lille was content to not bring anything up at all. Swirling in another packet of soy sauce, Lillie consoled herself that tomorrow was another day.

… Have you ever considered just ditching Gio and finding a new travel partner, Lillie? Since I’m pretty sure that this dynamic counts as some sort of emotional abuse.

“What time is it?”

A glance at her wrist watch, a sporty sleek thing “commandeered” from some sports shop two towns back, lit at her tap. A pretty sky blue bracketed by a sleek green frame. She read the numbers off after she finished her bite, having been raised better than to talk with her mouth full.

“So it’s been two hours?”

Oh, so Gio really has been a “““great””” influence on Lillie, huh? ^^;

Having not paid attention when they came in Lillie shrugged, and left him to the complicated things, like math.

That bit feels like it’d flow better if it was turned into its own sentence, and you had “Lillie shrugged” and onward become its own.

“You’re infuriating sometimes,” Sakaki fumed. “Did you at least notice if the brain-dead trainer attached to the Center’s computer has actually moved since we got in here?”

You should add a speech tag here to make it explicit who’s speaking. I assume it’s supposed to be Gio, but I admittedly wasn’t super sure.

Having been interested in finding a seat to enjoy the pretty view of outside. No, Lillie had not noticed much of anything. Hadn’t cared. Not that she was going to confess admit to that.

So Lilie stood, pushing her meal aside to get up. Though it took getting on her tiptoes, she managed to get a peek at the line. The boy and at the front of the line in his awful blue and green striped shirt might not have been there when they came in, but she’d noticed the ugly shirt at the front of in that exact spot the line when she last went to the bathroom… and that’d been ages ago. He hadn’t moved a hair since he’d gotten to the front.

Wait, how is Gio reacting to all of this anyways? Indifference? A growling “of course...”? Since he kinda just fades from view here.

And it’d been long enough that the kid’s beady-eyed wingul was napping on his shoulder, and what the younger trainer’s lack of movement was doing was starting to get a bit weird. She had to hop a little, but even from here she could see the screen was flickering back and forth… between two screens… and doing nothing else besides flipping between those two screens.

And the people behind the wingul trainer weren’t doing anything about it, just staring blankly at the air in front of them, like breathing, unblinking, mannequins.

Thaaaaat doesn’t sound remotely normal right now. ^^;

Lillie nodded and sat with a heavy thump, Lillie nodded. And It was a wonder that Sakaki could see it, as he’d slumped into the table in some mute motion expressiong of utter misery as she described… everything.

“You think he’s broke... like the professor?”

Poor Kukui who’s very personality had devolved, from a vibrant borderline madman of enthusiasm to… a posturing sham that said inspirational lines, trained new hatched rockruff, and did nothing else.

Never pegged Kukui or professors in general to be the types to have money troubles, though I suppose Kukui’s pad in Gen 7 is a bit run-down. It’s an interesting assumption to make about the character.

“Let’s find out.”

With that Sakaki stood, marched to the desk, and shoved the kid out of the way. Tucking the portable computer close, he hauled the clunky grey laptop and its pokeball transporter attachment to their table. Lillie wasn’t quite done eating, but on returning Sakaki shoveled everything off the edge, abusing the world’s perchance for ignoring him and ruining her last nibble of dinner.

I… don’t think that you want ‘perchance’ there, but at the same time, I’m not sure what word you intended to put in its place.

Lillie furrowed her brows and glared at him. It wasn’t much, but he’d known she was mad, even without her saying a word.

“They’ll pick it up,” he insisted. “It’s why they have help.”

I can already tell that being a Rocket Grunt in this setting was sanity-taxing given how cavalierly Gio gets full “pick up my mess, peasant” to others.

Not the point, so she told him because he was stupid like that sometimes and didn’t get simple things, like not being mean, or how to make amends reparations.

“You owe me dessert.”

And a better traveling buddy at this rate. :V

Sometimes you had to give the dark-haired trainer a firm hint.

“I spared you an oversaturation of sal-“

“Dessert.”

Lillie: “Seriously, Sakaki, have you ever gone out with a girl? Since sort of behavior is a fast way to remain alone your entire life!” >:|
Giovanni: “Ugh… fine.”

Sakaki sighed, and nodded. Point received if not understood, he’d do as she said if only to make her get off his case.

“Was he almost done?” Lillie wondered, not quite protesting, but not quite going along with him, because doing that would have been wrong.

Wait, is that Gio or Wingull kid Lillie is talking about? Since it feels like there’s not a whole lot of transition giving an idea of what’s going on at the moment.

