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Magical but Mundane One-Shot Contest - Results

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
Magical but Mundane One-Shot Contest Results

It's time at last to share the results of Thousand Roads' fifth one-shot contest! We ended up with sixteen lovely stories of daily life, and despite the "mundane" in the contest title, I think you'll find them anything but boring! There are a lot of fascinating entries here, taking a look at the sort of people and situations that rarely appear in fanfiction. Huge kudos to the writers for the effort they put in this year to bring us so many fascinating fics.

Now, on to the results! The next post in this thread is an index with summaries of all the stories submitted to the contest, with links to anywhere they've been published, a link to their highlight post in this thread, and an interview with the author (if available) giving some insight into their entry. It'll give you a quick overview of the entries and help you decide which ones you'd like to read!

After that, each submitted story gets its own highlight post. Each of these contains an excerpt from the story to give you a taste of what it's like, links to anywhere it's been published, and the judges' feedback for the story.

The judges were randomly split into two groups, and then entries were randomly assigned to one group or another (aside from judge fics, which were always sent to be evaluated by the group without that judge), creating essentially two parallel contests. These two groups will hereafter be referred to as Eevee Flight and Pikachu Flight, and they were treated entirely independently up until now, when I've recombined all the entries to make for a single results thread! Each judge ordered the list of stories they read from their number one pick to their last pick. Their score for a story was determined based on the point scale below, and then the points awarded to a story by each judge were summed up to yield the story's final overall score. Stories were ranked based on their total score across all judges, and the top three became the winners of their flight.

Place - Points
8th - 10
7th - 20
6th - 30
5th - 45
4th - 60
3rd - 85
2nd - 125
1st - 175

The ranks and point totals are not published with the results, but have been retained in case they're needed. Before I announce the winners, I have to thank all the judges for their hard work this year. The quality of feedback this year is absolutely fantastic, and I have to thank all the judges for being way more on the ball getting all their work in than I was! Thanks so much to our excellent judging team: Dragonfree, Flyg0n, JFought, kintsugi, lisianthus, tomatorade, and Windskull. As ever, you're the core of what makes this contest work.

And now, the moment everyone's been waiting for! Congratulations to this year's one-shot contest winners...

In Eevee Flight, JFought, ErazonPO3, and Wildboots!

In Pikachu Flight, NebulaDreams, Windskull, and scrivenernoodz!

Congratulations to you all!
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
Magical but Mundane Contest Entries


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"The Blur" by WindsweptCity
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I'd describe this as the story behind a story. Even as Kyogre is threatening to drown the world, life goes on for the main characters, who are trying to solve a puzzling mystery. It's going to take a lot of hard work, long, sleepless nights, and traveling to random places to collect information that doesn't quite make sense, but it might just result in discovering something amazing.
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

Usually I go to Bulbapedia and look through the list of trainer classes. I saw those interviewers who you run into multiple times in Hoenn, and realized they would fit the bill, considering most of what reporters report is rather boring, but once in a blue moon they get that giant story. A duo also sounded good, because then I could have two characters to have both sides. Which turned out to be Violet, who dreams and yearns for something magical, and Ricky, who's more grounded (because he's an electrician, heh) and totally content in his routine, if not mundane lifestyle.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

It's always fun including little things that I remember from the games. The three Ruin Maniacs in Hoenn are next to the tombs that hold the Regi trio. One of them even says after you beat him that he knows there's something incredible around here, he just can't figure out where. Also, the first time I ever saw Latios/Latias was when I was going to the Safari Zone, which is where Ricky and Violet start their investigation as well. Seeing them for the first time is a magical moment, but chasing them around the region trying to catch them gets old quickly.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

I probably leaned too much into the idea of Magical but Mundane as opposed to the daily life in the Pokémon world, though I'd like to think I still struck that balance. First time doing this type of contest, but I still had a blast.


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"A Change of Perspective" by Sinderella
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My story follows a young Pokemon Professor hopeful, Vienna, as she navigates the trials and tribulations of getting through her rigorous schooling and being heavily pregnant with her first child. She finds out the hard way that her pregnancy isn't going as well as she wanted to force herself to believe, and has to make some changes to save herself and her unborn child.
Links: Judges' Comments

How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

I am hyperfixiated on my own longfic, so I wanted to do something that related to it and its continuity in some way (anonymity be damned LOL), and I'd been wanting to do a Vienna-based story for a while, and had an inkling of this idea from one of my bingo prompts.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

I wanted to include more exposition about WHY Vienna was pregnant, and I also wanted to end it with her actually having her baby. But, I crunched this in about 3 days total and 10,000 words is not a lot on paper :KEKW:

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

I liked my general worldbuilding around the concept of becoming a Pokemon Professor, especially one interested in studying Ghost/Psychic types. They were details I'd been sitting with for a while and was happy to finally get them down into a story.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

This serves as a sort of prequel to my longfic White Swan, Black Swan!


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"The Cost of Paint" by The Walrein
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A new art gallery is opening, and there are two paintings that wouldn't be there if it weren't for Tess Smeargle. She doesn't seem very happy about it, though...
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

I've always been fascinated by the incredible versatility of Smeargle, and wanted to explore how they might fit into a PMD-world economy.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?[/b]

I had plans for a scene where Tess is called away to boost up a team of explorers before they enter a dungeon on an urgent rescue mission. There wasn't enough time to write it given how late I started, though, and it didn't seem like it fit the theme of the contest anyways.


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"A Day at Lawrence Pokémon Sanctuary" by canisaries
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Situated on an island off the east coast of the Unovan States, Lawrence Pokémon Sanctuary is home to pokémon of all kinds. Each day, its caretakers have their hands full with its inhabitants - mischievous shuppet, lovelorn kadabra, you name it! Follow the Sanctuary staff and pokémon as they make it through one busy day.
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

I actually struggled to come up with a subject at first. The whole "mundane" aspect made it tricky to think of something that was engaging as making it too dramatic would mean it wasn't really "everyday" stuff anymore. The same went for character arcs - how can it be a mundane occurrence if it changes you? In the end, I decided to go for a sort of anthology about the life of a pokémon zoo, later turned sanctuary. If I could make the story about the everyday life of a location rather than individual characters, I could have things happen that weren't necessarily routine to the characters but were to the location in the grand scheme of things and thus, hopefully, stick to the theme while still having my own fun. How well the judges think I stuck to the theme remains to be seen, but I did have my fun! I don't think I'll place this year, but as always, I'm glad I took part.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?[/b]

There was going to be a scene at the end of the story where the new hire gets to witness the hatching of a pokémon egg in the incubation section, and that would have been a whole "this job is crazy, but it's all worth it since I get to see this" thing. Unfortunately, the same thing that happens every time I take part in a story contest happened, and I ran out of space. Oh well!

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

I liked the trick that I had Rune pull when he was fighting the cryogonal. I knew I had to come up with something special to make the battle interesting, especially since I'm so ass at writing battles generally, and I think I came up with something pretty fun.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

Some people may consider it to be creepy or unethical to still be holding pokémon in what is essentially a zoo when they're so intelligent (and real life zoos already have their own ethical problems), so I want to say that I was aware of that. I just had no other idea to go with for this contest than "pokémon zoo", so I had to stick to that concept if I wanted to write anything. If I got the idea for this outside the contest, I probably wouldn't have written it. Also, it does not take place in HHverse, though careful readers may have already been able to guess that. In any case, I hope it was an enjoyable read, at least!


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"Day by Day" by Windskull
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Second Place Pikachu Flight

In the aftermath of a massive forest fire that destroys her village, a despondent buneary is given a journal to help her process her feelings. While she's dismissive of the idea at first she soon finds herself sucked into writing. But can it really help with her pain?
Links: Judges' Comments



How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

I knew I wanted to write a PMD story, and I knew I wanted to write a story in the form of journal entries. Those two plans combined helped me figure out the basics; I needed a character that would be open to writing.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

Not really! If anything, perhaps with more time I would have had more to say and developed some of the side characters more. But the story is ultimately heavily focused on Cotton and her first steps towards healing, and too much more would have taken away from that focus, I think.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

I like to think that the build-up to the reveal of why Cotton is so cagey about Honeysuckle is well-executed.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

I’d been wanting to write a story in journal entries for a while. Many years ago, I read a couple of these “Dear America” books which were historical fiction children’s novels that were written like journals. The way they handled the death of a character during the dust bowl has still stuck with me all these years later and was part of the inspiration for how I handled Honeysuckle.



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"Engineering Harmony" by JFought
First Place Eevee Flight
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"The quiet will be good for you," the guild said before transferring Alfred against his will to work as a guide in a neighboring rural kingdom. Moving from the city to the boonies is the definition of downgrade, or so he thinks. But even small towns have tricks up their sleeves; maybe this place isn't quite as backwards as he thinks it is.
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

For this one, I started on a premise of wanting to explore how certain species of Pokémon adapt to the demands and limitations of a civil, PMD society. Its a theme that I like, and at the time when I was coming up with ideas, I was thinking a lot about a specific part of my setting that explores this with its use of technology. But of course, I can't just tackle that head on, I have to be complicated about it. So I decided to try writing this premise through the eyes of someone unfamiliar with it. One thing lead to another, and we get the POV of an Audino sent to a small town because its obvious to everyone but him that he has auditory sensitivity issues, learning to appreciate the ways they try to accommodate for various ways of life and ultimately finding his own solace in that.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?[/b]

are these questions personalized? You have absolutely no idea. The story is exactly 10k. I cut stuff from the outline, and still ended up 1.2k over the word limit, forcing me to cut even more. And oh boy.

-several character interactions were cut short. vee's introduction scene was a big one, and the lightbulb scene basically had to get butchered.

-most of the worldbuilding. the basic premise of the town and most of the context that makes it interesting had to go for the sake of the story. it's not a decision i'm proud of, but i was running out of options.

-two scenes got cut, one down to a fifth size and the other entirely.

-an entire character.

And that's all after tightening the prose/dialogue and scrounging the entire document for loose scraps of unnecessary words. In hindsight I'm not confident I made all the right calls, but I had less than 10 hours left and was sleep deprived, so I just made decisions that felt right in the moment and promptly died afterwards.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

Well I don't want to imply I'm very proud of the way this one turned out ^^;. But I do still like the characters here. I hope at least that they can still shine.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

This isn't getting published until November at the earliest. I plan to release a much better version of this story, and with how ambitious I now realize it is, it probably needs some rethinking and expansion into two-shot territory to get there. But also I have other writing goals for September and October, so it's not my highest priority right now.


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"The First Red Dawn" by EonDuoLatias
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Links: Judges' Comments




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"Gathering Moss" by NebulaDreams
First Place Pikachu Flight
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Terra is the lone Golurk that manages The Fossil Cafe in their owner’s stead. Even after their latest master’s passing, Terra continues serving humans as they have done for thousands of years. But as their body begins to break down, they start to grapple with their own mortality as the fate of the cafe and the staff who depend on it hangs in the balance.
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

When SwSh came out, I had a few ideas about Pokemon in the Poke Jobs system, which really excited me because I love that mix of magical and mundane elements in fantasy. Funnily enough, Golurk isn’t one of my favourite Pokémon, but after reading one or two fics featuring them, I really warmed up to the Golett line, and thought the concept of a Golurk running a cafe had potential (I find it fascicnating when automaton characters try to grasp human emotions and novelties), though at the time I didn’t have a good idea of how to turn it into an interesting story.

After I started reading cosy fantasy books (such as Legends & Lattes and The Cybernetic Tea Shop, the latter of which actually features a robot running a cafe), I started being a lot more intentional about what I wanted to write and adding meaningful conflicts to something as mundane as someone running a coffee shop.

That and I felt there was a lot of untapped potential with Golurk, as with a lot of Pokemon, since not much is really known about their origins. There’s no way I’d be able to definitively answer that in a fic as there probably wasn’t intended to be an answer in canon, but I leaned a lot into the negative space of the Golurk’s worldbuilding by having their origins be a mystery even to them, which I thought left enough legroom for character drama. Because how do you start trying to understand yourself when you don't even know anything about your own species?


Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

I wanted to give Mog more of an arc with the idea of him eventually running the cafe but I thought it would’ve distracted from the main story. Of course, this is the type of story that could keep going with the different odd customers and the tangents about the different teas and coffees being served.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

I feel like this is the point where I’m starting to refine my story writing process, so I’m proud of a couple of things, particularly a few lines of prose and the way I handled certain themes.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

This is a tie-in for another fanfic of mine: I, Isobel. The current version up online is unfinished and I intend to rewrite it at some point, but I thought I’d throw it out there in case people are curious. This story is stand-alone, so this can be enjoyed on its own.


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"GOLD!" by tomatorade
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Any successful guild is measured in the quality of pokemon they output, but we don’t always think about those that help struggling teams along. Luckily, Plainsview guild’s stellar output has a stellar example of one such helper—a certain umbreon who goes above and beyond to turn every team he touches to gold.
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

I generally just like to poke around with different characters so most of my process was me thinking of people that would be interesting to follow on their day-to-day and ended up getting hooked on the idea of a PMD fixer-type. Which I think ended up fitting very well considering how a face-value interpretation of the guild system seems rife for exploitation. Otherwise, I really wanted him to interact with a bunch of levels in guild life and all the ways he'd ruined them.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

I think I included too much, in my opinion. There are a couple threads that I wish I could've done more with and given the limit it might've been a good idea to cut some. On the other hand, if I were to expand on it after the contest I'd like to go into a lot more detail in the way the guild functions and how all these different pokemon come together to keep it running. Also all teh ways that gets exploited, of course.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

I think the whole section within the dungeon is my favourite part. The story really picks up there and we finally see Ringo's Face-turn. I think I succeeded in making is disconcerting without ruining the tone like I might if I actually showed child abuse on screen. I also really enjoyed settingup Tylus' failings in the moment--though I generally love writing these kinds of heavily flawed characters.



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"Hexatious" by Robo
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A willful soul or two, wound through fate’s wayward whims—whatever they may be, beyond the veil…
Links: Judges' Comments



How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

Pretty quickly, for one (and preemptively, in a way)! To of course elaborate, once I’d caught wind of this contest via Reddit, I managed to cook up three concepts for my submission after a couple of days:

- Daily dealings with a Ralts-line lab assistant

- Rotom calibration/troubleshooting

- An ode to the fandom darling amongst other things (and personal favorite, in any case) Hex Maniac trainer class

That last one specifically is something that I’ve actually had in my creative bucket list for a good while now—granted, I’d far from call this piece a ‘pilot’ or anything for most of what I’d had in mind beforehand; to keep from getting too tangential, let’s just say that plans have changed whilst working on it… (continued below spoiler)

Speaking of changing plans, anyway, I ended up effectively going forward with all three of those concepts—albeit, after first firmly settling on the Rotom-tech. The idea of having to help acclimatize what’d effectively be a sentient power supply (and then some) was something that absolutely tickled me to think about; the notion of personality or prior experience potentially wrinkling such a process, even more so! As a small bonus, my recent-ish Mega Man Battle Network fascination had also birthed a ‘computer-based companion’ itch in need of scratching, so…

As the brainstorm surged on, though, the thought occurred to me of who exactly could be called upon to help get such a specter sorted out—thus, I decided to capitalize on what I mentioned two paragraphs ago. And as for what that ‘lab assistant’ idea amounted to…

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

While I was conceptualizing, one of the fun little thoughts I wound up with for the aforementioned Ralts line was that of a ‘kenku-esque’ take on telepathy. The idea was that, if a Pokémon’s foremost frame of reference for spoken English, et cetera ‘human language’ was…well, humans (as I’d imagine would be the case), its own psychically projected ‘voice’ in that vein—were it to ever bother with such, anyhow—could in turn start off as a memory-based collage of such vocalizations, before coalescing over time to form a unique timbre and tone to itself. I never had it in mind to base a whole narrative around that conceit, but now that I put it like that…I guess I’ll add ‘Ralts/Kirlia/Gardevoir very literally finding her voice’ to that bucket list.

In any case, once I’d committed to the Rotom & Hex Maniac interplay, the topic of communication obviously came to mind—and I thus briefly humored an iteration of the above, in the form of some classic TTS-style jank courtesy of whatever device said Rotom would be inhabiting. I wound up deciding to streamline things, though—partly because I was closing in on the submission deadline. Oh well!

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

I’m a firm(ly pedantic) advocate of the fact conceit that art is entirely a matter of interpretation—and as a matter of fact, this idea is one that I (ideally) embrace within every word that I write, beyond any other thoughts that I might’ve put behind a given piece of prose.

…All that being said, as I got further into this piece I began to anticipate a particular sort of ambiguity therein, regarding (what I personally make out to be—again, just to be perfectly pedantic) the three centermost characters—or rather, the impressions of such: I figure that a given reader’s lot in life will readily fill in whatever blanks they might see in this story, and in turn heavily color what sort of person (etc.) they picture behind each name within it.

As banal as it sounds to spell out like that, I find that much to be a fun idea—and I hope to see as much reflected in your guys’ feedback, on that note!

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

Just that, as per my answer to the previous question, I implore them to take the text on their own terms first and foremost—whether or not they want to keep whatever I said here (or anywhere else, for that matter) in mind.


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"Lather Up, Luxray!" by scrivenernoodz
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Third Place Pikachu Flight

What's got Volkner's Luxray in such a sour mood? The Shining, Shocking Star is no stranger to hare-brained, high-voltage schemes. But when it’s bath time for his most supercharged partner, Volkner's less of a genius than he thinks.
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

I've been writing Volkner for almost three years and over 200k words now. I love to show him being amped-up and silly in addition to the moody-blue-eyed son-of-a-Bidoof we love from canon. Because my main fic right now places so much emphasis on Volkner's lifelong friendship with Luxray, (as well as his unfortunate position as a third wheel,) I wanted to write a one-shot where they both get to be just the right amount of annoyed and unhinged in Flint's apartment. (Flint has egg trees!)

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

Oh, the opening scene had so many changes. Originally he was trying to grow a coffee tree with a Fresnel lens. (Bad idea.) Then he was trying to grow a coffee tree with a lamp powered by microwaved grapes. I was wondering how Luxray would get dirty, and I decided to simplify things by giving Volkner an experiment he could do in the penthouse instead of his workshop. Of course I brought a toilet into it. (A clean toilet!)

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

Volkner training a Pokémon to cut the power and NOT start a fire in the walls is a much bigger accomplishment than you realize. (*Side-eyes the entirety of My Previous Life Was a Thunder God like Volkner side-eyes his pastry.)

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

An EKG, or electrocardiogram, is a way to draw a visual representation of a person's heartbeat when there are concerns about arrhythmia. "Nitro," or nitroglycerin, is an emergency medication used to treat chest pain, usually during a cardiac event. Verapamil is a daily medication prescribed to prevent chest pain and regulate heart rate and blood pressure. All three things are unusual for Volkner's age, but completely normal for Electric-type Gym Leaders. ;)



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"Ordinary Things" by Farla
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Billie doesn't know precisely what part she did wrong, but it's also not exactly a surprise that sitting on a park bench has summoned police officers.
Links: Judges' Comments



How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

I was thinking about how dangerous or mundane daily life is depends a lot about where exactly you are in society. And also how when it's characters who are faking their way through life, the focus is more on them getting away with it or the reveal/unmasking, not the stress that comes from living in the space between those two parts.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

This one came together pretty much like I intended, for once.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

The unnecessarily violence. Billie gets only a slight benefit from causing someone else injury, and it's easy to have her be virtuous (she could've even avoided causing the drivers problems too - it's so easy to put her somewhere this won't happen). But why should Billie look at this as a situation where she has to be sure it's justified and necessary before acting? All the normal violence has even less necessity behind it.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

A lot of how I think about these guys is inspired by Pom Poko.


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"Past, Present, Future" by ErazonPO3
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Second Place Eevee Flight

Luculia Hiver works at the Hearthome City Museum, a building more concerned with exciting events of the past, rather than the present. Yet a chance encounter with a lone Mime Jr forces Luculia out of her office and into the latest exhibit— which may plant a small seed for the Museum’s future.
Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

Luculia is an original character of mine who was always meant to be juxtaposed with the more exciting lifestyles of your typical Pokemon protagonists, whether they be an upstart young trainer or a skilled veteran in the competitive scene. She’s an existing character for my story Way Out, in which she is suddenly thrust into Hisui— but her life beforehand is perfectly mundane, so I felt she was a perfect fit.


Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

I’m pretty satisfied with what’s in the story already, though one struggle I have with my writing is that I always feel like there’s more room to expand on things, even if I don’t always know where to go. With a bit more hindsight, I think there’s ways the story could have been made a bit stronger by digging just a little bit deeper.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

Getting to come up with all the artefacts that might exist in a Johto cultural exhibit was a lot of fun, and probably my favourite piece to come up with was a certain artistic interpretation of the Legendary dogs.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

I put most of this story together whilst on a short trip in Sydney, and I spent a day or two wandering around catching trains and going to museums, galleries, libraries etc to get inspiration. While I did want to keep the story focused on the tour through the museum, I hope some of the vibrancy of the bustling city also shines through!



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"Perfectly Imperfect" by Lord Knee
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Everything that had a soul deserved a little love.
It was a sentiment that Mildred believed in for as long as she could remember, and it was the same sentiment that inspired her to pursue an unconventional life.
But that was okay.

Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

Before the official contest theme was decided, I thought of a character repairing Ghost-Type Pokémon after seeing the Beauty in Repair theme. When the final theme was chosen, I ended up repurposing the concept and made it this character's job.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

I was worried about how long this would end up being when writing everything out, the first two segments taking up a good chunk of the word limit. After seeing the wiggle room I had left, I would’ve loved to have included more in the last segment of the story just to expand on a few details.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

Portraying the different Pokémon’s feelings in response to the repairing was a part I enjoyed writing a lot! The Pokémon I wanted to focus on were all ones I've never written about before, so it was fun looking at Pokédex entries for their behaviors and finding ways to incorporate that into why these Pokémon might view the repairing process a certain way.

I also really liked adding in a little world building about the materials used and the repairers themselves. For the materials, I tried to pick items that could act as a Pokémon world equivalents to those used in actual kintsugi. For the repairers, even though a Ghost-Type repairer would be the main focus of the story, I wanted there to be some mention of repairers who focus on other types of Pokémon and would use a different selection of materials to better fit the Pokémon they're working with.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

The main character's clients' names and their Pokémon are meant to be a little symbolic. The main character's name is also symbolic of the messages present throughout the story.

Also, the original setting for the story was going to be in a haunted mansion! The main character would enter the mansion at night to repair any Ghost Pokémon that may have been injured. There wouldn't be any official repairing business involved and anything done by the character would be more of a pastime. Initially, I decided against the idea because I didn't have much of a plan, but I think it would be fun to write this version someday!

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"Trueno" by Spiteful Murkrow
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I wrote a vignette collection themed around all those parts of your Violet playthrough getting around from point A to point B scored and text-synced to a Eurobeat playlist. As seen and heard through the eyes and ears of Best Bikederg from a second person perspective.
Oh, and it was an excuse to make the story’s Juliana a giant nerd so there’s more than a few Initial D references of varying degrees of subtlety.

Links: Judges' Comments


How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

This was admittedly a case where I had the story concept chilling on the shelf for a while and the thematic stars and my motivation aligned and gave me an excuse to jam something out as a proof of concept. For those who keep close tabs on me, you might have remembered me chatting last year for the Aeons and Avatars contest that I was playing around with a prompt for an entry centered around Miraidon that would be an excuse to write scenes going around Paldea with Eurobeat blaring in the background.

Yeah, this is that prompt. Given that even back then, I wanted to give more focus to the “boring” parts of Violet’s story campaign, I figured that it fit the “Magical but Mundane” theme close enough to be worth rolling the dice on a submission. After all, “Magical but Mundane” more or less sums up the vibe for the majority of the player’s journey in the Paldea games:

You, the new kid at school, zipping across the region from objective to objective on your very bike-y buddy who’s secretly some creature of legend that you don’t fully understand. All as you feed him sandwiches and crash into a few trees and random encounters along the way... (continued below spoiler)

This story attempted to capture that vibe by getting into the head of the titular character and showing off some of those less standout moments just progressing through his and his team’s journey as set to a banging and not necessarily familiar soundtrack. A bit of “magic” amidst the mundane, if you will. It’s not a 100% canon-compliant portrayal of a Violet campaign since at the time of answering this questionnaire, Game Freak spent their music licensing budget on Ed Sheeran instead of the artists this entry leaned on, you couldn’t officially nickname bikederg until the postgame, and you couldn’t properly drift your lizard while roaming around Paldea, but hopefully it still feels like an on-brand portrayal of the games’ Miraidon.

Granted, I could’ve completely misread the room and gotten dinged hard by the judges for flying too close to the sun in terms of a “character’s adventures”. But eh, I tried. We’ll see how things shake out.

Was there anything you wanted to include in your story but couldn't make fit?

A more in-depth proofreading pass, for one. Since I was tight on time prior to the submission deadline and there were definitely some moments that I went back and fine-tuned a bit after it came and went.

If we’re talking actual story content, Trueno was actually a very cut-down version of a larger concept that included some less mundane parts of Violet’s journey which were omitted to fit scope and theming constraints. I managed to get all but one of those vignettes I aimed for out the door, which was centered around a scenario involving the titular character putting the games’ rock climbing ability to use at a later point of Violet’s main campaign.

There were also some references regarding Eurobeat scene meta (e.x. the genre’s association with Para Para dancing, hence why the story’s Juliana is paired with the dance-themed starter) that I didn’t get to explore as much as I wanted due to length and scope constraints.

Are there any particular details or bits of writing you're especially proud of in your story?

This was a project where I went in under the goal of putting each vignette under a strict length limit to try and keep them synchronized with the music they were set to. There might have been a couple moments where I slipped up on pacing, but at least in terms of aggregate word count, it kept each installment nicely between 1000-1300 words when writing conciseness is often something I often struggle with. Also, I’d had a goal of writing a Eurobeat songfic in some capacity since 2021, so it was nice to get that one crossed off my writing bucket list.

I also did a bit of digging in order to try and nail the details for places and things that players might encounter while roaming around Paldea (e.x. the dashing and jumping sequence in the vignette set in the bluffs overlooking Cabo Poco is actually doable in-game if you’re quick enough with your timing). It also extended to little details like how the titular character’s drifting he starts getting into early on is based on how one would actually drift a motorcycle (just keep your health insurance in order if you try it out in real life!). And true to form for me as a writer, I got in some fun with foreign language content, in particular with the vignette set while camping, which might be a bit familiar to any readers who were into LatAm Spanish dubbed anime.

I mean, yes, there was definitely more than a little self-indulgence for me as an author involved in this whole story, but it was honestly a lot of fun just running around and seeking out all the little pieces that I wanted to go into this story and blending them together.

Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about your story?

The vignette titles are the titles of the songs that are meant to be listened to while reading. I’m not fully sure how that will work for the Zine release, but in the version submitted to the contest and the eventual public-facing version, said titles contain a hyperlink to the song the text was scored to.

As for that final version, you’ll be seeing it out in the wild sometime soon™ in serial format, if likely a bit noticeably longer than the version that will show up in the Zine and with some extra tunes to jam to.



thumb_for_ethics.png
"Work Ethics" by Wildboots
Third Place Eevee Flight
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They just want to clock in and do their job, but Management keeps making things more difficult. Or: a tough day at the office.
Links: Judges' Comments



How did you decide what sort of character you wanted to show the daily life of?

Slice-of-life thrives in visual mediums, but in fiction it's much harder to keep it from becoming boring. I decided the best way to create tension was with an unreliable narrator and dramatic irony. I've already done a short series about the daily life of trainers (Postcards), so I wanted to try something else. I finally settled on someone who thinks their office job is mundane and has no idea that they're actually in the middle of a much bigger and much more sinister plot.

I hope readers take this as an invitation to reflect on their own daily life: are there things you're ignoring because you've dismissed them as normal? On the other hand, I also hope it's a reminder that even if your job sucks, it actually could be worse! : )
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"The Blur" by WindsweptCity

Ricky groaned as his alarm rang. He groped out blindly at the Chingling shaped device, eventually managing to grab hold of it and switch the annoying thing off. Even after a few years, he struggled to stick to a set work schedule.

Stretching and cracking as many bones in his body as he could, he slid out of bed and flicked the light on, nudging a smaller, but no less plush bed on the floor with his foot. “Oy. Don’t pretend you’re a Voltorb. I know you heard that. It’s time to get up.”

Electrike shifted sleepily and mumbled something, skiing deeper into his bed, but it was enough for Ricky. It was a lot easier to get ready for the day as a Pokémon than a human, he mused, heading to the bathroom.

He had to relieve himself, brush, shower, and put on respectable clothes, check that his black hair and beard weren’t looking too wild, and apply deodorant, all before he could head to the kitchen and get some breakfast, where Electrike was already waiting.

The part-time electrician poured some Pokémon mix into a bowl, adding a few berries that grew on a farm south of the city, while sticking a couple of frozen sausage, cheese, and egg biscuits into the microwave for himself, while making coffee.

Ricky sat down heavily to join his Pokémon once everything was finished. Electrike glanced up from his food with a questioning look.

“What’s the plan? We’re going to the TV station today, to run some cameras. I don’t have any other calls, and they’re seemingly always in need of some help…”


Judge Comments

JFought

This one’s neat! The idea of a story about how the Latias/os news story at the beginning of RSE’s postgame came to be feels inspired, and you managed to get a pretty complete story out of it.

Ricky and Violet were a fun dynamic. I liked Violet’s energy and enthusiasm, and Ricky’s more humble and down-to-earth attitude is nicely contrasted. The rivalry they have with Gabby and Ty is also a fun detail to explain why we've never saw them in the games. They’re fairly simple characters at the end of the day, but they were charming and fun to follow, and I really think it helps this story in being an easy one to like. The side characters were a bit more hit-and-miss: I found most of them to be fairly shallow archetypes played a little bit too straight. But they’re each only around for a few paragraphs each, so none of them really detracted from the story too much for me.

Speaking of the story, it manages to cover all of its bases in pretty quick order. Every scene is short and to the point, getting across the essentials of our reporter duo investigating rumors of the Blur and developing their story. By the end it feels pretty complete, and honestly I’m a little envious that you managed that in 7k (*cough* not that i uh- *cough cough* not that i’d have any reason to be *cough*). I like how both of Ricky and Violet's strengths as characters are brought into their investigation (Violet being more assertive and proactive, while Ricky takes a more lowkey, conversational approach to gathering information), and the old, dusty camcorder is a pretty satisfying Chekhov's Gun that ties into Ricky's interest in filming. Though I do think there are a couple moments that are maybe a little bit contrived. Like, it was pretty convenient that they could just… teleport to Mirage Island, right from that guy's house moments after figuring out where it was. I suppose I can concede that going straight to the island keeps the story moving and prevents having to waste any time getting them a boat and sailing out there, though I do think this leads into my main criticism.

I think the main weakness of the story is its prose. It's minimalist to a fault, is the best way I can put it, and the moment-to-moment pacing is often stiff and clunky. There’s very little in the way of set dressing or small details to ground us in each scene as they come, and so I often felt I just kinda had to go along with how I think the story wants me to feel. It does feel like the focus is squarely on the characters and their interactions, and while I do think the leads are strong enough to carry these scenes, the story still lacks much of an atmosphere, if that makes any sense. Like, I think there are moments where this story could’ve afforded to slow down and let our characters just linger in the moment for a bit. Maybe when Ricky took a drink over to that fisherman, we could’ve had a little more buildup to really hammer in the humbleness of the moment. Maybe we don’t need a scene where they get a boat after all, but there was a missed opportunity to build up anticipation leading into the climax. Starting a scene by quickly summarizing “they got a boat” and then showing them on said boat on their way to the island off in the distance could’ve built up the climax more without having to slow the story down too much, and with 3k to spare you definitely would've had enough words for it. As is, it’s just very abrupt, and I think taking the time to give these scenes proper setup would do a lot to improve the quality of the storytelling.

As far as theme application goes, I do also think it’s a little shaky? My take on your interpretation is that we’re making a point of focusing on a facet of RSE’s story that was glossed over. Something originally considered too mundane to focus on, when realistically there would be a story there. Following these two around on their job as they cover small stories, slowly building up to their big break… I think I can respect this approach, though it does feel like the emphasis is being placed on "humility" rather than "mundanity." Though I think the actual weak link is the Pokémon aspect, strangely enough. We do have Violet’s Xatu teleporting our characters around, and obviously the plot is about chasing Latias, but there isn’t much else to really ground the setting in the Pokémon world and fulfill the second half of the prompt.* So much of the story is focused on the human characters that the two Pokémon characters that we have don’t feel all that important or essential. Xatu only being a form of transportation isn’t the most interesting angle to take, and the one moment where Ricky’s Electrike gets to be important is in a climactic battle, which, while I’m glad he got that and it makes sense for the story, theme-wise it doesn’t quite fit. I think I would’ve liked to see more of how Electrike fits into Ricky’s work. As it is, he just kinda follows him around in the background, and it doesn’t feel like the story is properly utilizing the possibilities of the setting.

