Welcome to Thousand Roads! You're welcome to view discussions or read our stories without registering, but you'll need an account to join in our events, interact with other members, or post one of your own fics. Why not become a member of our community? We'd love to have you!
Hello and welcome to Salvage, my big fic project of many years! In the aftermath of Mewtwo's escape from the Cinnabar lab, Mew was lost, and another creature was born. Neither human nor pokémon but wielding Mew's powers, it's vowed to find its mother and free her from imprisonment, no matter what it takes. This is a dark fanfic, which I'd say would be rated "R" or "Mature." Specific content warnings are under the spoiler below.
Content warnings include a large amount of violence, blood, death, and body horror; discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation; depictions of physical and psychological abuse and torture; and a lot (a lot) of strong and at times bigoted language.
New chapters once a week on Friday! If you've read this story before, expect only minor edits up until chapter ~10. I don't expect super major restructuring after that (e.g. cutting out or merging entire chapters, changing what happens/how things happen), but some scenes will have substantial changes. I'll call out anything I think particularly important in the author's notes for each chapter.
This is an old but still-in-progress story, and I appreciate all feedback, whether it's criticism or a quick "I liked it!" All that said, I hope you enjoy the fic.
Chapter 1
In the conversation they can't have, the child would apologize for letting him die. "Sorry I can't help you, but this is how it has to happen," it would say. "This is how it's supposed to be. Don't worry. You can still be useful, even if you're dead. I'll take your name and I'll take your face and I'll take your pokémon"--the one that is mine, the one that was stolen from me--"and I'll go and make things right. That's what I'm doing, and you're helping me. It's not all bad."
The child can't say anything like that, of course. It can't say anything at all. Absol is very strict about interfering with Fate. She's beside the child now, breath misting white in the chill air of the cavern, watching the human. That's what she does: watches. She watches to be sure that Fate plays out how it's supposed to, and she doesn't interfere.
Usually the child doesn't mind. The dying people are foggy memories at best. It has nothing to say to them. But this one it thinks it remembers. "I know you," it might say. "You used to make little origami sculptures for your desk, didn't you? I always liked those, especially the pokémon ones. They were pretty." He must have been an intern, then. Not someone who was around for very long. He's uncommonly old to still be training, but perhaps he decided to take a break after Cinnabar. Maybe he decided science wasn't for him.
Because the child has other memories, too, memories from a different life, and they whisper, "I know you. I remember you. I remember your face as you wrote the numbers down and lined the needles up. I remember your fear, human, and your shame, but I remember too that it did not stay your hand."
There wouldn't be time to say all that anyway, not even most of it. In movies it seems like there's always time for last words, but here it's all over quickly: the human slips from the edge of the path, down here where everything is glitter-slick from the river's spray. He falls funny on one arm and doesn't even cry out as it snaps, just grabs for an icy rock with the other.
"You don't have to be scared," the child imagines itself telling him as he hangs there for a terrifying second, still thinking he might pull himself back up. "I died once. It wasn't so bad."
His fingers find no purchase on the ice, and the incline keeps him sliding. His hand goes next to the pokéballs on his belt, but it's too late, too late. The river grabs his legs, pulls him down and under, and in no time at all he's gone.
Absol goes forward, thick claws splayed wide to steady herself on the ice. She paces at the edge of the water. The child imagines the human being swept along by the rushing current, slammed against submerged boulders and carried over hidden waterfalls. The river will take him to the depths of the cave, where stories say Articuno's nest resides, delicate spires of ice and cast-off feathers among the rocks. The human will never see it, though. He'll be much too dead.
Absol stops her pacing, turns back to the child and nods. It scrambles out from behind the boulder and joins her at the water's edge, peering into the dark, racing flow. Its shadow stretches over the water, rippled and frayed on the turbulent surface. There are lights behind it, illuminating the slushy path where it's safe for trainers to walk. Where the child's going there will be no light at all and only the bravest humans tread.
The child sits perched on the edge a moment longer, readying scales and gills and webbing. "I will meet you later," says Absol, and the child nods, not really paying attention. Absol probably likes it down here, where it's deathly cold and the shadows lie close at hand. She might stay a while, vacationing, but the child still has work to do. It hesitates, watching how the water froths around the jag of a half-submerged rock, then throws itself in.
Even prepared for the shock, even insulated against the water's bite, the child still feels the cold like a hammer blow. Its gasp pulls in a mouthful of water, which goes sliding over the child's gills like a deep and icy breath. The child lets the current carry it along, clicking and squeaking to conjure a radar map of the riverbed. It makes a game of dodging rocks at the last possible moment, twisting away with lazy kicks of webbed feet. Then the riverbed drops away and it's falling, flailing at air and spray with a whoop of delight. It hits a couple rocks on the way down, jarred but not broken, and plunges back into the river with a thundering splash. It drifts down until the current grabs it again and pulls it along.
Down and down, around tight bends and through surging rapids, over more falls into the heart of the caverns. The child rolls and tumbles along until the current slows and another drop brings it to the final basin, where the river stops and water seeps out through hidden cracks and fissures. The child strokes downwards in the pitch dark, ignoring translucent swimming things, ghostly in its echo-sense, and a few pokémon, wary, staying out of its way. There at the bottom it finds the corpse.
The child grabs it and kicks back to the surface, eyes opening to stare at nothing in the deep-dark. There's a shelf of rock against one wall, it remembers, and it gropes its way over blind until it bumps up against the lip of rock.
There's barely enough room for it to perch out of the water, and it hunches on the edge like a gargoyle, snorting the last of the water out of its nose while its gills close up. The corpse lolls next to it, broken arm tangled in the straps of its backpack. The child ignores the bag for now, and the clothes, and even the pokéballs. Greedy with anticipation, it fishes the trainer's pokédex out of his pocket, working by feel. It flips the machine open and squints into sudden LED brilliance.
The child ignores cold and cramping muscles, scrolling through menus, flipping through page on page of data. It learns as much as it can about the trainer's life, then snaps the device shut and in the darkness changes. Crouching there in another's skin, the child tells itself the story of who it is now:
You are Nicholas Garrett. Around eight years ago you were interning at the lab on Cinnabar Island--maybe. Something to do with the lab, or you wouldn't be here now.
Four years ago you began your journey. You're a slow trainer, but a thorough one: four years, five badges. You have a charizard--your starter--nidoqueen, primeape, rhydon, and several others of little consequence.
Today you came to the Seafoam Islands. Why, you don't know--looking for a seel, maybe, or just out for an adventure, maybe seeking the legendary Articuno. Whatever you were seeking will have to go unfound.
Because you died down here, Nicholas Garrett, in the darkness and the deep. You were twenty-six years old.
It's about time I tried to review/comment on other people's fics again.
I like the prose that's used here. It's quite vivid and descriptive. It seems that you tied in Absol's lore of foretelling disasters, which is a neat touch. The overall feeling is one of suspense and mystery, the ending feeling ominous. I mean that in a good way, of course.
I hope I can read more, since being consistent isn't the easiest for me 😅 Nevertheless, you're a great writer!
for whatever reason the one line where the child mentions that it shares Mew's dreams is burned into my mind and I'm very 👀 at this entire paragraph for what's probably no reason lol
There's no pokédex now to guide you, and you had too little time for proper make-believe. So now you are Melanie Roth, neither very young nor very old, of average height and build, hair indifferently colored. You never died and you never lived and right now you don't want to do anything but lie here and think unhappy thoughts, because all that's going to happen now is things are, somehow, going to get worse.
In general I like how this entire chapter is just kind of sad and gloomy; it really sells the idea that the child's mindset shapes/influences how people see it, how it causes issues when it's around humans/pokemon sometimes. It kind of feels like the narration is just being actively sucked in here, and it's a lot of things that would normally induce joy (crafting a new disguise! my friends are back!) just being the absolute worst instead.
I like how Mewtwo and the child are quick to blame it on like, literal changes in brain chemistry and not just character development. Which, fair.
"you want to be able to feel like a child again" is such a gut punch in light of the previous chapters, where everyone basically admits they want Sara back. But that wouldn't make for fun storytelling, nor would it make for fun growth, so here we are just trying. I like how the main conflict of the upcoming arc seems to be on people wanting to put things back, to make Mew free again, wishing things were the way they were--but somehow I think it's not really gonna turn out that way.
"Yeah, not like you." Rats is still studying you. "You've been doing that a lot lately."
But also in general Rats continues to be the best character, and her turnaround here after the implicit meeting with Mewtwo hits hard. It's weird when other characters stop pushing back on the child honestly.
I think you do a great job of conveying the dread that comes with the passage of time here. I'm reminded of like, summer break in high school--five days until Orre! That's so much fun! We can scream and have fun while the boat bounces up and down. Four days is also really far away! And then as the time gradually ticks down more and more the crushing deadline returns, except in this case it's not school it's your murderous psychic brother and whoever made him ...
"I don't understand," the charizard says hopelessly.
"I do!" Titan sounds surprised at himself. "I know you said it would all be sand, but it's still so much more than I thought! And it's so warm. Flying is easy!"
I stopped a moment here wondering if the hover-cycle is really likely to be too small? Do they make actual child-sized ones, and if so, is Melanie Roth that young? I completely forget, maybe she is, but it gave me pause; I hadn't been thinking of it taking actual small child forms.
The cord doesn't have enough slack to let Thunder be at eye level to everyone else, and you have to keep your chair pushed way back so you don't bang it with your knee.
Huh, but surely it'd be easy for Thunder to be at eye level by just being a couple inches further back? Unless the cord is just super heavy and laid along the ground and can't be lifted pretty much at all, but it doesn't sound like that's it when also the child worries about its knee hitting the cord.
For some reason the paper seems more interested in talking about Kanto's prime minister than Mewtwo himself, all about how Kanto's offered high-level trainers, troops, psychic suppression devices, anything, all "for the safety of Orre's citizens." That last part keeps being repeated like no one thinks it's true.
Not sure I get what something being repeated like no one thinks it's true means? How does repeating that indicate nobody thinks it's true...?
Love Rats and the child really wanting its Pokémon to just serve the moral support role it's imagined for them, instead of being actual partners, thereby also resigning itself to taking this on alone in its misguided desire to protect them.
I had the impression from the scene where the child returns to Mewtwo that it had recalled the Pokémon to their balls, and when it didn't talk to Mewtwo about bringing the Pokémon and then it sounds alone when the next scene begins, I figured it hadn't brought them, so it came as a surprise when several paragraphs into the scene it turns out the Pokémon are with it after all. Might have been worth mentioning they were there earlier.
Love the child's logic about how all the bad people live in Pyrite, and if Kanto doesn't have a similar Bad People Town it must be because Team Rocket is too powerful. Oh, child.
Enjoy the descriptions of Pyrite generally - nice feel of the place. Also the child's excitement about how illicit it all seems. Very cute.
"Oh. Uh, wow," Heracross says after a moment. "Guess you weren't lying, Hypno. Noctowl, I owe you an ice cream."
Mewtwo's enthusiasm is more unnerving than his disapproval indeed. I have the worst feeling terrible things will happen to the Three Musketeers. And surely Mewtwo plans to torture and/or kill any Cipher members they come up with. Fun!
Pretty quiet chapter, but it was fun to meet the shadow Pokémon and their characterization is lovable and flavorful. Also enjoyed the child insisting it's fine through a heatstroke, indignant at being treated like it needs help or assistance because it could transform into a shape that'd be fine if it wanted. What a child.