Sakaki’s black eyes flicked at her, considered her and her moralizing, and with a huff, he unwound the bound cord that he’d looped around the tech, and hunted up a power socket to plug the thing in.

“Don’t know, don’t care.”

… Is there a reason why you’re not just saying “his/the laptop” here? Feels like a bit of an odd choice of words.

And considering the kid was still standing at the front of the line, wingull napping, staring blankly at nothing, fingers flicking over a screen that wasn’t there, Lillie decided that for her sanity's sake she probably shouldn’t look at the desk, line, or anyone else for the rest of the night.

Wait, is it because of Giovanni that everyone else in the Pokémon Center is acting stiff and robotic and unnatural in general? Since something about the way that everyone else present is described feels really paranormal, as if they’re being entranced.

Flicking the purloined tech open, she watched it light up when Sakaki plugged it in. And, curiously, instead of the familiar, sweet, chime, it made a low clunk as it came to life. He came up, wrapping the plug in around a table leg of all the silly things, to see her brushing off crumbs from its audio ports.

Oh, so Gio is a Mac user, huh? :V

Sakaki cracked a near benign smirk at her housekeeping and set his personal, folding phone from the dark ages beside the laptop.

Settling back in his chair, Sakaki turned the device so it was between the two of them, so clearly this was going to be the “thing she had to see”. And knowing him it wasn’t going to be something as benign as a skitty video. Still, she settled in and waited while he twiddled the wire one last time, then, with a melodramatic crick of his knuckles, set his hands to the keyboard to type.

IMO, you should just flatly say “the laptop” instead of “the device”, since “the device” is ambiguous between his phone and laptop.

… Though why from the way that the text is describing things am I suspecting that this is going to wind up being something like a snuff video?

That’s when reality decided to “nope” out of the pokecenter.

The keypad turned intangible under Sakaki’s hands. Shifting from solid to mist in a blink, it stayed in its familiar frame, even in the same shape, but the whole of it, from keys to base to wires, had somehow slipped from the third dimension to second with no one the wiser.

And no one noticed, the keyboard, her shriek, or Sakaki’s fingers getting cut off by the seemingly solid seeming metal…

That wasn’t… solid?

Oh, so there is paranormal stuff going on right now, since that definitely isn’t normal. I would suggest thinking over a way to rephrase the first sentence/paragraph, since it feels very “memey”/”internet speak” relative to the rest of your prose in this story and it’s a bit jarring.

She’d recoiled from the table as if burnt. Knocking her chair back even. And again, no one noticed.

Except Sakaki. He looked up from fighting with the impossibility that was the pokecenter tech his reality-defying laptop, fingertips grey tinted and sinking into solid electronics, acting for all the world as if she were overreacting.

One moment passed, became two, then seeing she wasn’t coming back, he rolled his eyes, then called her over.

Lillie:

Giovanni: “Lillie, it’s fine. Seriously, just get over here already.” >.<;

The little pat on the table was a mite… insulting.. and she glared at him, dropping the hand over her chest to better glower at him.

His smirk and the follow-up pat pat of the table’s edge left Lillie with the overwhelming urge to bite him, or maybe talk Beedrill into biting him, and she hadn’t bit anyone since she was three years old.

I’m surprised that would be Lillie’s reflexive impulse over slapping or punching, since that certainly feels… feral for a person.

Lillie returned to her seat, shaking a little, and Sakaki, insufferable trainer he was, was underreacting [ ] because he could.

IMO, take a moment to beat it over the heads of the readers in brackets as to what Gio is underreacting to. Since the entire Pokécenter just went full reality warper.

… Though on that note, what is the background of the Pokécenter looking like at the moment? Since everything around Gio is just weirdness central at the moment, so it’s made me curious.

There were words for that type of… ung… Lillie didn’t have the words, just irritation, and a very firm glare… That he ignored, though he was merciful and lifted his fingers out of the metal mist with a wince.

“This isn’t new, just a recent reoccurrence.”

Lillie: “How are you not bothered by this?!” O_o;
Giovanni: “... You get used to it?”

It was a lame assurance, but she settled into the chair beside him, trying to steel herself.

Because if he wasn’t screaming, or freaking out, well she wouldn’t either.

inb4 Lillie fails at that in the very next paragraph.

Which was a lie because she just couldn’t stop shaking. But at least she didn’t shake out of the chair, or run off, or scream again.

Whelp, I got close, at least.

“You try.”

Lillie’s resolve to not scream was tested by the idea of touching that computer abomination of a computer. She opened her mouth, to say “wah- No!” but she was a horrible horrible sap for any request to help. Even one delivered so tersely by a man whose spirit ‘mon was something prickly, and poisonous and… And perhaps seeing the refusal from the pallor of her face, the shake to her frame, Sakaki added a please and Lillie groaned.