*(i guess the climax of sapphire is going on in the background, but it's not really important, it's just context for when this takes place.)

That was a long couple paragraphs, but I really do have to emphasize that I liked this one! I do think it has its flaws, but I’m only being hard on it because of how much I enjoyed it in spite of them. It’s a very earnest and charming read, and I came out of it feeling pretty satisfied. You showed off a lot of potential with this story, and I think you deserve to feel proud of it.

kintsugi

I really liked the direction you took with this one, especially with regard to theme: I think you did a great job on “day in the life”, more on that in a sec, but I really liked the direction you emphasized the implicit back half of the prompt, “in the Pokemon world.” I think you really captured that feeling of exploration that comes with jumping into a new region, trying out the postgame, chasing those playground rumors about that truck, and emphasized it with the choice of using reporter protagonists whose daily job is to hunt down these new things and share them with the world,. And at the same time, there’s a distinctly Older feeling to it; these are protagonists who haven’t given up on exploring the magical world around them, but they do need to thread in their actual jobs, a few precious nights out at the pub, some awkward clients. It’s a unique and fun feeling of, like, changed nostalgia; the climax of this story sees Ricky, Violet, and Electrike each achieving or revisiting a discarded childhood goal, and it’s kind of hammy but in a really cozy way–everyone gets their wish and it never really feels tense or in doubt, but it does feel narratively satisfying.

I’m also endlessly tickled that these guys are obscure rivals to the obscure rivals; I think you probably could’ve stopped at Gabby and Ty for characters in the Pokemon world who have a fundamentally straightforward/typical life, but Ricky and Violet are one step even further removed, and I find that incredible lol. I think Ricky as an everyman was a good pick for a protagonist, both for this story and this prompt. Earnestness is a trait that doesn’t always strike me as being at the forefront of protagonist-coded personalities, but I think it really works here–dude just wants everyone to succeed, and I think that worked great for the low-stakes setting that you built. There’s some really nice narrative lines from Ricky that really helped ground him and keep the tone lighthearted. My favorites were “one beer was not enough for this” and “he started to root for anyone to win but the men’s team from Dewford”–both of these capture a kind of Doneness that I associate with being a jaded adult, but they don’t strictly preclude him from spending some sick leave to bust open his childhood camera again. Violet’s motivation is one of those “oof, but also, I understand it” thoughts, but I think here it works well as a shorthand to quickly get across what she wants to gain and lose.

I thought some of the middle cluefinding bits felt a hair contrived, mostly because it didn’t really feel like Ricky or Violet do specific things that lead them to reach the next scene. It felt simultaneously too realistic (sometimes you do just randomly troubleshoot for hours only to find the fix in the entirely opposite direction) and too gamey (an NPC standing at a scripted event that you were cutscened into says an unprompted, cryptic hint that simultaneously alludes to your current fetchquest as well as your character arc). The flow of investigation after the library scene is: the gang is assigned to do a cover an art gallery showing, and a hex-maniac coded girl pops out and confirms that psychic presences are real; the gang is assigned to cover a volleyball tournament, and the first person Ricky happens to talk to has seen the Blur and describes it as red, white, and she; the gang is assigned to interview Dusty, and he mentions Mirage Tower and a mirage pokemon; Violet goes to her friend and gets pointed to the final location of the quest. I like the constraint that Ricky and Violet have to work within their jobs while still trying to find their own scoop, but structurally I found that their sleuthing read less as intentional investigation/putting together clues that everyone else missed, and more as being directed through a series of clues that we the audience can solve (due to the benefit of knowing the whole pokedex). It also doesn’t feel like there’s natural progression–was it specifically the word “mirage” that got Violet to talk to her friend in the last leg, rather than the knowledge that it’s invisible? I think things would’ve flowed a lot more smoothly, and the characters would’ve had more agency, if Ricky/Violet were able to build on the information to make choices that brought them to the next clue, rather than being assigned it by their employment. I think there’s a fair argument that this is reflective of reality, serendipitous things can happen, people still have to work their jobs while chasing their dreams, sorta thing. Mostly I just wanted a little more connective tissue in the context of specifically a sleuthing story, but I don’t really think this detracted a ton.

That being said, I thought this was a delightfully cozy story with a solid premise, a relatable but low-stakes conflict, and some really wonderful details. A smaller, equally plush bed for Electrike! The wheel of employment-based progress moving ever-onwards, and the gradually increasing blase reaction we take towards it! Castform making small clouds during the weather broadcast! This story oozes really cute details like that, and broadly I think you did a great job of telling a charming story that revisits the casual nostalgia of the Pokemon world. Thanks for sharing!

tomatorade

I think you’ve got a bit of a problem with clumsy exposition. Sort of a show-don’t-tell kind of thing, as much as I dislike that term. An obvious example at the beginning was starting a paragraph about Ricky with ‘the part-time electrician’. That is a load-bearing epitaph if I’ve ever seen one. It’s minor, but awkward, and kills any interest I’d have in him being a part-time electrician because it’s so plainly stated and doesn’t really show any impact that would have on him or his day-to-day. Why not introduce this by having him glance at his degree on the wall or think about his next client or something? Information like that I think needs to be shown. There are a number of other similar cases across the fic. Really, I’d recommend combing through your exposition and asking whether the story would benefit from having certain elements shown.

Debating with myself on how you handled the prompt. To your credit, there’s a lot of ‘magical and mundane’ details. I think you pay great attention to elektrike’s day as much as Ricky’s and the impetus to the story is exploring the life of a cameraman/reporter duo, which is a clever little take on mainline pokemon lore. Personally, I loved whenever you snuck in a little detail about camera or electrical operations—that’s the kind of stuff I’d like to see more of—as per my complaints earlier. But at the same time, this quickly veers into more of an adventure story given the prompt. The moment I think the tone changes is essentially once they reach Southern island. Everything before that worked for me as an exploration of both poke journalism and poke news reporting, but once they get there it quickly veers away from the mundane, imo. That’s not to say it’s bad on its own, only that it loses the prompt a little bit.

I did enjoy Ricky’s inherent rustiness though. It’s not something you often see in fic, but having him struggle to battle with electrike added some interesting takes and flavour to the battle, and helped sell his character.

It’s pretty funny to me that RIcky ends up doing more detective work than Violet. Not even really in a bad way, it’s a classic anime/cartoon kind of setup that works with the lighter tone of the fic—I can imagine them being side characters, the perky, ambitious news reporter and her beleaguered cameraman that does most of the work lol. He’s even the one that names it the Blur. He’s also got a bit of a convenient streak. While I appreciate the need to speed things up a little in order to keep your oneshot in limit, a lot of the investigative journalism RIcky does sorta… happens to him. It’s mostly people talking to him out of the blue or him asking the first person he sees a question and getting an answer. I would’ve like at least a brief mention of him making the rounds before leading into the question that resolves the scene. You actually do this with the initial research—having them struggle a bit before finding a pattern—so it’s not like it has to be super in depth, just some leadup to make his success feel less coincidental. Or more of a reason for him to know these specific people will have answers.

Ricky’s my blue collar hero. Love the way he bullshits through the art exhibit.

You don’t have too many characters, but the ones you have are done fairly well. Ignoring some of my previous issues with exposition, I get a sense of RIcky, Violet and their relationship fairly quickly. And electrike, of course, who doesn’t have too much of a presence in the story but comes through strongly whenever mentioned. Your pokemon in general are a strong suit. I tend to like fics that work well with pokepersonalites and how certain species might be used or express themselves, so things like electrike needing to run and castform being actually used for some localised rain and xatu’s whole vibe, are great little details.

However, I do wish Latias got either a bit more or a bit less detail. The two options imo are to keep her even more of a mystery or include a bit more personality and species specific detail like you do with the other pokemon in order for her to fit in more.

Ricky using his old camcorder to film Latias might be my favorite part of the fic. It's a very thematically strong construction to bring back something relevant to the start of the fic all the way at the end, and really strengthens the moment.

Overall, great job! I had many complaints, but I still quite enjoyed the fic and thought it was a fun take on the prompt.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"A Change of Perspective" by Sinderella

Shoulders back. Straight gait. Hair gelled, deeeeeeeeeefintely uses Dior cologne because he’s trying to smell more pristine than he is. Can see a tattoo poking out from under his cuff, does he have a sleeve? That’s a dress code violation. Naughty, naughty.

I watched him turn toward a hallway that leads toward the labs, and I quirked my brow as I reached up to wrap one of my curls around my finger. He wasn’t dressed for a lab at all, so what—?

He stopped abruptly, checked the signs, realized he was in the wrong place, and turned his heel toward the hallway leading to the classrooms. Better.


So, he might be slightly stupid. I can work with that, I thought with a smirk, leaning around my raised textbook to get a better look at his butt.

It was there that Odile decided to kick my bladder. Using it as an ottoman just wasn’t enough for her...


Judge Comments

JFought

Well I definitely know who wrote this one. :P

Right off the bat, I did have a hard time orienting myself in the opening scene. I think it might be a little too vague on details for a little too long to draw us into the story. But once I got settled in, I found this one pretty enjoyable! There’s an inherent risk to submitting a one-shot that is very transparently a companion piece to one’s own fic into a contest like this, but I think this story manages to toe the line more or less perfectly. And pretty cheekily, too: as someone in the process of reading WSBS, the premonitions surrounding Odette act as some pretty clear foreshadowing, but even if I knew literally nothing, it would still work just from taking the story’s worldbuilding at face value. And so the fact that I am familiar with some of these characters is really just a nice bonus for me.

I think you did a good job leveraging your strengths as a writer here. Vienna is a fun character to follow backed by a strong narrative voice, the bits of occult worldbuilding we got were really cool and interesting, and I enjoyed the slice of life stuff and how her arc in this story tied into that. Vienna has a lot of anxiety for the future in this stage of her life, between her pregnancy, her education, her relationship with her mother, etc. And I think the way all of these elements tie back into the contest theme, and the way the contest theme is then core to the message of the story, is a neat way to interpret it and well executed on your part.

I think the characters besides Vienna were generally pretty well-written too, with a lot of well-written dialogue. In particular I liked the dynamic between Vienna and her dad, it was very wholesome and I enjoyed their scenes together. And Wraith stuck out to me too: she was only there for the one scene, yet her manner of speaking and the presence you gave her was really memorable and still sticks out in my mind whenever I think about this story.

I do have two criticisms. The first is that I think Vienna’s mother and the conflict between them is a little underdeveloped. It’s not that I can’t accept how the story treats it in the end: I think it makes sense that Vienna’s mother still cares about her daughter and might also want to try and mend that bridge. It’s moreso that it all feels very secondary to the story in the first place, and so ending things on that note feels kind of weak. Like, whenever the conflict between them is brought up, it seems like it only exists as context for the “main” conflict, and the mother has very little presence otherwise. It doesn’t feel like something that’s essential to the story’s themes beyond that, so when the story tries to make a point out of her change of perspective happening outside of Vienna’s view, it felt strangely disconnected to me, and I find myself wishing we could have understood what led to that change a bit more anyway.

The other criticism is on theme. While I think you nailed the first half of the contest theme (daily life), the second half (in the pokémon world), felt a bit weaker. Pokémon and their abilities are utilized as part of the plot, but not really in a way that connects back to that first half. It’s really only there to establish that Vienna’s stressing herself out and the negative effect this has on the baby. For as much as I do like the occult stuff and the presence of Wraith, I can’t really say the way Pokémon are utilized here satisfies that part of the theme all that strongly, at least for me.

That out of the way, I do have to emphasize that these are really just small quibbles! I really enjoyed this look into Vienna from before the events of WSBS. I think you did a good job with it, and I look forward to continuing my journey through your main fic in the future!

kintsugi

I like the premise for this one a lot–“I didn’t realize how much of a life I didn’t have until half of it was taken away from me” sets up a really clever way to force a mundane day on the protagonist without making the story devoid of conflict, since the conflict is the mundanity now. And it’s fun to see how different people view this tension: Vienna is absolutely chafing at the idea of a forced leave, but the old tired adults in the room are kind of jealous that she gets a huge vacation tbh. Having Dad here to smooth things out adds a nice bit of grounding to the conflict–being boring is big and disastrous for Vienna, but people who aren’t hormonally pregnant teenagers are able to step in with some empathy and steer her in the right direction. It’s a nice, small scale conflict/resolution that I thought met the spirit of the theme really well.

The school slice-of-life bits are interesting and there’s some really nice worldbuilding, though I feel like the scenes themselves are double-dipping a bit. The first scene establishes what Vienna thinks she has to lose: Nina, her pokemon, the grindset to become the best student in the class despite being enormously pregnant. The second scene establishes more of the same, just minus the friends: there are really cool, somewhat spontaneous opportunities at this school, and by not being present Vienna runs the risk of missing the random hedge mismagius who comes out of the woods for lab and probably won’t come back–a lot of things in life are once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, actually. I think individually this overlap isn’t super redundant, and there’s enough uniqueness in the social/academic aspects of school being played out here, but the tension for both of these scenes is also the same: a semi-precognitive pokemon senses that there is something deeply wrong with Vienna’s fetus, Vienna insists that she’s fine, and everyone disagrees. It makes the story feel really front-heavy, especially with how the story resolves. I think having Mom make some really Flawed decisions in trying to deal with watching Vienna repeat (what Mom maybe sees as) her mistakes is a really fun dynamic to add to the story–again, it’s not world-ending family drama and everyone does come out okay, but it’s a really raw and fraught relationship that’s fun to examine. I feel like the examination gets less attention than the first bits of the story do, though: Dad basically says the conflict out loud on Mom’s behalf, and then Mom changes her mind offscreen. Vienna “[doesn’t] even know what changes in her, but [...] [doesn’t] question it”, so it ends up feeling somewhat random and out of Vienna’s agency as a result. It’s not unrealistic for people to reneg on their choices without explaining themselves, but structurally it feels odd, specifically because this is both what the story closes on and what it’s named after. I found myself wanting something more from this conflict that’s in Vienna’s control to identify or solve, rather than Mom getting over herself upstairs and offscreen. That the second minor emotional catharsis (the gang does a phone call and plans a party) happens outside of Vienna’s control as well adds to the ending feeling a bit structurally eclectic–they didn’t know that Vienna just had her big emotional understanding, and they would’ve called anyway, so it feels a bit unsatisfying as a random event.

I also think there’s some character stuff with Vienna that probably does need explanation for this to function as a standalone story. The father of Vienna’s child is not Popular with the gang, and I think that’s all we’d really need to know to make this story function structurally–it’s just that bits like “I swore, when I set out to get pregnant with that bloody fucker’s baby, I was going to make both work, some way or another” throw a lot of unresolved questions into the mix. In this standalone oneshot, the primary conflict that gets resolved is that Vienna is trying to “make both work”; there’s really not much else in here that goes about addressing why Vienna “set out to get pregnant”intentionally with a presumably known bastard, except perhaps some of the Mom stuff–but both feel under-examined and kind of come out of left field. There’s also a lot of Vienna dialogue that I thought was setting up for some sort of resolution: she’s deeply Thirsty and superficial, and clocks every adult she sees by what they’re wearing. It’s a detail that I feel has some hooks into the story: quotes like “what kind of top student would I be” and “they all had enough to worry about that wasn’t their stupid pregnant friend” speak deeply to coming of age conflicts of young adults trying to figure out who they are in the world around them. It feels like Vienna’s at times cruel fixation on how other people look is intertwined with that, but the emotional catharsis for soul-bonding with the fetus comes from Vienna not thinking about these things, but more in the sense that they fall out of the narrative than because she realizes she shouldn’t prioritize these things.

(sidebar, does the fetus get dumber once born? Some of the earlier actions like “kicking when it’s loud” track as advanced but realistic infant biology, i.e. not liking noisy disturbances, and some of the earlier stuff can probably just be attributed to statistics/random chance producing seemingly correlated results, or just doing it for the bit. But the plot is hinged on multiple Word of God-adjacent authorities stating she’s got complex emotions going on and that specifically these complex emotions are due to her accurately reading a mismatch between her soul and Vienna’s, and later her outbursts are timed responses to topics like “[the ethics of monetizing pregnancy fetishes] [summary]” and “stopping [Vienna] from saying or doing something stupid”, which are typically levels of sapience that I’d maybe expect of a really emotionally adept elementary-school child at a minimum.)

Overall I think there’s some really fun worldbuilding with the school. I love the details like the Occultolgy branch absolutely not messing around with cryptic warnings from Wraith–it’s fun on a meta-level because institutions doing the logical response is never really what we get in horror/occult fiction, and it also implies a nice level of respect for pokemon guest speakers in this setting. I also really loved the description of Wraith in general; it’s very cottagecore and overall just a cool direction to take mismagius as a species. I also think you did a great job of portraying the day-by-day elements of this: both how boring the passage of time can be (without making that section of the story feel boring) and how there’s really bright moments of joy even in the mundane things. Thanks for sharing!

tomatorade

So heartwarming :). This is the kind of thing I was looking to see from the prompts.

The strong point of this fic is obviously the world. It’s clearly established, every element feels like it’s been written in the background, existing all this time while I lived my life. And I’m only now peeking into a small slice of what’s happening. I felt this with the characters especially, you manage to touch on so many aspects of the human experiences—teachers, peer, friends, mentors, parents, pets (kinda)--which is an interesting note to have on the fic, but it never felt force here. I found myself taking on a lot of different perspectives over a very brief period of time without ever leaving the main POV and I think that’s a feat.

I appreciate the laidback approach to exposition here (for the most part). You’ve managed to get across most of what I think you wanted without needing to go too in depth on anything or bog down the real story with explanation. One especially interesting thing about the structure of the fic is the way pregnancy is weaved throughout—a presence from the start to the end. A great anchoring tool through every event in the fic while we’re jumping around between scenes. Needless to say, I like this. It’s a great throughline to tie the fic together even though the events are all kinda day-to-day. Without it the whole thing falls apart.

Admittedly, the direction of this story did not hit me quickly on first read lol. I couldn’t really say why, I feel maybe a little bit of chaos in the beginning. As much as I praised your use of exposition before, I also felt thrown into the deep end at the beginning. There’s not a lot of easing. Character details and interests and separate characters and baby names and psychic examinations are flying around the first couple pages and I didn’t really get into it until we hit the classroom. I’m not entirely sure how to remedy this—I like all the details included, but some might benefit from being spread out. Like, one of the characters could come in later instead of here and free up a little space in the scene. Otherwise, I think it works as an introduction. Vienna is a fun character with great rapport which is obvious from two words of dialogue. You do a smart thing showing her checking out some dude as the very first paragraph of the fic. It’s a strong detail that suggests a lot about her character and her ah… situation.

Character remains the strong point of the fic after, I think. You manage to bring a lot of depth and nuance to the situation and really build up Vienna through her priorities: her want to both take care of this bab and continue kicking ass at school, and have a social life, and mend relations with her mother. Plus her relationships. Her friendships are all fun and organic, but where you really shine is with her parents. Here’s the heart of the fic. I’ve always enjoyed these complicated sort of interactions. I think sweet moments are made all the sweeter by a little bit of conflict and uncertainty. Plus all the reasoning for this emotional reality was strong. Which is to say, I understood and empathised with her mother’s position even if I didn’t agree with her actions. It’s easy to mess this up and turn her into a villain, but the nuance you include is appreciated. You have a quite dense character piece here and I believe Vienna was developed far more beyond this oneshot.

For some minor nitpicks, I do wonder if the outcome of the class was too obvious. No that it should be some huge twist, but you end the hangout scene before with an extremely on the nose line about omens class and ah… yeah, I kinda just shrugged at that.

I do wonder about the unease of the baby. I’m not sure If I was meant to pick up on something specific causing that at the beginning. The text seems to imply a kind of vague discontent or overwork. Could also be her strained relationship with her mother, but I didn’t really connect the two given how that plot point shows up much later than the baby issues. IDK, this is only really an issue if you were actually trying to get across a specific cause— in that, case it didn’t come through at all. If not, It’s fine. I don’t think I really needed or wanted an explanation for what was going on. Sometimes things just happen.

And here I thought you wouldn’t sneak a title drop in there somewhere.

Happy writing! I think I know who wrote this one but shhhh…
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"The Cost of Paint" by The Walrein

Tess Smeargle looked intently at the calendar glued to her wall. All around it, intricate designs were carved into the glass-smooth stone, the work of sculptors with hundreds or thousands of years’ experience. Something she’d never be able to match even if Smeargle lived nine times longer than they did. She frowned, then set about her day.

Pokemon only washed when they were dirty, or wanted to conceal their scent like an outlaw, so there was no need for a bath before breakfast. Tess fished a few berries out of her icebox, then opened a window and unfurled a banner. Outside, constant streams of flying Pokemon formed a riot of colors in the sky. One of them took notice and swooped through Tess’s window a few minutes later.

“Morning Tess!” Aya Fletchinder chirped, dropping a sack onto Tess’ table. A portion of hard-boiled Chansey egg; it was quite the luxury to get it delivered routinely, but Tess could afford it. Unlike certain other things. “Looking forward to the gallery opening today?”

“Yeah,” Tess mumbled, already stuffing egg into her mouth...


Judge Comments

JFought

I have to talk about the worldbuilding here, because it is extremely creative. The idea of move jockeys is really fun, and the use of Pokémon moves and abilities here is some of the most inventive I have ever seen in a Pokémon fanfic. Your vision of the PMD world feels vibrant and inspired and I really do have to give you points for that because you deserve them.

I also think it works as an interpretation of the theme, just in a more macro sense. We get a pretty decent glimpse into how this town operates and how everyone being Pokémon fits into that. The look into the town’s art world is also really cool and you clearly put a lot of thought into it.

All that said, when it comes to the actual story, I do think it begins to falter. It seems to be about the conflict between Tess’ job and her desire to be an artist: she is someone who primarily enables others, whether it be to do their work or follow their dreams, and as a result is unable to focus on the things she wants to do. But it feels like the one-shot struggles to balance this story with its own worldbuilding. And considering that, I think the decision to end on a downer was a bit strange?

Like, I don’t have any issue with it on principle, but I feel like this kind of ending, where Tess bitterly reflects on how none of her pieces are in the gallery, only works if the rest of the story can back it up. But the story seems more concerned with painting a picture of this world than it is with Tess as a character, with only small glimpses into what she thinks and how she feels. Most of her struggle is just kind of told to us, we never actually see how she deals with it, and as a result it ends up underdeveloped. So I found myself unsure on what to take away from the ending here. While I can feel sorry for her, I don’t feel all that attached, and so I’m left wanting, not just by the ending, but by the story as a whole. It felt like this was supposed to land, y’know? And the fact that it didn’t brings the whole thing down a peg.

The easy solution would be to make the story longer, but I think doing more to ground the story within Tess’ perspective could do a lot here without really having to change too much about the general outline. I would’ve liked to see more of how she feels about her situation, how she feels about her role, what she does to try and work towards her dream, and the reasons why she faces setbacks. We get a little bit of the former two, but there’s a noticeable lack of the latter two that causes her to feel too passive, and so I think there’s a lot more that can be done here to really get us invested in her as a character.

All in all, when it comes to this story’s strengths, I think it excels. There’s a lot of really cool stuff here! It’s just that one thing that drags it down for me.

kintsugi

I thought that there were some really fun worldbuilding bits in this story–there are some pretty heavy game abstractions such as “PMD cities are canonically fairly similar to a generic fantasy/human setup” and “pokemon moves are literally magic” tbh that I think can be pretty difficult to make sound reasonable in a non-videogame narrative, but I think you made some clever adaptations here. It’s deeply “magical but mundane” imo; there’s something almost nihilistic and dystopic about watching the characters of our childhood fantasy drearily endure their 9 to 5’s, treat themselves to a new-age gastropub meal, and stick up their noses about fuddy-duddy safety regulations to make sure they don’t get crushed to death, but it’s also kind of fascinating to watch. I think you did a great job of making these things feel natural by introducing the details through blase, casual narration–Tess talking very clinically about her embedded Reviver Seed, or checking the news for the Rain Dance forecast, or the casual taxi!Fearow are occurrences that are deeply alien to readers but get conveyed really seamlessly. I think my favorite parts by far were the different types of art–while a lot of the employment stuff feels very despairing (in a realistic way), there’s something a lot more optimistic about how this society still manages to convey beauty to one another, even if they’re wildly different from one another.

I found Tess to be full of directionless anger, in a way that I struggled to understand in the context of the story–there’s undercurrents of a Point about her bitterness towards others being related to her own understanding/perceptions of inferiority of how her innate talents actually limit her, but it doesn’t really evolve beyond her naming that anger to the audience; it seems like she’s always known this is how she’s felt and the events of the story unfold just to give her the confidence to say it. As a result I mostly found it difficult to sympathize with her later sentiments like “I know this is a terrible thing to say [...] But I look at them, and I think, ‘I could’ve done better”, or “Tess questioned how many of them were there for the art and not the food”, or “Etta Butterfree’s gimmick – perhaps it was rude to think of it that way, but gimmick it was”. None of these characters really do anything beyond be observed doing the one thing Tess disparages them for, and I don’t find it morally wrong for someone to spend a lot of time on art that someone else doesn’t think was worth it, or to eat at a party, or to use technology/substances to alter how they see the world when doing art, so I’m not immediately on board with hating them when the narrator takes time out of a fairly limited wordcount to cast this behavior in a negative light. If anything, it feels kind of contradictory with the rest of the narrative in a way that doesn’t get a resolution. Tess thinks she could’ve done better, but a major source of angst for her is that she lives in a society (TM) where she feels she lacks the time to put in hundreds of hours in an art piece; she has some pieces at the show but she’s also self-conscious about how she’s not producing like the greats. Tess spends seven paragraphs eating in this story, and a single sentence actually observing the art in the gallery–because, again, a major source of her angst is that she doesn’t have the time to spend on art after her job and doing the essentials to stay alive. Etta gets shade for utilizing two abilities via technology, which is only a few shades removed from Tess’s ability to produce highly realistic drawings using her (implied) innate ability to flawlessly sketch perfect copies of the things she sees–is the issue supposed to be that Etta’s using tech to compensate for an implied lack of skill or natural talent, but Tess was just born with the right toolset? None of these things are inherently wrong when Tess does them either, and I sympathize with her frustrations, but I was also waiting for the other shoe to drop and for her to realize that part of what she’s mad about is herself. Because where I really tripped up is that all of these snubbed characters seem genuinely happy, whereas Tess is unable to feel anything outside of this faceless anger/depression. Perry is having a grand old time at the show and is happy to extend that joy to Tess; Etta’s effusively grateful to Tess for giving her a chance. When they do speak, the people that the narrative spends the entire time putting down act like joyous, well-adjusted members of society who simply happen to have different problems and solutions than Tess; however, the conclusion doesn’t seem to be that Tess is the one who should change, but instead the people who are living their lives outside of Tess’s pragmatism-over-all-else worldview. The specificity of Tess’s shade towards other characters almost identically mirroring her own actions makes it feel like Tess’s hypocrisy, despondence, and frustration is part of the point, that the tortured not-artist mentality is part of the conflict, but the story’s resolution doesn’t make it feel that way.

The concluding narration wraps Tess’s internal monologue up with what I interpreted as a pretty depressing take on how some people are just born special, and actually these people have a more profound struggle than the talentless masses who can easily be replaced by one another–that seems to be the implication of lines like “there were many others equally as strong or stronger” and “the cost of a Butterfree working as an artist was a Dustox working [...] in their place”. It feels like the takeaway is supposed to be that Etta and Perry are happy and grateful to Tess because she did help them out (at cost to herself), but also because they’re simply unaware that their gluttony and gimmicks are only possible because they and everyone like them lack Tess’s innate talents. Tess describes a world into which you’re born either with so much inherent value that you’re unable to gain personal joy out of a ‘lesser’ profession like art, or you’re born so easily replaceable that no one would really care if you ‘wasted’ yourself on a lesser profession like art. It’s certainly a huge departure from most meta-narratives about why we produce art, and it’s not unrealistic that someone would feel this way individually, but ultimately I don’t find the argument convincing broadly in the context of the story.

I think where I wanted more substance was understanding the story’s idea of value, what makes something worth it. There’s an undercurrent of constant tradeoffs and valuations in the story–the quarry workers forgo PPE because it’s more efficient to attune to other items; Rin and Tess don’t think abstract art is worth a damn because it’s not as good as “actual drawings” and isn’t “for the common ‘mon”; smeargle cannot make art despite their nature because they’re intrinsically more useful as move jockeys. In a world that seems to have enough resources to create and specifically value luxurious art pieces–there’s so much respect for sculpting high-wear buildings such as bridges that even art-hating [if it’s abstract or can’t be kept outside i think it’s trash] Rin is excited at the prospect of having new engravings–the capitalistic undertones that time spent is really only worth it if it produces a commodity with fiscal value really undercut Tess’s nihilistic viewpoint that some people are just Born Different, which makes them uniquely inclined to suffer, because under this setup her Born Difference gives her all the tools to succeed and therefore should bring her infinite joy. And it doesn’t, and it shows constantly, which is why I was confused when the story’s big buildup is that it doesn’t work. Tess’s value as a move jockey gives her the ability to splurge on admitted luxuries such as catered chansey eggs and private chauffeurs to work, but there are successful art gallery showings with happy artists and public art projects as far as the eye can see, suggesting that those who choose art aren’t starving to death in the streets. It’s hard to understand what she’s really concerned about giving up if she were to pursue art; is it just that she won’t be as rich as she currently is? It feels like the stakes are just that Etta and other artists live less luxurious lives than Tess currently does. The main tension reads as “I simply am born too skilled to live like the Poors”, which compounds with some of Tess’s other traits to produce a deeply bitter character who doesn’t get a meaningful resolution by the end of the story. I think the setup of her world and circumstances actually have plenty of room for sympathy–that many social systems see no value in producing art is an understandably sad realization–but her motivations for wanting to pursue money over art, and her viewpoints of those who don’t agree with her, make it both hard to understand her reasoning and to relate to her.

Likewise it feels like there’s a lot of lost threads about trying hard to master a skill, the value of practice, the meaning of mastery in a wide field–one of Tess’s first observations is reflecting that she biologically cannot live long enough to be as good as the greats who made her calendar; she admires Hawlucha’s ability to work hard to learn moves rather than merely copying them via Sketch; she references “thousands of other “move jockeys”” who in turn make her skills seem mundane and replaceable. Is Tess genuine when she thinks that Rin’s block carving, which she also states is “only a job for an apprentice”, also makes him “infinitely more of an artisan than [she’d] ever be”, or is this equally untrue because she’s so despondent about her own creative abilities that she thinks block carving isn’t worth as much cash and being an artisan is cool but worthless? All things said and done, this story seems to invite an opportunity to spend a day in the life of Tess as she realizes we live in a society, but also she explicitly has already decided/accepted that she’s one of the people who was just born more valuable to society. It’s a thought-provoking premise on paper, but I either wanted more or less of it–getting to know Tess’s bitter dismissiveness towards other artists, other art, other things she doesn’t see as valuable, makes it a lot harder to sympathize or understand her own surprise when she’s held to the same standards; at the same time, there’s not really a meaningful conflict or change, and most of the story is Tess walking around the city and being angry and sad before explaining to the audience what she already knows.

This is in a spoiler because I found it miles too pedantic to be an actual consideration for judging, beyond the broader point of “but what is actually valuable to people” discussed outside of the spoiler, i.e. I found this interesting to discuss but did not factor it into rankings.

On a mechanical level I think there’s a lot of risk with trying to justify societal value around game mechanics, the least of which is that Gen 10 might introduce Mega Ultra Z Maximum Pikachu, whose signature move Pikaboost grants +6 in all stats to all allies or something, and then the entire premise of the story gets nuked because Pikaboost also makes pretty pictures or something. Smeargle’s able to learn every move, yeah, but at the same time why couldn’t Medicham also learn Agility (in addition to Baton Pass, Psych Up, and Bulk Up), besides that this isn’t what the games are coded to accept? If Tess is going to be as efficient as possible, why not use Victory Dance to free up an extra moveslot compared to Bulk Up and Agility (and also reach max stats in 6 rather than 9 turns)? Could Recycle then solve her Leppa Berry shortage (and also have widespread impact on the world’s food economics)? In the absence of map tiles, could Tailwind just work on every allied pokemon in the world? Obviously the last few are not good storytelling tools, but concepts like "no Tauros has ever been able to learn Agility" and just the general existence of "Baton Pass" are extremely hard magic limits in a world that feels, on average, not bound by these limits. So to play some rules entirely straight while ignoring others feels like an inherently asymmetric setup.