Hi hi! Back again for the last week of Blitz, for chapters 3 to 6! If I had the spoons I'd read to the end of what you have posted on TR, because I am invested now. You weren't kidding when you said things start to pick up in 6, because now I have a general gist of how this is going to go down--I really wasn't sure, UNTIL the great Nathaniel Morgan rolled up onto the scene and DIDN'T FUCKING DIE (yet). Now, I get it. I figured, judging by the end of chapter 5, that the child was going to head on a journey to challenge the League and fulfill his Destiny(TM) and free Mew, and with how the beginning of Chapter 6 started going down, I figured that it was going to do it as Nate. I was confused for a moment because I'd seen some of your posts in the Discord regarding Nate and the child as separate entities, and THEN Absol showed up and said "wait don't let him die." It all pretty much clicked there. Is poor Nate going to be dragged across the lands with this gremlin and his Absol babysitter? I am fucking here for it; good luck Nate.
I really liked all of these chapters as a whole because I slowly but surely got my answers. The pacing was pretty masterful--nothing felt like an info dump, and it all just kind of came out pretty naturally just through the child's observations and the exchanging dialogue. While I still have a lot of questions, a great deal of them were kind of answered up to this point, and its only kept me invested. I partially know what's going on, but I still also don't. Like, what is all this about the child dying once before? I still don't have an answer for that, and I MUST know. But, I do have a general gist that they're doing All Of This to get the Pokemon they lost back--appreciate the confrontation with the Kerrigan homie bringing all of that to light. I'm guessing they were a human (or some version of one) at some point, had a team, and then when they "died" they lost them all. I feel like I'm on track, but sometimes this shit goes right over my smoothbrained head.
I have to say that I love the child's character. I don't know what they are, and I don't even know what they LOOK like when they're not in the form of another person or Pokemon, but the characterization is so top-notch I can't even be mad. I know I should be absolutely terrified of this thing, but you do really well in bringing out the idea that it's being referred to as "the child" for a reason--they're very childish. From the way they want to argue with their much-more-mature handler, to losing their temper at inconveniences and putting themselves into sticky issues as a result. They have all the power in the world, but they're still just a stupid kid who needs some guidance going forward and I absolutely adore that.
I do continue to question the choice of writing the child's POV in second-person, while sometimes we switch back to third. It's a very interesting choice, and I absolutely don't hate it, but I do wonder what the reasoning is. Being that this story is panning out slowly, I can only imagine that there IS a reason, which is why I won't get too much into it right now. You're 40+ chapters in and I'm only on chapter 7 now, so, I trust this process enough to hope that I will get my answer if I just keep reading lololol.
Thanks for the mighty fine distraction from work. This will probs be my last review for Salvage before the end of Blitz but I was definitely be back around at a later date. Until then, line-by-lines with no rhyme or reason :D
The pokédex observes everything, records everything, surely knows more than the trainer herself about everything that has happened on her journey: every pokémon captured, every item purchased, every visit to a pokémon center.
You know from TV that there are only two kinds of cops: hard-bitten, driven servants of justice who will stop at nothing to put criminals behind bars and the ones whose greatest exertions are in pursuit of donuts.
This characterization of Titan sort of threw me, because in the chapter we met him he was so "RAAAAAWR WHERE'S NICK I'LL KICK YOUR HEAD IN" and this dialogue reads as the complete opposite of that.
You make a guttural noise, a choked scream, and shove the nurse out of the way so you can get at the terminal again. You plunge your arm straight through the screen, shattering the mocking words, ignoring the glass in your arm, the shards of plastic and spitting wires. Your heart flutters before you remember to toughen your skin against the electricity, and you reach ever deeper, tearing up the machine's insides, searching.
I don't know why this was so GODDAMN funny. The thought of this alien thing, who's still basically learning how to Human(TM), just did something that totally isn't human, and they have to rack their brain for something that might deescalate the situation only to arrive at a phrase that does nothing but make the situation WORSE.
It's not badly hurt, although it healed too quickly. Skin's closed over some of the glass, trapping it in the child's flesh. It'll need to be dug out later. More blood will have to flow, but for now, only tears.
They always do find the bodies. Absol insists on this. The child insists that it's a waste of perfectly good food, and a huge pain besides. If she'd let the child hide them, it would take much longer for the humans to catch on, and it wouldn't have to keep getting new identities when the humans realize its current ones are dead.
I agree with the child on this one--why does Absol insist that the bodies be found? I feel like that only makes their mission harder. Is it a Fate thing?
This is me being a nitpicky former journalism major but this didn't read a lot like a news anchor giving a report to me. Maybe something more along the lines of "The sighting has left police perplexed, as he was found dead in Seaform Caverns last week."
But the rest of the room is crammed with old newspapers, from respectable publications to the kind that announce Pikablu sightings and report on people who've seen the face of Arceus in their breakfast cereal.
"I am sorry, Dad. You are right. I am not the only one involved in this. I cannot say more than that, but I promise you that if you help me get my pokémon back, I will return soon. I am almost done, and then I can be with you and Mom again. I did not want to leave. I did not want to be a part of this. But now I am. I need your help, Dad. That is all I am asking for."
I particularly enjoy how you write the child talking so stiffly. It really sells the idea that they kinda still don't know what they're doing. I have to wonder why Leo isn't sus of this tho because SURELY Matt didn't talk like this.
"I cannot! I am not lying. It really is dangerous! Come on, Dad, what is it that you want me to say?"
Leonard Kerrigan shakes his head, and you know his mind is already made up. "No. Just listen to yourself. You sound nothing like him--you sound like some kind of fucking robot. Who are you?"
Your grin stretches wider and wider, splitting Matt Kerrigan's face ear to ear as jaws reconfigure to accommodate the new rows of teeth forcing their way out of your gums, gleaming sharp in the dim light. Fingers grow claws and irises bleed to red as you stare into Leonard Kerrigan's eyes.
There are eight badges. There is a grand tournament held only once per year. It's only a little over a month away.
The child will win those badges. It will enter the tournament. And it will meet the trainer who holds the key to its future--its future, and that of its mother.
Here for the first half of my review exchange, for chapters 1-3!
Already, right off the bat, I am very intrigued. "Conversation they can't have" is in the first six words, and it already raises so, so many questions, and they only grow more and more with the rest of the paragraph and the next.
Who is the child? Why are they letting this person die? How can they still be useful when dead? How the heck could their face be taken? Why had this person stolen a Pokemon from the child? Is that part of why they're letting this person die? How would the child make things right? And make what right? What had happened? Why is Absol so strict about interfering with fate?
All these questions are immediately thrown at the reader from the get-go in a whirlwind of "what the heck" and it is glorious. You present so many questions, and yet are able to keep it from being overwhelming. Very nicely done!
Moving on, the child already died once already? Very interesting. I wonder what the circumstances of that were.
Huh, so the child has gills and webbed feet. They're definitely not a human, then. Blacklight is making me imagine them as a Mudkip, and the mental image of a tiny little Mudkip saying all these things is hilarious.
I also love the description here, I can very vividly picuture what's going on in the river.
The switch to second person gives me chills and I love it. Second person is extremely underutilized in fic, and you use it fantastically here.
And that final line. That final line. It's a perfect way to end a starting chapter, and raises TONS of intrigue. "You're dead. What do you do now?" is basically what it's saying, and it raises so, so many questions. I am very confuzzled, by also very intrigued.
Onto the second chapter! Again with the questions right off the bat!
Is the child able to teleport? Are they a psychic type, then? Are they Mew? Why was the child ready to die? What's Rats' relationship with the child? Is the child taking over Nicholas' life? Why? What's so special about Nicholas? Who's Titan? Did the child get all his information about Nicholas just from his Pokedex? What are Pokedexes like in this world to contain so much information on humans?
It's not quite as magnificent as the very beginning, but it's still very good and intriguing!
Next, we meet Titan. The child seems to know him from when he was a Charmander, is he the Pokemon that was stolen from them?
I wonder why they were going to Cinnibar. Nicholas used to be an intern for something there, maybe that has something to do with it?
I wonder why Titan doesn't like that name? Is it the name the child used for him when they knew each other? Did Titan grow to dislike the child for some reason?
I understand that Titan's dialogue having few commas or italics might be a stylistic choice, but it makes his dialogue feel very flat. If it doesn't conflict with worldbuilding or plans, maybe you could add a few more commas and italics in his dialogue? It feels like it could really use some pauses.
...no, child, it's not as simple as that. "Now I am him" raises so, so, so many questions, and I'm intrigued to see them answered.
Again? Was the child a trainer before?
Oh boy, now they're fighting.
So the child can use Pokemon moves like Rain Dance even in human form...very interesting.
Not much to say about the fight scene, but it was neat!
Save who? Who does Titan want the child to save?
And truly begin what?
This wasn't as good a chapter as chapter 1, in my opinion, but it was still good!
Onto chapter 3!
Huh, so the child has changed identities again. I wonder when that happened, and why they discarded Nicholas' identity.
"Just as much Pokemon as human"? I wonder what exactly that means. There's the pokemorph tag on this story, is the child one?
I wonder how the child knows all this stuff about Leonard? Did they know him in the past?
Oh boy. I'm guessing the child masqueraded as Leonard's son, and now Leonard is dedicated to finding out what happened?
Seems like the child is frequently changing identities. Very interesting.
So the child is smiling about hearing about the kids who snuck into the safari zone...was the child one of those kids?
So Leonard also has one of the child's Pokemon...I wonder who the other one is?
The last line of the chapter was nice.
Overall, I enjoyed these three chapters! There's so much intrigue, and yet it's balanced to not be overwhelming, and the protagonist is extremely interesting!
I'm excited to read more! Thank you for writing this!
Back for more Salvage, and wrapping up what is probably the opening arc of the fic, Chapters 4 and 5. The collection of the Squad:tm:
These were two hard hitting chapters in terms of the emotional impact. First is the child's identity as it ties to the stolen pokedex, and the second is the reappearance of Leonard Kerrigan's dead son. This is actually pretty interesting timing, as I'm currently watching a thriller/heist show on Netflix, and both chapters give off the same kinds of vibes down to the paranoid investigator getting perilously close to the answers, and the general public seeing what's happening but not knowing how to react. The dead walking? New pokedex policies? What on earth is going on?
And, personally, I still haven't the faintest clue. The mystery of what exactly the child even is ever-present, though again we get the inkling that they were formerly human and no longer are, and they are affiliated with Mew in some way. Other than that, I'm beginning to puzzle over their relationship with Absol, who apparently saved them from the Cinnabar eruption, but when they were still human? Or not? Because at some point their human self died and lost all their pokemon, which as of the end of Chapter 5 they have now regained. And now they're going to go challenge the Pokemon League?? Nothing like revenge and a rescue mission served eight badges at a time. With all this identity hopping, I wonder how they're going to complete a legal League challenge given they can't even use their pokedex at a PokeCenter without being flagged...
Which, I really love Chapter 4 and the way in which you write the child's complete confusion at how the world doesn't bend its whims to their mission, and the complete and foreign panic that takes over once they realize they might have messed up. If only I could punch straight through the ATM when it eats my bank card 😂 Interesting that for all of the things the child doesn't understand about humans and society, it understands how blood evidence works. Not that it was terribly careful about being seen or caught in the first place, if Leonard Kerrigan had a whole Pepe Silva board's worth of evidence/conjecture in his home-office.