Because she was a sucker, and he had her pegged since day one.

I was going to protest that that seemed like a thought process that no sane person would have, but… Lillie really did have problems saying ‘no’ canonically, huh?

Folding to her nature, seriously scan her with some trainer’s pokedex she had a nature, and that nature was Gullible, she wrapped her hand in a napkin and gripped the computer on the upper corner. Dragging the tech laptop towards her by the screen.

The “Gullible” quip is superfluous to the rest of the paragraph. If you want to keep it in some capacity, you should pull it out of its existing sentence and turn it into its own.

It didn’t sink into the table, or turn off, or snarl, or do anything odd. Rather it scraped along as if there was nothing wrong, and though cringing with every inch she drew it closer, she wheeled it to herself and borrowing one of his forks, poked the keyboard.

It clicked.

It was a normal click, even.

Lillie: “... How?!” O_O;
Giovanni: “Look, do you think that I know here?” >_>;

And she was getting weird looks from the people around her for poking tech with a fork but she ignored that. She was learning when to ignore people when traveling with Sakaki, and this moment fell under the “ignore” category. She poked again, harder, and the Nurse behind the pokecenter’s counter barked.

“You break it, you buy it!”

Lillie: “Oh, so the world magically ignores Mister ‘Ghost Hands’ here and just happens to see me poking at the demon computer with a fork. That’s totally fair.” >_>;

And since they couldn’t see, hadn’t seen, Sakaki’s fingers sinking into metal and plastic like it wasn’t there, Lillie couldn’t really explain why she was being so… weird… right then. So she didn’t.

She just unfurled her pinky finger from her off-hand and decided to sacrifice the very tippity tip to science.

In short, She did gave it the wussiest most pathetic and timid poke ever, and the thing clicked and was solid.

If unresponsive.

… Is Gio going through Ghost-type antics right now or something? Since I’m legit at a loss as to what on earth is going on here. .-.

She slid it back to Sakaki. Science done, for a lifetime, thanks. And she wanted to wash her hands, so bad. But doing so meant leaving, and it was like one of those horror movies where you couldn’t look away or get up even though you had to go.

Sakaki spun the device around from the top, mirroring her grip…

Or at least he meant to.

Watching glass fracture and flow away like water, losing substance and reforming as lines… that never got less creepy. There was one second before you had to blink, where you could see the electronics peal back into non-existence and the electricity snapping between the pieces turned to a hissing mist to devolve into smears to color…

Okay, ghost antics confirmed. Even if I have no idea how on earth this is happening right now.

She flinched into her chair after one loud crackle, while Sakaki reached up to slam the thing closed.

And he couldn’t.

His hand passed through it, and with a frustrated gesture, asked… well ordered… her to do close the horror show of a computer.

Lillie: “HOW IS NOBODY ELSE SEEING THIS?!” O_O;
Giovanni: “... Apathetic citizenry?”

Mainly to keep the creepy thing from happening again, Lillie obeyed.

She used the fork, because she was not touching this computer, or any computer, for anything, ever again.

And then Lillie went mad and lived in a cave for the rest of her life ranting about demon computers and “metal’s supposed to be solid!”.

“This happened before?” Because everyone else seemed to be pretending like this wasn’t happening was what everyone else was doing, and Lillie’d come to accept she wasn’t like everyone else..

“It’s like sticking your hands in a gastly.” He rasped, flexing his fingers. “Cold and burning without fire and you can feel it sloshing about you, there’s a sense of where it’s form and frame are, but there’s nothing really there…”

Lillie: “... Have you considered getting this checked out by a doctor?” .-.
Giovanni: “Bold of you to think that they’d actually notice this even if they didn’t laugh me off.”

Then, insanely he slammed his hands through it. Not in the breaking it into pieces sort of slam, though if the laptop had been real and he’d really connected tangible for him, there’d have been a big dent…

His palm slammed the table; she could hear the palm slap down against the faux wood. His fingers scraped as he felt for wires, connectors, and chips. The tech sloshed in its dimensions like… like a jiggling plate of jelly, roiling between existing and not, recoiling and encasing the trainers’ calloused hands, but mercifully not actually cutting them off.

And Lillie swallowed, tied her hardest not to puke, and compromised by staring at the ceiling while staying. She couldn’t give him much. Just her company for this moment, that while happening in public, seemed deeply private. It was an illusion of privacy, an illusion of safety, solidarity, while reality broke before them in such a small way.

And it was all she could do after all.