It also produces an arbitrary set of limitations that, in the wide sample pool of “every [non-legendary] pokemon ever, and every move”, can actually be solved–for example, Smeargle with Victory Dance/Simple Beam is actually more efficient since they’ve got Skill Swap and Entrainment on the field, and can quickly swap Simple back onto Smeargle so that it can pass boosts at roughly twice the rate of regular Victory Dance (and triple the rate of Agility/Bulk Up). Speed Boost Blaziken with Bulk Up can pass attack/defense/speed more quickly alone (and Mimic Psych Up if needed), Opportunist Espathra or Simple Swoobat as a partner can let you pass at more than double efficiency, evening out the inclusion of two pokemon–I wrote out a ton of these scenarios and ultimately scrapped them because it’s super pedantic. But there’s a ton of other ways to reach “just as good as one smeargle” with two pokemon; with a dozen pokemon, it’s arguably way more than a dozen times more effective than one smeargle. And like with the broad context of berries and PP and moveslots working roughly identically to canon and taken seriously, it feels like an exaggeration for a single smeargle to be equivalent to “a dozen or more extra Pokemon laboring away in the quarry, unboosted”. At the end of the day, Tess only knows four moves.

It almost feels like–mechanically–Tess’s argument is purposefully wrong, and that the takeaway actually is that people are much happier and more successful when working together (see above) instead of trying to be the jack of all trades, because it turns out with some cracked abilities/moves and four dozen moveslots to choose between, it’s entirely possible to do crazy stuff. Ostensibly this is not the message of the story, but I think this kind of “um akshually” is inevitable once the core premise of the story is located in the weeds of Pokemon mechanics played out entirely rules as written.

Overall, I did really enjoy the thought that went into the different mechanisms that this society functions. I think the quarry safety details and efficiency improvements via different pokemon moves were clever ways to produce a familiar-feeling world (the children still yearn for the mines) while emphasizing the weird and unfamiliar quirks that would make such a world different from our own. I also really liked the different ideas of how to make art palatable to people who don’t experience the world the way you do–I think one of the most alien and abstract elements of the PMD world is that there are so many different species living in harmony, and it was really fun to see how they’d bridge these gaps on a mundane level. Thanks for sharing!

tomatorade

I was most convinced by them ignoring safety warnings.

A great story overall. In many ways, less direct than some others in rotation, but I think that plays to it’s strengths. I had to read this one a couple of times to decide my thoughts on it overall.

One great strength of this story is the thematic weight, I think. It actually hits quite late, in the final paragraphs, but it got me to go back and pick up on details I hadn’t noticed before. It does especially well to tie into the prompt gimmick so to speak. Questions about personal worth and your own niche value—plus replacement. It’s fairly relevant to the world right now, but it’s fascinating to think about in the context of pokemon where everyone is so different that they can’t help but excel over others in certain areas. Also in the context of art of course. There’s a …but at what cost? Vibe to the piece that I like a lot. I think it captures the sort of fine artist malaise that tends to go around. And I love how this is pointed out in the first paragraph with Tess unhappily examining the work of artists she can never hope to compete with. Truly, the artist spirit resides within her.

The theming all around was great and you found the perfect character and story for it. Tess is intersecting with the two relevant areas of the story and so feels the stress of both of them. It’s very efficient in the sense that most everything brought up by the story is relevant and not extraneous pointless worldbuilding.

I think my main problem with this fic can be chalked up to a bit of artifice. Which is to say, while I appreciate how committed you are to making this world make sense through pokemon-specific items and moves and biology, and while that’s also the overall strength of this piece, there are also so many of them in such a short time that it feels like I’m constantly reminded of the source being a video game. It stretched credulity a little and made it more difficult than necessary to get very invested in what was going on. Which is especially a shame considering this was quite short overall. I’m not normally one to talk about extending fics or shorts—to some degree efficiency is key—but I think overall this really could’ve been helped by spacing out elements and letting them get introduced more naturally. You could also cut some, I guess. There’s a brief explanation of methods of reviving injured pokemon in the beginning that’s not entirely necessary and not very relevant, for example. But at the same time, I had fun with the creative ways you considered the pokemon world and how they built their livelihoods around their skills.

And you still have a lot of space and interest, I think. Even just a thousand more words could go a long way.

A minor nitpick on the end line, though. The one about how they aren’t showing smeargle paintings in this gallery. There… are smeargle paintings, I thought. Wasn’t Tess a part of this opening? It doesn't end up hitting as hard considering the start of the fic is her talking about being in the gallery, but I still get the point. Just needs some reworking.

I’d love to see this expanded, as I’ve said. There’s clearly a lot of thought and consideration put into this world and I think it deserves to be explored at a more relaxed pace. Really enjoyed this otherwise!
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"A Day at Lawrence Pokémon Sanctuary" by canisaries

The name of Isle Silent was most likely given ironically. Only two miles across, the rushing of the sea’s waves was audible in any part of the island, complemented by the wind in the leaves of its sugar maples and yellow birches. At least the traffic of the mainland Unovan States didn’t reach this far; the hum of motors and tooting of horns was a thirty-minute ferry ride away.

Then, more noise came. Isle Silent was bought by Mr. Brendan Lawrence, one wealthy eccentric and lover of pokémon, who wanted to see a childhood dream of his come true – his own zoo. Construction began and was completed, employees were hired, pokémon were brought from around the world until the zoo was ready to open. Mr. Lawrence insisted on opening the gates to Lawrence Zoo himself, and the masses swarmed the ticket booth, thrilled to see the pokémon on display.

Eighty years passed with the zoo growing, obtaining more pokémon, gaining more visitors. Critics expressed that the enclosures were too small, the environments too unnatural, the pokémon uncomfortable and stressed. Lawrence and his heirs, who still liked money a bit more than pokémon welfare, grit their teeth and obliged the public. They had the enclosures expanded and their vegetation and climate control improved, which silenced some, but not all. There were still people who saw that it was wrong to contain pokémon for human entertainment to begin with. Lawrence’s estate considered this a demand that simply could not be accommodated…


Judge Comments

Dragonfree

This was a very classic sort of slice-of-life, just picking out an interesting location and describing a normal day for the people there, with its own little problems and hopes and conflicts that are simply typical for the setting. There's a lot of fun colorful verisimilitude and detail here; the sanctuary feels like part zoo and part a sort of recreational facility for the Pokémon that live there, and it comes to life in these little vignettes. For instance, I really enjoyed the idea of battling as an enrichment activity for Pokémon, where they specifically get a trainer to come in and battle the sanctuary's residents while others get a lot out of watching, and a haunted house ghost enclosure that used to be more of an entertainment attraction but now just serves as a nice home for them.

The scenes are a bit detached from one another, a series of individual mini-stories with their own setup and resolution, but I think you tied them together pretty nicely through the setting itself and the sanctuary staff. I enjoy the individual scenes too, each with some humour and fun character interactions; many of the Pokémon focused on in particular have a nice sense of varying vibrant personalities, even when nonverbal, which lent it a lot of color, and it's just fun to see the interactions between these Pokémon and the staff, where the staff are very much like zookeepers but the creatures they're dealing with are more intelligent and communicative even if they often have some very cheeky chaotic energy. I particularly liked the escaped Shuppet, who immediately went to tell the other Shuppet how to escape too, only for them to all simply return later and squeeze themselves back in the same way they came.

I was surprised to find the story sort of kicked off by introducing Amanda the intern and how she'd be taking on various tasks throughout the day, only for her to be featured in exactly one of the vignettes before the end - it felt like the story was setting her up to be the main or POV character, someone whose workday we'd be following, but as it was, we didn't focus on her at all, and the opening scene specifically going out of its way to introduce her to us feels a bit odd or extraneous given that's the case. It feels like you might have initially meant for it to be more about her than it ended up being, or something like that; structurally it just comes out kind of funny.

I also did find the writing somewhat distant, clinical or wordy/convoluted at times in a way that ran a little counter to the overall lighthearted cartoon-esque mood. Take a sentence like, "They seemed to be proven right not even five seconds from Rook’s words as a gastly seemingly appeared from thin air right behind the enclosure’s glass, screaming with a grisly grin on its face, causing the children – and their teacher – to yelp in response." There's a lot going on in this sentence, with several clauses structured in a way that becomes harder to parse; I think it'd work better split up. It's unclear what the "They" at the start of the sentence refers to until you get to "Rook's words" several words later, and we've just seen him say it, so I don't think we need to explicitly mention that he's proven right to get the picture that he was correct in saying that when it then immediately happens. There's also a somewhat awkward repetition in "seemed" and then "seemingly" later in the same sentence - but both instances actually strike me as unnecessary here. I don't think there's any seems about either of these things - the gastly objectively does appear out of thin air trying to scare them - so all in all, why not just, "Not even five seconds later, a gastly appeared from thin air..."?

Later in the story, there's a sentence with three different instances of "again" where one would suffice ("Rune let his beam fly at the moment Boreas had started charging again, and it hit Boreas again, who shrugged it off again."). Those are just a couple of examples that particularly caught my attention, but in general it might be good to try to identify sentences that might be a bit too much and split them up, simplify the sentence structure, or excise unnecessary words or bits that aren't doing much for the sentence as it stands.

Overall, though, I thought this fic did a good job at being what it wants to be. It's not very complex as a story, the characters are kind of archetypical and it doesn't exactly ask any big questions, but that's clearly simply what it wants to be, and that's well in line with the genre - it's just a good lighthearted little look at a Pokémon sanctuary with some light endearing characters, funny little stories, and lots of little details to give a sense of how the sanctuary works and what it's like.

Flyg0n

This was such a charming and lovely story, with a lot of thought put into it. It painted a solid and clear picture of how this pokemon sanctuary operates, and how they care for the pokemon under them. It reads like a lot of care went into the depictions of the sanctuary.

I appreciated how the beginning establishes how it transformed from a glorified petting zoo into a real place that cares for the pokemon.

The entire interaction with the Shuppet escape and finding a way to lure them back was really entertaining. It was a fun way to incorporate both the human characters and the pokemon, and work in worldbuilding!

Also helping Kadabra with the little riddle/mind reading trick was absolutely delightful. I think those two parts were my favorite, in how they give us such a nice look at the pokemon’s personalities. What would a kadabra find enriching? Mental games. What do Shuppets enjoy? Spooking people and slipping out of vents, heh.

The Scyther scene made me laugh, that's exactly what it's like in a new workplace sometimes, where they find the most absurd tricks to play on you. It almost gives me national geographic or documentary vibes, in the best way.

I did find the battle itself near the end mundane, but I think it fits the story. Its not an action story, but a character and pokemon tale, and it helps to add to the atmosphere. It was also nice to get a pokemon POV. I thought it was especially interesting that the pokemon here have no universal language, but instead use other factors to communicate. Poor Rune, suffering a tragic heartbreak. Better luck next time!

Overall, I think the whole story is excellent. It really fits the tone and themes and utilizes its varying pov’s and setting very effectively!

lisianthus

The name of Isle Silent was most likely given ironically.

I always look for the openings of fics I’m reading (and especially reviewing) to tell me more about the plot I’m about to be transported to, or at least to tell me about the author, and… I really liked this! It feels witty but understatedly so, if that makes any sense, and it clues me in that the narration will probably be more of the same?

a childhood dream of his come true – his own zoo.
We’ll see this later on, of course, but I do think it’s an interesting tidbit that zoos once existed within the Pokemon world, at least in your AU! From the later games and anime, at least, I believe one would tend to get the sense that aside from the rare few who make their (illegal) livings out of mistreating Pokemon, being held zoos and other generally degrading forced acts affecting Pokemon would absolutely be out of the question… but then right after, one would remember that in the real world, zoos still exist. Not that Pokemon are wholly equatable with the real world’s creatures (who are also in need of protection, anyways), but I thought it was an interesting way to show that times had changed in your world, too — you could have pretty easily just written it off as ‘hey, so he wanted to make a sanctuary because he loved Pokemon so much <3’ but… sometimes, life isn’t as pretty, and I commend you for portraying that. Good choice!

Mr. Lawrence insisted on opening the gates to Lawrence Zoo himself, and the masses swarmed the ticket booth, thrilled to see the pokémon on display.

Eighty years passed with the zoo growing, obtaining more pokémon, gaining more visitors.
From your describing of the spectacle that came with Lawrence Zoo being constructed and opened, or at least from how I’m imagining it (lol), the zoo itself almost feels akin to what Jurassic Park / World was in terms of scale, and it honestly does interest me quite a bit in terms of wondering how it could be accomplished, and accomplished well at that. I think what you’ve described here opens up lots of room for pondering about worldbuilding by a reader, which is important! I believe it’s important to make gripping worlds and settings, and you’ve done well at that so far.

Lawrence and his heirs, who still liked money a bit more than pokémon welfare, grit their teeth and obliged the public.
Ahahaha… T_T, more of that sliiiight sarcasm there with the ‘a bit more’, which is well warranted when it’s on the topic of Pokemon welfare, really. I like your style here!

After eighty years of operation, it would no longer be known as a zoo but rather Lawrence Pokémon Sanctuary, financed by Brendan IV’s other operations and the public’s donations.
I was actually curious about the difference between a zoo and a wildlife sanctuary IRL, just to see how big of a change it would be to go from one to the other, and the main difference it seems is that zoos operate through breeding and capturing animals on purpose, and sanctuaries take in animals unable to survive in their natural habitats? With that in mind, I suppose a lot of the change would be in regards to future planning…

Give me a vision again. Come on.
I think this is a really neat way of introducing the audience to the differences of working with really any given Pokemon! I’m assuming from what I’ve seen before your world isn’t one where humans can understand Pokemon as if they were using human speech, so visions from a Psychic-type are a very creative way to solve that issue without resorting to pure guesswork, at least in this case.
“Why wouldn’t she just show me a vision of her eating mago berries if that’s what she wanted?”

“It wouldn’t be as fun.” Sasha smirked.
This whole scene made me laugh, it’s a fun one! I wouldn’t have thought of that either LOL… also a really neat way of showing how intelligent she is, which is probably to be expected as she is a Kadabra, but I still think it’s neat, and shows how tricky being a caretaker can be!


Their guide was Rook, an agender person whose fashion could be described as “casual goth”, and with Rook was Espelle, one of the sanctuary’s kadabra.
…I lov Rook already, LOL, sounds like I could use some fashion advice from them. I’m getting ahead of myself and taking into account later parts of this story, but your characters are diverse both in background and personality without making a ginormous deal of it (speaking about all of this as a sapphic (magical) girl), and sometimes you don’t always see that in fanfiction — it’s neat. :)

The building was painted in black and tones of gray and purple with ghostly figures and spiderweb patterns in the mix, a remnant of the times this place had sought to entertain more than educate.
Part of me almost wonders if the Ghost-types within enjoy it like that too LOL, like as a ‘natural domain’, but who knows…

“Shuupp,” Shelley said. Then she phased through the ceiling.
I’m being nitpicky to the point where I’m worried about properly including this into the review, but I think conjoining the above two sentences may help the flow of the story? It reads fine as it is, but just a small suggestion for you.

Like a plastic bag caught in the wind, she flew up in the sky, doing loop-de-loops and looking quite chipper.
This was such an interesting simile! Maybe I’m just not well-read enough, but it’s rare I read simile usage that feels vivid enough to make me momentarily stop reading, and likening a Shuppet to a plastic bag floating in the wind is another I can add to the list, lol. Creative!

“You’re the grumpiest person we know,” Jack said.

Ikuko’s brow lowered in offense. “What? Am not.”
This exchange made me laugh, LOL… it’s something relatively easily extrapolatable from the description we’ve seen of her, but even without knowing her well, I feel like it’s a very on-character exchange, and a lifelike one at that!

“Shuppet’s emotion sense is of the same caliber as a beartic’s sense of smell.
Its Pokedex entries talk about feeding on negativity, so I’m not really surprised per se, but I still think this was an interesting in-universe factoid to share! I bet they’d be good friends with Audino, then…

Ikuko humphed. “‘Twas nothing,” she said, twiddling her hair.
Possibly despite her grumpy air, I think I’m quite a fan of Ikuko’s, LOL!

“We never checked out how Shelley got out of her enclosure.”

A silent second passed before the two of them ran back to the enclosure. It was empty.

Jack grabbed his head with both hands. “Son of a –”
I like how you just focus to another part of the sanctuary after this, it gives an impression of it being a very busy place were no task is ever fully complete! Your pacing has been good, so I think that decision was a smart one so as to not linger for too long.

“In fact, you see this here?” Freddy bent down to tap his prosthetic. “That’s what he did to me.”
I was suddenly very scared for Amanda when I came to this part… she’s stronger than I am!!

Freddy waved a hand. “It’s only for the first few times, though. Then they realize that if they killed you, they wouldn’t get fed.” He straightened his posture and gestured to the buckets. “So! Buckets are here. Just get in there and toss the meat out to them and get out. It’s easy.”
I like when older characters are written as being completely used to some plot device that seems absolutely insane to the reader and protagonist alike, sort of as a foil to what really most people would feel when contending with a difficult or scary task. Very minute thing, but I like your characterization here!

She could do this, right? Well, she had to do this. She couldn’t refuse a task on the first day. She had to show them she was willing to tough it out. She’d wanted to work here all her life.

Surely, it would be fine. All she had to do was walk a few steps, toss the meat, and get out. The scyther probably wouldn’t even notice her. She’d be alright, and then she could get back to feeding all the cute little harmless pachirisu or what have you. Yes, it would be fine.
Sometimes I struggle with writing stream-of-consciousness thoughts in third-person limited POV, but I wanted to take a second and say that you did well here!

“Good luck,” he said as she stepped through, then shut the door behind her.
How ominous

I’m going to blink, she thought. I’m going to blink, and it’s going to attack me, and then I will be dead.
As an oftentimes nervous ‘fear-for-the-worst’ woman by nature myself, I can authoritatively say that this is a very real and lifelike course of thought, LOL. Your skill with characterization is very present in your prose!

“You told her the Reaper story, didn’t you?” she shouted.
Ohhhhh, no. (lol)

“That’s screwed up, Freddy. HR will know about this,” Erin stressed.
Good for you for fighting for your fellow staff members, Erin! God, I couldn’t imagine the relief Amanda felt upon not only completing her task safely, but also to know that Freddy was just playing a joke! …Though I’d personally be upset, lol.

“You told her she had to go without blinking?”
Even worse than before, LOL. :(

She gave the scyther one last look before she left. They seemed a lot less scary now, at least.
Even though she had a bad first impression, I hope Amanda will come to be good friends with the Scyther…

It had weathered quite a many hits in its heyday, but still it stood firm.
Also small thing, I think I have an idea of what you’re trying to do with this (emphasizing more hits than ‘quite a few’), but I’m unsure if it’s a proper phrase? Not that it matters all that much, really, but something I was wanting to bring up~.

Rune wanted to approach her and greet her, but the thought of it made him weak in the knees.
Your choice to have a third-person limited approach to a Pokemon is neat here, as I feel like for more sapient Pokemon it can be an interesting narrative choice — but I did find it to be a little odd that it’s happened only intermittently throughout the story? I understand the changes in perspective and character focus meaning using that imited focus on multiple characters, but with it not happening with Brett or Rook, for example, but it happening with Amanda, it feels a tad bit disjointed. Maybe something to consider for the future?

No, he could not approach her yet. But soon he would earn that right.
Chivalrous, lol… well, we’ll see where that takes him!

Rune nodded fervently, which was a gesture he knew to mean “yes” to the humans.
Rune feels like he’s a very curious Pokemon! Or at least an observant one, given he seems to know lots about human mannerisms.

It was a strange pokémon Rune hadn’t seen before – a large, floating snowflake-shaped creature of ice. That was what a cryogonal was, then.
One sees Trainers not knowing what a given Pokemon is all the time, but it’s never particularly occured to me that Pokemon could be the same! It makes sense, of course, given Pokemon have their own favored biomes and such, but I feel it’s a detail that’s cool to include.

Rune clenched his right fist around his spoon.

[…]

The next fighter, the machoke that had cut him off, was already marching up to the field. Rune hoped he would lose.
How vindictive LOL… well, I guess I can’t blame him too much.

Elsewhere, Jack, Kate, Samos and Ikuko were at their wits’ end, having tried all manner of tricks to coax the runaway shuppet back to the Haunted House and failed every time.

[…]

It was a temporary solution anyway; someone would surely come up with a better solution before long.
I like your tying up of the loose ends from leaving off with Ikuko and her crew here! It really feels like being a caretaker at the sanctary is a position that requires a creative mind.

As Jack, with some input from Kate and Samos, recounted the misadventures of the shuppet, Amanda listened intently. It was important to pay attention to one’s coworkers, and Amanda wanted to do things right all the way until the end of the workday, though it was hardly difficult with Jack being such an engaging storyteller. The others laughed when Jack described the way they’d utilized Ikuko’s ill temper to lure the first shuppet, and Amanda laughed with them, already feeling that sense of camaraderie that she hoped to foster in the many coming days.
It seems like she had an alright day, Scyther nonwithstanding… good!

This was a treat to read! Your characters were airtight and so was your worldbuilding… I think I’d like to read more of the goings-on at Lawrence Pokemon Sanctuary sometime, because in my opinion, you capture both the magical and mundane well here. I’m interested to see who the writer was!

Windskull

I think this story has a lot of potential. You have your humor and tone down really well. The Mango pun was great fun. And using a grumpy coworker to lure the shuppet back was both clever and hilarious. The solution Rune comes up with in his fight scene is fun, and I couldn’t help but root for him. It’s okay bud, there are plenty of frillish in the sea, metaphorically speaking.

I also think your characters are overall pretty likable. Except for Freddy. That guy’s a jerk. Pretty much every character that’s given a name feels like they have a narrative purpose. Even the pokemon have strong, fun personalities.

There are a few things I would like to critique, though. First and foremost is the opening. The entire opening sequence feels very expository, and not necessary for the most part. Yes, it provides some interesting background, but I think the story would flow better if you could find a way to make that information come up naturally within the rest of the story.

As an example, given that you've written in a new-hire character, it wouldn't be outlandish for some of the history of the sanctuary to come up on their way to her first assignment within conversation.

Speaking of Amanda, there were also a couple of things I found structurally odd. When she was introduced at the beginning of the story, I expected that she would be the primary POV focus. So imagine my surprise when she doesn't even come up again until halfway through the fic. I wonder if moving her scene to the beginning might help with that.

Additionally, while most of the scenes are standalone, you have this ongoing plot regarding the shuppet. Because each scene feels separate, but not *completely* separate, it ends up making the story feel a bit disjointed. I think this could be solved by making the shuppet plotline be the connecting thread through the story, maybe making it come up in the standalone scenes. You also have two kadabra scenes - one where they’re being fed and Rune’s fight scene. I think it could help tie things together if you were to spend a sentence or two showing Rune extra hyped up that morning or something of the sort.

Outside of that though, I don’t have any other notable critiques. You have few, if any typos or sp&g errors, and your prose is overall pretty good. Like I said at the beginning, this fic has a lot of potential. It just needs a bit more work to string things together so it can shine.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Day by Day" by Windskull
Second Place Pikachu Flight

Hot Season, Moon 2, Day 10

Dear Diary,

That's what I'm supposed to say when I start one of these, right? That's what it says when it comes up in one of my books. But if I'm being honest, it just looks tacky to me.

I don't know why I'm doing this. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure how I’m supposed to do this. Is there a specific way?

Maybe I should explain why I'm bothering in the first place. My name is Cotton. I'm on the cusp of adulthood. Not that you could tell, given that I'm still a buneary. I guess it's not too strange. Clay is a year older than me, and he's still a cubone.

Clay is one of my friends, by the way. Alongside Ash — he's a charmeleon — and Honeysuckle.

Honey is

I got off-topic. Great. Forget this. I'm wasting time. I have better things to do...


Judge Comments

JFought

Y’know, in hindsight, I’m actually kind of surprised this is the only journal entry fic. Not that a competitor would’ve given this one much to worry about, as it is very well executed.

For starters, I think you made good use of the format: it suits this interpretation of the theme really well, and the interpretation itself also feels fitting for the contest. I’m having a hard time putting it into words, but the premise, goals, and execution of the story all fit together really well here. “Trauma arc” might sound like a off-angle take on “daily life” at first glance, but as something that both a) naturally takes a long time to learn how to cope with, and b) is an all-encompassing aspect of life in the meantime, it actually makes perfect sense as a premise. And the use of the journal format as a way to keep track of Cotton’s headspace and where they are as the days go by is effective in demonstrating the effect their trauma and grief have on them.

Speaking of Cotton, they (i don’t think we ever got a gender) come across well as a protagonist, and I felt for them pretty hard. I liked the way the days are paced, with “long” days covering general stuff that’s going on when they felt like writing, and “short” days where they felt the need to vent and reflect a little bit. No scene was too long and they all did well in communicating something about how Cotton was doing at that point. Especially the short days. Some of them… oof.

Though it’s the long days where we really get a glimpse into what’s going on outside of Cotton, and I think that’s where a lot of the real strengths of the story’s theme interpretation come out. It isn’t just Cotton that’s recovering from the fire, it’s their whole village, and even in spite of the format you manage to communicate that feeling well and develop some depth for the side cast. It’s that theme of slow recovery that I think defines your take on the prompt and permeates throughout this story. It’s a very novel interpretation, and I find myself appreciating that.

The only other thing it needs for theme is to be grounded in the Pokémon world, and luckily, I think your use of the primary PMD setting is also pretty smartly done. It’s a lot of small, subtler things: Cotton’s distress over their delayed evolution, their discomfort around Ash due to his tail flame, the implementation of Mystery Dungeons in the story, and the way the fire connects back to the main plot of Rescue Team. Not to mention all the neat worldbuilding you show off. I like the whole subplot with Cotton’s dad, which connects to the overall arc of the fic without actually being about the fire, while also tying into the PMD-ness of the setting as something that does happen often in this world. The world feels like PMD, and more importantly takes advantage of that to enhance the story, and that ties back into what I mean when I say that everything seems to effortlessly fit together here. It’s all done entirely in subtle ways that make sense for the story that you’re trying to tell.

For my one criticism, there are a few moments where Cotton’s writing feels maybe a little bit too “prose-y” for an off-the-cuff personal diary. You do try to acknowledge that in-story, and I do like the way you did, it’s a really cute character moment, but I still felt there were moments where it seems like we’re following the logic of prose rather than train of thought. A few strange “as you know” moments like describing what half-ferals are (like, as silly as it is to say, you would assume the diary already knows this, unless we’re meant to assume that Cotton didn’t before meeting Amberwing), or times where Cotton describes a detail in a way that doesn’t feel natural for a journal like “I turned and thanked Amberwing profusely” (why would Cotton feel the need to write this like that? it feels kind of detached in a prose-like way, but maybe that’s just me). It’s not that big of a deal: there’s a lot of varying mileage in how much someone might choose to nitpick the writing style, and that’s just going to be inherent to such a personalized framing device. In the end, the story is still effective the way it’s told, and sometimes that’s all that matters. I just think it’s something worth looking out for in a post-judge editing pass, as personally it’s the only thing preventing me from getting fully immersed in the journal format.

Overall though, I really like this one. Everything worked together here to create a novel take on the contest unlike anything else in this flight. Fantastic job!

kintsugi

I think the premise and conceptual strokes of this are a really good interpretation of the theme–it feels distinctly coming-of-age in a way that still feels very day-in-the-life; while some people grow up by having big crazy adventures that get made into franchise-starting videogames, most of us enter the broader world one step at a time (and sometimes a few backwards). I also really liked the rebuilding aspect of the community, which provided a nice background for Cotton rebuilding their own life, and I liked how that was always in the background even when Cotton’s entries focused more frequently on their interior life. In particular I liked the image of the saplings growing out of the destroyed tree. It’s a bit on-the-nose but in a way that I think is comforting, and specifically in a way that reminds me of fiercely trying to find meaning out of these seemingly senseless and random tragedies.

I think the character conflict for this one is also really fun. By far the most interesting dynamic for me was between Cotton and Ash: I liked how everyone is playing out very clearly and realistically to their characters, but they end up in this awkward sort of stalemate/tension simply by nature of how they are. The setup feels very age-appropriate; these guys are just learning to navigate fundamental differences in themselves but they aren’t quite good at figuring out how to do it seamlessly yet! I also think you had some really insightful details about Cotton’s day-to-day in the wake of the fire. Having to share your room with strangers, spending all day smearing stucco around, not having your coziest bed when you really want to sleep–there’s a lot of mundane things that can happen when everything goes wrong, that aren’t nearly as bad as the original disaster, but permeate your life nonetheless.

Conceptually, I liked the idea of the diary entries as a fill for the theme, and I really liked how Cotton dances around Honey for so much of the story. Like your title suggests, this is about taking things day by day, and I think the rapid-fire epistolary nature of this was used to shorthand the passing of time–grief and recovery are not one-off affairs, so it makes sense that Cotton needs to revisit this idea across the weeks as they try to make sense of this. I also liked how you had the seasons roll over here; it makes sense that a fire would happen at the end of hot season, but there’s something about changing from hot to harvest, summer/fall, that reminds me of the world becoming a little colder, a little less carefree, which I thought suited the story’s themes very well. Structurally, I found that the diary entries removed a lot of weight from what felt like key emotional conflicts. There are a couple of dialogues that feel like they should be really influential to Cotton’s catharsis at the end of the story–Mom, Dandelion, the machoke, and finally Amberwing checking in on them at Mom’s insistence; the excursions into various dungeons and finally Cotton’s solo-moping trip; and Cotton and Ash reconnecting at the end of things. They end up recounted in the diary, but since (realistically) Cotton can’t write things out verbatim and isn’t investing a lot of time in trying to fictionalize/detail these events to an audience who hasn’t witnessed them, a lot of the emotional drama feels more summarized than experienced. I like the on-paper idea of using a rapid, drabble-style format to explore a lot of different angles for how people recover from disaster and face grief, but I found myself less connected to the emotional climaxes when they did pay off. Likewise, I like the on-paper idea of the really short, terse diary entries–in a story that’s told largely through apersonal summary, it speaks deeply to the idea of somebody who can’t even muster up the energy to do even that–but there’s quite a few times that this happens, and whatever catharsis drives Cotton to keep writing happens offscreen, so it doesn’t really feel satisfying. I think from a meta level I also know, unlike Cotton, that they are going to keep writing more entries (since the scrollbar exists), so that tension is lost on me. I think the story’s resolution speaks to some very powerful themes of growing up, rebuilding, and feeling joy again, but I found myself wanting the narrative to focus more clearly on how and why these realizations happened, while the diary format made things feel summarized and a little disjoint.

All things considered I think there’s some really wonderful imagery in this, and it’s a creative use of the medium and theme. Clay pointing his bone at Cotton is a really metal mental image, and I like how it’s specifically being pinned by that bone club that sparks the story’s resolution–speaks deeply to the idea of carrying but redefining the past. I really liked the world you fleshed out in the background of this, and how it seems like while everyone’s doing their best and being their kindest selves, there’s no immediate answer that they can give Cotton, because that’s a lesson that’s got to be learned on its own. Thanks for sharing!

tomatorade

I appreciate the up-and-down nature of this fic. I can’t pretend to be an expert, but I do know that mental health is not consistent, that there will be bad and good days and that's one thing that comes across strongly here. An epistolary journal-entry format is an excellent structure for this, too. It lets you play around with scene length a lot more easily, cover a lot more time effectively and illustrates the mental struggle Cotton goes through very well. Extremely effective choice.

Cotton was a great character to follow. Her age was an interesting point to me.. She says she’s on the cusp of adulthood, but I don’t honestly know what that’s supposed to mean for this world, and I kept thinking she was much younger than maybe you intended. I’m not entirely sure why, this could be my own judgment on her being told to keep a diary by her mother—a very middle/high-school trope—or it could be a result of how in her own head she is through the fic. Maybe it’s just the angst around keeping a journal lol. I’m not even sure this is something that needs to be rectified, but worth pointing out. Cotton’s language did fit the age range you were going for, though. And I didn’t find it too jarring with what I interpreted her age as—I suppose I saw her as faintly immature for her age. Or just the standard PMD protag, tonally. They always read younger.

Anyway, I loved how Cotton displayed a kind of avoidance and frustration that felt very real and sad in a fittingly mundane way. She tended to tiptoe around the effects of the fire even if she presented herself as stoic. I especially love how aware he is that her newfound fear of fire is impacting her friendship with Ash especially. Sad but understandable. A lot of the tragedy of her situation is how understandable the way he reacts to everything is.