The child's terror at losing the pokedex was brilliantly done, and the image of it curled around the dex, shaking and crying was truly visceral. My only gripe is again trying to picture the child in my mind's eye and not having a physical form to use in these scenes. Is its hand small and has a hard time holding onto the pokedex? Is it large, and can grip it powerfully with one hand? Does curling its body around the dex take its full length and it's more like a hug around this life-line of an object? Or is its body big and it holds the dex over its heart, this tiny object that represents its soul? I don't usually concern myself a lot with character's physical descriptions, but I haven't the faintest clue of what the child even is. (pretty soon they're just going to be either Missigno static or just a ditto and I'm not sure which one is more absurd to picture in every scene)
Absol is a curious one, too, seeing as she's sort of responsible for even getting the child into all this in the first place. I wonder what kind of Fate Absol has in mind when she spurred the child into collecting their pokemon again, especially if Absol was already involved in the Cinnabar eruption in some fashion, why does she need the child to mete out this "justice" of Fate to those who meddled with pokemon DNA? Also uncertain if she knew how much of a nightmare dealing with the child was going to be in the end, since she seems exasperated with the child about just about everything. Wonder if Fate says she can't go find another vengeful all-powerful human/pokemon hybrid that's less of a brat?
Okay, I think I finally get the second person usage here. It only took me about fifteen chapters-worth of reading to understand 😂 I like the usage of second person when we're "the child as another person". It was chilling watching the memory of Matt Kerrigan's death through the mind's eye of the child while sitting in the same place but currently wearing his appearance. The moment when Matt rang the bell, and Leonard's reaction to seeing his son again was heartwrenching. The way it's narrated from a position of mild annoyance on the child's behalf is this weird dissonance that's only heightened by its manner of speaking (no contractions) and as Leonard notices, it's like a robot. An automaton wearing Matt's skin. Chilling, really, and the way the child has no qualms warping Matt's face into some nightmare creature to taunt and terrify Leonard, it's perfectly, skin-crawingly chilling.
I think I'm beginning to get the hang of this fic (which of course means it's going to go completely off the rails in some other fashion, I'm sure) and I'm looking forward to where we're going from this rocking rollercoaster of a start.
The first chapter seems strong and leaves me with a lot of burning questions:
- wtf is the child and how did it end up dying once already?
- What is "Fate?"
- What is the nature of the child and Absol's relationship?
- What, specifically, is the child trying to accomplish?
- What is it that Nicholas Garrett was afraid and ashamed of?
I wasn't able to get a great read on the child. The mood felt somber initially; the child wants to comfort Nicholas, but can only watch him slip and fall to his death. But then it's having fun dodging rocks and plunging down the river. I don't get the sense that it necessarily felt guilty, or at least not very guilty, but even so, the death was described with a degree of drama and gravity that felt at odds with the subsequent fun. The child isn't doing this for kicks—it has to "make things right." I'm left scratching my head at this dissonance.
I think the prose was good overall. The narration never really *stops* to give details; they're kind of just injected as relevant, and I found that that was enough for me to picture the scene. Efficient overall. I liked the glitter-slick ice, the delicate spires of Articuno's nest, the cold hammer blow of the water, the ghostly translucent swimming things. I get the sense of a place that is bleak but sometimes pretty.
Some small notes:
The child ignores cold and cramping muscles, scrolling through menus, flipping through page on page of data.
I believe this is a complex-compound sentence (in this case, 1 dependent clause followed by 2 independent clauses). In which case, the rule is to put a comma after the dependent clause: "Where the child's going, there will be no light at all and only the bravest humans tread." I am referencing this: https://www.thepunctuationguide.com/comma.html#compound-complexsentences
I think you need a comma after "bottom", since it's a complex sentence.
Anyway, overall, the mood and description leave me interested to read more. The chapter ends with a pretty compelling question. What *is* the child going to do?
A glittering barrier hangs in the air in front of you, brilliant streamers of light peeling away from its surface and arcing towards the charizard, searing his scales and flashing raindrops into steam.
"Please. I don't understand. Who are you?" You almost can't make him out for the hitching in his voice. / "I told you. I'm Nicholas Garret now. I used to be somebody else. I could be someone else tomorrow. But right now I'm Nicholas Garret. What doesn't change is that I'm your trainer, and I need you to help me. What will it take for you to accept that?"
My understanding is that the child was once Titan's trainer, but Titan was since transferred to Nicholas. I wonder why the child didn't talk to Titan in its original form or whatever, rather than disturb him with the transformation. Perhaps the child didn't consider he might have felt attached to Nicholas.
I guess, thinking about it, maybe the child never actually revealed to Titan that it's a weird shapeshifting entity? Maybe in their previous relationship, the child was pretending to be a human the whole time? Or maybe it actually was a human and only recently changed into whatever it is now. That would explain parts of Titan's confusion. Although to some degree he's probably being deliberately obstinate.
Through the whole conversation + fight scene, I felt awful for Titan. It's such a disorientating situation to be in, and after the child's cold replies and admission to letting Nicholas die, I can understand why he would lash out. And then he just gets absolutely abused.
The prose is still good, I think. Fight scene is fast but not desperate. There's never any doubt that the child will win. You still don't linger on things for very long, which I don't think is good or bad.
At the end, Titan could have stumbled off somewhere else, but he chose to join the child. I wonder to what extent that choice was influenced by devotion to the child vs devotion to Mew. I wonder how much resentment toward the child Titan will carry with him.
I want to thank everyone again for all the lovely reviews! I have quite a lot to respond to, and my pace is, admittedly, glacial. But I've read and enjoyed every single one. They've given me loads of ideas, and I'm incredibly grateful for all the attention this story's gotten. I will do my best to get out more replies at something approaching a reasonable pace! For now, coming back for a quick Chapter 49 review reply so I don't fall further behind.
Dragonfree - Ch 49
I stopped a moment here wondering if the hover-cycle is really likely to be too small? Do they make actual child-sized ones, and if so, is Melanie Roth that young? I completely forget, maybe she is, but it gave me pause; I hadn't been thinking of it taking actual small child forms.
It was intended just as a shout-out to Jade being taller than Melanie, not that Melanie was actually child-sized. I was thinking of how the seat/handlebars of bikes have to be adjusted to account for people with different heights or leg lengths; ime it is noticeable if you're on a bike sized for someone shorter, with your knees coming up real high and so forth as you're pedaling along.
...but it occurs to me that for motor- (or hover-) cycles you don't actually need to reach the pedals, just rest your feet somewhere, soooo maybe they're more one-size-fits-all and there wouldn't be a big difference unless it was actually a child-sized vs adult scooter? This might be a little research fail on my part.
Huh, but surely it'd be easy for Thunder to be at eye level by just being a couple inches further back? Unless the cord is just super heavy and laid along the ground and can't be lifted pretty much at all, but it doesn't sound like that's it when also the child worries about its knee hitting the cord.
It could rise higher but would also have to draw back from the table as the angle between it and the ground increased, no? I was thinking to go up a meter or so it would need to move back a third to a half of a meter, maybe, to accommodate that, which would leave it kind of floating awkwardly away from the table in the middle of the aisle where people might bump into it. Not that the extension cord isn't a wicked trip hazard as it is. My intuition could be way off and the amount of horizontal movement required might be nowhere near that great, though.
Not sure I get what something being repeated like no one thinks it's true means? How does repeating that indicate nobody thinks it's true...?
"...prime minister saying again today that offers of military aid are for the benefit of Orre's citizens, in the interest of safety..." "...alleged that offers of resources, up to and including Kantoan troops, are a matter of "safety" for Orrean citizens..." "...again that this is a matter of public safety and not an attempt to exert influence over the region..." "...despite skepticism, Kantoan officials have continued to insist that safety is their primary concern, and there is no ulterior motivation behind their offer of aid."
Love Rats and the child really wanting its Pokémon to just serve the moral support role it's imagined for them, instead of being actual partners, thereby also resigning itself to taking this on alone in its misguided desire to protect them.
Glad you enjoyed this! I've struggled with including the pokémon where they previously weren't part of the narrative (see below), but I do really like this conflict that it's creating for the child. Objectively I gotta say, Rats, it would probably be better for you to do like the kid says and sit this one out, but at the same time it's obvious why she (and the others) won't. Which really just gives the protagonist one more thing to worry about, like it needs more of those. >:D
I had the impression from the scene where the child returns to Mewtwo that it had recalled the Pokémon to their balls, and when it didn't talk to Mewtwo about bringing the Pokémon and then it sounds alone when the next scene begins, I figured it hadn't brought them, so it came as a surprise when several paragraphs into the scene it turns out the Pokémon are with it after all. Might have been worth mentioning they were there earlier.
Hgk, yes, I went back and forth multiple times on whether or not the protagonist should have its team out with it in Pyrite/when meeting the Musketeers. They were not in this scene (or Orre at all) originally and pretty blatantly have nothing to do here, but it doesn't really make sense for them not to come along, ESPECIALLY immediately after Rats is complaining about being left behind/being left out of things. I'm not sure whether I flipped to having them present late in the editing process or not, but I wouldn't be surprised, and it would certainly explain why they kind of just show up late, since they weren't intended to be there at all. And then they proceed to do literally nothing during the whole conversation with Mewtwo in the abandoned building, hrrrrrg.
In general character logistics are awful for this next run of chapters and have been driving me up a wall. Unfortunately I expect there'll be more goofs like this in the future until we slim the cast down again and I get some blessed peace, lol.
Of course he likes to be called a legend, doesn't he.
It sure would! When the pokémon don't realize you need to be there because you're the story's protagonist...
Glad you enjoyed the worldbuilding and the descriptions of Pyrite here! I think it's pretty clear I was having a good time with them. And I'm not sure what you mean, deciding to get involved with Mewtwo will prove to be a great decision that none of the shadow pokémon will forget. I'm glad you like them, though! I've had a lot of fun writing them and have been waiting way too many years now to reach their (re)introduction.
A quiet chapter indeed! Things will start picking up a little in 50, and we'll be creeping up slowly towards the peak and then the long crazy ride down to the story's end. I'm really looking forward to it, and I hope you are as well! Thanks for a lovely review. And thanks for pointing out those typos! They should all be fixed.
Pyrite Colosseum's dingy lobby is nothing more than a small room, gated off from the dome itself by exposed beams and chain-linked fencing. There isn't even a proper door to the colosseum, just a ragged hole in the dome itself, like some huge pokémon charged through and wrecked the entrance and nobody ever bothered to fix it.
The stadium is huge but somehow without Indigo's grandeur, the air fogged with smoke from people dragging on cigarettes—here! Indoors! They'd never get away with that in Kanto.
I enjoy all these sorts of details in here, both as worldbuilding and for the child being so very psyched about things like smoking indoors (child no).
Now and again a more experienced battler does show up. One linoone in particular draws a warmer-than-usual round of applause, and a few appreciative laughs and catcalls when he simply knocks his opponents, a chattering pansear and a spoink who freezes up the instant she sees her opponent, out of bounds. He's fast and efficient and almost mesmerizing to watch on the field, a flowing ribbon of white and brown stripes, but he's still a linoone, and the pokémon he's fighting are babies.
Enjoy this Linoone and the child's feelings on him.
You go from floaty, almost dizzying relief at the thought that you won't have to find out what Mewtwo wants with Divel, whoever that even is, to tingling apprehension over what he'll do if he doesn't get his way. You want to ask Mewtwo what made him so sure the human would be here in the first place, but not enough to actually try it.
Man, the way Mewtwo's toxicity makes it infeasible to even know what on earth is going on on excursions that he himself drags you on without the potential to suffer serious consequences.
Maybe you should battle Noctowl. You could show him what a proper match is like. Also, you'd definitely win.
Finally Titan grows frustrated and rears back, clapping his wings together to blow out a wave of superheated air that the linoone can't simply dart around. Thunderstorm lets out a loud, rude buzz and recoils, metal skin glowing with heat. Even from here you can tell Titan's trying to apologize, but Thunderstorm ignores him, descending on the linoone in a sparking fury.