Well, I suppose that would explain why everyone is dutifully trying to dutifully ignore Giovanni right here and now. I, too, would probably start having sanity slippage from this. ^^;

Alright, for my overall thoughts.

I liked that even though the story is an offbeat AU, the way that Gio and Lillie are behaving feel pretty true to their characters from what I remember offhand. It’s honestly a decently impressive feat considering how the premise isn’t all that common and neither are the events that are depicted here. It’s something that’s not a lot of AU authors pull off properly.

As for things I wasn’t as fond about… the elephant in the room is that there are a number of structural issues in your current version of this chapter. You should strongly consider re-reading through your chapter speaking aloud, there are a lot of bits with awkward phrasing or typos. I also had trouble gathering what on earth was going on at times, both from lack of description, and from a lack of contextualization of some of the more surreal moments of the chapter. I assume that this is all important to Transversal, but there was a lot of stuff that I just felt very out of the loop on and lacking context. Like how and why Gio is phasing through his own technology and why that was important.

I… also wasn’t really sure what the point of the story was at the end. Like if there had been more tie-in between Lillie noping out of ignoring Gio while playing up that it’s yet another thing she’s grinning and bearing from Gio, I think that it’d have resulted in a more solid ending note while things just kinda abruptly cut off at the moment.

Sorry if the feedback was a bit harsh @K_S , but there’s definitely promise here. With some polish and a fresh coat of paint, and maybe taking the time to show things off and explain them a bit more thoroughly, I think you’d have a nice little piece.

Hope that helps, and good luck with your writing!

 

[K_S]

Laughs, well I'm glad the opening line worked for you. The point of this was part to make some notes platable, and set up for a +6 sorta story... but it turned into a +9 for reasons, it's the first/intro entry, where I try to gentle people into the world I've set up, introduce the main cast, then toss in the + storyline with the other chapters. This section is the intro really... I have the others in bullet point forum and plan on popping them up once I've done my review work for the month.


Nah Gio doesn't want to disable the phone. Lillie's not quite up to understanding that he hates everything and anything about this region and therefore would see more catharsis in destroying the thing and selling the pieces rather than following the logical plan of reformating and selling it whole. His spites so great he took a hammer to it, as for why he keeps the old phone it's his only means to contact Silver, something established in the base story but that Lillie doesn't understand yet. There's a section later on where they communicate or try to, with modern tech and it goes as well as Gio's laptop experience so he gets the "why" behind their dark age tech usage.
Lillie's still wrangling with Gio being young and old all at once. Some of her confusion is bleeding out into the descriptive text, it's a bit sloppy but I haven't found a way to show it better yet. Something I'm working on.

Yes, the writer of "the prince", I've some examples coming up in later areas... that I hope to wiggle in, but I didn't want to jump that far ahead in the story with the introduction of the setting/idea via Lillie's viewpoint... Though here.. the cops might get called, and the call will go to no one... because reality is not working right anywhere for anyone, and thus normal/sane consequences have gone out to lunch and never came back.

Nah the walking tech-bane he is not. It's a new effect of the Legends punishment, probably inflicted on him the first time they realized he can bypass their "hardship learning experiences" by hacking ATMs and getting unlimited money on an account. They couldn't stop him from doing that, didn't get society/financials well enough to understand how to sanely punish him, so they stop him from accessing it or getting any benefit from game genie coding himself 9999999 money at the first opportunity and making stabs at say... the kahuna/champs pokemon bank account while he was at it.

Ah, they're in pokemon center six at the moment, the computer refolding reality is "incident 6" I think I'll need to drop the lead in and just drop the section....

In response to your Silver line... yeah when Silver was super young he got sick a few times and Gio being a sole parent had to drop everything to care for his son since he couldn't trust outside help to keep an eye on the "heir apparent" and not make a stab at killing the kid or something... He also did some background raising of Koga's kid a bit, though that's something I've not been able to wing into the tale proper or any of my tales where I know it's a plot point.

Yeah, when you're a shy do-gooder traveling with Mr. asocial plot master... there are going to be "we don't talk days" and those are going to be the most peaceful best days of the journey when you look back on them.

Considering Lilie's starting to realize everyone's not exactly real in this story, she leaves it wondering if only her and Gio are the only real people and is terrified to leave him because it's established she can't tell what is and isn't. And compared to her own upbringing Gio's prickliness is all sunshine and rainbows, she'll probably get to the point when she calls him out on his knee-jerk asinine traits, but she's not near there enough to think about it, much less start demanding to be treated better.