Bro, team go-getters lives. Deep PMD lore inbound. The ‘magic and mundane’ highlight of this fic, beyond the day-to-day of a traumatized buneary, is the day-to-day of guild members. It’s always very fun to see what teams get up to when they aren’t ransacking dungeons, and disaster relief is both a new one and one that makes a lot of sense. It’s also interesting to me that this takes place somewhere in the midst/end of red/blue rescue team. I found that to be a fun idea that ended up fitting the prompt better than I initially expected it would. Pokemon do still have to live while that world is being saved, after all, and while the ‘main plot’ was in the back of my mind while reading, I never found it distracting. Cotton was too strong for that.

I loved all these little short entries Cotton gives. I mentioned the format being strong, and this is where it really shows. You manage to really get across the mood of a whole day through the simple: ‘ I miss Honeysuckle’, among other things. It’s powerful. And manages to say a lot through very few words. It doesn’t need any setup, really, part of what makes it work is being an unexpected bad day. There’s some cool consideration for species. Cotton not being able to evolve due to her unhappiness is clever. Admittedly, the eventual evolution as a climax to the fic is fairly predictable as a result. It’s something I see too often for it to hit me that hard really, but it worked well enough, I think.

I do have a minor complaint in that you almost use the format too much. Or too close together. The ‘I miss Honeysuckle’ was easily the most effective version of these slumps, and honestly I found some of the repetition of short, sad entries to tire on me. I still like the concept, but it settles into a sort of rhythm that takes away from the emotional weight and it’s less effective the more you use it. Eventually, the fic manages to get really in depth with Cotton’s emotional state, so there’s payoff, but it does flatten a little bit nearing the midpoint. After Cotton’s first outburst where she snaps at her mom and runs off is when it starts to pick up again.

I would also maybe cut some of the closing lines for the entries. Admittedly it’s in-character, but it seems every other one ends with some version of ‘I wish I could be happy’. You tend to start or end a lot of entries on pithy single-sentence jabs, but these things become fairly noticeable after a while. Honestly, it could be remedied by just combining them with the next or previous paragraphs, when appropriate.

Back to more positive, there’s a strong but gentle sense of healing over the course of the fic. You really notice the way Cotton’s mentality changes as time goes on, even through stumbles, but it never needs a big ah-hah! Climax, which I think is to the fic’s strength, especially in fitting to the prompt. It’s a long, slow, mundane (wink) process that really works. It feels paced very well, never too slow or too fast, just when I’m wondering if she’s learning, the next entry has her relearn how to socialize or find something to be happy about etc…

This is especially evident in how she thinks about Honeysuckle. Transitioning from pure grief to a sad sort of acceptance. Also with the journal. It’s nice to see her get into writing when she hated it so much at the beginning.

And finally, more justified short entries. Cotton meeting her father again worked really well for me. The tone’s very different near the end of the fic, a great release of emotion and tying up of some loose ends, but despite being the exact opposite emotionally, this worked just as well.

Great fic, overall. Felt like a complete package at the perfect length for what it wanted to do. A classic example of how to set up and payoff plot points—I’d struggle to find plot nitpicks to unravel, here.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Engineering Harmony" by JFought
First Place Eevee Flight

The wind whistled through the plains, rustling through tightly-packed grasses and the leaves of stray trees. The flapping of wings overhead signified the return of birds from the south, calling noisily to each other as they spoke of new destinations and speculated about the weather. The wheels of a passenger carriage creaked as they rumbled down the dirt path, joined by the steady stomping of a zebstrika’s hooves, and the crushing of stray rocks underneath, and the groaning of wood straining against metal, and the bumping of cargo jostling in the back, and the tapping of an audino’s claws on the carriage door as he hung out the window staring boredly at the sight of precisely nothing.

Damn it was quiet.

Alfred pushed away from the window with a defeated sigh. That was it: boredom had won. He had thought he brought enough books to last a journey.
Fateful miscalculation. His destination was supposed to be signaled by a large mesa called the Giant’s Grave, and it was definitely there, but the thing was massive! It had appeared over the horizon hours ago now! The sun was setting!

The audino adjusted his loose-fitting emerald vest and sprawled out across the seat, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the city he left behind.
It’ll be good for you, they said. It’s so much quieter, out in the Palkia-shunned boonies. What did the guild know? He could’ve been working as a guide in the biggest guild branch of the east, instead of a small, backwater kingdom like Farbroad…

“Hey! We’re almost there!”

Alfred bolted upright and rushed to the window to look out and ahead. Right there in the distance, he could barely make out a collection of silhouettes that could only have been buildings, coupled with a tower that poked above them. No walls for fortification; it must’ve been Harmonia all right...


Judge Comments

Dragonfree

At first glance, this was a story about an Audino from the city becoming a guide in a rural town and adjusting to life there, which was cute. But it properly captured me during Alfred and Espio's conversation towards the end, where it clicked for me that actually this entire story was about accessibility - exploring the concept of accommodations through a PMD world, where people with drastically different body types and capabilities coexist in a humanlike society, and the ways that people will get used to inconveniences and friction in their daily lives, even though things could be so much easier if society would rise to accommodate their needs better.

On a reread, there's a lot of fun stuff to notice about that focus; for instance, right from the beginning, Alfred is being transferred because he's told that "It'll be good for you; it's so much quieter." Initially one sort of takes this to be a metaphorical quieter, just framing the less hustle and bustle as a nice thing generally, but with hindsight, it becomes clear it was very literal, and his superiors from the city really were trying to help him: Alfred's sensitive hearing is constantly bothering him, and back in the city, where there's so much more noise, I can only imagine it made him noticeably irritable, even though he himself is blind to why they'd send him out to the boonies. He complains of how the market bothers him more than the city noises used to, but what he's really noticing is that things are usually actually quiet now except for the market.

(And I think it's deliberate, too, that the story has Alfred preferring his desk organized and Helios preferring the messy environment - sometimes people have conflicting needs, but Alfred at this stage is a bit oblivious to this.)

Espio chose his form based on a rational calculus that being an Espeon gives him the greatest and most flexible possible ability to do things - but then spends his life trying to create accommodations that make it easier for others to do things, too. I found his character quite interesting; he may be very focused on practical rationality, and feel others should think like him with regards to evolution, but where many fictional characters of that broad archetype would be coldly dismissive towards others who are less rationally focused, he's just genuinely very caring and wants to make things better for everyone else too, even if he's not always appreciated for it. He's just a good nerodivergent-coded bean. I enjoyed the way that Alfred quicky warms to his mindset, being a guide who is ultimately meant to do the same for the guild's clients, and the relationship that forms between the two. I find myself even sort of wondering if it would have improved the story if Espio himself had been introduced a little earlier - the story holds back on showing him onscreen for a while, even though his influence is then found to have permeated everything about Harmonia, and I would have enjoyed getting a little more time with him.

Espio's gift of earmuffs to Alfred at the end, at any rate, is really sweet. Alfred hadn't really complained to Espio about the noise, but Espio quietly picked up on it when he visited with the lamp, intuited how Alfred is uncomfortable in his daily life the same way he intuits what's ailing other people in their daily lives, and decided to do something about it. Which Alfred is initially so sure he doesn't need; after all, he's always lived just fine with city noise... but it's so easy to become complacent and stop realizing what you're missing, and so easy for Espio to massively improve his quality of life just by paying attention to what's bothering Alfred and choosing to try to accommodate him even if he doesn't realize it himself.

I enjoyed the various side characters and flavor here too - old-fashioned rural naming conventions based on species that have been supplanted in the bigger cities, the presence of Espio's inventions, Rhys who moved there from the same kingdom as Alfred with a drink named after a mountain from home (but she's a Rhydon with Rhydon tastes, so it's not very appetizing to poor Alfred - another little bit of how the coexistence of different Pokémon species naturally magnifies the difference in needs and desires between people). Vee is such a tiny child and very endearing, and Helios's contrasting casual rural mindset is fun, though he has a smaller role.

For criticisms, I was a little confused when Alfred had visited Espio, and then decided he wanted to talk to him with a "newfound purpose", but then seemingly spends several days just asking people around about Espio but making no actual effort to meet him again, until it just so happens Espio wanders into the guild. I sort of kept wondering what was stopping Alfred from just inviting him for drinks like he meant to, given he knows where he lives at this point and is also in frequent contact with his niece who could presumably bring him a message whenever. It might be smoother if Alfred either didn't have this big explicit moment of conviction deciding he wants to speak with him (instead sticking to vague interest/curiosity), or if there was a sense that Alfred was nervous or reluctant to actually do it somehow - as it stands it really reads like he has every intention to invite him for drinks but then just kind of doesn't.

There were also a couple of minor mistakes here and there (in one instance "She gave her a funny look" when it should be him), but the writing mechanics were otherwise solid.

All in all, I thought this was a really strong story, especially thanks to the interesting throughline that digs a little deeper into the concept of daily life in a PMD world - it really is a world full of people with very different needs and capabilities, and that's going to have big effects on what their daily life looks like, even when it's invisible to them.

Flyg0n

This one is fantastic. I absolutely loved it. It took me a second to get settled in, but once I did it progressed smooth as butter. Alfred was a great MC, the perfect blend of a little unaware of things, a little skeptical but also friendly and charming.

The world is well constructed and I could get a very clear feel for how everything works. Nothing is info dumped too quickly, but instead is built up as it becomes relevant, and it paints a great picture of this take on the PMD world.

I have to admit, as I read it, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t until the very end for me that all pieces really clicked into place (a good thing, mind you). The story truly is mundane in the best possible way for me. All the little details Alfred observed, like the water wheel, the post by the board, and even his first interaction with Rhys and then learning more about her later.

The story never feels too hamfisted about its point, but rather guides the reader through a very interesting exploration of the challenges of accommodation and a world where different species challenges play a role. And even while this is happening, it never loses its sense of sticking to magical but mundane theme.

Like how would quadrupeds count change, or why an Eevee would pick an Espeon to evolve into. Or an Audino who struggles to get a little peace and quiet. I liked how Alfred came to a gradual yet natural feeling understanding of these things, and the way that creating these inventions actually makes his job easier too.

Not only does this story really nicely explore the day to day lives of pokemon and how they get along, but I think it serves as a delightful exploration of the various ways pokemon might think to construct their society and towns and cities, and how this can create or lower barriers for other mon.

Two of my favorite parts are the scene where Alfred asks Espio why he chose to evolve into Espeon, and the line where he admits how helpful something as simple as the perch in the entrance hall is. That and of course, the ending line where Alfred gets some peace and quiet.

For me, this story hits all the notes of the magical but mundane by incorporating species' unique attributes with no shortcuts, by really focusing on the day to day, and by capturing a slice of an important moment.

lisianthus

I’ll preface this by saying I’m not familiar with PMD aside from the general setting and plot premise of the games, so some of this may be lost on me, apologies. That being said —

Alfred pushed away from the window with a defeated sigh. That was it: boredom had won. He had thought he brought enough books to last a journey. Fateful miscalculation.
Fast reader… or maybe perhaps just a long journey? Either way, I think this gives a small glimpse into Alfred’s personality in respects to his interests, which is good! (very relatable, as well lol.)

It had appeared over the horizon hours ago now!
A mirage, perhaps…?

The zebstrika pulling the cart threw a look back.

I find it to be neat that as your world seems to have some influence from the human world, just with Pokemon as the main sapient inhabitants, Pokemon all tend to have their own jobs that suit them. Maybe it’s not really worth bringing attention to because it’s an ubiquitous thing in all PMD fic, maybe it is worth bringing up, but I think it’s a good addition that adds more life to your world.

As he followed the directions he had memorized, the world slowly grew louder. Pokémon talking, chattering, squawking, roaring, barking over… prices?
Does the question mark here indicate that not all Pokemon can understand each other innately, then? I feel like he’d be able to know what exactly was being said otherwise, unless if the voices were far enough away to be muddled.

Perhaps the concept of proper organization was too much to expect from a nominal guild branch in the middle of nowhere.
Oof, harsh… I’m getting the feeling that Alfred is a bit… posh, let’s say, but I guess he has a point in this jab — not a good way to make an impression!

and luckily enough.
I’m a bit unsure if this sentence was left uncompleted on purpose? If it was, then I think it could also work with an ellipsis after (instead of a period) to show a trailing-off thought, then the italicized ‘course’ in a new paragraph — but that’s just personal preference.

Right. A guide needed to know everything there was to know about the land surrounding their town.
I’m a bit surprised they’d transfer someone like Alfred to the boonies, given the responsibilities of the job! He doesn’t strike me as particularly comfortable with being there, despite being at least learned enough to make do… so I wonder if he’ll really come to enjoy it.

hit the wall with a *thunk!*
I like how you signified that sound effect with both italics and asterisks! I might use that in the future if you don’t mind~, because it feels like a good system for when one’s writing makes relatively heavy usage of italics.

“Vee. I’m…” Something seemed to confuse her. “...Three!”
Aww… hi, Vee! Something big must have happened for her to come alone to the guild building, right…?

Okay, so this time he grabbed the handle and the crank. Some more effort got the box off the wagon and pressing into his arms, punctuated by the sound of several objects rolling around. He almost lost his balance trying to carry its surprising weight. “Wh-what’s in this thing?”

“I put my rocks in there,” Vee stated matter-of-factly.
Aww… I lov how earnest she is! Silly, too, but I wonder if there are some rare kinds of rocks inside…? Somehow I get the feeling that things aren’t fully how they seem.

“SHIT!”

The audino stumbled backwards and fell on his own tail. The cotton head of an impidimp jeered down at him, swaying on the spring released from the open box. Vee was in a defensive posture, her tail raised and fur on end. “Shit!”

Horror dawned on him. “D-don’t repeat that!”
VEE, NOOOO….. this was a nice bit of comedy, LOL! God knows one has to watch their language around impressionable Pokemon (lol), but I won’t lie that it’s a bit silly to think of a kind-looking Audino swearing, even if simply caught by surprise, ahaha..

a fairly sizable building with a wine glass sign and a big set of double doors.
My mind keeps wanting to put this in a Wild West-style setting because of the mesa LOL, but the double doors feel a tad characteristic!

Alfred felt a little concerned as to what he accidentally ordered, but hell, he could probably take it.
Uh oh, LOL… here’s hoping this ends in him making a new friend!??

We get no news out here except rumors, and I find I prefer it that way.”
Hmm, I think it’s good Rhys chose the slow life, then! Lots of people feel the same way, really, so this feels like a very realistic sentiment.

After finishing his drink, he made sure to pay in full. And with a light head and lighter wallet
Completely optional, but in terms of stylistic flair, I would have maybe done the ‘lighter wallet’ part in parentheses? I like the repetition, anyways!

He figured the best time would be the morning before work, that’s when it was quietest. And so, with a basket in one paw and a feeler in the other, he took his chance.
I’m guessing that the difference between the city’s hustle and bustle and this rural town’s would be the attitudes present with each differing? IIRC Audino are able to sense feelings quite well with their feelers, but perhaps I’m off the mark.

Alfred placed a paw on his hip. “A single cheri berry?” Sounds like he’s trying to get rid of you.
LOL… In some ways I guess I wouldn’t blame poor Uncle Espio, Vee seems like a lot…

“We can shop together!”
She’s so sweet and earnest..

And she just walked along, barely acknowledging them as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

She’s gotta be royalty.
I would have chalked it up to her just being friendly with the others in her town, buuut given she’s an Eeveelution…

And yet with the help of that device, it was over in just a few seconds. “What is this thing?” he asked.
This is so neat! I think if one is going to write Pokemon in a humanlike manner, building in solutions to the physical limitations faced by certain types of Pokemon is a must, and this is a creative solution to handling money for sure! Nice work..

“Espio?” Rhys passed Alfred his drink. “You mean the crown prince?”
WOW…

“I think I’ll try and have a drink with him.”
Sure seems like Alfred is going to make a new friend!! (I hope?)

Maybe I should find some new hobbies.

And then the door opened and Espio walked in.
This comes as a bit of a surprise, but I’m excited to see if they hit it off or not! Somehow it’s not a shock, and I think it might be because you’ve set up Alfred wanting to meet him properly earlier on…? Good work!

Alfred blinked. What.
…is Espio going to move the window???

Espio covered her eyes with his tail. “Don’t stare directly into it.” Even as he scolded her, Alfred was sure he caught him smiling.
Cuuute… Espio seems like such a good uncle!

“Electricity…?” The enormity of what was just implied was slow to dawn on him, but once it did his eyes became as wide as Vee’s. “You mean, this doesn’t use fire, or gas?!”
Wow, I’m surprised using it seems to have not occurred to those in the city, given Electric-types exist! Just goes to show one can find innovation wherever they go, I suppose…?

“V-Vee! That’s off limits!”

She looked at him with drooping ears. “I’m bored,” she whined.
She’s so silly… :)

Espio leaned forward to lap at his apple cider.
Already said this, but I like these ways you’re showing differences in how Pokemon go about humanlike activities with these descriptions and adjectives!

“Sounds expensive.”

“It can be.” He bent down to drink. “I pay it with your taxes.”

…Was that a joke?
LOL?????

“Y’know, after hearing that, I’m surprised you’re not a vaporeon. Or a jolteon, for that matter. Why’d you choose espeon?”
Choose!?? Wow, that’s a very cool piece of worldbuilding that Eevee would be able to choose their evolution stage… I like it quite a bit!

Espio nodded. “Yes. I believe the goal of technology should be to ease the burden of participating in society. Much of Farbroad consists of misfits: pokémon who couldn’t adapt to the rise of cities and structures meant only for the most well-rounded and versatile of us. You see this in the nomads, and our immigrants, and the many four-legged ‘mon who call this town home.”
Right, I like how noble Espio’s goals are! Really, I feel as though especially in such a diverse setting that attitude is a great one…

“They’re earmuffs. They help reduce noise,” answered Espio. “Consider it my thanks for being Vee’s friend.”
Oh, how sweet… I can tell Espio has such a passion for helping others… I’m sure Alfred appreciates it!

He opened the door, entered, and closed it behind him.

[…]

He leaned against the door and admired the calm.
I oftentimes look for the first sentence in a fic to set the story and scene in my mind, but… in this case, I feel like your last few sentences here were quite strong!

I enjoyed this work more than I thought I would have, really! I still don’t know if I’d like every PMD fic I’d come across, but I’m happy to say this one opened my mind quite a bit! Your worldbuilding is very very strong here, and I think your characters were personable — the morals present in the story were very nice to read, and I think Alfred’s development to being a bit more accepting, I suppose, of the new world around him, was great to see. I think this story played a bit more into the ‘mundane’ part of our theme than the ‘magical’ part, but that’s not a bad thing! I'm not fully an enjoyer of PMD's ‘Pokemon as humans’ vibe, and I still at times got that vibe which is just not my cup of tea, but the way you modified it to make it clear Pokemon were still the characters in the end was entertaining, really! You did great, and I’m pleased I had the chance to read something out of my personal comfort zone. I’m curious to know who the writer is so I can check out more of their work!

Windskull

This fic focused on something that I really love to see in PMD worldbuilding. In a society where there are sapients of such different needs, how do they accommodate that? A rhydon isn't going to fit in a door built for small pokemon like sprigatito, but a small pokemon like joltik isn't going to be able to open a rhydon-sized door. Something like a Grimer won't be able to use a ladder and probably can't use stairs. This fic focuses on solving those problems.

There are little implications of the state of the world spread out through the story, too. For example, the layout of Harmonia and Alfred noting the lack of fortifications implies that they don't have a lot of enemies. Or perhaps that there's enough of value to take for them to worry about attackers. The intention ends up being closer to the latter. There's also implications in the decision to station Alfred somewhere quiet what with his sensitive hearing. Something he seems frustrated and perhaps a little belittled by.

I noticed there are quite a few little worldbuilding quirks within the fic that give me the vibe this might be part of some bigger universe that you’ve written. Whether it is or not, there’s just enough detail that the world feels lived in without bogging down this story itself.

As for the characters, I like how distinct all the named characters feelYou really get the vibe that Alfred is frustrated by the fact that he was assigned here.Espio is a bit cold outwardly, but it’s clear from his actions that he’s a caring individual. Vee is adorable.

In terms of critique, I’m finding it hard to come up with anything substantial. There are a few sentences here and there that I think would have worked better if they were restructured, sure, but it’s subjective and it's really all I can come up with.

Overall, I think this was an excellent story. It feels like a small slice of life in a much grander setting, and I think it shows the theme well as a result. I had a wonderful time reading this.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"The First Red Dawn" by EonDuoLatias

The chill of the autumn night seeped into my bones, as the pitter-patter of the heavy rain and crashing thunder echoed throughout my tent. I lay there, my tail curled up around my legs and body, my eyes closed but my heart racing, as I waited for the return of the Supreme Commander.

He told us to rest as much as possible, prepare ourselves for the fight. To treat it as a performance, an opportunity to showcase our power. But we all knew one thing: that the performance had to be perfect. Any single mistake could lead to us—me, perhaps the rest of the battalion, perhaps the entire war effort—failing, losing.

I haven’t stepped onto the battlefield for almost a month now; the 149th Battalion had been putting in the heavy lifting. In the span of three weeks, they had liberated the entirety of MSDP and STPL—Mossdeep and Sootopolis, the two major islands in the South. On the other hand, our battalion had not had the opportunity to fight much recently, aside from a few minor skirmishes; the takeover of most of Mainland Hoenn had been quick and successful, without too many setbacks.

The humans wouldn’t give up Hoenn so easily, however. Though Lilycove was the only city in the Continent which they still held, they held it with an iron grip. Having set up massive blockades across the of the city, most of the humans have taken refuge there, attempting to regroup and fight back.

And so, in the outskirts of the city, our regiment stayed, awaiting the return of the Supreme Commander, awaiting the results of his scouting mission, awaiting his orders, the orders that, maybe, just maybe, would win Hoenn for us—for the people. But we didn’t have to wait long...


Judge Comments

JFought

I’d like to preface this review by saying that I don’t think focusing on the daily lives of soldiers in the middle of a war is an invalid way to interpret the theme. Honestly, I respect it a lot. It’s a big risk to take in a contest like this, and I think the idea has a lot of unique potential that would otherwise go completely untapped.

To that end, there are some places where the story manages to touch on that. The premise of the war is interesting, and the background we get in the beginning on how it’s been going works well in setting the stage. “Pokémon Dragon Riders” is also a cool concept to show off and you do a fairly good job of establishing a dynamic between Xavian and Yelanie.

However, while the concepts at play have potential, pretty much all of them came out feeling underdeveloped. I’m not talking about the war itself: I actually like that we don’t know much about it, I think it adds nice intrigue to the situation. But a lot of this story’s threads and characters are just kind of… presented to us. Like things are happening without any real consequence or glue to tie them together.

I think a good microcosm of what I mean is the third scene, which, if you would allow me to be harsh, felt completely pointless. And that shouldn’t be the case, right? We’re introduced to a new character, are given allusions to a wider war effort; they talk battle strategy, the stakes are set, Commander Latios is given characterization to show his devotion to his cause. This is buildup! In a vacuum, this would be interpreted as an important scene. Except, the climax it’s building to occurs right after, as a short scene that ends right as the battle begins, and then that’s the fic. Nothing that was established in that scene goes on to matter, which raises the question of what kind of purpose it was trying to serve. Maybe its purpose is supposed to be a thematic one, but that leads us into the broader issue.

My take on what you're going for with your interpretation of “daily life” is that you're trying to show off the aspects of war that are normally glossed over. We have a soldier character, and they spend the story training and preparing for a battle. That is the purpose of that scene then: to show preparation. But this is the farthest the story is willing to take its own premise, as it fails to communicate anything else. Xavian, our protagonist, just kind of exists. He has a place in the army, engages in a character dynamic at one point, and the story happens to be told from his point of view. But he never goes through any kind of experience, and we get no insight into how he feels about his situation beyond being loyal to his commander and sharing his beliefs. There is a “conflict” in theory, with the whole war and everything, but there isn't really any conflict. Any central idea or emotional core or interesting contrast or character dilemma or any other form of thesis or purpose to tie the story together and give the audience a reason to care. Instead it feels like this one-shot is only interested in showing off a premise and the fact that you thought about it, and while I can appreciate that, it isn't a very compelling interpretation of the prompt, and I can’t say I came out of this one feeling much of anything.

I specifically brought up Xavian because by far the easiest way to fix this would be to flesh him out, and explore why he’s in this war and how he feels about it and what he fights for. It wouldn’t be the only way, but with how the story is set up, it almost feels like that’s what it’s wanting to do in the first place, and I think it would be the most natural way to help give this story a stronger tie to the contest theme. Though even if that isn't the route you’d like to take, you already have a good setup, it just needs something to give it context and us a reason to care about it.

For a less broad critique, I did think it was strange to keep Xavian’s species unstated for so long. It brought down the beginning a bit, because the descriptions given to hint at his species were too vague to really put anything together, and I found it distracting. Otherwise, I do think the story is fine on a technical level. Maybe you rely on em dashes a little too much, but I think the prose does what it sets out to do and sells its scenes well.

All that said, I hope my criticisms made sense to you. I will admit that there’s a part of me that maybe unfairly sees a potential in your interpretation of the theme that I'm not sure this story was going for, and so I’m trying to remain fair and not let that bias cloud my judgement. And I can see some of the ways in which you tried to adhere to the theme. But sorry to say, I just don't think it comes together in the end.

kintsugi

I like the broad strokes of this, especially through the contest lens–war as an everyday event isn’t something that we all have to face, but it can certainly become the day to day for some people. I think this angle especially works from the point of view of looking at how people normalize things that aren’t normal for everyone else–so to see how Xavian is so used to the harsh realities of war, to see the mundane aspects of training to kill, puts a lot of things into perspective. Normalizing via showing the absence, so to speak; it’s also certainly true that for some people this is unabashedly their everyday.

Themewise, where I get lost a little is twofold. First is that this isn’t just any normal day in the military–the emotional conflict in this story is limited, but it’s largely Xavian’s pre-battle anxieties, on the day before (what seems) the biggest battle in his lifetime. One side is set to be erased from history while the other is primed to found a brand new nation. To me, even though the story cuts before the actual battle takes place (on the very cool image of Xavian kickflipping Steven Stone in the face tbf), it’s still very much about the anxieties of that battle, and therefore is very much a piece building up to a very singular, non-everyday event:the titular first red dawn. I struggled to square “first” with the references to the previous efforts to take MSDP/STPL and the fact that Lilycove is referenced as the human’s last stand, so presumably there have been bloody days before–in light of the contest theme I thought perhaps that the title’s “first” is referring to the fact that bloodshed is the new norm, and that the everyday for everyone after will be the red of this glorious revolution, but that’s a bit more bleak than the story content implies outright–which again leaves the actual day’s events as being quite far from the (implicit) peaceful days to follow that Xavian and friends are fighting for.

Secondly, both on a theme and story level, I wanted a bit more understanding of what this actually means for the day to day of the people involved–primarily, why they’re fighting, what they’re fighting for, and what they’re fighting against. I’m using lines like “guarding their trainers with their life” and my general understanding of what liberating/skirmishes/battles tend to imply in warfare to assume that these fights end in death, not “fainting” or something more explicitly Pokemon-coded fwiw, but through that light, Latios gives a lot of lines about brutal warfare that I would honestly think are pretty villainous–“we have something that the humans can’t even dream of [...] love for the cause. Remember: the people have faith, our struggle has hope, our nation has strength”–my understanding here is that the humans are fighting to avoid extinction, and that the pokemon forces here have successfully overrun all of their other cities with great casualties, so I find it hard to believe that anyone in the human’s shoes wouldn’t have love for the cause of not being wiped out. To say that the difference between you and the opposing side is that unlike them, you love your side–feels a bit reductionist, and also specifically reductionist in the way that doesn’t feel realistic, since pretty much all groups of people have love for the idea of not being eradicated. An earlier Latios line stood out to me for similar reasons: “treat it as a performance, an opportunity to showcase our power” strikes me as a very callous way to describe preparing for death, and specifically uses words to fictionalize the killing, such as “performance” and “showcase”, to avoid naming the very real deaths that are going to take place. I don’t think Latios’s actions are explicitly unrealistic here, but I was waiting for some sort of shoe to drop, i.e. that Latios realized that this level of dehumanization for their enemies is necessary lest his troops begin to sympathize for the pokemon/humans on the other side or something.

On a more granular level, “why they’re fighting” got a bit murky as well. The ending scene implies that human-aligned flying-types don’t have riders (only the pokemon are described to be in the air, and trainers except Steven Stone are only referenced as being “on the ground”), so I wasn’t entirely sure what role aerial mounted combatants would have–the most effective part of a cavalry charge is typically the momentum of Horse at Speed, with the rider largely there to navigate and eliminate nearby threats, but in this setting, the steed is largely capable of navigating itself, and the rider is mostly just going to endanger themselves, like Xavian pointed out. Likewise the actual mechanics of the encampment read very traditional-human-warfare to me, even when these implements might not be amenable to pokemon–how would Furret pitch a tent in a way that’s more efficient than digging a burrow? How can Espeon hold playing cards in her paw? How does Salamence’s anatomy allow her to salute? And zooming out a bit, Xavian’s relationship with Yelanie feels less like comrades or brothers-in-arms, and more like a trainer/pokemon. Yelanie’s lines are all effusive praise (“you’re a natural, comrade”, “they aren’t as skilled and as powerful as you”), or indicating that she’s been twiddling her claws without him (“just give me a command”, “I’ve been waiting for you for so long”). And Xavian’s lines to her are critique (“The humans are smart—smart cowards, but still smart. Remember”, “A little more forward, I think, would be better, and be more fluid in your actions”--which I found pretty incongruent with the plot’s conflict that he’d be the one out of practice for being benched for so long) and commands. It feels very asymmetric, and combined with how closely their society imitates human society, it feels like they’re working to overthrow a human nation/regime just to replace it with their own.

All in all, I found the setup of this very striking and memorable–the Pokemon franchise has a lot of normalized conflict, so it’s interesting to see the more extreme versions of that conflict explored and normalized. I think the mental image of linoone leaping from dragonback is rad, and the ending image, with Steven’s metagross cinematically mega evolving so brightly that the light eclipses all else except the image of our protagonist leaping through the air, is very striking and dramatic. Nice work on your entry this year, and thanks for sharing it!

I noticed some grammar/clarity things as I was reading through–not really something that weighed too heavily into my judging, but since I was doing a close read I wanted to flag these for you:
I haven’t stepped onto the battlefield for almost a month now
Most of the story is in past tense, so this should be I hadn’t stepped [...]
Having set up massive blockades across the of the city, most of the humans have taken refuge there
Dropped a word in the first half of this sentence, and the back half is in present when it should be in past tense.
And so, in the outskirts of the city, our regiment stayed, awaiting the return of the Supreme Commander, awaiting the results of his scouting mission, awaiting his orders, the orders that, maybe, just maybe, would win Hoenn for us—for the people.
There’s a fair few commas in this sentence. Though I think they’re all legally/grammatically in the clear, the one between “his orders” and “the orders” kept tripping me up, and it might read more clearly (though less technically correct, with since the fragment is partitioned off now) as: And so, in the outskirts of the city, our regiment stayed, awaiting the return of the Supreme Commander, awaiting the results of his scouting mission, awaiting his orders. The orders that, maybe, just maybe, would win Hoenn for us—for the people.
Immediately, I stood to attention on my hind legs, saluting the Commander as he approached the campsite, continuously descending until the Latios was directly in front of me, hovering slightly above me.
The subject of this sentence changes in a way that makes it hard to track: “I stood to attention [and saluted]”, but then “[the Commander] continuously descend[ed]”. It’d read a bit more clearly as [...] I stood to attention on my hind legs, saluting the Commander as he approached the campsite. The Latios continuously descended until he was hovering slightly above [and in front of] me.
I nodded. The visibility of the early morning would be much lower, I knew, which might make our job more difficult; but it would make theirs harder as well, I thought to myself.
The semicolon here is technically right, if the italicized thoughts are treated like dialogue, but I found it a little confusing to read. Might work better as two sentences here: [...]which might make our job more difficult. But it would make theirs harder as well, I thought.
After all, from what I know of your steed too, he’s an insomniac too.
You could probably axe the first “too”.
The Salamence, on the other hand, dived downwards, her claw brimming with draconic energy
Might’ve meant “claws” here? I know there’s an attack technically called “Dragon Claw” (singular), so it could go either way I guess.
Though I’m quite glad that at least my skills didn’t deteriorate too much.” Well, it probably did, to be honest, I thought to myself. It’s just that it won’t make too much of a difference…hopefully.
It’s a little unclear what the “it” in “Well, it probably did” is referring to. Inferentially I imagine it’s meant to be about Xavian’s time off of training, which is sort of what the “it” in “just that it won’t make too much of a difference”, but the previous dialogue refers only to “skills”, so I’d imagine “they” would fit better, as in Though I’m glad that at least my skills didn’t deteriorate too much. Well, they probably did, to be honest.
“You’ll be fine, I promise! I’ve been training a lot, I’ll have you know! And don’t worry about making mistakes, I’ve been practicing my saves a lot lately!” The Salamence insisted, laughing.
Dialogue punctuation quirk here–this should be [...]“I’ve been practicing my saves a lot lately!” the Salamence insisted
Indeed, the jockeys aren’t the most graceful most of the time. Though the steeds probably have the easier job to play in the air most of the time
Nothing technically wrong, but there’s a few too many “most [of the time]” than I think is necessary here.
But at least I could fight better—I hope, at least.
Likewise here with “at least”.
“Four no-trumps,” the Latios murmured, as the Espeon opposite her raised a paw in the air
The bolded “her” probably should be “his”, since it seems to be referring to Latios, who’s consistently used he/him before and after this.
On the ground, hordes of Pokemon formed a defensive line around the city, guarding their trainers with their life.
“Life” should be “lives” here.
On his wrist, a single, multi-coloured crystal glistened, and in his hand gripped a loudspeaker.
“In his hand gripped a loudspeaker” doesn’t quite parse, though I see the parallelism you’re going for. I think something like On his wrist, a single, multi-coloured crystal glistened, and in his hand, a loudspeaker blared would keep the parallelism, while His wrist glistened with a multi-coloured crystal, and his hand gripped a loudspeaker would keep the verb-likes the same.

tomatorade

I almost wish this was less focused on such a pivotal moment. That’s not to say you missed the mark on the prompt, I think you’ve especially understood how to start and end this oneshot, but so much of the story centers around this great battle that it distracts from the everyday running of the camp and what it means to be a pokesoldier in this war, which is what I’m here for.