He couldn't even pay enough attention to see who won? Whatever small part of you isn't terrified of finding out what Mewtwo has in store for Divel is scandalized on the Musketeers' behalfs. No wonder Noctowl's friends were so excited to have someone new come and cheer them on. He's terrible at it.
You see him now and are even more annoyed that Mewtwo expected you to somehow realize he was important. He's completely ordinary—normal human size, the usual number of limbs, wearing a long, dusty blue coat.
What an ordinary human, with the normal number of limbs
"Yeah, come on!" Heracross says. "Have some fun. Who wants to go to the beach, huh?" Titan raises a hand, but after looking down at Rats, who is fixated on you, sheepishly lowers it again.
"I am sorry, Rats, I really cannot..." Divel disappears through the doors of the colosseum, and you find yourself speeding up. He isn't moving especially fast, but you can't lose him, you can't, or Mewtwo will—"
What do you think? Mewtwo snaps. It's a Cipher trainer. Idiot. We're going to find out what it knows.
That, at least, is good. It's good to have some kind of lead. But how did Mewtwo even learn about this person? "Mewtwo is going to talk to him," you amend. "We have to find out if he knows anything about Mew."
Enjoy this contrast to how Nate would undoubtedly be acting in this situation.
And what's pathetic is you blink away tears as you drag yourself to your feet. You're trying to help Divel. You're trying really hard! But he's mean and stupid and he's going to make you send out Mewtwo, and even though you did your best not to hurt him Rats still thinks you've been bad. You don't even want to be here in the first place, and now everybody's mad at you like this is all your fault.
"I was not going to burn anybody up!" you say, and it comes out too close to a sob.
Divel nurses a shiny, puckered burn down one arm; he must have gotten too close to your fire despite Rats' efforts. "Sure, I believe that," he grumbles, and you can tell he's already thinking of escape again. You're sick of this. You almost want to let him go.
It's too much. It's too familiar. This evil human sneering at you, daring you to hurt him. When you're helping, you're trying to help, why is he being like this?
"Boss, wait!" Rats says. But the master ball is already in the air, and it splits open with a crack, spilling light into the abandoned building's dim interior.
Enjoyed the interrogation scene a lot; some choice less is more there, glancing past what's actually happening while centering the child's despair and the way it eventually resorts to just returning to Unempathetic Brain. Oof. Divel reminding it of Nate creates a fun compare/contrast thing, after just how much abuse Nate took from it earlier in the fic. It has grown a bit by now! But sadly not enough to refuse to go along with Mewtwo's orders, or enough to stick to not letting him out to maim and murder people.
Poor child is just so scared and cowed. Love that paranoia about how Mewtwo will see in its head that Rats suggested putting him back in his ball and he'll punish everyone for it. It's not even wrong. They really are in a profoundly fucked-up situation.
Mewtwo's awake now and standing at the edge of the roof as usual, still and silent like he can't see the stew of guilty thoughts churning in your head. You try to push them down, to muster your courage before you speak. You're sure it looks pathetic to someone who can see inside your skull. "What do you want?" you ask.
I like how the shoulders wanting to twitch down suggests how tense it's been for this whole conversation.
Curious if it just didn't occur to the child at all after Mewtwo'd gone into the ball for the picnic to just not let him out again as Rats was suggesting. Much of its argument against that was that they wouldn't be able to get him into the ball unwillingly, but here he went into it willingly, and at that point does it really believe that much in the reasoning for why they need Mewtwo to find Mew?
You drop the master ball, and Mewtwo takes shape. He stiffens briefly at the shadow pokémon's calls of greeting, a spike of alarm setting your own heart racing. But after a moment he gets ahold of himself and says, Yes. Hello. I am... here.
"Well, come on, sit down," Heracross says. She has an entire box of soda cans, and empty ones lie scattered on the blanket around her. "Want a drink? We got all kinds."
A... drink.
"Sure. What's your poison?"
There's a flicker of consternation across the clone's psychic field. Then, Water, I suppose.
The child releases War into the ocean, and there's a brief awkward moment when it becomes clear there's no batteries for Thunderstorm, and Hypno's beside herself with apologies and Togetic's zipping overhead, cheering, while Mewtwo stands as if frozen at the edge of the group, staring at the boisterous gathering in front of him.
Sudden slip into third person here? (Really enjoy the no batteries for Thunderstorm and Hypno being so apologetic about it - so mundane, like forgetting the vegan food for the vegan friend.)
Mewtwo approaches cautiously, as worried someone might pop up and attack him
"Most people think 'desert' when they think of Orre, but we've actually got loads of beachfront property. Lots of sand, you know—we're basically one big beach!"
I believe sand has to be in close proximity to water to count as a beach, Mewtwo says.
It's not quite clear who's speaking here, since the question wasn't addressed to anyone in particular and the last of the Shadows who spoke is Heracross, who has the next line instead.
"There are some things that humans have that pokémon don't," Hypno says. "The kinds of things I was interested in, I couldn't really find them out in the wild."
"I mean, sure," Heracross says with an airy wave of her drink. "We live in a society and all that. Even pokémon society. Unless you're a scyther or something. Out hunting by yourself until you get real crazy and need to go find another scyther to bang. But you gotta admit that humans make a fetish out of work like nobody else."
Extraneous asterisk here, unless there's a footnote here somewhere.
"Well," Noctowl says gently. "I don't think we were planning to tackle such weighty topics tonight."
"Yeah, probably best not to go there," Heracross says. "Maybe another time, huh, Two? I'm with you on the absolute bullshit nature of all things human."
"Right. Something more cheerful," Hypno says brightly. "You're supposed to be the most powerful psychic, Mewtwo. Do you think you could have carried off a whole cargo ship the way Lugia did?"
Love them just going "welp, let's take the subject away from politics"
"Well, I like to fight a lot," you say, somewhat dubiously. "But I also like to watch TV. And go swimming. And play pretend. And make sandcastles. And cook! And..." You're momentarily stymied. There's too many things.
The food is passable, Mewtwo allows, and you wince. He says you need to get them to like you, but he isn't even trying. Or worse, this is how he thinks you're supposed to act to get people to like you. The surge of anger and consternation from the clone, directed at your own private thoughts, leaves the shadow pokémon looking queasy and uncertain.
I can hold my breath a long time, too, Mewtwo says. He sinks lower, submerging his entire foot, then yanks it back, lighting up your head with discomfort and indignation.
"Whoah, hold on, there," Hypno says. She's paddling easily along at the surface. "If you don't like water, you probably don't want to go all the way in. Even touching it is a big step if you haven't tried swimming before."
I'm no coward! Mewtwo snarls. He stops floating—he must want to get everything over with in one big plunge. And plunge he does, with a prodigious splash, as all his muscles decide they want to get away even after his mind's insisted he's going in.
I believe that should just straightforwardly be "War's".
Aaaand the child's back behind its less human shell. Again I can't help but wonder if it (or at least Rats) considered just not letting Mewtwo out this time, once he was already in. Seems such an easy prospect, right? Mewtwo will get mad but you can simply not let him out to express it at all... Surely it at least thought about it.
All in all, love to see Mewtwo awkwardly thrust into a social situation, stubbornly diving into water to prove that he isn't a coward and then psychicing the sensation of drowning all over everyone. He's easily hurt by being humiliated, and of course, for Mewtwo, being hurt means getting angry and murdering people, as one does. Terrifying and a total pitiable dork at the same time. I wish for him to genuinely learn to have hobbies and enjoy things, if the child truly refuses to just put him in the ball and keep him there.
Also Rats continues to be good, and the Musketeers are just so lovely. Love them and their mundane everyman-ness.
I'm glad you enjoyed Chapter 50! I hadn't really noticed the parallels between Divel and Nate until I came back to do the edit, so I leaned into it a bit... Always fun to find weird parallels in there that you wrote without realizing. I'm also glad you appreciated the "normal number of limbs" line; that was one of my favorites. Quite a lot of "oh no" this chapter, it seems... And, oh, we've barely gotten started.
For chapter 51, I'm glad you had fun with Awkward Panda Mewtwo's first picnic! The contrast between him being a dick and the Musketeers valiantly trying to pretend that this is just a normal dinner and no one is being a weirdo was a lot of fun. I love the musketeers a lot and am glad I finally get to introduce them to readers over the course of this run of chapters.
The situation the child (and its pokémon, though perhaps to a lesser extent) is in is fucked-up for sure, and past attempts at thwarting Mewtwo haven't gone very well, but it's a valid point that it should probably be thinking harder about simply not letting him out, or at least Rats should. While in the abstract the child is worried about needing Mewtwo to find Mew, more pressingly it knows that Absol doesn't want it to put Mewtwo away like that, and she'll let him out if she has to. That's more what the child's worrying about when it says "Absol would never let me keep him like that." If it puts him in the ball and then refuses to let him out, like, even once, he is never going back in there, as well as no doubt ready to do terrible things to everyone in revenge. But I can stand to bring that reasoning forward a bit more. It would not surprise me if at some point the child just stuffed Mewtwo in the master ball and tried to get rid of it and damn the consequences, but it's not quite that desperate yet. :P
I'm glad you noticed the little scyther moment there, too. I was definitely thinking about the differences in our headcanons while writing it.
All typos zapped! Thank you for those, and thanks so much for taking the time to review.
I have many more reviews to get to as well--I promise I haven't forgotten! I'm just trying to keep up with Dragonfree's so that I can avoid falling even further behind.
My primary motivation in bumping the thread today was simply to announce that Salvage turned 10 on November 1st! It's hard to believe that I've spent an entire decade writing about floor lasagna and our protagonist's endless bad decisions, and yet here we are. I've written a little more about what this all means, where the story's going from here, etc. elsewhere, but the most important thing for me to note here is that I've created a self-hosted mirror of this fic for anyone who doesn't want to deal with FFN to read the full fic! You can find it here:
Salvage is a dark Pokémon fanfiction about Mew, Mewtwo, and what happened after the destruction of the Cinnabar lab.
fic.thousandroads.net
This version is up-to-date with the FFN version and also includes a number of extras, some of which have had very limited release before now. The layout here is very basic, but it's at least readable, with no ads and no CAPTCHA and even a dark mode. I hope to be able to make some further tweaks to it in my ample free time to pretty it up a little bit. This format should also, in theory, make it pretty simple to offer PDF and EPUB downloads of the story as well. That hasn't really been working out for me thus far, but someday relatively soon, I hope!
At this point I'm not entirely sure what to do with the weird nubby version of the fic posted here (and on AO3). Ignore it until I'm completely done with the FFN version? Just start posting unedited chapters from here on out? Start a new thread that's an exact mirror of FFN? I'll see if I can come to a decision by the end of this year, at least. It feels a bit weird to have this abortive thread hanging around as "the" version of Salvage on TR, when there's so much more of the fic out there!
It's been a wild and wonderful ten years of working on this fic. I hope it won't be even close to ten more! For now, thanks to everyone who's seen this story through even a little bit of its run. It's been a privilege to meet so many wonderful authors and readers throughout this story's run, and I'm hopeful its last couple years are just as rich. I'll have Chapter 52 out as soon as I can!
Heya, so much to my chagrin. I… don’t believe I’ve ever reviewed anything you’ve posted here on TR before, even in spite of you quite generously giving me reviews from RB3. So consider this the start of some belated reciprocity.
Okay, so for context, but I vaguely remember reading the v1 of Salvage up to shortly after Mewtwo murderizes the Rocket Base years ago on Serebii, and even left some reviews that are somewhere out there.