Lilli's not paying attention to Gio beyond obeying his "suggestions"/orders. When she glances down he's slumped, and giving up on everything like an over-emotional brat he was in his adolescent hey-day. But again, she's not paying him too much mind, being rather single-minded attached to her "job".

Not... broke as in fiscally broke, but broke as in "not functioning right in any way shape, or forum". like the people in the line, or those around Lillie who only notice certain things, in another fic she refers to her mother as "broke" as well but "broke in the head" and nearly falls apart at the (for her) borderline criticizing her mother. Gio winds up saying that it's alright to say Lillie's mon is "broke/ill" and leave it at that, even though Lillie is near textbook describing psychopathic/psychotic episodes. It's a small shout-out to some scenes in "training"/"transversal".

Nah meant perchance, it's old, clunky, and wrong modernly speaking, yes, but Lillie's a mix match of memes(which Gio and Kukui actually showed her), old classic learning(really it was classic Shakespeare and classic TV for her growing up and that was it), and almost zero socializing. So I leave odd bits in her word choice to reflect that. I need to actually get around to showing how bizarre her lifestyle was pre-journey but I haven't had an idea how to do it yet. I started talking about the abuse in another story, but this tale really isn't going to go there.

Were he in Kanto he wouldn't treat the place as his personal dumping ground. Now Johto, Illex, definitely yes, but he's just being obscenely lazy because he realized no one is going to notice/care/and there will be no consequences for him for it if they do. But on the other hand, he doesn't want Lillie rooting through it and getting messy and him having to care about that...

Honestly, I think she'd be thrilled to find a way to travel with Silver rather than Gio, Silver's a ball of trauma but he's a considerate ball of trauma, dear old evil overlord dad's just a jerk all around when he's trying to be decent.

Honestly, Silver's mom had it so so hard at points. Gio was more socialized and less of an ego trip, so he was borderline platable, but still, she had to put up with so much... Lillie's probably going to beeline for Gio's extended family the second they get out of this and be like... "I'm so sorry you have to deal with this".

Lillie was asking after wingul kid. I'll have to make that clearer.

because it's not his, literally or even in Lillie's perspective, he did just steel it, after all, so she's not passing the ownership to Sakaki yet.
Ah, that's a fun theory, but it's not Gio's fault that everyone is robot modeing. It's the Legend's fault and a fundamental facet of this false Alola region

(transversal has examples in the 'mon, when Gio riles them up with an encounter and figures their attack radius/sensing the PC circumference and spams it by standing one step out of a 'mon's "range of vision" though perfectly visible by anything with working eyes in the real world, notes this, and had Weedle rile up the 'mon and gets a no response since they're both out of range of the creatures "limits". He then makes an easy kill/leveling system based on manipulating these stats and gets Weedle up to Beedril in three days as a result. In "Training" he has another "this isn't how it should work but I can Game this to my own ends" and the reverse happens when a mandated plot point won't be worked around no matter how hard he tries and trying bites him in the rump-Training and Transversal-.)

It becomes more obvious when Gio's around as he's a point of very obvious contrast and is playing the system as he discovers how it works. Lillie, being with Gio and justifiably paranoid, is starting to see these effects, not only in people she knows in passing (her mother and Kukui for example) but in everyone now she knows to look for it.

Initially, I had it as bale... but swapped it to "nope" because Lillie's voice is a mix match of classic mimicry, goody two shoes, and memeing when under stress...

She's starting to meme more as she becomes more immersed in normal teen culture.

Well, she admits it's a backslide, her wanting to bite someone was a knee jerk at three... and Gio's inspiring her to regress.

As for what the rest of the center's like... the same as it always was. the only thing going nuts is the line and Gio's stolen laptop, I probably should expand on that though but Lillies is so freaked out I couldn't really swing her looking around, she's just blue screening at Gio's laptop, hands getting cut off... oh dear god why... reaction that unless someone jostles her she's not going to look at anything beyond the horror on Gio's table.

Knowing Gio's luck and who's really running the world he'd crawl into a hospital needing medical treatment and the staff would try to shove
him on a plate and into a box to heal him of his injuries as his ah... present overseers have no idea how hospitals work, and have only seen pokeceners through their whole lives.

Well, I'm glad you were able to enjoy my tale despite its flaws. Characterization is something I've tried to hone, so having them be identifiable despite their odd scenario is a huge help. Some of the "errors" were deliberate, to show Lillie's odd thinking, and some of it was legit errors on my part. When time permits I'll try to groom a few of them out and make the whole more approachable. As for the point, it's just a series of one-shots loosely tied to Transversal, basically notes to prose exercise that I'm going to turn into a +9 fic, it's a part writing exercise, part short tale practice.