Really, what this boils down to is wanting more. I guess I wouldn’t mind the focus if we still saw the day-to-day of soldiers in between battles, but most of what we get is combat practice. You don’t really touch on different troops outside that, or different priorities and jobs within the camp. And you definitely have the space. Five pages is quite short and generally left me wanting more by the end.

One thing I did like a lot was how chill this was. It’s easy to make every story about war drab and miserable and anxious, which is often appropriate, but here you have a kind of levity and certainty to there-combat routines that really pulls me through. The reading experience was fun and easy, the characters bounced off each other well even if some of the dialogue had too much exposition and felt slightly awkward. It had that classic PMD vibe even though this took place in the mainline world.

Otherwise, my complaints are mostly a series of picky little problems I found reading.

First, I’d love to know the species of the MC earlier. You had no problem with every other character, but Xavian gets lost pretty immediately.

You also have a tendency for some clunky exposition. A lot of moments in dialogue consist of one character telling another something they should already know—this is how you introduce the MC’s species, much about the upcoming battles, the strengths and weaknesses of steed vs jockeys at the end of the second scene.

Speaking on more positive aspects of the fic, I liked the world quite a bit. You made a smart choice not really diving into the broader strokes of the war—it helps keep this very focused and helping edge the fic overall towards the mundane. But it still offers a lot of intrigue for the state of the world and relationships between people and pokemon. It’s mainline pokemon, but with what I guess is a bit of a communication breakdown between the two camps. It’s also interesting to me that the pokemon are essentially human-level intelligent. It helps me sympathize with them much more than more animallike pokemon, though it might’ve still been fun to play around with more animallike characteristics in the context of war preparation.

I’ll also return to the tone. The tone and characters are very fun. And you’ve found the perfect moment for them right between battles. It elevates the reading experience, I think, or at least makes it a smooth ride. It was fun to watch the characters interact and to see the relationships through the text. Plus little details like manouevre callouts during practice helped make the fic feel alive.

Great fic! I think you’ve got an interesting slice of war going on and I’d be interested in seeing the results lol.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Gathering Moss" by NebulaDreams
First Place Pikachu Flight

Latte art is one of many human novelties I have yet to find the purpose of. Milk is poured at exactly the right angle to draw a heart or Pokémon in coffee foam, which is appreciated for ten seconds, then destroyed with one sip.

I have lived for 1,978 years in my service as a Golurk. I have witnessed wars. I have protected
kingdoms. I have seen societies rise and fall. Latte art is trivial in comparison. Yet I attempt to make it regardless...


Judge Comments

JFought

To start with, the opening few paragraphs for this story are basically perfect. A very strong establishment of character that manages to outline and foreshadow the conflict and themes of the story, in a way that’s very charming and captures the reader’s attention. You got me invested in the story’s first-person POV right off the bat, and the rest of the one-shot follows in line without missing a single step.

You do an incredible job with Terra as the POV character. Their prose is terse and matter-of-fact, yet never tedious. On the contrary, they’re a really fun character to follow. Everything is understated, but the comedic moments are well tailored to it, and the emotional beats are all the more poignant for it. I really like the story here: it’s essentially about of an old person carrying on the legacy of their late friend as their own health deteriorates, except the person is a Golurk who has been around for a very long time and for whom “dying” holds a very different meaning. It's an interesting angle on the contest theme, and you make effective use of Terra’s Golurk-ness with the way it colors their perspective on the situation and creates problems for them as they get closer to “hibernation.”

As for the side characters, they were fun and got some decent development and focus. Mog’s sub-plot does feel a bit like a detour, but we got an important bonding moment out of it to sell the friendship between him and Terra, and it’s balanced fairly well with the rest of the story. Delores and Elizabeth have a well-established role here too, and I enjoyed the conversations they had with Terra. In fact, I enjoyed the conversational dialogue in general in this story, and I think that ties in to what really sells it on theme. You spend a lot of time developing just enough of a cast to get across what it must be like to run this café: a coworker and two regulars (and the various patrons, who have quite a bit of personality too!). And it’s through Terra’s relationships with them (plus the small flashbacks with Steve) that we come to understand what they value in this place and in their work. The story feels ambitious in what it’s trying to do, and while it fittingly is over 9k, I was surprised it didn’t cut it closer to 10, and I think that speaks to how economical you were with the characters and scenes that it manages to accomplish as much as it does with room to spare.

I think if I have any nitpicks, it’s that I do think there's some untapped potential in regards to theme? In the sense that Terra is the only character in the story where them being a Pokémon really feels like it matters. We do get a couple small moments with side characters like that Inteleon patron or the Machoke, and there is a part with Mog where we kind acknowledge it a bit, and you do try to capitalize on the concept PokéJobs with your worldbuilding, but I’m not sure if I’d say you quite brought out the potential of it all. There’s a part of me that wonders if maybe Morgrem is too human-like to feel “uniquely Pokémon” in this specific context: the story does try to make it relevant with that moment where he lets Impidimp in and they ransack the place, but I wouldn’t say that’s enough, or enough in a way that meaningfully ties back to the theme. Though in the end I still say “nitpick,” because Terra being a Golurk is already essential to the story in a way that ties back to the theme; any weaknesses that might exist elsewhere don’t matter much in the face of that. I guess I just feel there’s more you could’ve expanded on here with what you’ve established.

Another nitpick I have is the way Terra’s return is just kinda accepted after how big of a deal them going to sleep was made out to be. Everyone seemed very certain they had gone into hibernation, and then they wake up and it’s treated with the gravity of a power nap. I say nitpick this time because I think I do get why it's like this. With the ending as-written, going through the paces of a “you’re back?!” reunion, even in short, probably would’ve harmed the pacing, and I can accept that it might be better off this way. It just still felt kind of strange, y’know? It might be worth taking a second look at to see if that can be smoothed over in a way that doesn’t break anything.

Though really, I don’t think you need to change anything here. The story as-is is fantastic, with strong emotional beats backed up by an effective use of slice-of-life. You really sucked me in with this one, it’s a strong entry and you deserve kudos for it!

kintsugi

I really like your decision to bring in a lot of characters that explore themes via absence--especially with the contest theme being about mundane, daily things, I think it’s a clever way to gear them up for learning lessons despite “slice-of-life” often implying a certain amount of stasis. And there’s something delightful about exploring the mundanity of immortality, the boring ways that this ends up coloring perception of interaction and worth, that I think only comes across in this exact kind of setup. It’s something that feels distinctly suited for the Pokemon universe, and yet it’s not at all a direction I was expecting.

The worldbuilding on this is really unique, but again, also feels really suitable for Pokemon–gardevoir can be anime fans, morgrem can be tired of being defined by their dex stereotypes, golurk can become instruments of art and peace. And all of them can have opinions on coffee. With the background conflict of the protagonist trying to figure out who they want to be, how they want to live their everyday life, I think this type of setting works really well–it does feel like the world is largely fair and open to them, and the choice can end up back in Mog/Golurk/anyone else’s hands, which is a type of catharsis that I think is really furthered by demonstrating all of the opportunities available to pokemon in these little background details. There’s some human-centric bias, but in an approachable/realistic way–this was a human city first, after all. And like. Honestly I think gentle worlds that paint a little of the “oops turns out morgrem do still face prejudice but the protagonists are all very cognizant of that and it’s based not to be racist” feel a lot more realistic than “there is, universally, nothing at all possibly wrong beneath this curtain, kindly ignore the demographics of who’s on top and who’s not”. Either way there’s a lot of really cute details in this that I think serve the premise really well–of course this is a quaint coffeeshop run by one of those retired ruin maniac folks, of course this morgrem is a bad baker and his buddy-cop-buddy can’t help because they can’t taste, of course there’s a machoke moving service that doubles as a portable truck jack when needed. I thought the setting here really works both from a theme and just a structure perspective: when it’s about “magical but mundane” it feels right to really delve into these random quirks that everyone in this world is used to, but in a tight first-person story about someone coming to terms with the end of their life, it also really works to establish what they have to love and lose.

The main draw here is far and above the characters, and little intimate details and banter and all. I think you do a fantastic job with the dialogue here; everyone’s got a distinct voice and these distinctions really stand out in Golurk’s very calm, methodical, ASMR-like narration. I like that Mog has his own little arc and learning, that Dolores seems to have already had hers. It lends a lot of credence to “is my purpose to connect?”, and it makes the world feel bigger than Golurk, which adds an extra layer of tension–ultimately the world will continue onward no matter what happens to them. The central conflict that they end up going through is also really fun–gathering moss is a scary concept for golurk, since that means not serving, but is it really so wrong to put down roots? And I think the flashbacks help highlight that they’ve been putting these roots down all along.

Conceptually I think this slaps. I think the golurk lens is a great choice for exploring daily life–they are inherently trying to learn, because they were made to serve, but they inherently struggle to learn, because this is not what they were made for. In the story’s background of small, polite learnings, doing boring things and learning boring lessons, I think the golurk narration helps give a character who could earnestly want to learn all of these lessons for the first time while still being ancient and ultimately bound by their nature. I liked how kind you make them; I think you really demonstrate how having consistent rules not colored by emotions might make you bad at picking up jokes or sarcasm, but would still let you understand people. There’s something specific about “I do not know if she knows how I feel” that really got me lol–ultimately this story does a really good idea of nailing down what’s to love about connection, and growing, and ultimately reflecting. Thanks for sharing!

tomatorade

What a great interpretation of the prompt. Honestly, embarking on my own short story journey I did not think for a second that magical and mundane could lead so much into the habits and biology of certain pokemon. You’re not the only one to do it, but I found myself kicking myself every time lol.

You’ve got a great start here. I can’t remember the first time I read, but rereading I can see the themes slot into place over the first page or so—very efficiently, too. The first three paragraphs in particular are an excellent way to start a story. It’s very brisk and to the point and even despite the physical comedy of a golurk trying to make latte art, manages to get the contrast of their age and the fleeting nature of latte art. It’s an especially strong way to focus your premise, too. ‘Two kinda bumbling pokemon try and run a cafe’ is good, but the thematic strength on display here is what really carries the fic, I think. And adds a real heart throughout. Especially near the end, but Terra’s devotion to Steve is wonderful. Another added benefit of opening on Terra having lived hundreds of years is making that connection feel so much stronger.

Plus those transitional flashbacks Terra has of meeting Steve and experiencing Stow-On-Side and the hibernating golurk adds a great structure to the fic. Otherwise it might be easy to forget what this is all for in between baking worries and cafe interactions.

Now’s as good a time as any to get into characters. You’ve got some archetypes here—stoic, robot guy; snarky sidekick with a heart of gold; even the wise mentor is there in spirit—but for the most part, I think you manage to break free and carve your own little niche. Terra is the obvious strong point of the fic. Just them being a golurk adds a lot of flavour to them on it’s own. It’s always fun to see how other authors interpret pokemon biology and lore, and golurk is not a common choice to explore so that’s something to appreciate. I also appreciate that they aren’t totally detached and flat emotionally. They still feel, just in their own special way. Their personality manages to come through strongly in the prose, which is alway a plus.

And of course, their sentimentality. I said earlier how much I liked their relationship to Steve and I’ll say it again here. You’ve got a great collection of details to flesh out their relationship, and it’s impressive how much personality Steve gets just from these small details. By the end, I feel like I have a real sense of who he is. This sort of sentimentality also fits in really strongly with the theme. Just zooming out and realising that Terra’s time with Steve was not too long gives a lot to think about in context. There’s also a subtle sadness to their reflections. The whole fic feels like a late part of their grieving process.

Very easy to empathize with them anyway. Some people need to stop bullying the elderly golem, they’re trying their best :(

The side characters are also mostly good. Steve is great, as said, but even the regulars are a fun bit of flavour to the mundanity of the fic’s day-to-day.

Mog is the only character I really have problems with. I get what you were going for—a kinda sidekick character to Terra in the grand tradition of cool robots and their snarky pet humans. But they ended up feeling weird whenever they were on page. They have a cartoony sort of humour when the rest of the fic felt much more grounded. I do not understand how they haven't been fired lol. Terra is too nice for their own good, and they even say that they’d considered letting Mog go, but considering how concerned Terra is with getting things right, watching them wander into the kitchen and see a mess every time strains credulity a little. It’s something to tone down, maybe. Mog can still be bumbling and not very good at his job—which is something I liked about him, actually—but rolling pins on the floor and dough everywhere felt at odds with Terra as I understood them.

The other issue I had with Mog is how you handled his… arc? Conflict? I’m not sure what to call it. I think the events themselves are great. It adds some depth to Mog beyond just the baker guy. Unfortunately, it starts and ends within one page. Terra doesn’t really have any thoughts about it beyond forgiving him, there’s no real conflict or presence beyond that page, so it ends up being a weird little side note that I don’t think fits in very well. It’s hard to tell whether it really had an impact on their relationship either way. It might help to set it up a little bit more beforehand, or have it have some consequence after or expand it or something.

The end is both beautiful and harrowing. Especially given I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But the brief montage of all their stations and experiences is one of my favourite moments of the fic. And the change they have after is subtle, but there. It’s an interesting sort of arc for them to… not really accept that they will die, but accept that they are even capable of dying lol. And the way they connect themself back to all the human lives they’ve passed through and your introductory paragraph about latte art—all that’s the cherry on the sundae.

Unfortunately, I have another minor complain. After the montage Terra has a chat with their kinda-creator and it’s just distracting. It comes out of nowhere and isn’t super connected to the rest of the fic and has me asking a bunch of new questions that you have no time to develop or wrap up, all of which is especially unfortunate right at the end when I’m supposed to be crying. This would work a lot better in the context of a larger story that can expand on that, but given that I only have this oneshot to read it didn’t end up working for me.

It was a great fic, though. Very much my vibe, and I think you used the prompt very well. Good job!
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"GOLD!" by tomatorade

One morning, when he was very young, Ringo’s father became obsessed. He had his box of trinkets out and spilled on the floor of the sitting room. As an old flareon, he was a tumbleweed of white fur and red fur so dull it appeared white, and he seemed an ugly tumour attached to the white wool rug.

All his old memories were lined up before him, decades of old coins, bits of machines from eras past, and the old, bleached purses used to hold them. Maybe for him to reminisce. He did not reminisce quietly; what Rigno really remembered was watching him rant to himself from the doorway, too timid to make himself known. The noise shaking him.

All because of gold coins...


Judge Comments

Dragonfree

I think you've got a very neat concept here coupled with some strong characterization: this guild boasts of a load of gold rank rescue teams, but really half of them were fully manufactured by this Umbreon, who will casually create crises for his clients to resolve and then have blackmail on them for the rest of their lives. Ringo is deliciously sinister, and it's painful to watch Tylus ultimately chickening out of telling the truth and silently accepting the gold rank, Absinthe seeing his own little brother being obliviously taken advantage of to facilitate it. I'm sort of torn on how well it fits the theme, though - it doesn't feel very slice of life, what with the straight-up villain and stakes and injury, even though we see a bit of normal day-to-day guild operations alongside it. Of course, part of the point here is that this is daily life for Ringo and the guild, horrific as it is - lure a child into a dungeon and knock them out here, blackmail there, pick up a new oblivious client along the way - but as far as daily life in the Pokémon world goes, I would not have identified that as a significant theme in this story without knowing it was an entry in this contest!

I think you did a very nice job with buildup in the pivotal scenes here, which did a lot for the story. Ringo and Whiskey in the dungeon was already worrying after learning Ringo is definitely up to something, but Whiskey slowing down and noticing that the still-smiling Ringo isn't limping anymore is a great moment of real dread; the pause that follows is tense, drawn out in just the right way, and then there's Ringo telling him "I think it's about time" and to listen for something, and Whiskey sincerely listening as hard as he can because if he wants to get good at this he needs to sharpen his senses... There's just a very good, unsettling rhythm to this bit that makes it really hit. And likewise, I thought the scene where Tylus frantically runs into the dungeon knowing he's going to find something awful manufactured for his benefit was great; just pure dread and shock and then Ringo is there casually feeding him the cover story, feel free to embellish, chiding him for being too busy being upset and in shock to take care of Whiskey. You did a great job on Tylus's mental state and desperate efforts to resist and refuse and the way Ringo's heard it all before, and on the way Tylus ultimately just succumbs, and how dreadful all his clients feel about it while Ringo sits there brimming with satisfaction. And the contemplation on how when there's not much crime going on the would-be heroes of the world are left having to resort to Ringo's trickery to achieve their gold-rank feats is fascinating and has awful implications for this world - is basically every heroic rescue a problem that was staged by Ringo?

This story suffered for being confusingly written, though, in a way that's hard to fully articulate. It's a combination of typos, sentence fragments, frequently odd or unusual word usage, and various writing choices throughout that make things sort of vague or not fully connected together, all compounding in a way where on the first readthrough I felt like I just really wasn't properly following what was going on until about halfway through when the pieces started to connect. Obviously part of the point here is the buildup of a bit of mystery before you reveal exactly what it is that Ringo is actually up to after he casually knocks Whiskey unconscious. But one way or another, as I read this for the first time I felt less like we were building up a mystery and more like the story was just completely going over my head. It took me three reads of some scenes to piece together what's really going on and what they're getting at; some I still haven't quite figured out.

Here's my current understanding of things: Ringo's father hated gold because it displaced previous currency which displaced trading and bartering. Ringo picked up from him a certain contempt for the notion of gold as something to truly value and revere; instead Ringo thinks of himself as the steel scaffolding that keeps everything else upright, and of gold as merely some meaningless thing weak and stupid people feel the need to show off for its own sake, that he'll generously facilitate for them for a fee. He appears to be blackmailing Absinthe and others in the guild for money, ostensibly in exchange for information about jobs but presumably really in exchange for not revealing they didn't earn their ranks legitimately(?). Tylus in particular is someone who he's promised to get to gold rank before tomorrow, and he fulfills that promise by first feeding Bella and others the information that an Ursaring in a certain dungeon is meant to be gone (to set up why he'd be justified in taking a child there, presumably; I think it's also suggested the information there was ever an Ursaring in it may have also been an offscreen Ringo fabrication), then telling Tylus to go check on that dungeon while (presumably) drugging the guy who's supposed to be guarding it, and then tempting Absinthe's naïve younger brother Whiskey into exploring the dungeon with him, knocking him out and then himself inside it so that Tylus will find them and 'rescue' them and can tell everyone he fended off the Ursaring that'd attacked them. Absinthe, who wants to make a move against Ringo, overhears Ringo telling Tylus to go to the dungeon and that he'll be arranging the rank for him, and he means to try to stop Tylus and persuade him to help him take Ringo down before tonight, but he doesn't actually make any move to do so - presumably because Whiskey was the one taken, and that successfully shocks Absinthe into silence(?). Tylus is shocked when he gets there by Ringo hurting a child, and threatens to reveal what Ringo's doing, but Ringo calls his bluff, and ultimately Tylus goes along with Ringo's story and is miserably promoted to the gold rank, while Ringo finds a new target at the celebration.

I like this plot, if I've understood it correctly. But when first reading the first scene, for example, I just had trouble following why this old Flareon is so angry at his own gold coins that he's taken out a box of them and scattered them across the floor just to bite them in half. On a reread, you do technically answer it in the scene:

Though he tended to rave at many objects and more pokemon, Ringo could never forget this image of him in particular. It was the only piece of the puzzle he ever understood. The lone card he took and shuffled into his own deck. Later in life he’d learn the continent had taken gold as its currency. After silver, which came after grain, which came after simple bartering.

His father had lived through most of that. And made his feelings know in dents and scratches.
But the way this is phrased feels very roundabout, doesn't really make it obvious why just living through the transition from bartering to grain to silver to gold would make his father suddenly want to destroy his own coins years after the fact, I think. And because it's not super clear, and it's kind of an odd thing for someone to do in the first place, I at least initially came out of the scene just confused by why his father hated gold so much and what the scene was actually trying to tell me - I figured maybe we were supposed to find out more about it later, but it never happened.

I felt something like that for a lot of this story - dialogue where I couldn't quite follow the flow of conversation, roundabout descriptions dancing around something I couldn't quite grasp, characters reacting to each other in unexplained ways I didn't quite understand.

And she just sat there, blinking. Absinthe passed by while she thought. The long tail of his head-leaf trailed across her partner's shoulders and he seemed to shudder. Weakened a moment.

“You saw, right?” he pleaded.

Pleaded. Like her grandma in cold winters, unable to get up out of bed.

When he smiled back at her, a muscle tensed in his neck. His scales seemed duller, there, even sitting in bright grass and bright light. Their eyes did not fully meet.

She swallowed. Glanced once more at Absinthe, who’d already stomped off without a word.

And then the strangeness vanished. Things warmed. Tylus sighed and softened and they were a whole team again. She could wonder what happened later, but for now they had work to do.

“Yeah, I saw.”
Here, for example, I'm still not totally sure what just happened. Why is Tylus so badly affected by Absinthe's leaf brushing him? Why is he so urgently asking Sewsoat if she "saw it" (saw Absinthe's leaf brushing him, or something else...?)? I initially thought this was setting up something dodgy about Absinthe, or that Absinthe had just done something to sabotage Tylus somehow, but if there's meant to be anything dodgy about Absinthe other than also being unwillingly trapped in Ringo's web, I don't think I've picked it up from the rest of the story, and the Absinthe-POV scene that follows this doesn't seem to illuminate anything about it - he doesn't even seem to recognize Tylus's voice when he then eavesdrops on his conversation with Ringo, so it doesn't sound like they had any previous relationship. Part of me thinks the latter scene might actually be meant to take place before the former, but that feels like kind of a stretch too since as far as I can tell every other scene is in chronological order, and the scene with Sewsoat and Tylus talks about it being part of their pre-lunch planning, while in the Absinthe scene he's at lunch, so the internal time cues also seem to suggest the first one happens first. All in all, even after several rereads, I'm just not sure what the relationship between Absinthe and Tylus is meant to be here or what this interaction means or how that fits in with the rest of the story.

I kept being confused by the narration in one way or another throughout the first half especially; most of the time I can basically figure out what you were probably trying to convey, but the way it's put is somewhat confusing or counterintuitive and has me stopping to reread the sentence or paragraph before I can be sure what you meant. This happened in some form multiple times a page, but just a few examples I happened to remember or make a note of: The Wingull are "always on time, never punctual" which feels at a glance like just an oxymoron (I guess you mean they technically arrive on time but procrastinate on the actual job?); Whiskey talks about a bag of necessities and then goes on to "Kinda hard to read in Absinthe's chickenscratch, but he'd begged a copy weeks ago" with no mention of any note or anything written down or anything he might have "a copy" of (I guess he's referring to some kind of unmentioned inventory of what should be packed for a mission?); Wheateater having "a bit of a reputation and too much money for drink" just took me a bit to parse correctly (presumably you mean that he has a reputation for drink, and a lot of money to spare that he spends on drinking, too much in the sense that if he had less money it would at least put some limits on it); Ringo describes a "nice break in between work" as "Needed, but not desired—as the hardest worker in the guild, even he recognised the value of a little time to himself" which kind of seems to indicate he doesn't want a break right before saying he does (I guess the point is he can reluctantly understand that it'd be good for him even though he doesn't actually want it?).

There are also some random shifts to present tense in here, even though most of the story is in the past tense - I don't think that contributed majorly to the clarity issues or anything, but it was there.

All that said, though, even though I had some difficulties following the story in the first half especially, I thought it made up for it in the second half, which I found quite memorable and evocative and interesting - once I properly got what the story was, I was into it. Ringo is such a magnificent evil bastard, and Tylus is just so freaked out and miserable about the whole thing; I love what you did with these scenes, and you've clearly got a knack for that sort of buildup and emotion. In hindsight I thought it was a somewhat odd choice how long it takes to introduce Tylus, given the climax is so centered around him, and I think I would also have liked to see a bit more of Absinthe - I'm still a bit confused about his role in things, as I mentioned above - but by the end I definitely dug what you were doing with this. Prose clarity can be a somewhat difficult/subtle issue to address, especially if English isn't your first language, but it's something that should come with practice, especially with the help of a beta who's willing to be honest if they don't quite understand.

So aside from those issues, I really do think you've got a neat thing going here. It is less about the daily life theme than I would have expected in this contest, but simply as a story I think it's very interesting and delightfully twisted.

Flyg0n

I thought this idea was really cool! A sly, deceptive Umbreon, making sure that certain exploration teams are able to make Gold rank by pulling strings and setting up some clever tricks? Plus the buildup to the reveal was rather nice.

I particularly thought using multiple POV’s to establish how different people in the story viewed Ringo was a good idea. It helps to show how his deception is definitely fooling some mon and not others, and gives a good show of how some mon are simply unaware while others are too busy or fearful to take action.

Unfortunately, I did find myself struggling a bit with prose and some generally confusing sentence structure. These things can be pretty tricky though, whether it's trying to go for evocative prose or just english being a weird language.

Generally, the only real answer for this is a beta and going for simpler prose. Instead of giving any specific advice I’ll just say to keep working on it! No matter how you spin it, getting the hang of prose is really hard. I think there were some good lines as well, so it's all about balance.

I also thought that another good part was the way different characters have unique dialogue and speech mannerisms. It can be easy to slip into samey voices, but I think here I found there’s clever ways in which the different characters sounded distinct. Even something like the way a certain character swears differently or speaks differently.

I did find that the way the story felt like it had a bit more climactic conclusion and buildup made for a fun read but did ever so slightly detract from the more mundane day to day problems. Still, I thought that as a concept on a whole, it works well for the kind of story it is, and uses a really neat concept instead of a more heroic or moral character.

By the end of it, Ringo gets away to making Gold, but it feels like a satisfying conclusion, especially for a short story like this.

lisianthus

Another PMD fic, so another preface that I don’t know too much about PMD aside from the base storyline and plot! So I’m bound to misunderstand some things, apologies!

and he seemed an ugly tumour attached to the white wool rug.
Oof… vivid imagery, but it’s certainly cutting to the core and grabs a reader’s attention.

All because of gold coins.

[…]

He bit gold coins in half and spat out the remains, plowed them into the floor with a paw, called them easy, raved about them turning to dust in his pockets
(I believe you missed the period at the end!) But wow, a real-life gold fever, huh… must have been a bit scary for Ringo to see his father so enraptured?

Starting to turn to something, bella swore.
I’m a bit unsure if this was on purpose given Ringo was capitalized, but I believe you missed the capitalization on Bella’s name? I know that some fic writers tend to not capitalize Pokemon names and such, but I’m unsure if not capitalizing the name itself was on-purpose. If it was, I’m curious as to why!

The swellow and other mailbirds made themselves known as dark streams through the blue and landed easy and clean on their perches. They’d chatter for a while before dropping off the mail.
This is a neat small bit of worldbuilding! I think it’s neat to see how PMD authors reconcile Pokemon being humanlike, but being able to specialize in certain jobs due to their natural characteristics. Mailbrings make sense…

He sorta sank in on himself. Looks back over his shoulder. He’s not budged from the doorway, claws curled around the door and ready to sprint. He whined a little and it reminded her of a deflating balloon.
This paragraph mixes present-tense and past-tense and it reads a bit confusingly in terms of ‘flow’ to me? I’d personally just stick with past-tense to simplify things, but it’s your call.

Umbreon sat in the corner, usually, but he was born in public, no doubt.
Good way of introducing what kind of Pokemon Ringo is without going into his last name like with the others so far!

She couldn’t remember the title guildmaster blaziken
Unless if I’m missing something, since ‘Guildmaster’ is a title, I believe it should be capitalized.

And he held true to his title, taking her stack of notices gingerly between his teeth and shoving them awkwardly in a space in his bandana. They fanned out in the crook of his neck like a ruffled collar.
I like how this reflects the physical form of an Umbreon not being able to really… grab things? It roots your world as one with (sapient) Pokemon first and foremost.

Despite all his charms, Ringo knew when to give up. He sorta shrugged, pushing himself up and off his wrong leg. With a quick shake and one last smile, he set off. Pausing for the last word.

Damn friggin’ bastard umbreon
Harsh words, lol… but I do think that having a narrator be so strong-feeling shows something to be expected, I suppose, from each character, without properly telling about their personality traits.

Chatty Cathy
Hmm, I’m unsure as to what Pokemon she is? I sort of feel as though sticking to the ‘last name = Pokemon species’ format you’ve previously set up would be a bit less confusing here.

He bandaged open wooden spots with each notice. In only a couple minutes it was all white and black again and Benny got to admire today’s handiwork.
I think I’d use ‘the day’s’ here instead of ‘today’s’, as the latter feels more like something suited for first-person narration, or dialogue?

Lucky for Ringo, Benny’d get a trip to jail for chucking a hammer at his head.
LOL… this was a small moment of levity, and another nice way of indirectly letting us know of Benny’s thoughts. He really doesn’t like Ringo, huh!?

But It […] got a facefull of black and yellow fur, instead.
Two things — I don’t believe ‘it’ should be capitalized in this case, as it doesn’t seem to be a proper noun? And ‘facefull’ is spelled without that last L, I believe.

The one thing he’d miss on evolving would be the ability to blend into the sea of green, being so short. Even his bright red eyes kinda looked like the poppies from far away.
I wish I was able to figure out what Pokemon Whiskey is from this description, as I’m sure it’s good enough for many to infere ahaha! Neat way of describing.

“Tell me when a junior can go into a dungeon,” Ringo urged.

[…]

“...If you’re up for it.”
Interesting! I’m afraid I don’t fully fully get it, as I’m not really able to follow much of this story due to not having much background knowledge, but this is a good story-driving development.

Sewsoat Dewott
I’m admittedly a bit worried your cast of characters is getting a bit too large here? I’m feeling it’s a bit difficult to follow the developments in this story with so many characters to remember, especially as they tend to have very similar speech patterns. Just something to think about, but I do feel it’s getting a bit confusing, although I understand your aim in showcasing many parts of your setting.

Tylus had the spark in him, though. And never stopped seeing gold.
I think your motif of ‘gold’ being present here is good, it gives the sense that gold is very important to your society here… and from what I’ve seen as of now, it makes sense why!

the slow tick of Bella’s pidove clock
I like this small thing of Bella having a Pidove-shaped(?) clock! Sounds cute…

He couldn’t make it to two, but it hardly mattered when he left a half-hour early.

[…]

giving up when he

[…]

He yelped[…]’

I’d put Whiskey’s name a few times within these paragraphs, as it’s much clearer than only using ‘he’ to refer to him? I admittedly forgot the character being focused on due to the POV change a few paragraphs back.

They ran into ferals on occasion.
It’s interesting to know that ferals exist — maybe that’s why having a Pidove clock isn’t that weird to Bella, and that sort of thing?

The last thing he heard was a sharp crack.
Wow, this was abrupt! But a good usage of suddenness, it creates a feeling of ‘uh, what just happened??’, which is good for creating suspense.