Granted, this is a v2, and I frankly barely remember anything about that initial read beyond that the Child was this weird mix of creepy and offputting, cute and childish, and funny in a black comedy sense that’s hard to describe. That, and my reviews before around 2021 frankly generally sucked anyways since I often struggled at just figuring out what to say, so let’s fix that with a refresher and see how much has changed from what those vague recollections from years ago:
Chapter 1
In the conversation they can't have, the child would apologize for letting him die. "Sorry I can't help you, but this is how it has to happen," it would say. "This is how it's supposed to be. Don't worry. You can still be useful, even if you're dead. I'll take your name and I'll take your face and I'll take your pokémon"--the one that is mine, the one that was stolen from me--"and I'll go and make things right. That's what I'm doing, and you're helping me. It's not all bad."
Ah yes, right into those ‘creepy and offputting’ vibes with the Child going full blue and orange morality as a shapeshifter. Just a lovely feeling there.
The child can't say anything like that, of course. It can't say anything at all. Absol is very strict about interfering with Fate. She's beside the child now, breath misting white in the chill air of the cavern, watching the human. That's what she does: watching. She’s watching to be sure that Fate plays out how it's supposed to, and she doesn't interfere.
A bit nitpicky, but “That’s what she does” probably works better with the gerund form of “watch” since “watching” can function as a noun in the sense of “the act of observing something” but “watches” cannot, and it leans in harder to “watching the human” in terms of format parallelism.
Usually the child doesn't mind. The dying people are foggy memories at best. It has nothing to say to them. But this one it thinks it remembers. "I know you," it might say. "You used to make little origami sculptures for your desk, didn't you? I always liked those, especially the pokémon ones. They were pretty." He must have been an intern, then. Not someone who was around for very long. He's uncommonly old to still be training, but perhaps he decided to take a break after Cinnabar. Maybe he decided science wasn't for him.
Because the child has other memories, too, memories from a different life, and they whisper, "I know you. I remember you. I remember your face as you wrote the numbers down and lined the needles up. I remember your fear, human, and your shame, but I remember too that it did not stay your hand."
I remember being so confused back in the day as to what was going on since it took me forever and a day to figure out what the Child was. I don’t know if it’s those lingering memories of where this story goes or else if I’m just more observant as a reader now, but those signposts are definitely a bit clearer than I remembered since this hints pretty strongly at the Child being at Cinnabar Mansion or wherever TR’s Mewtwo lab is.
There wouldn't be time to say all that anyway, not even most of it. In movies it seems like there's always time for last words, but here it's all over quickly: the human slips from the edge of the path, down here where everything is glitter-slick from the river's spray. He falls funny on one arm and doesn't even cry out as it snaps, just grabs for an icy rock with the other.
Seriously though, that made me wince. Good reminder of how this is an M-rated story.
"You don't have to be scared," the child imagines itself telling him as he hangs there for a terrifying second, still thinking he might pull himself back up. "I died once. It wasn't so bad."
Right, this is why it’s a “conversation they can’t have” and not “couldn’t have”. The guy whose face the Child needs isn’t dead yet. Though what on earth does it take to kill the Child if it died once already? .-.
His fingers find no purchase on the ice, and the incline keeps him sliding. His hand goes next to the pokéballs on his belt, but it's too late, too late. The river grabs his legs, pulls him down and under, and in no time at all he's gone.
Child: “Nah, you’ve got that wrong, lemme fix that for you:
”
Absol goes forward, thick claws splayed wide to steady herself on the ice. She paces at the edge of the water. The child imagines the human being swept along by the rushing current, slammed against submerged boulders and carried over hidden waterfalls. The river will take him to the depths of the cave, where stories say Articuno's nest resides, delicate spires of ice and cast-off feathers among the rocks. The human will never see it, though. He'll be much too dead.
… Wait, how on earth does the Child know what’s down there anyways? I legitimately forget if it picks up stuff via proper learning not.
Absol stops her pacing, turns back to the child and nods. It scrambles out from behind the boulder and joins her at the water's edge, peering into the dark, racing flow. Its shadow stretches over the water, rippled and frayed on the turbulent surface. There are lights behind it, illuminating the slushy path where it's safe for trainers to walk. Where the child's going there will be no light at all and only the bravest humans tread.
The child sits perched on the edge a moment longer, readying scales and gills and webbing. "I will meet you later," says Absol, and the child nods, not really paying attention. Absol probably likes it down here, where it's deathly cold and the shadows lie close at hand. She might stay a while, vacationing, but the child still has work to do. It hesitates, watching how the water froths around the jag of a half-submerged rock, then throws itself in.
That actually makes me wonder what form the Child had prior to assuming this one. Though I suppose that might have been very deliberate given that there was a non-zero chance the Child was in their true form which… yeah, that’s a big spoiler there.
Even prepared for the shock, even insulated against the water's bite, the child still feels the cold like a hammer blow. Its gasp pulls in a mouthful of water, which goes sliding over the child's gills like a deep and icy breath. The child lets the current carry it along, clicking and squeaking to conjure a radar map of the riverbed. It makes a game of dodging rocks at the last possible moment, twisting away with lazy kicks of webbed feet. Then the riverbed drops away and it's falling, flailing at air and spray with a whoop of delight. It hits a couple rocks on the way down, jarred but not broken, and plunges back into the river with a thundering splash. It drifts down until the current grabs it again and pulls it along.
I have to wonder how much of that is innate to the Child and their abilities as a shapeshifter and how much of that was picked up from practice that’s just now being put into action. I suppose that’ll be something for me to keep an eye on as I get further into this story again.
Child: “Hah! I could do this all day!”
Down and down, around tight bends and through surging rapids, over more falls into the heart of the caverns. The child rolls and tumbles along until the current slows and another drop brings it to the final basin, where the river stops and water seeps out through hidden cracks and fissures. The child strokes downwards in the pitch dark, ignoring translucent swimming things, ghostly in its echo-sense, and a few pokémon, wary, staying out of its way. There at the bottom it finds the corpse.
The child grabs it and kicks back to the surface, eyes opening to stare at nothing in the deep-dark. There's a shelf of rock against one wall, it remembers, and it gropes its way over blind until it bumps up against the lip of rock.
There's barely enough room for it to perch out of the water, and it hunches on the edge like a gargoyle, snorting the last of the water out of its nose while its gills close up. The corpse lolls next to it, broken arm tangled in the straps of its backpack. The child ignores the bag for now, and the clothes, and even the pokéballs. Greedy with anticipation, it fishes the trainer's pokédex out of his pocket, working by feel. It flips the machine open and squints into sudden LED brilliance.
So wait, do Rotom appliances not exist in a mainstream sense in Salvage’s setting, or is this set in the period of canonical time before those catch on in mainline? I assume it’s the latter since this is an old story by origins, but it does make me curious how the march of time in franchise gets reflected in your story, if at all.
The child ignores cold and cramping muscles, scrolling through menus, flipping through page after page of data. It learns as much as it can about the trainer's life, then snaps the device shut and in the darkness changes. Crouching there in another's skin, the child tells itself the story of who it is now:
… Oh right, Pokédexes take on Pokégear / PokéNav functionality in this setting. Forgot about that one and I did a double-take at first on how on earth looking at a bunch of creature entries was supposed to help the Child.
You are Nicholas Garrett. Around eight years ago you were interning at the lab on Cinnabar Island--maybe. Something to do with the lab, or you wouldn't be here now.
Four years ago you began your journey. You're a slow trainer, but a thorough one: four years, five badges. You have a charizard--your starter--nidoqueen, primeape, rhydon, and several others of little consequence.
Huh, I don’t know how I forgot about how the average trainer in true game fashion has more than 6 Pokémon, but it’s a neat little touch that shows off the assumptions of this world. And I suppose that explains a thing or two about that spiel about how Pokéball shelves being bad worldbuilding under certain assumptions.
Today you came to the Seafoam Islands. Why, you don't know--looking for a seel, maybe, or just out for an adventure, maybe seeking the legendary Articuno. Whatever you were seeking will have to go unfound.
… That actually makes me wonder if the story will ever answer that question. I don’t remember it getting answered up to the point where I originally got to, but somehow I doubt that it’ll really just be left forever a mystery if the story made a point of bringing it up in the first place.
Because you died down here, Nicholas Garrett, in the darkness and the deep. You were twenty-six years old.
Go on one really, really messed-up journey across Kanto and IIRC from what I’ve heard through the grapevine, Orre later, of course. Just like how every identity-stealing shapeshifter dreams of doing.
Honestly, coming back to this story was a bit of a breath of fresh air. I don’t have a microscope on hand to compare what changed between this and the v1 (though it certainly felt a lot like what I remembered), but you can already see shades of the trademark “creepy, cute, and black-comedy” vibe come through, if with heavy emphasis on the “creepy” part thus far.
While there’s not that much to judge of the story just yet at this point, I do feel that already, it manages to put its foot forward with one of its strengths, both as a chapter and for an overall story. Namely that it gives a good hook that keeps you interested in coming back for more, while giving hints if you’ve got a keen eye as to what’s going on. I mean, some of that might be from the benefit of having seen an earlier version of this story, but eh. My initial readthrough honestly had me stopping and wondering what on earth was going on, while even without the benefit of knowing approximately where things are headed, I got a much more solid vibe on what was happening this time around.
As for weaknesses, I honestly don’t have a whole lot to bring up for Chapter 1 given that it’s essentially a teaser prologue that sets the stage for the rest of the story. But maybe we could’ve seen a bit more of the Child and Absol in the first chapter to establish who they are? Since it was certainly short enough that even doubling its length would’ve been safely under “slow and plodding” territory as long as the added length wasn’t all something like an uninterrupted monologue. But eh, there will be plenty of chapters after this point where we get to see them tick more, since… I honestly completely forgot about Absol and what her personality was like ^^;
To cap things off, I liked it, @Negrek , even if part of me regrets not having the time and energy to dive into things further tonight. But there will be future occasions for that, since if I can help it, this won’t be my last brush with Salvage during RB4, and assuming you keep putting out updates here, not my last for the future beyond it, either.
Alright! So, I’m here for the catnip Blitz! Full disclosure, I’ve read this fic before on FFN.
I’ve told you before that this fic is actually one of my inspirations in fanfic. So, it’s a shame that I’ve never reviewed it before (I blame the crippling anxiety).
On to the review!
Chapter 1
I love how disconcerting The Child’s narration is. It’s fascinating how clear that while the Child is intelligent, it clearly is still a child and doesn’t quite have the full maturity level an adult will.
Little sneak peeks of the messed up shit that the child remembers. I love conspiracy shit and this perfectly scratches that itch.
Great prose as well! Its been said before, but so much of this story’s draw for me is the unnatural pov of the Child and a gorgeously smooth prose that delivers on the unnatural vibe of the protagonist. You tell us so much with comparatively few words, very efficient with your prose.
What I remember loving from my first original read through was that I was completely engrossed in the mystery of the story. You’re so good at building that up through the Child’s eyes while not giving us all the answers all at once.
Also really like how cold the Child is. Such a cold and darkly unemotional perception of the events. I remember the mystery of what the hell is the Child utterly sucking me in and that’s carried so heavily by how fascinating the Child’s POV is.
I will say that this opening feels new to me. I don’t really remember it, but that might just be because it’s been a few years since I read it back on FFN. It feels very “prologue-ey” but I unironically love prologues. So yeah, great start and I’m excited to dig back into this.
Chapter 2
I don’t remember this being so short on FFN. Either you shortened it significantly or you’re in the midst of some fuuuun rewrites (Been there). Or I’m just misremembering because its been a bit.
Holy shit what a quick and efficient way to drive the plot forward. I love when stories get right down into the meat of things and just like a real child (love that about this character), the Child is more than a bit impatient in getting right down to business.