But he could not admire long. He let himself a final moment of peace, glancing back at the limp form of Whiskey. It was time.

They had to be injured for Tylus to find.
This is taking a dark turn…

he’d learned Ringo had taken Whiskey on a trail run
I believe you missed a period here~.

And Tylus struggled to keep himself composed on the march to Hill dungeon.
Wouldn’t ‘Dungeon’ be capitalized here, as it is a proper noun?

“Ah—” Sewsoat sighed as she saw him. “Daddy’s had a bit too much again. Quitting didn’t last so long, I guess. Give me a minute.”
Ahaha… well, can’t fault him for trying? (though I get the impression quitting happens semi-often, what with her reaction lol.)

He spronted.
I believe this should be ‘sprinted’?

“You didn’t.”

“Of course not.” Ringo coughed, a shuttering wheeze following. “The ursaring did.”
WOW… what a sleazeball, lol!! That’s one way to promise a rank up(?)…

WOrd had gotten around apparently.
I’d put a comma after ‘around’ here?

A very deliberate pause. A glasses-tilted-down-on-her-beak pause.
I like how you describe the pause, it’s like I can feel the intensity and stillness of it!

Ringo’s father would hate him—all he touched turned to gold.
This is a good callback to the motif throughout this fic.

“Really? I’ve seen you around, didn’t think that was your scene.”

“Oh, yeah, I worked at Treebow, believe it or not…”

Ringo looked back at Tylus one last time. He’d make a good choice at Treebow. Selfish and stupid and weak, but very eager to follow directions.

The mienfoo seemed the selfish type.

“...I could give you some tips, if you want.”
I like this ending! It feels like a good way of showing how Ringo feels zero remorse, lol…

Thank you for participating! While I personally wasn’t able to follow this work very well and my personal enjoyment was thusly limited, I have a feeling it’s the sort of work that PMD fans would be very invested in, and I think your worldbuilding is deep here! Nice job.

Windskull

So let me start off with this: I love the concept of this fic. I love the idea of looking in on a guild and the corruption inside it. And I think the idea of someone intentionally faking disasters to move people up in rank is an interesting way to do that. And when your prose hits well, it really hits well! One such example is the opening. I love the description of the old flareon looking like “a tumbleweed of white.”

Additionally, I think several of the characters you set up are really good, and you have a really good grasp of character voice. Every PoV feels distinct.

Despite all that, I think there are a few things that hold this story back. Let me start with the objective stuff, then I’ll move into my more subjective critiques.

Firstly, I think the story could have used closer proofreading. There were several typos throughout the fic. I’ve noted a couple of them below.

[The hairline cracks were looking dangerous. Starting to turn to something, bella swore. ] Missed capitalization

[He linked to flash his rings as he flashed his teeth.]
I think you might have meant “liked.”

[He spronted.]
Sprinted?

Secondly, I noticed a few instances where the prose changed between present and past tense, and I don’t think they were intentional.

Third, I noticed a notable number of sentence fragments. Some of them may have been stylistic intentions, but I think the frequency of them was detrimental to the story. In relation to that, I also noticed that there were several instances where the only thing wrong was that a pronoun was missing. It works in some cases, but not in others. Below is an example of what I’m talking about.

[He jittered doing chores. Left long scratches across the handle of his broom, to the point Bella noticed as she instructed and forced him to take a chair beside her desk. Glared at him for the last hour as she kicked up the dust and sent it outside her office.]

A more proper way to word this would be something like…

[He jittered doing chores, leaving long scratches across the handle of his broom until Bella noticed and forced him to take a chair beside her desk. She glared at him for the last hour as she kicked up the dust and sent it outside her office.]
I don’t mean to harp on these too much, but I really think these mechanical mistakes significantly hamper the flow of the story.

The last, and most subjective, critique I have is that I wish Ringo's motivation for doing what he does was a bit more clear. We get a bit of it from the opening scene and a bit at the end, but the through line isn't there. If he's being paid by his clients and enriching himself, it's not entirely clear. He does imply he knows the head of the guild they're graduating to, but it's not clear if this is a favor to them. I think fleshing this point out could help the story shine.

Despite my critiques, I do think this fic has a ton of potential. Like I said, you have a strong grasp of characterization and character voice. And when you get into the flow with descriptive prose, it comes out really nice. It just needs a little more work to make it shine like gold.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Hexatious" by Robo

At moments like these, Murielle couldn’t help but muse about the nature of fate. Not that such a thing wasn’t expected of her; in fact, most folks would figure that someone of her inclinations would have especially firm opinions on the intangible forces that be—hence the many times she’d needed to clarify that she didn’t have a spirit board handy to help pick out lotto tickets, or the myriad heedless heedfuls that took her every shrug to be some sort of forecast either way.

Well, if nothing else, she couldn’t help but feel that those forces—whatever they were—had some strong stances about
her.

Case in point: Two months ago, when she’d finally made the move to Castelia that she’d saved up something fierce for, she’d hoped to fade away in the urban hotpot’s hustle and bustle—what would’ve been a welcome change of pace after way too many years’ worth of being a small-town objet d’art. Such foolish ambitions had at least come to pass for a while, taking enough of a load off her mind for her to take a stab at a novel she’d never even known she wanted to write…yet one glance at a wayward poltergeist later, and here she was—not the talk of the town, sure, but the office occultist.

On the bright side, a bullheaded little bird had assured her that IT would indeed pay well...

Judge Comments

Dragonfree

This was short and sweet, and I think you did a nice job of getting across some good slice-of-life character in a very short space! The idea of one of the Pokémon world's casually real psychics being called on to serve as tech support for a Rotom appliance is delightful, and I enjoy the way that they bond over both feeling unappreciated and taken for granted. The company higher-ups don't bother to remember Murielle's name, but they haven't bothered to call their Rotom any kind of name either. I like how Vigil reaches out to her by name after Alvey leaves, and Murielle only realizes after a bit of conversation that she doesn't know Rotom's name either, and gives them one when it turns out the only thing anyone's called them is stuff like 'Gizmo' and 'Whatchamacallit'.

The dialogue interactions between the two of them are fun and have a lot of cute flavor to them. Vigil trying to cheer her up about the name, Murielle second-guessing her psychic senses when she thinks she may be misreading things, and Vigil forgetting to take the screenshot for a bit just make for a nice little genuine awkward interaction between two different slightly awkward people, brief as it is. And after the little timeskip, it's very cute how Vigil just sort of makes up little malfunctions as an excuse to spend some time with Murielle as a beta-listener to her novel.

The story raises some other thoughts in the process of all this - the way Vigil's working for no pay or anything, stretched thin across many different bits of tech, not even named, is kind of depressing on the face of it, and although Vigil is baffled by money, I did sort of find myself wishing the story lingered a little more on what it is that Vigil does get out of this if anything, why they're content with their situation or, if they aren't, whether there's any hope of getting out and not spending their life doing free labor for a company that doesn't care. And does the whole malfunction ruse mean Murielle and Vigil are not able to just hang out in a proper outside-of-work capacity or on the weekends? Is Vigil just stuck living alone in a whiteboard at the office until people come back to work on Monday morning? Addressing these questions fully might have been outside the scope of a short one-shot like this, but it might have been nice to see nods towards them of some kind.

Some of your sentences are a little long and convoluted, I think, particularly in the opening few paragraphs of narration; I had to read the first paragraph here several times the first time around:

At moments like these, Murielle couldn’t help but muse about the nature of fate. Not that such a thing wasn’t expected of her; in fact, most folks would figure that someone of her inclinations would have especially firm opinions on the intangible forces that be—hence the many times she’d needed to clarify that she didn’t have a spirit board handy to help pick out lotto tickets, or the myriad heedless heedfuls that took her every shrug to be some sort of forecast either way.
There are a few things going on here: most of this is one really long sentence, it uses some kind of florid language ('myriad heedless heedfuls'), and for the whole first chunk of it there's just no way to understand what it's on about: we don't know what "moments like these" are, or why musing on the nature of fate would be expected of her, or what "her inclinations" means, or why "her inclinations" would cause her to have opinions on "intangible forces that be". Once we've gotten through the full paragraph, we can probably surmise that the deal is that she's a psychic, after which we can go back to the first bit and figure right, yeah, people expect a psychic to think about fate and know about supernatural forces. But we don't get to the information necessary to make any of it make any sense at all until we're most of the way through the paragraph, as it stands.

The rest of the intro also feels kind of weirdly roundabout and opaque, in a similar way. You state the intangible forces seem to have strong opinions about her but then meander a bit before actually getting to the relevant thing that she thinks might indicate that. Then there's a confusing mention that "a bullheaded little bird" assured her that IT pays well; I'm still not sure what that's supposed to mean. All in all, I had a harder time getting through the first four paragraphs here than through the entire rest of the fic, which is mostly breezy and charming from there! Try not to overthink your narration - there's a danger that readers may just give up if they're having trouble puzzling out what the first paragraph of the story is saying.

All in all, though, aside from the confusing start and perhaps wishing we'd gotten to see a little more of the two of them, I thought this was a solid piece - an inventive little exploration of two people connecting in a situation that's very mundane in the Pokémon world while very fantastical from our point of view.

Flyg0n

My first time reading this one, I enjoyed it. Then the second time, it was especially good once I sat down to really absorb the details. It revolves around an overlooked and taken for granted “hex tech” and a Rotom who takes residence in a new smart whiteboard.

The story is simple but subtle and has elements of their budding friendship, as well as capturing the droll aspects of office work yet blending them with Pokemon elements really effectively. Where it shines for me is definitely in the subtle and simple elements. The choice pieces of dialogue that convey relationships and the little actions.

Murielle is very kind, patient, helpful, and enjoyable to follow. I enjoyed how their conversation about Vigil’s name shows us how their boss basically dismisses Vigil and mostly wants to save a buck, heh.

And it gave them a shared connection point, showing how at the end of the day, all this boss cares about is himself but they can care about each other. Overall loved how this uses an office setting to integrate a pokemon like Rotom and take a look at how they operate in a pokemon world.

I did find myself stuck near the end a bit. There’s a part where it transitions to a timeskip and then to an ending where they’ve settled into their own routine. The transition felt a bit quick to me, and the end didn’t quite click with me in terms of impact. I don’t think it needs anything huge or climactic but I think a little extra length and transition could help it really hit.

That aside, I thought the story was a very good one, with a lot of elements that work together really well, great dialogue and characterization!

lisianthus

I'm unsure as to who you are, but if you do reveal yourself, I'm going to be looking at more of your stories!! You intertwined the fantasticalness of the world of Pokemon with normal life really well here, so very fitting of our theme of Magical but Mundane. If I'm not incorrect, this story strikes me as a bit of an 'unlikely friendship' that actually is a bit more likely (or fitting) than one might expect, as both Murielle and Vigil are underappreciated and taken for granted often. Very well done, and I thank you for submitting something to the contest! (please consider posting your works on the bulbaforums too lol, we could use another engaging author like you!)

At moments like these, Murielle couldn’t help but muse about the nature of fate. Not that such a thing wasn’t expected of her; in fact, most folks would figure that someone of her inclinations would have especially firm opinions on the intangible forces that be—hence the many times she’d needed to clarify that she didn’t have a spirit board handy to help pick out lotto tickets, or the myriad heedless heedfuls that took her every shrug to be some sort of forecast either way.
I tend to use 'first sentences' or paragraphs to clue me into how much I think I'll like a fic -- sometimes it doesn't work, of course, but in this case I was quite intrigued on your take of a Hex Maniac's daily-ish life! I can totally imagine people bothering her about telling the future for their gain, and her consequently being rightfully bothered about it especially LOL... being a Hex Maniac sounds like tough work! Positive and negative (mostly negative?) stigma abound...

what would’ve been a welcome change of pace after way too many years’ worth of being a small-town objet d’art.
One of my favorite things about fanfiction and reading in general is learning new words!! With the examples above in mind of Murielle being near-harassed for being her Trainer Class (was she born that way, I wonder?), it makes complete sense she'd choose to characterize herself as 'a small decorative or artistic object, typically... as a collectible item.'

yet one glance at a wayward poltergeist later, and here she was—not the talk of the town, sure, but the office occultist.
Noo... I can only imagine how frustrating that would be!! Prejudice, even if well-meaning, can be extremely exhausting ;_;.

On the bright side, a bullheaded little bird had assured her that IT would indeed pay well.
I'm going to hope I'm not missing some Pokemon lore and assume it was just a Flying-type Pokemon itself, but really in any case I think the mental image of her taking career advice from an unusual shrewd bird likely much smaller than her is really fun! I like it when authors add levity to their stories through random anecdotes, especially when the narrator is memorable.

“Do we really need a ‘smart’ whiteboard, Mr. Alvey?” Murielle looked to the man(ager) in question, wondering if he’d gone numb to caffeine at some point in his life—that had to be at least his sixth cup of coffee since lunch.
I really like this flow-of-thought narration style especially with third-person POV, it's something I try to do but oftentimes find a bit tricky! Maybe at some point within middle management one just gains caffeine immunity. :chansey:

“Hey, I’m plenty smart!” That cut of indignance came loud and clear through its speakers, mustering even more snark than the last.
In terms of worldbuilding, it makes perfect sense to me that Rotom smartboards exist! Rotom Dexes seem to host Rotoms with large personalities, so I think one would fit quite well with the largeness of... a smartboard? It's another silly mental image.

Her words surged with a breath from beyond herself, sending through it what she hoped would be one last amendment to the wisp’s efforts…
So she can essentially 'remote' into the Rotom through her powers as a Hex Maniac, if I'm reading this right, then? This story is chock-full of worldbuilding, I've never thought much about the different career paths one could take based on their Trainer Class!

Work your magic, Miriam!” Murielle watched on as he sauntered out of the room, making sure to lock the door behind himself (thankfully enough).

“Murielle, right?”
Maybe it's just the base programming, but I find this Rotom to be quite kind and personable, hardly the image you'd think of in terms of 'robot office assistant'!

She could’ve sworn there was a shrug in there somewhere.
I like how Murielle can sort of 'sense' the movements and such of the Rotom, as if it were a person or contained within something a bit more humanlike -- small details like that make a world of difference, I've found, and this work has a lot of them!

They blinked—the board did, rather. “I have a few, I guess: ‘Buddy’, ‘Gizmo’, ‘Whatchamacallit’…”
Those all sound like names a vertain manager would bestow on some poor Rotom (lol), but for real I think it speaks volumes that the people working with Rotom don't... particularly have much of an interest in it, or rather don't seem to see it as a coworker or an equal? Maybe that's an 'of course' thing as it's not a human and doesn't get paid, for that matter, but it is plenty intelligent, and you'd think someone before would have cared enough to bestow upon it some sort of name that's not just a stand-in. Maybe it's a tale of both Muriel and them being taken for granted? :chansey:

Vigil smirked across the top of the screen, with an extra shrug emote for good measure.
SHRUG EMOTE... your way of intertwining close-to-real-life elements with Pokemon is very flawless and engaging! I can imagine the scene well...

“Wait a sec—what ever happened to Adelaide? Did Darkrai devour her after all, or…?”

[...]

“…Heh.” They’d taken the word right out of her mouth.
I love the idea of her becoming friends with Vigil for real! You already got a hint of it as time progressed in the story, but I think a timeskip works well for your purposes here. I think getting through an office job is pretty mundane, but doing it with a sentient whiteboard Pokemon is quite magical! This story left me wanting more, not because it wasn't enough, but because your writing quality is quite good and I think your worldbuilding is on point! Thank you for sharing~.

Windskull

I really like what this fic sets out to do: fill in the blanks between canon. We see Rotom-powered devices in canon. And as we all know of technology, sometimes things need fixing. I love the concept of people with an affinity for ghosts working as technicians for rotom devices. While I’d love to see more, this works well as a self-contained story.

Beyond the basic plot concept, I like how much is revealed about the situation at this office in so little space. A boss that is either not too caring about his employees or just is deeply, deeply terrible with names. Someone who can be suckered into questionable purchases. I think that’s one of the strengths of this story: that it conveys a lot in a fairly small word count.

If there’s one thing I think could improve, it’s that the jump from the first scene to the closing scene is a bit abrupt. I would love to see a bit more of the growth of the bond between Murielle and Vigil. At the beginning they’re friendly, but acquaintances. But by the end, they’re having biweekly meetings. And I can’t help but feel a short scene or two to transition them to that point would have smoothed things out.

But outside of that, I really don’t have any critique for this one. The concept was fun, the execution was good, and I didn’t notice any spelling errors or grammatically weird sentences.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Lather Up, Luxray!" by scrivenernoodz
Third Place Pikachu Flight

It was true. Pokémon battles hadn’t thrilled him lately. But that had nothing to do with the espresso machine Volkner was building in his bathroom. The fact was, five shots stirred into tap water and a vanilla éclair at The Solar Bean had cost him thirty-four bucks, and that was ridiculous, even for a Gym Leader’s check.

And it was true. He could already hear his buddy Flint nagging him about it.
“Ya know, dude, if you accepted more battle challenges, you’d prob’ly get a bigger commission for stuff like that.”

“As if,” Volkner muttered, copper wire clenched between his teeth. He’d just finished installing a whole new lighting system inside the toilet so it glowed neon purple while it brewed and stirred the perfect breakfast beverage...

Judge Comments

JFought

Full disclosure: I used various random means to pick which story to read from the pool, and by pure chance this ended up being the first I read. And I can’t help but wonder what my reviews would have looked like had I rolled anything else, as this one set the bar high. I was lukewarm on it at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I came around to just how well this story understands the assignment, and it ended up being the standard I judged every subsequent entry in this contest pool to.

It has all of the qualities of a good slice-of-life story. The situation is particular, but it does a good job of framing it in the context of Volkner’s life without wasting too much energy on exposition. The characterization is top notch: Volkner and Luxray are both fun to watch, and the rest of Volkner’s team, while bit players in comparison, still have a vibrant spark to them. The story itself is low-stakes yet entertaining in its absurdity, while showing off several facets of our two leads. By the end, I felt like I understood something about Volkner’s life in this particular phase of it, which is every single thing I can possibly ask or hope for out of an entry for this contest. All that remains is the Pokémon aspect, which this story also does well (it's baked into the premise!) so I legitimately have no complaints. In my opinion, this is what hitting bullseye on this contest’s theme looks like.

Even just outside of theme, the story is very well paced and written. There’s a lot of fun prose in here, it’s very energetic and fits the tone well. The length is also just right for the scope: only a few scenes, yet you manage to wring so much characterization and context out of them. I like the way you portray both sides of Volkner (“manic engineer” Volkner and "Electric-Type Gym Leader" Volkner), and Luxray felt extremely like a big electric lion, very proud and lashing out because he’s just kinda pissed and discontent. And to elaborate more on the side-cast, yeah their roles are small, but Ambipom and Pip-Pop are cute, and you manage to characterize Flint quite a bit through environmental details even before he makes a last-second appearance to yell at Volkner for his shenanigans :P. Said shenanigans definitely lean on absurdity (Volkner is the polar opposite of responsible), but I enjoy what you communicate about his character through it. The story just has so much personality packed into every aspect, I have to stop myself or I'll just keep going on forever.

For criticism, there are a few places where the descriptions left me feeling a bit lost, particularly during the bath scene. I found myself feeling a little confused as to how the bathtub fit into the room exactly, so I did have to just kind of go with the flow there. It also didn’t feel like we got much of a handle on why Luxray was so angry until the end. Like, to me, the signs seemed to be pointing towards their living situation, but then in the end we’re told he was just going stir crazy from a lack of battles, and I guess that just wasn't the impression I got from the glimpses into Luxray's head. With how quickly the story moves on after Volkner says it, it almost feels like it was supposed to have been obvious.

Overall though, I thoroughly enjoyed this one, it's a fantastically handled interpretation of the contest theme. Good job!

kintsugi

I think you really nailed the background interactions and character banter in this piece. Luxray lazily x-raying stuff, Ambipom’s little bit of scope creep with the pikachu foam art, the increasingly absurd chair compositions at The Solar Bean–these were delightful little bits of comedy that I think really helped set the theme for what could be a lot more morose piece about addiction and thrillseeking. I also really liked how earnest all of your main characters are: some people in this story definitely have their sights set on the wrong things, or at least not the most useful things, but everyone’s really open to following their hearts here without denying this privilege to others. It makes the conflict kind of inevitable but also never feels too irreconcilable, which matched well with the tone. The brick joke at the end about The Solar Bean toilets is *chef’s kiss*.

One thing I was a little less sold on was the continuity/flow and the Flint marriage subplot. There’s a pretty clear narrative thrust for the first few scenes: Volkner wants to try something, Luxray thinks this is a bad idea, it is in fact a bad idea; Luxray gets dirty, Volkner thinks this is a bad idea, a very cuddly bath time ensues. There’s pretty clear motivations, emotional stakes, and resolution for both parties. Flint’s inclusion in the story brings up some ideas of additional tension–are Flint and Candace as forgiving of Volkner’s actions as the narration would have us believe? Is Volkner doing a lot of this lashing out because he doesn’t want his way of life to change? And is it working, since this isn’t the first time Candace would’ve postponed the wedding? What is an egg tree? There’s a lot of deeper hints at things going on under the hood, and the mystery is certainly ratcheted up by Candace’s new love of tarot cards, but these are mostly things that Luxray points out, and that Luxray has no real way of solving, so they end up fizzling out without much payoff. I wanted either more or less of this–currently it feels a bit teased, in a way that I don’t find strictly unrealistic, but without a satisfying ending for fiction purposes.

I’m admittedly a little uncertain how much Volkner is supposed to know about electronic device design/troubleshooting, or really electricity in general. This is normally stuff I wouldn’t really tunnel in on, but since it’s supposed to be a day in the life of “the whole city’s handyman”, I wanted a bit more context for Volkner’s decisions. There’s a lot of pedantics in the spoiler, but largely–he doesn’t know a lot of things and misuses a lot of jargon that I would expect him to know if he is a savant electrician. This is not including the blatantly unsafe stuff, which could at least be chalked up to character flaws. This leads to some weird circular logic–either he’s not actually as good of an electrician as he says he is, and all of Sunyshore has deleted their GFCI for the lolz; or he’s the only one who thinks he’s in possession of “engineering genius”, and the city just goes along with it so that he doesn’t actually attempt to do rewire their homes. It’s a large enough discrepancy that I think I needed it answered more clearly.
Early on he mentions “copper wire clenched between his teeth”; “copper” feels both redundant (most electrical wire is copper, so it’s calling attention to the default) and confusing to bring attention to (is it not jacketed? Bare copper has applications, but not here. There are like, copper pipes also common in espresso machines and just general steam/plumbing applications, but those are never going to be “wire”). He also mentions wanting a check on the “boiler pressure”, but the “porcelain lid rattled”--later we learn that the toilet tank is the boiler here, so if the lid is rattling, there’s not inherently not much pressure built up, since tank lids don’t really seal for positive pressure and an object bolted to the floor rattling = the lid is shaking and offgassing, so no pressure. There’s also a ton of homebrew that must have been done not just to the toilet, but to the wiring of Flint’s house–namely, the removal of GFCI (if you short your bathroom by dumping water on it, typical bathroom wiring interrupts that immediately), but there’s also something really weird happening if shooting the walls takes out the lights but not the elevator. Most of all, I’m really not sure what he means by “find the breaker”. A circuit breaker in an electronics environment is basically a switch that automatically opens (breaking the circuit) if the current passing through it exceeds a certain threshold. In most modern homes, all major electronic devices (including wall outlets) have breakers, and these breakers are housed together in what’s called a breaker box–there’s sometimes memes in the electrician community about breaker-finders or whatever, but that’s usually in the context of needing to visit clients’ houses, which are unfamiliar, and not knowing which breaker in the breaker box is the one to turn off before beginning operations. But Volkner’s trying to stop supplying power to an active ground short in a place he already knows (as a familiar electrician would’ve tripped the breaker before proceeding, and a faulty circuit like the one shown here would trip the breaker automatically). If there’s an active short happening and there’s a supposed breaker lying around, it’s pretty safe to assume the breaker isn’t working and finding it won’t fix the problem. All this to say: breakers are physical hardware in a fixed, typically-known location that, of their own accord, deenergize; it’s both unclear why Volkner is so fixated on finding it and why he thinks the best way to fix it is to shoot the walls with electricity.

Overall I thought the pacing and banter of this one was on point, and I liked your choice of conflict–these are certainly more mundane settings, but there’s still some realistic emotional conflict here and characters end up making some bad decisions! It’s a cute little story with a lot of charm, and I would die for Pip-Pop. Thanks for sharing!

tomatorade

A fic that appeals to my ADHD if I’ve ever seen one. I’m not sure how intentional this was but the structure and storytelling of this oneshot feels very volkner-esque even besides the narration. It has a manic sort of slice-of-life energy—I often found myself losing what the initial premise and general thrust of the action and getting lost in the moment by moment. This was mostly a good thing, there’s a real distinct personality here, but admittedly it got one over on me on occasion.

This reminded me a lot of anime pokemon in terms of tone and events. It’s very wacky and slapstick in a lot of ways. You’ve got an absurd anime premise in him trying to make a toilet coffeemaker for no discernable reason, plus the dialogue and characters are exaggerated in that way. And add on some untold damage to Flint’s apartment that makes you wonder where the police have been all this time. This is not really a value judgment; while anime is not really my thing, I appreciate that you stuck with this direction and a lot of what you have here works really well. It was fairly easy to suspend my disbelief for the most part.

And I especially appreciated all the lightning theming. I think you covered every possible term and pun and interaction someone could have with electricity. Very fitting.

All that being said, the writing itself occasionally clashes. Specifically, I constantly found myself thinking Volkner should die lol. You’ve got some great descriptions and a lot of visceral prose around Volkner tussling with luxray and getting messed up, but that also stretched the believability of the slapstick. It was fairly jarring to read something that sounds like it should be fatal, only for Volkner to shake it off like it happened every day. It’s a shame because you have a lot of great descriptions around the physical sensation of being electrocuted or assaulted by a big cat, but every time they happened I expected a different response and it never managed to fit right in my head. The first moment this happens is Luxray assaulting raichu and there’s little way to describe it other than brutal lol.

I think some levity in the moment might help. Or find a way to shift some of the more extreme sensations a little more positively. I like how savage some moments are but it’s hard for me to reconcile that with the generally lighthearted tone.

A minor side effect of this is that it was difficult to gauge the seriousness of the situation. Volkner was at 100 the whole fic, which was a fun bit of character, but I had difficulty judging whether a threat was meant seriously or was part of the bit.

The POV jarred me a little bit too. I couldn’t tell whether you were trying for an omniscient POV or close third, but you jumped between Volker and Luxray’s thoughts in the beginning a few times and it read awkwardly. I don’t have much experience with omniscient so if that’s what you were going for I might just recommend detaching the perspective and giving a broader view separate from any one character’s emotions. If not, then stick to one POV through the scene otherwise it can get a little confusing. I think out of the two, Luxray was my favourite. You get a lot of Volkner’s personality from an outside perspective such that the internal perspective is nice but not entirely necessary.

The characters are really fun and the definite strength of this piece. Volkner’s a bit of a freak, but that’s fine. I get why he’s the electric gym leader if he’s this much of an electricity junkie lol, I chuckled every time he talked to luxray like he was asking his dealer for a fix. Luxray was also great. There’s a flavour of xenofiction to him that’s really interesting and I tend to like a lot in pokemon fic. His abilities are especially on display. I love the consideration you gave for the x-ray vision, especially, and as said earlier all the ways you write about electricity are exciting and fun and add a ton of flavour to the fic.

Returning to plot, by the end the chaos of the rest of the fic starts having some drawbacks. In the moment it’s great, managing to turn cat bathtime into an action flick is no small feat, but at the same time so much happens that getting to the end and realising that the fic was really about luxray being bored not battling left me a little confused. It’s a good thread to tie everything together, but I wish there was a little more. Especially near the beginning, to tie everything back at the end. There are some points of this to be fair—some of the back and forth in Flint’s apartment involves it. But I think it could help to have a little more directness with this theme. Or to include a quieter moment or two. Or just to introduce it more strongly at the beginning.

They payoff at the end was great, by the way. It’s… maybe more of the tonal balance I was looking for. For some reason it was a lot more believable to me that the nature of Volkner and Flint’s friendship was of Volker destroying his property and arguing about it after. Also very cathartic after the events of the fic.

Anyway, this was a great fic! Very fun. Definitely fits into the theme.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Ordinary Things" by Farla

Anywhere the police show up is somewhere Billy shouldn't have been five minutes ago. But Billy zoned out watching Arlie sitting in the corner of the playground piling handful after handful of sand into a growing mountain, and the window for getting the hell out of there without certain pursuit has already closed.

It wasn't supposed to be a big deal. They've been on the train, in and out of shops, a movie theater, even ducked into a pokecenter for a few hours to wait out the rain and made it through without incident. This is a public space. People are supposed to sit on benches here. Children are supposed to play in the sand.

"Officers," Billy rumbles...


Judge Comments

Dragonfree

Really interesting, memorable concept here, of Zorua/Zoroark using illusions to blend in with humans day-to-day and trying not to get found out. The opening's a particularly memorable scene - the intrigue of Billy's obsessive focus on what's supposed to be normal when we don't yet know what's going on, the casual way they play cross-gender illusions, the tangible paranoia, the way the cops get threatening and suspicious over nothing at all and keep reacting badly and escalating even when Billy's just doing what they ask. The whole exchange is so tense and uncomfortable, simultaneously uniquely Pokémon - literally a Pokémon using illusions to blend in - and a clear reflection of police harassment in real life. There's a million and one reasons people can take issue with you, because there's a million reasons they take issue with each other. This whole scene just grabs the reader's attention and keeps it.

I also enjoyed the flavor and care put into how they use illusions here a lot. Billy's put so much thought into precisely what sort of human to project, wearing what sort of clothing, having the sort of deep voice that'll be perceived as intimidating or threatening because sometimes that's useful - but even when creating object illusions, there's the careful way of not just instantly having a thing appear to turn into an entirely different thing, instead doing stuff like discreetly turning two bushes into one thick bush and then removing branches until it's just the original bush, or turning a dumpster into a slightly fuller dumpster. And creating the illusion of talking, speaking human language, is something very difficult that Billy has figured out but Arlie may never really learn, which makes a lot of sense. These details lent a lot of richness and verisimilitude to the story and made it fun.

One of the sources of tension in that opening scene, of course, is that Arlie is not nearly as careful as Billy - a child who still doesn't quite get it, a bit too carefree and playful for a world where they must be that wary and meticulous. His leaves shaking after the experience, and Billy being there like well, he has to learn to deal, and Arlie initially rolling forward as a rock before Billy sternly makes him put on the human illusion again, made me feel pretty bad for him, even as there's a strong sense that Billy just believes this is necessary tough love that will hopefully facilitate him living/staying free longer than his ill-fated parents. Oof.

What was missing for me a bit in this story was getting a good sense of why Billy considers it so necessary to be able to impersonate and blend in among humans. She addresses it a little at the end, by saying If the only kinds of things you can be are rocks and bushes and trash, then one day you end up becoming a little white and red ball for good. But for me that just kind of doesn't entirely answer the question and raises more instead - wouldn't one think the best way to not be captured would be to stay away from humans, instead of going out of your way to integrate openly into a city when it's this difficult, this hostile, this traumatic? Or is there a different reason they need to stay integrated in human society, and the necessity of disguising themselves well is just downstream of that? Or is staying in the city not a necessity so much as a principle for her, a sense that they have a right to be here even if this is what it takes? I can imagine very interesting answers to these questions, and the way the story is built up led me to expect we were going to explore them - all the focus on how difficult and dangerous this is and how much risk they're taking and how it's kind of traumatic for Arlie but Billy feels duty-bound to keep it up anyway. But we end up not really exploring Billy's motivation for being so adamant about doing this at all beyond that one vague allusion, and it makes it feel like something's missing, like we don't quite get the last puzzle piece we would need to properly understand what drives her character here.

Other than that, though, I thought this was very well done, and in particular a really effective use of space - short and sweet but makes extremely efficient use of the small word count to get the point across.

Flyg0n

I thought this story was a particularly fascinating approach to the question of ‘daily lives’ by specifically focusing on a Zoroark struggling to get by in day to day life. The switch up of pronouns did throw me off early on, but I also think it does create an interesting setup and establish that something odd is going on. That builds really nicely into the reveal a little later that the pov character is using illusions.

The constant stream of trying to insist to themselves how they are sure they are trying to get this disguise right and this is definitely normal, right, was one of my favorite parts. That, and slow unveiling of information that the reader can use to build an understanding of the situation.

I did find the prose to prove somewhat confusing the first couple of times I read however. There’s no easy fix, as it seems to be an intentional effort to capture the unique pov of Zoroark, a trickster illusionist pokemon.

I don’t find it distracts super heavily from the overall story, though it could prove effective to open with a more tame circumstance to set the scene, since it's something so unusual. Some of the prose throughout did leave me a bit more confused than intrigued.

I also had just a little bit of trouble establishing a sense of place. Looking back at the first scene with the officers, it strikes me that there are two officers but the wording of it made me miss it at first.

Even so, I really enjoyed this one in concept. It's a great spin on the concept of ‘magical but mundane’ that asks how a sometimes maligned pokemon running from the law might live their day to day life, and creates a pretty cool dissonance between what we might think of as ‘mundane’ vs what is mundane for the POV character.

I think it's a fascinating exploration of Zoroark POV in particular.

lisianthus

Anywhere the police show up is somewhere Billy shouldn't have been five minutes ago.
Good first sentence! It sets the audience up for an action-packed story and easily piques interest.

the window for getting the hell out of there without certain pursuit has already closed.
‘Had’ would be a better word here, as you’re already writing in past tense.

See? This is a normal person who puts their normal clothes in a normal washing machine and throws them out if they stain. And the final piece on her belt: white on bottom, red on top, round and shiny. See?
I’m confused here, is Billy… just trying to blend in? The emphasizing of her ‘normalness’ feels a bit out-of-place for someone simply trying to do that, so I’d assume she’s hiding something…?

"What's in the bag, sir?"
I sure hope that’s not her getting misgendered on purpose! :(

"The little girl in the green dress, right over there," she says, pointing and then flicking her finger. A pink dress would've been better. But he childishly insisted on green, though at least she talked him around to one in neon colors. He couldn't look like he was trying to hide. And now he childishly isn't taking the hint.
Huh, Billy just seems even more suspicious with this, given… Arlie doesn’t seem to be her child?

and with any luck more bones will break
I would add a comma after ‘any luck’.

Safe, Billy tells herself, panting as she shakes out her fur
Oh, she must be a Zoroark, then! That makes her blending in that almost sounds like she’s trying to assert her human-ness make much more sense.

"Don't whine at me like you're some pokemon
…isn’t she a Pokemon?

there's no need to worry about him saying Auntie when it should be Daddy
(And I know pronouns don’t always equal gender, but I am a bit confused as well.)


Thank you for participating! I must say, I feel like much more background knowledge for this fic would have been helpful… I was quite confused going through this, and I feel as though I sort of left with more questions than answers. Is Billy a Pokemon? Is Arlie a Pokemon? Why are they ‘on the run’, and why does Billy have Arlie in the first place? You of course don’t need to answer all of these, but I think that having more written here would be nicer, admittedly, as to my personal view, the work felt a bit disjointed. Perhaps I'm just missing the point lots and lots, and if you've meant this to be a 'fast-paced hard hitting' style of story, please disregard literally all of my comments! I know that some authors like to have lots of unknown elements in their works, so I completely understand if that was a purposeful decision!

Is this for an existing AU? It did feel quite action-packed, and if you were going for that then you accomplished it — I just was confused for the bulk of it, and think that perhaps the story sort of flew over my head due to the pace, is all -- I don't doubt others would feel very differently, though! Thank you for the action-packed submission!

Windskull

Conceptually, I love this story. I think it’s a neat look into a pokemon with a lot of potential for interesting storytelling. And it brings up some of the struggles a zoroark might face trying to blend into human society. Especially somewhere where loitering or “looking suspicious” is liable to get you hassled. In that sense, I think it works really well with the theme.

That said, I did feel like the story needed something more. It feels like it was meant to be part of some bigger story, with a lot of little plot threads that are hinted at and feel relevant, but are barely touched on. Why is Arlie with his aunt instead of his grandfather? It's not really clear. Some things work just by implication, such as the fact that his parents are gone or the fear of being shoved into a PokeBall. But other things feel like they needed more context.

I thought the prose was generally pretty good! And I didn't notice any spelling or grammar errors. But there were some structural decisions that threw me off. I’m curious why you chose to have the genders of Billy and Arlie’s disguises be different from the gender that’s used in their internal thoughts. I feel like there’s some interesting stuff you can do with that! But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t confuse me, especially in my initial readthrough before I realized they were Zoros.

As an aside, I noticed the dialogue appears to be in a bigger font than the prose. I’m not sure if that’s intentional.

Like I said at the beginning, I love this story conceptually. I think it has a ton of potential. But I think it could really excel with a bit more time in the oven to flesh it out. To let us see more of what's going on with these two. And if you do write more of this concept, I'll be sure to check it out.
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Past, Present, Future" by ErazonPO3
Second Place Eevee Flight

The train screeches to a halt, and Luculia’s hand tightens around the strap hanging overhead. Somebody stumbles into her and she stumbles into somebody else, but she remains on her feet— and earns a red welt on her palm for her effort. A few other passengers in the carriage mutter to themselves, but most are used to this by now; the same Snorlax has been planting itself on the train tracks for a snooze the same time every day for the past week, and all efforts to relocate it had been in vain.

On the first day they’d been stuck on the tracks for thirty minutes before the train could move along again. Today, somebody’s Alakazam pries the door open with telekinesis without even needing to be told, and they all spill out onto the tracks and through the hole somebody’s Bastidion had punched through the fence. Luculia checks her watch for the time— if she takes the shortcut through the park, she can still make it to the museum without ending up too late for work.

The park, however, is an obstacle course of its own. Luculia narrowly dodges the splashing from a pod of Popplio and Brionne in the fountain, and in doing so narrowly dodges getting trampled by a rugby team of mixed human and Machamp players. She holds her breath as the team stampedes by, wincing as her hair whips a hurricane around her. She scurries back towards the safety of the footpath as the dust settles, and attempts to smooth the wrinkles in her blazer and the frayed ends of her ponytail down. It’s a futile effort, but at least she’s still in one piece.

Up ahead the Hearthome museum ekes into view, its gothic stone facade peeking through the trees. Luculia continues down the footpath with an added briskness in her step, but wavers as a flash of pink catches the corner of her eye. There’s a rustling sound near the neatly trimmed hedges that she really ought not investigate if she wants to get to work on time— but as much as she wills it, she can’t bring herself to plant her foot another step further...


Judge Comments

Dragonfree

This was very cute! I enjoyed the flavor here a lot - things like train delays due to Snorlax sleeping on the tracks are exactly the sort of fun fantastical-but-mundane situation that would arise in the Pokémon world that I was hoping to see in this contest. The opening shows various Pokémon playing casual mundane roles in Luculia's day - someone's Alakazam opening the train doors and a Bastiodon bashing a hole through a fence, a mixed rugby team with both humans and Machamp, having to dodge splashes of water from Popplio and Brionne. And I really enjoyed the brief, off-hand mention of how groups of wild Mr. Mime are called circuses and how they'll occasionally parade into town to put on performances. Mr. Mime isn't a Pokémon people tend to think about a lot in a wild context, but it's a lot of fun to imagine this interpretation where they're just creatures who naturally like to perform and will roam around putting on shows.

The foreground storyline, of course, is these museum employees bonding with a lost and abandoned Mime Jr., and I think you made that pretty cute as well. You had various cute/tragic moments like Junior looking around for something they both know isn't coming, how Junior mimes all his distress silently and the hat drooping when he's disappointed, Luculia covering where she hopes his ears are, but also this fun setup and payoff with him telekinetically moving stuff around because it's not technically touching it, and then ending up using his telekinesis to stop a boy touching the exhibits. I also enjoy Nadia immediately figuring there's no way Luculia's actually going to be taking this little guy to the Pokémon Center at lunch (Nadia's fun generally), while Luculia's sort of trying to keep a distance.

The actual museum part is also fun; there are nice little details that remind me of some of my own museum visits and lend verisimilitude, and it's neat to see your interpretation of some of the sorts of historical artifacts that might be kept in a museum in the Pokémon world. I got a kick out of the Paradox legendary beasts being simply one fanciful artistic rendering of the legendary beasts - that's the sort of thing you get with historical interpretations of myth, after all! Likewise, the Rainbow Feather that's a replica but it'd still be awkward to tell the Johto Museum that they broke one of their borrowed exhibits is just fun and makes the whole thing feel more real.

I would have liked to see these two aspects of the story woven together better, though. Junior is there as they go through the museum exhibits, but he very much fades into the background in favor of simply doing a fun tangent about what a Pokémon world museum would be like, all the way up until he saves the Rainbow Feather replica, minus the one comment from Nadia about how maybe he'll make something that'll be displayed in a museum one day. This makes the museum exhibit bit feel a bit disconnected from the rest, and it also doesn't capitalize on the space you have to develop Junior's relationship with Nadia or Luculia as much as you could have: a lot of the actual bonding time they theoretically get winds up being time where he's just sort of silently in Luculia's arms as they explore the museum. I think you could kill two birds with one stone here pretty easily by giving a bit more attention to Junior for this chunk! Let him be interested in particular exhibits; let Luculia and Nadia have more back and forth interaction with him, showing him the things he wants to see, clarifying things he seems curious about, rather than just sort of going through the exhibits as a detached tour guide and security guard tagalong. The story's charming as it is, but I think more real character interaction here would add more depth to it and harmonize these two main sections into a smoother whole.

And then there's the bit where half the story is about Junior bonding a little with Luculia, but then it ends up being Nadia who becomes his partner. Luculia is of course trying to keep a distance, and I think you're intentionally going for a bit of an interesting subversion by having the POV character end up as merely a witness to Junior forming a bond with Nadia. I can respect that - it's a fun idea to tackle that, how sometimes people would just end up playing a side role in how other people find their permanent Pokémon partners. However, it sort of awkwardly splits the bonding time, resulting in Junior getting even less actual bonding with the person who does become his partner - he only even meets her halfway through, and they only really get a couple of small moments before Junior's officially Nadia's, so to speak. It's cute but it's just not quite enough time to build up this relationship in a way where we would actually care about it. And meanwhile, Junior's relationship with Luculia gets sort of awkwardly left hanging a bit and doesn't really go anywhere, without actually being well developed enough beforehand for it to quite create a real emotional effect out of her realizing he should be with Nadia instead. I think to make this really hit you would have needed a different approach that develops these relationships better first.

I also noted some wobbly mechanics and mistakes going on here at times. You leave out the periods in Mr. Mime and Mime Jr., which are both generally standard for those abbreviations and officially part of their names, but you also write "Bastidion" a few times (it's Bastiodon) and "Craniados" (Cranidos) - it's good to look up the spelling of Pokémon names if you're not 100% sure you have it right. And while the story is written in the present tense, when the narration refers to things that happened in the past, you usually use the past perfect: As it turns out, the flash of pink had been a Mime Jr. This is how you'd do it if the narration was in the past tense, to describe something even further in the past, but in present-tense narration, you want the simple past or present perfect (has rather than had). In that sentence, you just want, "As it turns out, the flash of pink was a Mime Jr."

All in all, a cute and flavorful little story with an interesting main idea/twist, but it could use an extra round of proofreading, and I think the relationships are not quite fleshed out well enough as it stands, both because it's short and trying to develop Junior's bond with two different people, and because it spends a lot of its length on the museum tour, which isn't quite focused on those relationships. I think the key concept is neat, though, and the flavor is great - it only needs better focus to properly shine.

Flyg0n

This story felt so poignant and sweet, and covered a lot of mileage in such a short time! I think it opens so effectively, setting the tone for that “mundane” part of the magical and mundane theme. Luculia is suffering through the droll trip to work, and the immediate open establishes it so well.

I also love the way Pokemon play an immediate yet so casual role in the story. Alakazam opening the doors, Bastiodon making a hole in the fence, and the pokemon playing in the park. It paints a great picture of the little ways in which pokemon would be able to help in people's daily lives.

The story gets to the inciting incident nice and quick, in a way that feels natural. It’s neither too long, nor too short. Speaking of, little Mime Jr. is so precious! The way you wove in worldbuilding by working in the circus troupe mention does a lot to show how pokemon fit in in this verse.

The middle sections flows so nicely, as Luculia gets a chance to show Mime Jr around the museum. I think it helps build their little relationship, and the Mime Jr’s curiosity and interest in the museum very nicely. The worldbuilding adds a lot to the sense of cohesion to the world. Also, shoutout to the paradox beasts lol,that was great.

Its a background element, but choosing an exhibit on the Johto beasts, who were said to be feared by humans, and then showing how in the present and future, humans and pokemon still work alongside each other, was quite cool.

It all culminated very well with the ending. Nothing dramatic, but a simple act that sparked a change. I felt a little sad that Mime Jr ended up not with Luculia, but the security guard, but then again it made sense and fit the story. It gives a sense that life goes on, that it can be mundane, but even a small change can have a significant impact.

Imagine if Luculia hadn’t stopped in the park, or just left Mime Jr at the pokecenter. Instead, he found a new future. Love when the title of a story reflects the story itself in that kind of way.

A very beautiful tale!

lisianthus

The train screeches to a halt, and Luculia’s hand
Small thing, but I think Luculia is a very pretty name, and it sounds very ‘Pokemon’, too! The best of both worlds~.

A few other passengers in the carriage mutter to themselves, but most are used to this by now; the same Snorlax has been planting itself on the train tracks for a snooze the same time every day for the past week, and all efforts to relocate it had been in vain.
I love this small bit of worldbuilding; it feels very rooted in the Pokemon world (magical), but train obstructions exist in real life, too! Very creative~.

The park, however, is an obstacle course of its own. Luculia narrowly dodges the splashing from a pod of Popplio and Brionne in the fountain, and in doing so narrowly dodges getting trampled by a rugby team of mixed human and Machamp players. She holds her breath as the team stampedes by, wincing as her hair whips a hurricane around her.
Your worldbuilding feels so effortless here, with your world being one where Pokemon and humans feel extremely integrated — I’m a fan! It’s really engaging.

Truthfully, she knows that a little tardiness isn’t about to cost her her job given that she’s the most punctilious of the staff otherwise.
I love it when I can learn new words from fanfiction LOL! Punctililous… her using a lesser-known word in her narration gives an air that she’s quite well-read, which makes sense given… she works in a museum?

(She’s also helped with the book-keeping a few times, when the accountant falls behind, and knows they can’t afford to replace her right now).
I love this LOL… we stan a queen who uses leverage ihjdbkhnehjrkbjkfn.

The baby Pokémon is sitting on its own, shaking and shivering and whining and whimpering without ever making a sound.
Poor thing…

Luculia bites her lip.
I can almost hear her inner thoughts here… I’d feel conflicted about leaving a Pokemon in such a state alone, too!

The first place she should bring it is a pokécentre; they’ll know what to do with it, where to put it.
But she’s already late for work now, and she’s sure it’ll survive a few hours with her until she can take it to the local centre on her lunch break.
This is telling! I feel like some people would have been like ‘well, I’m already late, so I guess I’ll head on over to the Pokemon Center now?’, but Luculia doesn’t — it shows you about her priorities and personality both!

as the resident epigrapher.
I love learning new things from fic (as I’ve already mentioned), and I think this is an interesting job to give her! The study of writing inscribed on things like stone and other hard materials, it seems…?

she narrowly dodges getting heckled by Cathy at reception
I like it when smaller details like this are added into prose, it really gives the feeling that the characters exist and have lives outside of the short window a given fic shows.

“I said don’t touch,” she scolds, and it merely lifts its bare palms at her. Luculia pinches the bridge of her glasses.
“No telekinesis, either.”
LOL… this was silly, but leave it to a curious little Mime Jr. to look for loopholes!! Feels very realistic to me.

It’s a great academic resource, though Luculia decides that it might be a little morbid for the baby.
I think this was probably a smart choice…

as two pairs of shrewd eyes
I’m assuming this is Nadia and her Gallade? If not, I believe it’d just be one pair, unless if Nadia herself has two pairs of eyes~.

Luculia tries to suppress her grimace. She’d been lumped with the task of tour guide a few times in their first year as a sort of hazing ritual, and they all know how disastrous she’d been at it.
Oh god, I would be the same… well, at least they know she’s not very well-suited for it T_T

and they’d put her in a position where talking to groups of strangers is the entire point.
I’m actually not fully sure, so feel free to disregard, but because you’re using past tense here, it miiiight fit better to use ‘was’ at the end? I’m unsure, but it did catch my eye.

each pillar and balustrade.
A new word! I somehow never knew balustrades were called that, given they’re relatively ubiquitous…

”You’re too much of a worrywashi, sometimes,”
Can I steal this line, LOL??? I love it when authors use Pokemon for their similes and phrases, as it adds to the deepness of their worlds, if that makes sense? Worrywashi is silly…

one of their necks’ is as long as a Farigiraf’s, and another looks more like a Craniados in shape than every other quadrupedal depiction. All she can say of the third is that it looks like a furry Bastidion.
Are these the Paradox Forms of the trio? I admittedly don’t think I’ve seen them in my SV copy yet, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a picture of Raging Bolt before, and that neck comment made me think that could be it. Neat explanation of their forms’ minute details being mostly unknown!

“It’s also said that this piece was painted by a Smeargle, because of the black pawprint used as a signature. We don’t really know that for sure, but I’d say it’s likely,” Luculia adds.
This is so cool, I love this small bit of… historical lore, I suppose? Your worldbuilding is quite deep, and I think it adds to the overall tone of the story.

The most noteworthy thing about it in her mind is its similarity to the hokora in Celestic town, though Sinjoh religiosity isn’t her expertise.
I really really really appreciate you doing your research here, as an Inari Shinto girl myself. :)) It’s really neat to learn about new cultures and traditions through well-researched writing and fanfiction, and your work is chock-full of it! (Though I do believe ‘Celestic Town’ maybe should be capitalized?)

Looking at them is something of a religious experience; with the way the threads gleam, the two Legendaries’ magic almost seems to come alive.
Oh, this seems so cool… god, descriptions like this really make me want to visit the Hearthome Museum (or at least a local one IRL!),,,

Nadia doesn’t reach him in time, but thankfully she doesn’t need to; an invisible barrier of some kind forms between his outstretched hand and the Rainbow Feather, while his feet remain rooted to the ground.
Mime Jr.!!! You can tell it’s really taking a liking to being at the museum!

a whole can of wurmple of insurance claims.)
(Also stealing this phrase if that’s fine, LOL…)

every guard will read the message on their pokétches to keep an eye on him.
I wonder if Poketches are localized only to Sinnoh, then…? Rotom Phones exist in the current version of the games and such, but perhaps this just takes place a bit earlier? I like the questions this opens up!

The occasion is usually reserved for young trainers on their journey, but it’s nice to be reminded that boring old adults with day jobs can experience it too. Even if it’s something she only ever gets to witness.
Does Luculia not own a Pokemon herself, then? Not that it’s a bad thing, some people just don’t feel the desire to have one, I suppose~!

A month passes by like a mundane hurricane
I like the (accidental?) meter here with ‘mundane hurricane’!

Luculia continues on to her office, her near-completed Old Kalosian transcript awaiting her on her desk. She sits down with a restrained groan, and boots up her computer.
Another day, another twenty emails.
I like your bringing us back to the mundane here, with some progress on her transcript! …and more emails, LOL.

What can I say… out of all of the authors here, I’m extremely excited to see who the author is! Your blend of history and worldbuilding makes this story feel just very smooth and rich, and just very entertaining! Your characters have realistic dialogue as well, and really, I think you blended the magicalness of Mime Jr. and the mundaneness of a ‘boring’ (I think I’d like it?) job well. Thank you for sharing, this is probably tied for my favorite out of all of our entries!!

Windskull

At its core, I found this story charming. The opening sets it squarely within the pokemon world, presenting pokemon solutions to problems that we could theoretically see in the real world, but in a different way. Sure, we may see obstructions on the train track in real life, but we’re not likely to see people pry their way out of the trains and cut a shortcut through the fence to get out.

I think there are some cute little worldbuilding ideas in here. For example, I found the use of “Circus” to describe a group of Mimes really charming. The decision to make the pov character a museum employee contributed to that, giving us a chance to look into a different facet of the pokemon world.

All of that aid, there are some things I could critique. For one thing, I did notice a couple of unnecessary commas throughout, as well as a couple of misspellings of pokemon names - particularly Cranidos and Bastiodon.

Additionally, as much as I love the story, I found myself wanting more. I would have liked to see and spend a bit more time with our perspective character. I felt like we could have used just a little something more, especially at the end. I'm finding it a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly what's missing, but I think it might be that the bookend opening and ending feel a tad uneven. In the opening, we spend half a page — about 1/6th of the story — getting off the stopped train and going through the park. In the final scene it's summed up in one paragraph. If your intention is to compare the pov character’s trip then to now, I think spending a bit more time would be beneficial.

Outside of that, though, I think this is an excellent story!
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Perfectly Imperfect" by Lord Knee

Everything had a little soul in them.

From a young age, it was a sentiment Mildred’s parents expressed more times than she could
count. It would appear in the off chance she sustained a bruise playing outside, all between the application of a bandage and wiping away her tears; it would appear whenever they noticed a plant in their garden needing support, bowing low in one moment and looking up in the next. It appeared whenever something broke and was painstakingly repaired, even though neither parent considered themselves to be professionals in the art of repairing.

Every voicing of the saying heightened her curiosity, eventually prompting the question as to why they said it. The answer she received only left her more curious — perhaps a little more a child her age should be, but it stuck with her all the same:


Because everything that had a soul deserved a little love...

Judge Comments

JFought

There’s a sword in this one, so you get points for that. I am an extremely fair and objective judge with no biases whatsoever.

I liked the intro segment: a nice little abstract of the story’s themes. I think the prose throughout this one-shot is fairly good. There are a few long sentences here and there that mess with the pacing a bit, where they might’ve worked better had they been shorter or structured differently, but I think overall it serves the story’s purposes just fine. I also liked the idea of Mildred’s occupation of repairing Ghost-type object ‘mon. There are some creative ideas attached to that (the idea of a Chandelure’s eyes being made of wax, and therefore possible to burn off by accident, is particularly inspired), and while the repair job itself is maybe a little simplified in execution, it works as a premise.

Theme application is where it gets… strange. I’m reminded of the theme poll, and the prompts “Unusual Professions” and “Beauty in Repair.” This one-shot feels like a meeting of both of those themes, and had this been a contest for one of them, then the theme would have been on point. But this is the daily life contest, and that’s where things get a little shaky. I think I see the logic: I get the impression this story was conceptualized during that voting period, and was applied here because, objectively, this is a showcase of what Mildred does on a day-to-day basis. But I can’t shake the feeling that the story is trying to be for a different theme, and while I feel like I should be able to ignore that for the sake of evaluating it purely in terms of “daily life,” it's very hard not to, and for a couple reasons.

The big one, really, is that Mildred feels weak as the protagonist. She’s a little too perfect, and doesn’t seem to have much to her beyond her ability to be a mouthpiece for what the story is trying to communicate. We don’t get much sense of what her life is like, how she feels, if she has any current struggles; we don’t even see any of her Pokémon until pretty far in, where we only get to see one when the story implies many. Her life feels irrelevant to the story and what it’s trying to be about, and that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, if that weren’t the core element this story is trying to leverage in order to fit the contest’s theme. I wish we got more focus on that, and perhaps less on her job to make room for it. Given that we’re told she has a relationship with Ghost-type Pokémon, I think there’s room there for a change of focus to do a lot of good here.

The story also feels like it starts to drag after a point, which I think can be owed to the scenarios starting to become a bit repetitive. The Pokémon are different, but the message is always the same, and doesn’t really change or evolve much. Every Pokémon has a fairly similar issue with being repaired, and Mildred’s response always boils down to the same point. Each scene is fairly long too, and it often feels like we're just waiting to arrive at a foregone conclusion that was already established in the introduction. Hammering in your themes too hard too quickly runs the risk of your story running out of things to say, and I do think that causes pacing issues here. To showcase a theme over three acts like this requires some form of progression: it wants the opportunity to develop and breathe. Here, the story feels out of breath by the time the swords leave the scene, and then it keeps going.

Gah, I don’t like sounding this negative, it stresses me out. I do think there’s plenty here worth being proud of: it’s well written on a technical level and has some neat ideas. Were this a different contest, I may have felt differently about it. But unfortunately, this story just didn’t click with me.

kintsugi

Huh, this golden repair thing is a neat concept and I wish there was a shorthand name for it.

I like the merging of themes for this one–to have healed so well that it’s just a normal thing, is the goal of healing, isn’t it? Framing around Mildred’s daily occupation is a nice touch as well, as it implies a softer and kinder world, and also highlights the kind of whacky professions that would be unique to the pokemon world. What do you do if your sentient lamp breaks? Are there professions specializing in non-training related injuries for pokemon? Is it difficult, or at least awkward, for diurnal humans to work and live alongside nocturnal ghosts? And the answers here are really fun, and help build a uniquely slice-of-lifey setup in a pretty wild world. I also think Mildred is a nice viewpoint character for this kind of world, and the bookend intro/closer has a nice folksy feel that both matches her as a viewpoint character and serves as a nice hook.

The meat of the story feels much like a fable, with three strangers bringing similar questions to the protagonist’s doorstep, the three/two/one pokemon in each of the scenarios that Mildred faces, and the recounting of a lesson learned. Where I think this structure lost me a little was in how heavily each of the three scenes overlapped with one another, in a way that I struggled to pin the exact reasoning behind. There are lines in the story like this one that make me think part of this was intentional:
Repetitive as it was, for a majority felt this way, she never minded. If it took constantly relaying the same information to alleviate even a bit of hesitation and doubt, then she would do so many more times.
And morally/in real life, I think that’s true: some lessons don’t ever get learned, and some take a lot of repetition. But for the purposes of a story, it does feel a bit like the scene is simply being reset three times–which, functionally, is true as the clinic opens and closes its doors, but does have some odd structural implications for the oneshot. The pieces end up slightly different, and it was in these differences that I was expecting to find some nuance. Adelaide has complications and needs to reschedule at the last minute–her pokemon aren't comfortable with strangers, but she leaves them anyway, and when she returns her first comment is on how they “look” rather than making sure they’re physically helped–but this doesn’t really lend any change to how her pokemon behave, or why they’re sad in the first place, or why they would specifically want to be told that they’re worthy of love before they can begin to heal. Likewise, Ethan arrives and is very sad and awkward, which matches his pokemon’s behavior more closely, but the only real difference this presents is that he imitates his pokemon’s behavior when Mildred convinces him that healing is nice actually. Bernadine’s an actual runaway child, but that doesn’t end up having any major impacts on her scenes. I think the biggest litmus test for me here is how the story would read if these characters were switched–if Bernadine came in with the honedge crew, for example, would the story meaningfully change from the addition of her backstory and the removal of Adelaide’s?

The part that I found a little harder to digest was how each of the takeaways, which I took as Mildred’s speeches to each of the pokemon at the end of their scenes, were also largely identical. The honedge crew is told that we can heal and be worthy of love; the gem crew is told that love can restore and heal beautifully; the chandelure is told that our pain does not make us unworthy of being loved. The nuances between these messages are so subtle that I think, at least in as short of scenes as these are, they feel functionally identical. Like with swapping the humans, I’m not sure if it would’ve really made a difference to me if sableye and misdreavus had received chandelure’s speech, for example. The throughline of the story seems to be that Mildred is gradually giving these pokemon (and the audience) more and more information about herself, as her personal examples become more personal, but her personal revelations are also fairly swappable, imo.

Broadly, I’m also a little unclear about some of the messaging here. Kintsugi the art is a philosophical one but also, as an art, is a cosmetic one, so it’s less constrained by some of the subtext such as–is it wrong to repair -other- people in a specific, permanent, and obvious way?–since it’s only performed on objects in our world, but in the pokemon world and in the allegory you’ve drawn, it’s performed on pokemon, who in this story are characters. One thing that I found a bit reductionist and pedantic about the threefold repetition was that each of the pokemon hesitates and then is quickly won over by Mildred that they were wrong for feeling this hesitation. It feels much like their doubt is being set up for the purposes of being disputed by Mildred, which I think almost works in a fable format, if there was more substantive variation between why they doubted and why they changed their minds. But moreover, the examples that Mildred gives to convince them about how healing is good don’t actually seem to have a lot of application to ghosts, so it’s unclear which of their specific fears are being assuaged. In the first group she gives an example of their trainer receiving a cut or bruise, which feels like a poor comparison, since these are specifically injuries that humans can heal easily without leaving behind any sign of injury. She reveals a scar to the second group, which feels a lot more flavorfully fitting, but it also feels undercut because 1) the scar is specifically located in a place that she has to reveal, and it is not visible otherwise and 2) the scar is presumably a natural healing, unlike the performance art that kintsugi becomes when done to people. The story she tells Chandelure is most personal, but also most confusing to me: “My parents, after I was scolded, told me to have hope” [emphasis mine]–it’s another example of someone being told the moral to feel better, but I was also not sure how Mildred being told something by her parents is a response to “then how did [Lampent] feel happy again”. I think the morals also suffer from feeling the same because they’re delivered in dialogue–because the individuals learning the lesson in this moment aren’t contributing to the narrative besides plaintive plinks and hums, it feels less like they’re learning something and growing, and more like they’re being told something and agreeing.

All things said and done, I found this entry to be delightfully small-town feelsy, and the general sets/vibes really work. I think there’s something really fun about the sort of hedge witchvocation that Mildred’s found herself in, and little details like calling Bernadine’s parents make the area feel really cozy and lived in. I liked how methodically you described the mixing of the different pastes, how there’s certain recipes for certain types of ghosts, and how the pastes themselves are really toxic (which I took as a nod to urushi). These were fun little details that helped build up Mildred’s cred for me, so to speak, and it made it feel like this was something she’s been doing for a while. Overall I thought this was a really clever take on the theme and a cozy read; thank you for sharing!

I noticed some grammar/clarity things as I was reading through–not really something that weighed too heavily into my judging, but since I was doing a close read I wanted to flag these for you:
She chased it further away with a sip of the tea, the warm sweetness invigorating.
The “the warm sweetness invigorating” is a participle that doesn’t really attach to anything. It’s not strictly wrong, I think, but it reads a bit clearer as something like She chased it further away with a sipe of the tea, finding the warm sweetness invigorating.
As she tied her apron, and slipped on her disposable sleeves and gloves, the bell on the door jingled, a young woman appearing in the doorway who looked quite reminiscent of how exhausted she felt earlier.
Likewise the last participle isn’t quite complete. Changing “appearing” to “appeared” cleans that up a bit.
That’ll have to do.
Should be in past tense: That’d have to do.
Mildred lifted her head up, Honedge creaking in surprise when they made eye contact, cowering behind Doublade.
Same participle thing. Mildred lifted her head up. Honedge creaked in surprise when they made eye contact, cowering behind Doublade.
The atmosphere bore on her shoulders, the glare she received intensifying.
Participle again–The atmosphere bore on her shoulders; the glare she received intensified
In the past, she’d encountered similar instances with Aegislash’s species, intimidation a tactic they would deploy outwardly until she figured out this way to counteract it by standing her ground and hoping her intent to help came across.
“Intimidation was a tactic”. I think you could also cut a few words here: Aegislash she’d encountered in the past employed outward intimidation, which she’d figured out was best counteracted by standing her ground and hoping her intent to help came across.
An accepting glint skittered through Honedge’s eye, voicing light plinks, the twins following in suit apprehensively.
This needs to be two sentences, or joined with a semicolon: An accepting glint skittered through Honedge’s eye. Voicing light plinks, the twins followed suit apprehensively.
He stared at her again, something akin to the beginnings of acceptance in them, slowly pulling the shield closer, Mildred beaming.
“Mildred beaming” is sort of dangling off the end there and it feels like something else got cut around it.
“Alright, Ethan. Let’s see your Pokémon,” she said smiling.
Missing a comma after “said”
It’s... happened before, resulting in repairing with pieces of near identical gemstones to fill in the empty spaces.
This sentence should also be in past tense
Sableye grunted, soft but laced with clear passion, claws gripping the pieces even tighter. [...]
An abrupt, harsh snarl tore from Sableye’s mouth, pointed teeth flashing menacingly, life briefly igniting his eyes in a surge of unwavering protectiveness. [...]
She put together a ghost gem adhesive, dabbing a paintbrush into it, facing Misdreavus. [...]
Red eyes gazed plainly into her own, the barest indication of a nod giving her the okay to proceed.
These aren’t strictly wrong, I think, but overall the number of participle phrases give a very urgent, stream of conscious feel and makes things harder to follow.
Mildred glanced down at Sableye, who’d apparently been staring at the interaction.
I was confused by “apparently”--according to who?

tomatorade

The sentiment at the beginning feels like it should be expressed at the end. It’s almost too straightforward, I keep expecting a lesson waiting to be learned by Mildred but she seems to have everything in order. In general, while she has a lot to like, the tone of the story suggests some kind of shared learning experience which never quite clicked for me.