Did the Child literally absorb Nick’s soul? I don’t remember that detail. It’s damn chilling to think about. I thought it was just using transform, but DAMN the implication of that bit is terrifying.
The hideout is in Sevii? I don’t remember that. Nice addition if it is one, I love little worldbuilding that acknowledges the wider world in pokefics.
Oh MAN Titan is terrifying. I love the way your prose frames him and his actions. He’s physically imposing, clearly powerful, and confused, and that’s a terrible combo to deal with.
The Child’s cold repetition of “your trainer is dead, I am your trainer” really shows us how the Child is still just that. Its just a kid that doesn’t yet understand the horror behind that statement.
Then, the battle. My god, that battle. It’s punchy and kinetic and pushes the pace with some great choreography. I’m a sucker for battles, and anime styled battles where a pokemorph (of sorts) is duking it out is exactly the kind of shit that hits all of my right buttons. It also has some great uses of creative tactics and moves (which is probably easier when you have basically all of them at your disposal lol).
I love the way you weave moves and abilities into the fight without outright naming them. To me, that’s when I enjoy a pokefic battle the most (when I can tell what’s happening without outright naming game mechanics).
The stubbornness in Titan… The slow realization that he knows who he’s been fighting... it’s so well done and heartfelt. It reads like Titan stubbornly refusing to remember what happened when he was still called “Titan”, which I really like.
I really really like the attention to detail in this. Healing the wounds will help, but you’re absolutely right to note and mention that the blood loss effect remains (unless whatever healing move used also regenerates blood), because even if the cut is healed the Child still lost blood during that fight.
I do think that the Child just brushing off the battle with Titan as ”resolved” kinda seems awkward. My own kid tends to dwell on things that upset him, but I know that kids often do just shrug it off and move on. Still, you mentioned a duskull (which again, I feel like is an addition that wasn’t there my first read) and then brushed off that character introduction in favour of ending the scene.
My issue with that is probably just that I wanted more of your writing lol.
Chapter 3
Oh my goodness, I don’t remember the Child’s morphing being so freaky. Dead child’s hands? Face modeled after a celebrity? I don’t remember quite how the Child does this, and it is so just… creepy to read from the perspective of a being that this kind of thing doesn’t matter to. I wonder how horrific the original “from scratch” face was.
The idea of a charizard sitting there moping over a soggy cone while a togetic slobbers on a popsicle and the Child’s just reading the paper is a hilarious visual.
I feel like the Child is kidding itself a little bit about why it comes to Fuchsia. Just wondering what could have been? No, you’re definitely longing for a normal life. Even if you don’t know it, Child.
Ah, so there’s an ulterior motive to the Child being in this particular place. I remember the name Kerrigan, but not why I remember it.
OH damn, right to Kerrigan’s entire thing. He’s looking for the Child because the Child fucked up and stole the wrong identity. What a horrifying thing to happen to your child, I can’t even imagine what he‘d feel knowing that his kid disappeared but came back only to disappear again. It would drive anyone insane (and probably explain his wife leaving, that’s traumatic for a family to go through).
You do such a good job at reminding us that the Child is a child. Things like them learning about the world from TV and taking that information at face value, their dislike of coffee, and their distaste of boring newspaper.
I feel like Officer Feldhorn isn’t as harmless as the Child thinks. There’s probably a principled cop under the smell of donuts and coffee, hopefully the Child doesn’t slip up too much around them.
Despite the dark implications and worldbuilding here, I really like the ray of sunshine you ended on. It’s a nice reminder that underneath all the terrible shit, the Child is still just a Child.
Chapter 4
Cinnabar having this eerie cursed feeling makes a ton of sense. So much bad shit has happened there that psychics would probably be able to pick up on that.
No seismometer picked up the eruption? That’s… suspicious.
The child was even there for the eruption? That’s… doubly suspicious.
I’ve said this a ton, but I LOVE sudden tonal shifts within chapters. The shift as the Child realizes that the pokedex is locked away and it’s been outsmarted by Kerrigan, into utter terror and anxiety…
’Chef’s kiss’
As well, the terror and fear at losing its identity is a very nice touch. We distinctly don’t get a name for the child, so Nicolas Garrett is it’s whole identity. Losing it seems to spark some trauma-related panic, probably because the Child lost whatever it’s previous identity was.
Damn, the healing in this fic. I forgot how you worked it. Horrific imagery with the glass under the skin, you made my skin crawl so good.
The irony of the child feeling disgust at the attempt to steal its identity, while it’s been doing the exact same to the trainers whose identity it steals is a poignant touch. I wonder if it’ll lead to some introspection here.
Oooooor it’ll just lead to the Child getting all vengeful. Nice. That is very childlike tbh.
Absol seems like a very good guiding presence. I definitely get the vibe that the Child would not have made it this far without Absol helping it through. Maybe a tad too detached, but this ain’t a normal child to be rearing.
Maaaan having a childlike pov that doesn’t understand how horrific it’s actions are is ROUGH. Absol knows why what the child did was horrific, but the Child itself seemingly can’t even fathom why.
The entire argument between absol and the child felt like it was a foregone conclusion. They both know that the Child is going to do something. I think that Absol knew that too. Makes the advice of “rest so you can make the right decision“ hit harder. Absol knows that she can’t stop the Child from acting (the Child made that clear), but maybe she can set the Child on a better path than “murder-monster”.
Oh MAN, I forgot the story went that way. Negrek, you conspiracy thriller spinning madlass, this is food for my paranoid soul.
Chapter 5
So, like… I know the Child isn’t human anymore. But, damn do I feel bad for the amount of death it’s witnessed. It’s just a kid after all.
A kid who is currently impersonating a suicide victim to extort a pokemon from the victim’s father… that’s a hell of a fucked up kid.
Interesting implication you make here. The Child can change itself to adopt pokemon features and abilities, but loses the ability to convincingly act human when it does so. I wonder how long it would take for that change to happen, how quickly the Child could change itself into something combat capable if necessary?
A scene like that… I‘m a parent myself, so anything to do with dead kids or parents getting emotional about their kids… they just hit me harder. Leonard, despite all the negativity from the Child, comes across as a genuinely sympathetic character.
I love the repeated mentions and reminders that the Child is definitively NOT human and is not good at this sort of covert operation. Like, down to the stilted speech patterns and the fact that it doesn’t know what a hug is, you’re so good at telling us things without outright telling us anything.
Its fairly obvious that Leonard knows something is up, but I’m not entirely sure what sparked the confirmation of it. Something with Duke obviously, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I love getting the answer to questions I literally had early in the chapter. How fast can the Child change itself? In the speed of a thought.
Another excellent action sequence. A human with all the power of the pokemon world at its fingertips… I see why Rocket (at least I assume it’s Rocket) created this thing. The Child is OP.
Excellent body horror, I frigging love “morph into something horrific“ scenes and the Child pulls one off here masterfully. Although, I highly doubt that it’s going to get away as scot-free as it expects.
Aha! So Cinnabar WAS the work of the universe punishing the island for what happened there. Horrific thought tbh. I wonder where the Child was created now, and what calamity waits for that location.
Chapter 6
Oh man, some limitations on the Child. No weird heads, can’t change the brain shape. Must make it difficult to mask itself as most pokemon tbh, even if it can replicate their abilities.
Another note: YES ROCKET HERE WE GO
OH ITS NATE TIME?!!?!?
Its a damn shame I’ve forgotten so much of this story. Its so good.
I love that the Child picks up on “The Great Nathaniel Morgan” and runs with it. I remember that little running joke and I love it.
Despite the Child’s clear youth, it actually is very very smart. Mimicking a pair of salamence to create a distraction and using telekinesis to nab the Pokédex was an ingenious strategy.
Absol’s freak out over Nate… I feel like that’s somehow important to the story, but I don’t remember how. I guarantee that it’ll come back up later.
Lol I love the juxtaposition of ”Great Nathaniel Morgan” with the fact that the Child does not have a high opinion of his abilities.
I find it somewhat strange that there are regular animals just walking around in the world. It’s a strange quirk, usually they just don’t exist. A way to get around “do we eat pokemon or not”?
I knew there was some sort of reason for Absol freaking out. I don’t remember what yet though. Nate is definitely importan though. Moreso than a standard Rocket grunt.
Aaaand we end with sleepy Child sleeping. I guess all that healing really takes it out of you.
I’m sorry to cut it short here, but I screwed up my wrist Bad and can’t really type extensively anymore. Thanks for the fun reread and I’ll hopefully be back when it’s better!
Happy birthday! I wanted to post this yesterday but I ended up falling asleep before managing to finish it, so here it is. Looking forward to chapter 53!
Her idea of helping is to observe and occasionally hold something for you.
Having something of a hard time picturing an Absol holding something (at least in a way that's at all useful).
They introduced the Purple Ranger right before Mewtwo burned down your house, so there should be at least one cool transforming action figure of her now.
Absol extends one paw and then drags it back towards herself, claws grating loud against the metal roof. "Neither of you is as you should be."
"What?"
Absol scrapes her claws again, a prolonged rasping noise that makes your spine want to climb out of your skin. "This killing. Who has the choice not to murder, but chooses otherwise? It makes no sense."
Enjoyed this whole Absol conversation a lot. I always assumed too that when Absol described the shadow on the water's face it was describing the Absol's nebulous Fate sense, that that was simply how she experiences sensations like someone's death not lining up with Fate. But it makes a lot of sense that she was just agitated about it because in a situation where Fate is indifferent, where it really doesn't matter if someone lives or dies, of course you should help the person, you should save them, and why aren't they? (And what she meant specifically by shadow on the water's face is presumably essentially the sense of feeling uncomfortable with herself (her reflection) at the thought that she's letting it happen and not doing anything about it.) She's duty-bound to ensure the child and Mewtwo meet and move Fate along correctly but at the same time she's sickened by both of them and yet doesn't quite have the words to articulate it as a moral objection exactly. I'm enjoying how she still phrases it in terms of things not being as they should be - still in a way that sounds like they're simply not supposed to be like this, rather than that it disgusts her personally. (Theoretically, maybe her Fate sense genuinely also tells her they're not supposed to be like this by the time the fated meeting happens. But I suspect it's just the way she's naturally inclined to put her moral intuitions.)
And of course the child responds with denial and deflection, unable to confront that it's also kind of terrible. Not on a Mewtwo sort of scale, maybe, not taking pleasure in it the way he does, but certainly terrible enough to want to just leave an unremarkable Rocket to die after being mauled by a bear, and find it terribly inconvenient and annoying to be told not to. Enjoying the bits where it's also kind of uncomfortable talking about or defending its feelings about Nate at the time, too.
All in all, I like this a lot. The idea of Nate having some indirect part to play in the Fated events was intriguing but honestly I enjoy the idea he was totally insignificant all along even more. Though I imagine he'll still wind up being involved in how things shake out, in one way or another - his influence on the child, if nothing else. (Though of course that opens the question of whether that should automatically mean Absol's Fate sense should have sensed this decision as something consequential... She did explain in chapter six that it's weaker the less direct it is, but also she definitely made it sound here like she didn't feel even the slightest tug of Fate about that whole thing. Maybe his involvement is limited to the bits Absol hasn't seen and won't be there to facilitate?)
Me? If Mewtwo's emotions keep yo-yoing like that you swear you're going to get heart palpitations. After that disaster of a "picnic?" Why would they ever want to see me? He actually turns to glare at you. And that was your fault. You did nothing to prepare me. Were you expecting me to figure out those pokémon's strange rituals myself? You want them to like us too, don't you? I can see it. And you couldn't even help with this, your supposed area of expertise.
"What? What did you want me to tell you? I didn't realize you didn't know how a picnic works."
Why would I? the clone snarls. I was made for battle, not for boring anecdotes or... or swimming.
A thrill goes through you, too. Someone who knows Cipher people who actually matter, not nobodies like Divel. More nighttime visits to anonymous apartments, run-down houses, back alleys and abandoned streets. But maybe fewer of them, if this pokémon really knows important people. People who might be working for Cipher even now, who might know where to find them. Might even have seen Mew with their own eyes. It's... exciting. It should be exciting.
It should be, shouldn't it. Poor traumatized child.
Mewtwo does the psychic equivalent of snorting in derision. With a twitch of his hand Tyranitar's airborne, limbs waving uselessly. A second tiny motion and he goes crashing back to earth.
Tyranitar begins to rise, inch by agonized inch, muscles straining against invisible force. Mewtwo grabs him with psychic again, lifts him, drops him, then drags him across the ground with telekinesis. You wince, imagining Tyranitar's spines snapping and grinding away against the rocky earth.
Love to see a fic where chapter 52 features a Tyranitar getting tossed around psychically by a superclone
Glowing out of the settling dust is an energy barrier that separates Tyranitar from his sculpture, which is untouched save for a burst of sand-laden air rushing through its tiny streets. You let out a huge breath and look up at Mewtwo in wonder. You thought he meant to pulverize that sculpture for sure.
Oh. His tail twitches with a fury you'd no doubt feel if it weren't concentrated elsewhere. Namely on Hypno and Noctowl, who hold arm and wing stretched towards the sculpture, eyes glowing as they reinforce a joint reflect shield. Right. Okay. That makes more sense.
Enjoy this moment of wonder and then "Oh, never mind, that was Hypno and Noctowl." Of course Mewtwo would never just not want to destroy years of somebody's work.
"Weeks!" You can't help it. It bursts right out of you. You think the longest any of your art projects has taken is maybe a couple days.
I have no talent for friendship. I was designed for battle. That is my interest, and that is where I have my greatest strength. I don't understand this obsession with friendship. It's nothing but a liability for someone like me.
He hasn't watched enough TV. There are quite a few shows that could teach him about the power of friendship.
It doesn't actually feel good to be more right than Absol. She doesn't follow you, doesn't acknowledge that you won. And you don't sleep, either. You lie in darkness and try to remember Tyranitar's stone sculptures, tracing their contours with your mind's eye. They're beautiful, intricate, sweeping stonework legends and inspiring battles. But you think your favorite is the lumpy one with the human and the caterpie. The one that Mewtwo hated.
I enjoyed sculptor Tyranitar a lot; still really fond of what this fic does to really give all these Pokémon characters their own sense of having a life and hobbies and existing outside the context of the plot. The Musketeers are still lovely, all still resolutely sympathetic to Mewtwo; they've been through being experimented on and made into killing machines themselves, so of course they're inclined to be more patient with Mewtwo's toxicity than they perhaps should be. I worry for them. Though maybe they will start to get through to Mewtwo, just a little bit. Maybe.
Haven't you ever wished you could simply snap your fingers--click you teeth, perhaps--and fix something?
Yes, yes, everyone's very eager to get on their moral high horse, aren't they? Even though taking their slow, respectful* approach would only lead to more deaths in the delay. Humans kill pokémon, and I kill humans. It's what I was born to do." Mewtwo gives a mental headshake.
I don't understand why you're so certain that I'm wrong, Mewtwo says. *You know Fate. You know how all of this ends. You know I'm right. Admit it. I understand that you're scared. I know you fear change, especially in those crevices your portents don't reveal. But let go of that fear. What will come to pass will come to pass, won't it?"
There are a lot of other bits of errant Markdown here, at least on the fic.thousandroads.net mirror, where I was reading it - it looks to be about the Markdown parser, at least the one the site uses, having certain rules about when it parses asterisks as italics and when not, in concert with the way you're using italics for Mewtwo's dialogue and then unitalicizing some words for emphasis. You may want to look into trying to make sure the parser can handle this case, one way or another... The bits I highlighted:
I thought art was a human* endeavor,* Mewtwo says, and you sigh inwardly.
I don't understand, Mewtwo mutters to himself. So many pokémon know the evils of humanity. They have experienced them personally. And yet they do nothing to stop them. They feel no desire for revenge. They'd rather make their little sculptures or engage in pointless show fights or, worse, go off to serve some other* humans instead! And all their excuses are, oh, I'm too weak, I could never do anything to them anyway.*
What do you mean? Do you think I should ask* people to change?* Mewtwo's tail actually twitches a little, there, with the force of his derision. Who gives up power willingly? If you're to have, you must take from someone else.
No. They must be playing at something. But he sounds uncertain of that. The heracross, maybe. She sees where I'm coming from. The hypno's nervous, but she feels she must not understand* me. And the noctowl--the noctowl pities me.* Mewtwo's tone is so venomous that your stomach churns with nausea. Me! And for no... For no good reason.
To what purpose? That's what I can't grasp. You and I have good reason to seek their assistance. What do they gain? There's a certain weariness about Mewtwo's words, a kind of mental sigh. I wish they would be content being "friends" with you alone. I have no interest in these... bonding activities, whatever you want to call them. Pointless wastes of time. Imagine swimming* for pleasure.*
You're trying to puzzle out why she would say Mewtwo has many years--he's barely older than you--and why Mewtwo's getting mad about it when the clone breaks in with a sneer. I have more important concerns to attend to. Such as my mother. Perhaps once she is no longer being imprisoned* and tortured I can turn my attention to such entertaining tasks as learning to make friends.
It’s Super Catnip time! No time wasting, let’s goooooo!!
Quick scan of 6 to refamiliarize myself with where the story is.
Chapter 7
Shit, I feel like you’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from Animorphs for the Child’s brand of body horror. Given how I do know you’ve mentioned Animorphs on Discord, I feel like this tracks.
I love the Child losing its patience very quickly. Kids don’t typically have great patience, so it’s great to see that here. I love the way you used the outburst to also quickly introduce the concept of the Child to Nate. Very efficient use of a single segment.
Nate literally endears himself to me in a few moments. “What the fuck are you?” is such a relatable response because we’re sitting here wondering the same damn thing.
Lol, Nate’s continued “I don’t know what’s going on, but fuck you” is such gold. The Child is so insistent that he has to help, and Nate‘s reactions give me so much joy.
Lol, now for the real heart of this fic (Imo). Nate and the Child bickering back and forth are so great. You do a great job with expounding on Worldbuilding and plotlines while building the relationship between them.
Oh MAN, Nate’s arm. I hate and love body horror and you are top tier at it. The child literally snapping his arm and him passing out? Satisfyingly gross!
Chapter 8
Man, having to face down a mirror image of yourself while your body is still half beat to shit would be a nightmare.
Lol, I frigging love the Child’s insistence that Nate is explicitly evil since he was in Rocket. And Nate’s incredulous and slightly insane laughter as the Child continues to threaten him
To be completely fair to Nate… that’s probably the correct reaction to the Child’s brand of murderous bullshit. What else can you do but laugh?
A moment of compassion from the Child as it realizes that Nate probably had it worse healing from the softboiled. I like it. Softens the “murderpsychokid“ a little bit. It’s almost immediately brought back with the Child urging Nate to move faster, but at least the Child displays a small amount of awareness.
Nate lends such a macabre sense of humour to the whole story. I love how he’s the perfect audience representative for just how fucked the whole situation is, after all the connecting you’ve had us doing with the Child up to this point.
Oh man, War is a joy. A sadistic tentacruel who likes handshakes? Freaking amazing character lol.
Really like the little “training” stint. I like it played up as a game and it really shows how close the Child is with their pokemon.
LOL the Child literally pulling out a car battery was great. Nice little bit to let us know how freakishly strong the Child is.
You write the Child in such a great way. I love all the constant reminders that mentally, the Child is still just that.
My apologie, but I had some trouble with the concussion and a return to work. I meant to do 4 chapters, but I wasn’t able to get through the next 2 in a reasonable time. At least it leaves me open to be back for events!
I was sort of surprised the child in un-empathy-mode manages to figure out they must have left because of that, though I guess the notion of "word of attacks spreads, others who might be attacked flee" is not a human-specific one.
"You just don't appreciate good music. It's not about being easy to listen to. Feel that emotion! This is raw shit because life is raw shit."
"Well, life sucks, but at least we aren't the only ones who feel that way, right? At least there's somebody else out there who'll say it. At the top of their lungs. Above a killer bassline."
"I think I recognize this one. Isn't this 'Springfield Blows?' I thought that one was supposed to be inspired by a cartoon the lead singer thought was funny."
Enjoying the general sense of friendly banter (and the oblique Simpsons nod).
Mewtwo has a straight flush again. Somehow. I think I enjoy this game, he says smugly, sweeping the chips over to himself and arranging them in neat stacks without touching a single one. It's less interesting than a battle, but in some ways it's similar.
Aww, I love Heracross there a bit hurt her friends really don't enjoy her music.
Oookay, there was a lot here. Hypno points out that their efforts to include Mewtwo in group activities are kind of like the Purification Chamber, and yeah, that's probably literal. I went back to chapter 48, where Krane describes how Shadow Pokémon can only express anxiety and rage (sound like anyone we know), and he suggests nobody knows how Cipher's Shadow Pokémon came to be but it's possible Shadowfication is contagious; I think Mewtwo is the original Shadow Pokémon and spread it to Mew who Cipher then used to make more after she was brought to Orre? Extended exposure to Mewtwo is almost definitely why Red's Pokémon were all Shadowfied, and possibly why Red is so weird too. (And there's even a bit in chapter 48 where Hypno's human companion mentions if Hypno sensed something off with the Pokémon in the Master Ball she would want to help.)
The funny thing is when I went back to it that thought process felt immediately familiar, like an "OH YEAH, that was a thing I was thinking," but there's no trace of this theory whatsoever in the review I wrote of 48, which has me like ???. Either my brain is déjà vu-ing extremely hard or I thought of this and just never mentioned it for some reason or maybe I mentioned it somewhere else? I don't know, point is, this definitely feels like pieces fitting together.
I'm also driven to suspect that Mewtwo's insistence on having the child do the killing is due to a newfound reluctance to do so in Mewtwo, thanks to the Musketeers' purification activities, for all his talk about how he just wants to see if the child is reliable. Ooof, though. Bet it's not going to be fun for it to return to its regular brain state.
(Is the child being affected by being in Mewtwo's presence a lot for a while now? Well, it sure does feel a lot more anxiety these days... but I think that's unrelated and it's probably immune to the actual Shadowfication effect by virtue of the bit where it's constantly transforming the composition of its brain from one state to another, so the connections that would be atrophying over time keep getting forcibly refreshed?)
I'm also pondering the implications for the protagonist itself and its two selves... maybe the inhuman self really is basically a Shadowfied version of it? It's not exactly very capable of anxiety, but Professor Krane did also say Shadow Pokémon's emotional responses are blunted, so while the way it and Mewtwo act are very different, both fit in different ways. Unsure, of course, if that's basically coincidence (Shadowfication does similar things to the brain as the child's return-to-pokmon coping mechanism) or if it's genuinely key to what's going on with the child. Will have to think on it a bit more, but I definitely feel like I'm on to something with this in general.
Lovely chapter generally, some Rats being good and the Musketeers are a delight as always. Just loved their interactions throughout here and the way they keep humouring Mewtwo and the way it actually slowly gets through to him. What good eggs. And the bit where Heracross loves a genre of music and her friends don't like it at all but still enjoy listening to it with her and riffing on it and bantering is just good, genuine friendship stuff. Love them.
also I do enjoy when a fic has a chapter 53 in which a protagonist does a murder
What is that noise? he demands. That's supposed to be music?*
You probably want "you" or "your ears" or the like.