The problem here is fairly solvable, I think. There’s good opportunity for Mildred to bungle some things here or there. Not necessarily that she does a bad job at first, but maybe she’s not able to adequately explain why it’s okay for the swords to be scarred now. Maybe she draws a blank or doesn’t yet fully understand her parent’s words. Or she’s not quite in tune with the pokemon’s insecurities at first, but slowly grows to understand them. You do have a moment of revelation when she’s dealing with the misdreavus and they start crying… but, it feels a little out of nowhere. I never had the sense that she didn’t understand the beauty before, so it didn’t work on me tbh.

The problem, really, is the repetition. The way it is now feels like Mildred and her clients learning the same lesson three times, without much change. This makes the narrative feel a little flat overall, which is why I mention potentially turning that repetition into a bit of an arc.

There are moments of exposition here or there which I would rather discover on my own. Her job, for instance. You tell us that it’s strange three times (once in narration, once through a customer, and once through herself) and I feel like that takes away from the strangeness a little bit. I’d like her job itself to impress upon me rather than the narrative insist on it, if that makes sense. There are other moments scattered here or there, too. In the first paragraph of her waking up, she thinks about how she isn’t great with mornings, but I feel like that can be removed and strengthened by further showing how that is. She’s a little wacky with the kettle, sure, but maybe she also puts her clothes on wrong, or spends a little too much time in bed or something to humanise her more than plain explaining would. Another example of this is with the ghost types. You have a habit of, within their introductory descriptions, explaining their personalities, too. I don’t think this is necessary. You do a good job expressing them in the appointment, so moments like these feel repetitive and take the joy of discovering these things away from the reader.

That said, I appreciate moments like you holding off on explaining what her job is precisely until she’s meeting with clients—that’s fun. I think it gets to the heart of the prompt, really leading the audience on a tour of her work like it’s take your kid to work day and we’re the kid. You’ve included some clever ways of delivering exposition as well. I love the details of the injuries and how clear these objects are as parts of the pokemon—the way they react to the process is interesting and the actual injuries are creative. I did not realise so many ghosts were associated with repairable objects lol.

Diving into the greatest strength of this piece: your commitment to the prompt. This is maybe a more direct interpretation, but you really go in depth on what it means to be a ghost-type-repairer. I like you showing the process from beginning to end, including dealing with clients and aftercare. It’s very much a medical-facing job in that way. If I had a minor complaint, it would be to maybe push the creative aplpications of what ‘repairing ghost types’ means. I get the kitsurugi angle to this, and turning injury into something beautiful, but, much like I complained about earlier, there’s a bit of unfortunate repetition to her doing kitsurugi over and over when I would want some evolution or variety. In this case, maybe the misdreavous pearl needs a replacement and she has to find one, or the chandelure needs extremely careful attention that tries her abilities a little. It doesn’t have to be crazy or even much more in depth than this, I only want to see more breadth in her profession. Really test the limits of what it meant to repair ghost types.

I like Mildred a lot as a character, She’s very in-tune without seeming like a supernatural empath. Fittingly, she’s very much a doctor/nurse type who practices what she preaches. Watching her comfort the anxieties of her patients was sweet—same with the people tbh. And while I complained about her a little in previous sections, I did enjoy her motivational speeches about beauty and injury and such—I especially like that she tied her own experiences and the experiences of the pokemon’s trainer into her teachings. It’s a great way to relate to anyone, let alone pokemon. It’s a great showing of her inherent empathy. Plus the pokemon get fun gifts sometimes :) like lollipops after a vaccine. That shit was awesome when I was a kid.

Overall, this is a very sweet, very wholesome fic that really nails what I was expecting for the prompt. I’d never considered that a ghost repairer could exist even within the pokemon world, but reading this had me go ah…. This makes sense. Really convincing, really creative, good job and great writing!
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Trueno" by Spiteful Murkrow

Strumming and then sounds you recognize as guitar and drums joined with something more electronic. You blink and glance rightwards, your feet pattering against the cobbled streets in this square as the guitar wails.

“How’s the music, Juliana? Things coming through clear?”


Daa-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-daa.

You blink after you find yourself humming along as the electronic sounds come back. The music’s certainly come through loud and clear for you. You look back and see your present rider, a girl with pigtails thumbing up to a Rotom indwelling a phone attached to a strap fixed to your body’s natural harness. She’s called ‘Juliana’ and comes from a much bigger and brighter lab than you called ‘Uva Academy’, while the Quaxly in front of her is her partner that she keeps calling ‘Loo-kas’ for some reason...

Judge Comments

Dragonfree

This story has a very authentic Scarlet and Violet flavor; it really feels like a slice of a playthrough, just Juliana traveling to different places in Paldea over different terrain with mixed but steadily growing success, which is a fun and appropriate way to approach slice of life. I confess Eurobeat is not my genre, but the use of the music they're playing as a running thread in the story was a cute detail that lent the story a bit of its own unique twist on the flavor.

I think the POV here is lovely, as well. You've got a lot of specific flavor and character to this take on Miraidon to make it feel more unique: they don't really understand Juliana's language but do their best; they have a naïve way of thinking of all buildings as 'labs' because it's what they grew up with; they had really emotionally connected with Turo and considered him a friend; they're traumatized but also a bit of a goof; they don't really understand why Juliana keeps calling them by a different name; they know what they're supposed to be like, how strong their Hadron Engine is meant to be, and feel continually frustrated when they don't live up to that, even when they're making real strides that Lucas and Juliana are impressed with. It's sweet to see the slow shift in their thinking, from the utter self-deprecation of the beginning to realizing they're part of the team and they're going to be okay, even if progress is slow, and it forms a nice character arc to build this around.

It is a bit challenging to write a story in prose that's so centered around movement, and while I often felt you did a nice job getting across how it feels and portraying this very fantastical creature who transforms as they go, I did sometimes find myself having some trouble following what the descriptions were actually getting at, particularly in the section about the ledge - I read it over a few times and I still can't really picture what's going on there. It's hard to be entirely sure how to make it clearer without being sure precisely what you were going for, but in particular, you name a tree, Miraidon runs towards it, then they turn back the way they came in the other direction, then Lucas yells to hit the brakes, Miraidon's claws dig in... and suddenly they're facing tree branches, and the ground is far below? Weren't they running away from the tree there, and didn't they just land? I just can't quite make sense of how this physically plays out. I gather in-game there's a way to jump backwards in S/V that'll let you get up ledges you couldn't otherwise, but even when I was looking for that, I'm not quite getting that from the description here.

Another thing I felt was going over my head a bit was the cartoon that they watch on Noa/Penny's recommendation. The way it's used in the story gives a very strong sense that it's not just a story element, but a reference to a specific real-world show - but since I didn't know the show, references to "one space-y looking human that seems strangely indifferent" about a race just didn't really communicate anything; I still have no idea what the fact he looks strangely indifferent really means, or really what "Run as fast as possible on the peak I don't know" is meant to signify. Googling around suggests the show is Initial D, a name I guess I'd heard before, but I don't know anything about it. I think this element of the story might be more accessible to people who are unfamiliar if you described the relevant bits of the show in a bit more depth to show what it actually is that Miraidon finds compelling about it - you suggest a bit later that they can relate to some of the story about the racer not being ready for the race, but I think expanding upon that a bit more could help properly drive this home. Likewise, the pair of women saying they're a team prompting Miraidon to think about how their own teamwork isn't unlike the women in the show would be a lot stronger if we had a bit more of a sense of what "the sort of teamwork that those two women from the TV show have" is like! Is it just about the fact they serve different roles, or is there something more meaningful that you want to communicate there?

I also felt occasionally it dipped into what felt sort of repetitious - in particular, there were a few different bits where Miraidon is headed straight for something and Juliana tries to steer them away in a panic, which gave me a bit of a sense of déjà vu. (And it felt a little odd to me that Miraidon seems to consistently be the last person to notice that they're barreling straight towards something! The descriptions aren't very focused on what their surroundings look like exactly, but one would think they would see where they're going, at least if their passengers can, unless they're specifically staring at something off to the side.) On some level it makes sense, for a story so focused on movement, that a lot of it involves sticky movement situations, and that's the most straightforward way to do that. But in at least one instance I found myself feeling like we'd just had basically this exact same beat happen. I do wonder if you could have expanded the focus of the story a little to show more of that sense of teamwork that ends up being important to Miraidon's arc, and that might also introduce a little more variety. When we're so focused on Miraidon's movement, it doesn't feel like everyone else is doing all that much but being there reacting to Miraidon's expanding repertoire of movement abilities, but when Miraidon's thinking about teamwork, they mention that Lucas and the other teammates step in to fight for them when necessary and that Juliana and Chispa help them navigate; I think it would've been lovely to see a little more of that, so that we'd be able to appreciate it more with Miraidon at the end! (We do get the bit with the Mankey in one section, but it sort of feels like it goes by very quickly and doesn't have a lot of emotional weight, so by the time teamwork was brought up the first time around I'd fully forgotten that had even happened.)

Lastly, there were occasional typos and sentences that didn't quite parse - it could've used another round of proofreading.

All that said, that's a lot of words spent on nitpicking, but overall I thought this was a lovely story with a lot of good flavor and enjoyed the characterization of Miraidon in it. It's a very solid treatment of daily life in the world of Scarlet and Violet, and the understated character arc is a sweet way to bring it together.

Flyg0n

Wow what an absolute bop this story was. The idea of combining eurobeat songs with Miraidons growth works fantastic, given Miraidon’s source and design. And using different songs to match his slow unlocking of all his powers again made it a really catchy read.

As I understand it, the show being referenced is Initial D, which is pretty cool, and makes for a good comparison. I appreciate that reference wasn’t just passing for fun, but actually comes back throughout and is woven into the entire story.

Without having any familiarity with the show in question, the story does a good job emphasizing the key bits. The old seemingly useless car, the team aspect, and the drifting, of course. I live how Trueno sees himself in the car, relating to it, and how it shows his growth.

I also liked how his development was shown through his language. As a pokemon not native to the time, Trueno has trouble understanding human language while Lucas can understand his trainer much easier. It was a fun worldbuilding detail to show Trueno being distant and separate from the team and eventually grow closer to them.

There were a few times I found myself a little confused with place and movement , such as when he “climbed” up the hill, but I know it can be pretty tricky to perfectly capture a specific movement in words, and I think the character beats land well regardless.

Ending by having him still not having become fully powered up is good as well for this exact reason, as it helps emphasize the lesson Trueno needed to learn throughout his days. It wasn’t just about having power and being useful, but about being patient with himself and relying on his team and accepting their support.

Also I have to say, the music is quite well cued to the text. It can be hard to balance in a way where the story can still work with or without and make sure the reading pace matches but generally speaking it fit well. I really loved how all the elements of progression lined up, and I think this a fantastic daily pokemon pov story from Miraidon’s point of view. Good job!

lisianthus

A songfic is neat! A creative choice. Second-person is an interesting choice, though I’ll say that works of that nature to me, anyways, are almost always either hit or miss, making it a daring one, let’s say. I do personally think that this would have additionally worked with a more traditional POV scheme, and I personally would prefer any second-person fics I read to focus on humans, but points for trying for you — I think this was a fun concept to explore, your execution was nice, and there's likely an audience for it, right?

your feet pattering against the cobbled streets in this square
‘The’ would be a better word to use as opposed to ‘this’, I think.

“How’s the music, Juliana? Things coming through clear?”
I almost thought this was your way of introducing the charcter the reader is supposed to be through dialogue — would have maybe been a neat opportunity, maybe?

a Rotom indwelling a phone
I’m almost certainly going to steal this verb for the future, if only for describing Rotom, LOL.

There past the clip-on headphone on a mount meant for Cyclizar that has been loosened as much as it’ll go, […]
A comma after ‘there’ would help for readability here.

you’re pretty sure humans call him
—I’m a Pokemon? I’m assuming I’m Koraidon or Miraidon, then? This is an interesting choice for sure, and I think it can open up a plot to some interesting points, but… I’m not really sure if it’s the best choice in terms of appealing to a wide variety of readers, as it’s likely going to be quite tough to relate to a Pokemon in full, even if sapient. I do think you've done well in making Miraidon a fun character to 'be', though, so your execution isn't exactly lacking.

how you’re “the strangest Cyclizar they’ve ever seen”.
Good confirmation that the reader is either Koraidon or Miraidon, then!

“Wait, what on earth is that word Juliana keeps calling me?”

“‘Trueno’. You know, ‘thunder’?” the Quaxly answers you. “It’s the nickname she wants to call you. Kinda like how mine’s ‘Lucas’.”
Aww, cute! I like this call to the work’s title and the explanation of Miraidon’s name, too.

It was the name Arven still calls you even if he’s seemed to have grown to dislike you
If you’ve used ‘was’ in this sentence, I’d say sticking to that past-tense would be better here — vice versa, using ‘is’ works fine, too. Though in any case, ‘even though’ fits better than ‘even if’, I’d think.

… Like in what your old friend used to call ‘Drive Mode’.
These callbacks to Miraidon’s former trainer are nice, and they serve as good mystery — I’m assuming we’d get to learn more about them as time goes on?

“I-I don’t understand, my Hadron Engine should’ve-”

“Ack! Go right! Go right!”
Oh no!! It’s a bit easy to forget that Miraidon technically has a mind of its own in the games, as one is always able to control it while playing, so this was a neat thing to include, I’d think.

Some human girl with an Eevee backpack whose name eludes you, maybe it was ‘Noa’?
NOVA…? (Hi, Penny!)

You suppose that your mind has been drifting lately.
Nice wordplay here.

“Stupid overgrown newt! I was sleeping!”
Very apt for a Mankey, LOL…

Everyone has been changing, except you.
Aww… poor Trueno! You’ve been getting stronger, too…

“Bzzt! Hey, Wheels! Do you think you can-?”
Wheels, LOL… another nickname added! Chispa feels like a very spirited Rotom, but then again, perhaps all of them in official media are…?

Your movements are not quite as fluid or fast as when you’re running along the ground, but you’re able to power along this river, flinging watery sprays behind you as easily as you would plumes of dust on the road.
This feels pretty vivid, or at least as vivid as a Miraidon could describe what it’s doing to a listener? Good work on making the actions here feel believable!

If that ‘Herba Mystica’ or whatever your old friend’s child calls it
Wait, wouldn’t that be Arven, though? I’m a bit confused as to why Miraidon would be referring to Arven like that when it’s already used his name befor, it feels a tad unfamilliar?

“Bzzt! Speak for yourself, featherface!” Chispa snaps. “Just because electronic gear’s made water-resistant these days doesn’t mean it’s good for them to be soaked!”
Chispa feels like what I remember Rotom Dex to be like in Sun and Moon, and I mean that positively! Spirited support characters like him are very nice in ensuring a story is nice and fresh.

You must be picking up on more of Juliana’s language than you realized.
Neat way of showing how much Miraidon has travelled! I was a bit confused as to why Miraidon had suddenly started to know human language, so this explanation was a good one?

that ghost-chest teammate
Ghost-chest… I’m curious as to what Pokemon this is!

A part of you wants to go back when your strength is back to avenge your friend, but the prospect of returning there sends a shiver down your metallic scales. He’s surely still waiting there for you, and you’re completely unready to face him again.

Especially since he won’t be defeated just by some race down a mountain.
Oof… poor Miraidon! It’s scary to know one isn’t ready for a tough challenge…

but you remembered that one of the women in this scene turned some sort of harness for the blue car while the other helped spot things in advance.
I wouldn’t know at all, but I’m curious if this is referencing any existing anime? I feel like it could because this feels like you’re going off of some episode’s plot, but I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never seen any racing anime.

You don’t know how much Juliana or even your Pokémon teammates who understand you fully grasp what you’re going through, but they’ve always been there to help you chase it.

[…]

A small smile comes over your face. Even if you wished it could have come together differently, you too, are part of a team.
Aww… it’s good at Miraidon is a bit happier with its circumstances now.


Your fall abruptly stops as you feel air blowing against you and sail ahead, and you look up to see energy membranes filling the gaps between your horns and spreading wide. ‘Glide Mode’ your old friend called it, an old companion that you’ve just recently introduced to your companions.

“For crying out loud, Trueno, unfurl your wings at the top of your jump and don’t scare me like that next time!”

Lucas quacks with a critical huff much as he has many times before during this journey, even if you still have a hard time wrapping your head around how quickly he’s changed.
This whole party seems quite spirited! Though I guess you’d expect a Quaxly to get pretty fired up, too…?

Your heart swells when you see yourself rise relative to the peak you’re on, when suddenly the air underneath you feels like it gives out. Your eyes widen as you abruptly lose altitude, and you hear startled yelps, including your own.
Oh no!!

You lift your eyes as you see Paldea unfurl in front of you as you glide along and you realize that you recognize a lot of these places.
I think having a comma before the ‘and you’ would be nice for readability?

Those earlier anxieties fade away as you grow sure that one day, you’ll have your full strength back, and be able to share it with the others on your team.

This was a sweet ending! I wasn’t fully able to get into this, as I still stand by thinking that third-person would have been something that would have roped me into this more, but… I think your creativity here shone! From making this into a songfic, to including Spanish (to fit the region) here and there, to making this second-person, I think your creativity is a good part of this work, and it was a fun one to read~.

Windskull

I think the framing of this story is excellent. Let’s just start there. The use of music as a connection between the moments we see into worked really well - even if it took till the end of the second scene before I realized the section headers were links to music. Music that was actually being played in-universe at that.

And as we get pretty deep into Trueno’s head, we get a deep understanding of who he is and how he thinks, something I think is honestly helped by the decision to use second person. I consider myself an appreciator of second-person pov, and I think you nailed it really well here.

I do kind of feel like this strays a bit from the heart of the contest theme - or at least, the core, basic idea of it. Miraidon’s situation and healing journey aren’t particularly “mundane” in my opinion. But at the same time, I think there’s an argument that the focus on Trueno’s daily life is just another interpretation of the theme. And I think it helps that we do get so deep into Trueno’s head. It makes it less about the journey, and more about his journey.

There are a couple of specific passages I want to point out.

[Juliana tugs sharply at your harness to turn, and by reflex you oblige, your hoops sliding along the ground sharply enough that you swear you hear them screech screech.]
You have a repeated word here.

[ “Why not? Humans like listening to music while they’re traveling since it makes the time pass by faster,” the Rotom answers you. “Juliana has been getting into these songs lately since they’re apparently meant for going fast.”

... So even the song is a reminder of how far you’ve fallen and how pathetic you presently are.
Great. Your only consolation is that he isn’t here. Your rival, who chased you off from your old
territory back when you were strong.]
I’m not sure I see the connection between the thoughts here. Maybe it’s meant to be that the explanation reminds him that he should be able to go faster? It wasn’t entirely clear.

Critiques aside, I do like the story overall. There’s a lot of charm in it, and I got a kick out of moments like the backward long jump. And while I do wish there was just a bit more at the end, I think as a story overall it’s really great. Excellent job!
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
"Work Ethics" by Wildboots
Third Place Eevee Flight

Monday morning begins, as it so often does, with technical difficulties: the cable car is stuck at the top of the hill again. I swear it breaks down every other day, but of course the city can’t be bothered to fix it.

A grinning hiker stands at the bottom of the cliff with a painted cardboard sign.
Onix rides only $5! Tips welcome. Sometimes I have to wonder. For a trainer down on his luck, I imagine a little light sabotage is an easier way to earn a buck than an honest battle.

But there are only two other options. One, slog up the stairs on foot and risk dirtying my uniform. Or two, wait for the cable car, which could take anywhere between ten minutes and the rest of the day, and risk clocking in late. Neither one is an option at all...


Judge Comments

Dragonfree

This was delightful. The narrator is such a genuine jaded office worker, just trying to do their job, only their job is fundraising for Team Galactic, just as Dawn's about to storm through.

The narrative voice here is impeccable and fun to read - it has a lot of character and entertaining turns of phrase and fun details. I deeply enjoyed bits like their view that Cyrus doesn't really do anything but is less of a tyrant than the manager of the poffin shop where they used to work, or their suspicion that the Hiker with the Onix may be sabotaging the cable car, not to mention their sighing irritation about poor Dave from graphic design giving some little kid his badge, which might not get him fired if he makes a medical claim. It's just a great time.

It's also a fun commentary on this sort of corporate job. They seem a little bitter about never having gotten to be a kid on a Pokémon journey themself, but they at least frame this to themself as being about helping kids in their situation. What their day-to-day job actually involves, though, is sending out overly friendly reminder e-mails about the upcoming grant application deadline, meeting with representatives of large donors like Mr. Backlot and trying to navigate giving the right responses in the face of legitimately problematic PR scandals that they see mostly in terms of how damaging they are for the company's image, trying to call up and persuade other donors to keep them going, and writing up incident reports. It feels very grounded and real, even in its fantastical context; even Team Galactic has PR and employees who feel like they're trying to accomplish something genuine even when what they're actually engaged in is pretty shady.

By itself a lot of that qualifies as basically something that could just as well be happening on Earth except for the identity of the specific organization, but the Pokémon elements are also lots of fun. Everyone gets a Pokémon assigned by the company who might or might not be able to do little tasks to help with the job, explaining how the grunts always have a selection of the same few Pokémon; employees having a disagreement (I enjoyed this disagreement as well and how it continues to show at least some Galactic staff as genuine idealists, one way or another) escalates to a Pokémon battle in the middle of the office that knocks over desks, and that just seems to be something that happens sometimes, though childish and problematic; and of course, one day a child storms through the office with her powerful team of Pokémon, casually upending everything, battling her way through the building and leaving actual adults powerless and shaking.

I don't have much in the way of real criticism for this one; I think it's very good at being what it is, though its take on daily life in the Pokémon world as distinct from ours is a bit lower-key than some others. I think I might have enjoyed hearing more about Cyrus than we did - we establish there are rumours about a cult of personality around him but don't really hear what those rumours entail or all that much about what he's actually like. But it is fun in a way that to the narrator Cyrus isn't even all that important, just this weird higher-up who doesn't really seem to do any work, and I think I get what you're going for with leaving the reader to extrapolate the truth of Cyrus's cult of personality from the canon while the narrator is completely unconcerned with it. It's just something that came to mind as something I might have enjoyed seeing more of.

As a story, though, this is just a lot of fun and very well written, and I enjoyed reading it a lot.

Flyg0n

I have to say, I didn’t see the “twist” in this story coming at first! It was quite entertaining to read the trials of a poor mundane office worker, committed to making the world a better place, and see the inner workings of his perfectly normal and respectable job.

And then I realized, just as the name drops came, and the little pieces fell into place. The use of specific pokemon and the mentions of what they did. Very solid build up, in the way where someone might guess, but also still have fun seeing the little quirks of the world and PoV character.

Truly the MC is the one who really sells this whole story, even right from the start. His skepticism about the cable car and Onix rides paints a great picture about his slight pessimism yet the way he strives so much at his job shows he has particular things he cares for. Especially his hypothetical little jimmy.

I think one of my favorite parts is just the sheer ‘annoyance’ at trying to convince wealthy donors to back them after all the bad PR incidents, like the Lake one, and how its so very frustrating. It really adds to a both amusing and slightly scary sense of how someone can end up thinking they’re doing some good even for a group (or person) that plans to do a lot of bad.

It also provides some solid context for how Galactic presents itself and operates as a front company. The worldbuilding gives a distinct impression that in this setting, making it as a trainer is no easy task, and (assuming no propaganda), can be pay-to-win. Weaving in worldbuilding can be hard to do effectively, but it works well here. His conversation with Mrs Backlot shows us that Galactic survives because of how it spins the narrative and pretends to do good (or perhaps, actually does a little good).

Also this guy is such a big office mood. Coworker loses their keycard and a fight is happening upstairs? ‘Above my paygrade’ indeed. And the fight between Jake and the coworker our MC has to stop was almost comedic, especially when juxtaposed against the knowledge of how for their lovely leader Cyrus, none of those things matter.

All in all, the story feels so down to earth and real in the way it captures the human attitude. Very good.

lisianthus

I swear it breaks down every other day, but of course the city can’t be bothered to fix it.
In some weird way, bureaucratic tie-ups resulting in things that matter not being addresed existing in the Pokemon world is a comfort — small inconveniences like this set the ‘mundane’ feel well here.

Since the ride costs almost as much as a second coffee would, I skip the tip, even though the onix stares after me with reproachful eyes.
Scary… given how we’re sort of led to think the Trainer may have messed with the cable car, I wouldn’t put it past him to also train his Pokemon to intimidate riders, ahaha…

other white collar workers
Suuuper small thing to the point where I’m worried I’m being much too nitpicky, but I think ‘white-collar’ should be hyphenated, as it refers to the job class instead of a white shirt.

and I know for a fact there’s no creamer left because Alexa stole it for her glameow like no one would notice.
I love this narrator sliding office drama into their inner monologue, it’s very lifelike LOL! That creamer was for everyone, Alexa!!

the weird, promotional energy drinks that fill an entire shelf in the fridge.
I can only imagine the crazy branding that’s on them, given how IRL ones are quite out there already lol. I like the small details you’re including here!

I should really find the time to evolve Flick; these days, he mostly hangs from the underside of my desk and naps.
My big question as the narrator was trying to figure out their commute was if they were able to ride their Pokemon up or not, and if they could have but didn’t, why that was! Good way of addressing this, and Flick sounds cute!

I do my best work in double-spaced Arial size twelve.
I enjoy how this narrator feels simultaneously ‘over it’ in regards to the monotony of working life, but also very… assured, I suppose, that they’re very good at their job at the same time.

Just a friendly reminder, I begin to type, though this is actually the fourth or fifth reminder,
Oh god, I feel this LOL… do your best, Flick’s Trainer!! Their snark here is well-earned, I believe, and I think your writing of their personality is hitting nicely.

I click send with one hand while the other reaches for the middle left desk drawer, where I keep packets of department store cookies and chocolates. The commander is partial to the ones with kebia filling.
Bribes, LOL… I can believe they’re necessary to get one’s work stuck from bureaucratic hell, even though the idea almost feels shocking!

And above all, why, why, would he do something like that in full Galactic uniform without pausing to think how it would reflect on our work?
I’m curious as to if this is referring to events in the Sinnoh main games? I’m very possibly mistaken here, but I thought I’d ask! Sounds like a super huge ginormous nuisance in general to deal with for obvious reasons, especially as it sure seems that the person treating the Magikarp so badly has the exact opposite worldview of the company they work (?) at.

“I can assure you that those involved no longer work for the Galactic Corporation.”
This was a huge surprise, maybe I should have known, but I feel like giving the surprise twist of the narrator working for essentially the back-end arm of Team Galactic opens up lots of neat opportunities for the story to go.

At that, Kimberly’s stare softens. It’s not hard to see how experienced can slide into eccentric, an old man muttering into his soup. He needs no help from us to bluster his way into early retirement.
Wow, smooth… sure seems like our narrator is quite skilled at what they do! …Their PR skills are probably a very big help as time goes on and as Galactic gets into more trouble, ahaha.

she pipes up, “Would you agree there’s a cult of personality around Cyrus Schopenhaur?”

I almost choke in surprise.
What an out-of-the-blue question! Almost feels as though it’s for an interview rather than a meeting, lol… but if she’s asking, there must be some observable truth to her question.

He’s not a tyrant, not like my first manager at the poffin shop where I toiled through undergrad,
Shudders… I have been there. (actually, am there lol)

I wish I could tell Kimberly that I stay at Galactic not because I’m so charmed by the leadership but despite it.
I was wondering if this was a ‘change things and do work to help the community from the inside’ situation, given I’m sure it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to know their means are… severe, to say the least. Good to hear!

I lean across the table, hands clasped as if in prayer, gaze locked on hers.

[…]

“I’m sorry—it wasn’t your fault that you, a full-ass adult, decided to go for your belt and throw down in the middle of the office?”
REAL… I love that our narrator is the only sane-seeming one there LOL… they clearly have their shit together, and it makes their stream of consciousness and reactions to the annoyances thrown at them very enjoyable. God, I couldn’t imagine having to break up a fight like that! You’d think they wouldn’t allow Pokemon into a mostly unrelated white-collar job, but what do I know.

“Jake,” I plead, leaning against the counter for support, “you’re supposed to do your job.”
I can feel the sheer annoyance in this sentence, lol… god, what a trainwreck to take care of!! Flick’s parent needs a promotion!!!

He peers over the volume of Nietzsche in his hands
From the little I know about Charon, but the slightly larger amount I know about Team Galactic themselves, he absolutely would read Nietzsche LOL. Very good in-character pick!

cult of personality. More like cult of incapacity.
I am officially worried about my working life turning out to be like this, LOL…

And when the sounds of another pokemon battle start up, rumbling through the floor, I crank my music louder. As long as my desk remains intact, I’ve got work to do.
Seeing the narrator’s ‘I-really-don’t-give-a-shit-anymore’ meter slowly yet surely rise throughout the course of this fic has been very fun, lol… I guess someone has to get the work done, huh?

Beyond the partition of my cubicle, the office has been obliterated. Someone flung a swivel chair straight through the ceiling. Plasterboard crumbles from the hole. The water cooler lies on its side, the surrounding carpet dark with damp. Scorch marks bloom across the carpet and arc up the wall. It’s impressive, actually.
This was a big whiplash! Not like it wasn’t unpredictable given how much had already happened in the day, but wow. ‘Impressive’ is… an apt word for sure.

Sometimes I think I’m the only one around here who does any real work.
I think you are very, very, very right.

This is far, far above my pay grade.
You’d think Charon would have handled all of this, but no! Flick’s poor Trainer is slaving away…

Careless handling of a security badge

I’m pretty sure this would be part of the mainline Sinnoh games’ story, maybe? Someone infiltrating Galactic HQ and stealing a security badge feels pretty Pokemon-like, but what do I know lol~.

God… I really really was captivated by this work, and I think you did a wonderful job. From what I’ve seen, I think you’ve captured the dreariness of working in a dead-end office job well, and your narrator simeltaneously not caring and caring more than anyone else in the room is a fitting personality for a storyteller in this environment? Your inclusion of Pokemon into a working environment helps to give that magical touch to the mundane here, and I think you’ve done very well all around! Great job, this may very well be my tie for favorite of all of the entries here!

Windskull

Even in fanfiction, even after my workplace moved away from it, Salesforce continues to haunt me.

Jokes aside, I found this story a fascinating look into Team Galactic, especially in a post-Legends Arceus World. I like the idea that they were still, to some extent, doing work for the good of the region. Were was the key word, of course, with the shift in culture seen under Cyrus. A shift that the remainder of the region can see, but our protagonist doesn’t. He’s spending just a bit too much time keeping his head down, to the point where it almost feels willfully ignorant. But at the same time, he gives vibes that he genuinely feels like he’s doing something for the greater good. Ah, the bureaucracy.

I also really like that it’s not made immediately clear that we’re in a story about a Team Galactic employee. Instead, you build up to it with little things that make a lot of sense in hindsight. The mention of his pokemon and how and when he got it. The mention of another office in Eterna. And then the mention of the Lake Valor disaster. Speaking of, our POV character doesn’t seem to realize what caused the disaster. Makes me wonder what the official report in the office is.

In terms of critiques, I really don’t have much! Maybe I would have liked to see a bit more self-reflection from the protagonist, as I think it could have made the ending hit harder. But at the same time, that might have strayed from your intentions. I thought the prose worked really well for the framing of the story, and I didn’t notice any typos, so nothing to say on that. Overall, excellent job!
 

Negrek

komorebi
Staff
There we go! That concludes this year's "Magical but Mundane" one-shot contest! Another huge shout-out to the winners, the judges, and of course all of the writers who put in time and effort to make this another wonderful one-shot contest. Writers, you're welcome to publish your stories now, and readers, I hope you enjoy browsing through the excellent catalog of fics we got this year!

As in previous years, authors, please let me know when you publish your stories so that I can link to them from this thread! In the past I've also made AO3 collections for contest fics, but as AO3's collection system has changed in a way that makes adding works to collections much more of a pain, and relative lack of use in past years, I'm not planning to do one this year. Let me know if having one would be important to you!

As always, I welcome any feedback on this year's contest! I think it ran pretty smoothly this time around, and I hope you all enjoyed the ride. For those of you participating in the zine, look out for updates in the next couple days as we move into the next phase of execution! In the meantime, enjoy reading the reviews, excerpts, and interviews in this thread, and hopefully a few newly-published one-shots as well!
 

canisaries

you should've known the price of evil
Location
Stovokor
Pronouns
she/her
Partners
  1. inkay-shirlee
  2. houndoom-elliot
  3. yamask-joanna
  4. shuppet
  5. deerling-andre
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