"I'm sorry you aren't enjoying yourself, Mewtwo. I understand if you'd rather leave. But if stick around, well, you might learn something, just like your friend said."
Coming back for some review replies, finally! Thanks to everyone who stopped by, for Review Blitz and otherwise. I also appreciate the feedback I received during RB that some people are confused about wha's going on with this story--whether it's been discontinued (at least on the forums), why there are only ten chapters here, etc. I'm going to update the first post a bit to try and make the situation more clear, but in summary:
1. This fic is still ongoing! You can always find the most recent chapter on FFN or my personal site.
2. The version here on Thousand Roads is a (thus far minor) rework of the story and is currently on hiatus.
3. I do intend to continue posting here once I make more progress on the revision. However, I've been prioritizing publishing new chapters in the FFN version.
At this point I'm not sure when I'll be making my next update to this thread. I have been doing much better putting out new chapters recently, though--if that continues, I may start taking a bit of time off to work on this revision again. No promises on timing for that, but it is something on my mind. Sorry for the confusion, and thanks for your patience wrt the weird state the TR version of this fic is in!
In the meantime, I have some review replies I need to get to, finally... Have a few things to say...
It's been a while for sure! Glad to see you back again. And you're right, your reviews have definitely evolved a lot since the heyday of Ye Olde Serebii Forumes!
A bit nitpicky, but “That’s what she does” probably works better with the gerund form of “watch” since “watching” can function as a noun in the sense of “the act of observing something” but “watches” cannot, and it leans in harder to “watching the human” in terms of format parallelism.
Hmm, something pings me as off about "That's what she does: watching." Don't know that I like a gerund there, it feels like I want a straight verb!
Right, this is why it’s a “conversation they can’t have” and not “couldn’t have”. The guy whose face the Child needs isn’t dead yet. Though what on earth does it take to kill the Child if it died once already? .-.
It's not especially quick on the uptake, but the protagonist can learn over time! And it watches a lot of television.
That actually makes me wonder what form the Child had prior to assuming this one. Though I suppose that might have been very deliberate given that there was a non-zero chance the Child was in their true form which… yeah, that’s a big spoiler there.
Definitely a good question to be asking! I don't know if describing what the protagonist looked like before changing would lead to any big insights, though...
So wait, do Rotom appliances not exist in a mainstream sense in Salvage’s setting, or is this set in the period of canonical time before those catch on in mainline? I assume it’s the latter since this is an old story by origins, but it does make me curious how the march of time in franchise gets reflected in your story, if at all.
Yeah, this is from way before rotom-stuff was introduced. I try to treat the tech level of this story as "basically 2005" but with well-known pokémagic conventions (advanced healing, whatever the hell is going on with pokéballs). People still read newspapers and watch network TV! Mobile internet connectivity is severely limited! Truly a wild time to be alive.
… That actually makes me wonder if the story will ever answer that question. I don’t remember it getting answered up to the point where I originally got to, but somehow I doubt that it’ll really just be left forever a mystery if the story made a point of bringing it up in the first place.
Nope, we don't learn much else about what was going on with this guy. The protagonist's reflecting on his potential motivations here as an indication of the fact that it recognizes that he had some kind of life going on outside his intersection with its narrative--but also that it doesn't particularly care.
Thanks for taking another look at this old fic. It's always fascinating to see how people's impressions change on a reread. Definitely helps to have a bit of context going into this one! I'm glad you enjoyed the read and took the time to put together such a nice review.
Good to see you here! I'm honored that you consider this story an inspiration, and your reviews here really brightened my day. Thanks for taking the time to leave your thoughts!
I love how disconcerting The Child’s narration is. It’s fascinating how clear that while the Child is intelligent, it clearly is still a child and doesn’t quite have the full maturity level an adult will.
Thank you! The sense of strangeness combined with childishness is something I'm always trying to capture, so I'm glad it's working for you!
What I remember loving from my first original read through was that I was completely engrossed in the mystery of the story. You’re so good at building that up through the Child’s eyes while not giving us all the answers all at once.
I'm glad you enjoy the mystery! Some people like it, some people find it way too confusing, but I'm glad it's something you enjoy.
I don’t remember this being so short on FFN. Either you shortened it significantly or you’re in the midst of some fuuuun rewrites (Been there). Or I’m just misremembering because its been a bit.
I don't remember what all I changed here, either, heh. All in all I think the beginning section has one to two fewer chapters than it used to (pretty sure Nate used to show up in Chapter 8, but it might have been 7), so a fair amount of material came out of somewhere. Can't remember if it was actually here, though!
Then, the battle. My god, that battle. It’s punchy and kinetic and pushes the pace with some great choreography. I’m a sucker for battles, and anime styled battles where a pokemorph (of sorts) is duking it out is exactly the kind of shit that hits all of my right buttons. It also has some great uses of creative tactics and moves (which is probably easier when you have basically all of them at your disposal lol).
Thank you! I do love my battle, and the opportunity to do silly things with someone who can use pretty much any pokémon ability in existence has been a lot of fun. It's almost too much power, heh.
I do think that the Child just brushing off the battle with Titan as ”resolved” kinda seems awkward. My own kid tends to dwell on things that upset him, but I know that kids often do just shrug it off and move on. Still, you mentioned a duskull (which again, I feel like is an addition that wasn’t there my first read) and then brushed off that character introduction in favour of ending the scene.
That's fair! A lot of the earlier chapters do wrap up pretty quickly. I think the protagonist does think that things are cool between it and Titan since it won their battle, but obviously it's got a lot to think about wrt where the two of them are going to go from here, too.
Duskull's always been here, but he's a quiet guy, so I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't remember him.
Oh my goodness, I don’t remember the Child’s morphing being so freaky. Dead child’s hands? Face modeled after a celebrity? I don’t remember quite how the Child does this, and it is so just… creepy to read from the perspective of a being that this kind of thing doesn’t matter to. I wonder how horrific the original “from scratch” face was.
Oh, it's freaky for sure! I do enjoy a bit of body horror. And working without a template, I imagine "horrific" is probably a mild descriptor for what the protagonist came up with!
I feel like Officer Feldhorn isn’t as harmless as the Child thinks. There’s probably a principled cop under the smell of donuts and coffee, hopefully the Child doesn’t slip up too much around them.
The irony of the child feeling disgust at the attempt to steal its identity, while it’s been doing the exact same to the trainers whose identity it steals is a poignant touch. I wonder if it’ll lead to some introspection here.
Ahaha, well, introspection isn't one of the protagonist's great talents, really. :P
Absol seems like a very good guiding presence. I definitely get the vibe that the Child would not have made it this far without Absol helping it through. Maybe a tad too detached, but this ain’t a normal child to be rearing.
She does her best! She's definitely more comfortable with other absol, though. She doesn't have any real idea of how to parent a weird mew-child-thing!
So, like… I know the Child isn’t human anymore. But, damn do I feel bad for the amount of death it’s witnessed. It’s just a kid after all.
It's not something the child itself dwells upon much, but yeah, its situation is undeniably a bit fucked up, and it's gone through some horrible things.
Its fairly obvious that Leonard knows something is up, but I’m not entirely sure what sparked the confirmation of it. Something with Duke obviously, but I couldn’t figure out what.
Duke didn't recognize the protagonist, and Leo thought the protagonist's behavior towards the persian was off.
Another excellent action sequence. A human with all the power of the pokemon world at its fingertips… I see why Rocket (at least I assume it’s Rocket) created this thing. The Child is OP.
It sure will come back again at some point! Just don't hold your breath waiting for it, heh.
I find it somewhat strange that there are regular animals just walking around in the world. It’s a strange quirk, usually they just don’t exist. A way to get around “do we eat pokemon or not”?
Yeah, I do use normal animals in this setting. To me it's hard to imagine an ecosystem running with just complex creatures like pokémon and plants, so I figure mundane animals would still be around to fill all the gaps not occupied by pokémon. They're actually more abundant than pokémon themselves! The fact that it gets rid of a lot of the eating-sapient-pokémon weirdness is a nice bonus, too. :P
Shit, I feel like you’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from Animorphs for the Child’s brand of body horror. Given how I do know you’ve mentioned Animorphs on Discord, I feel like this tracks.
For sure! There are a lot of elements of the Animorphs series here, really; the morphing, obviously, as well as the action/suspense focus and an emphasis on tough moral choices, gray characters, and the impact of trauma on characters. We did a reread of the series on Discord recently, and it was surprising how well it held up. Reading those books as a kid definitely had a big influence on me.
I'm glad you had a good time reading back through this fic again! It was a lot of fun reading your commentary and seeing what you remembered or didn't. Thanks for leaving such nice reviews. I hope I'll get the opportunity to check out Journey proper soon; it sounds like a really fun story, and I know you've been working hard on it!
I'm glad you liked this part! It's been a long time coming, obviously, and I wondered how people would take the reveal that Nate's really not anyone important who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to get dragged into all this mess. Personally, it's always delighted me that he's literally Just Some Guy, his entire role in the story is to be Just Some Guy in contrast to the protagonist, Absol, and Mewtwo, all of whom are very powerful people with special destinies/purposes (or at least believe themselves to be). It is a bit of an anticlimax, though, to learn that there's nothing special about him after all.
It's very interesting to me that you frame Absol's reaction to Mewtwo and the protagonist as disgust. I would say that her way of expressing things, saying that they're "not as they should be," is pretty close to how she experiences them. She literally doesn't understand why they'd behave the way they do, but it's not right, that's not how people are supposed to act, and she's mostly wigging out with fear and anxiety because she doesn't know why this is happening or how to fix it. The moral dimension of it is a secondary concern for her--she definitely agrees that wanton murder is bad, but it's so far outside her frame of reference that it almost doesn't computer alongside "what is happening what is happening why is this happening."
Your point about Absol recognizing him as consequential because he's ended up having a big influence on events is an interesting one. Way, way back Absol made a couple of comments about humans being able to alter Fate in a way pokémon can't. If that's true, you could imagine that while he may not have meant anything to begin with, Absol getting the child to save him may have inadvertently given him the opportunity to change the way the child's story played out. In line with the Fate Absol foretold for the protagonist and Mew? Not clear, but someone could try suggesting this possibility to Absol if they wanted to see her develop a bad case of head pressing out of anxiety.
Enjoying the bits where it's also kind of uncomfortable talking about or defending its feelings about Nate at the time, too.
ngl I was thinking of Mewtwo2 vs Tyranitar a bit while working on this part.
I enjoyed sculptor Tyranitar a lot; still really fond of what this fic does to really give all these Pokémon characters their own sense of having a life and hobbies and existing outside the context of the plot.
Thanks, he was a spontaneous NaNo addition, but I ended up having a lot of fun with him.
The Musketeers are still lovely, all still resolutely sympathetic to Mewtwo; they've been through being experimented on and made into killing machines themselves, so of course they're inclined to be more patient with Mewtwo's toxicity than they perhaps should be. I worry for them. Though maybe they will start to get through to Mewtwo, just a little bit. Maybe.
I don't know if Mewtwo could have found more sympathetic pokémon, really... Mewtwo would probably reject any notion of their being similar, but the parallels the Musketeers see between their situations are definitely real. If nothing else, it's way outside Mewtwo's previous range of experience to encounter people who treat him as trustworthy and valuable instead of terrifying and/or simply as an asset, so he's going to have to figure out how to navigate that.
There are a lot of other bits of errant Markdown here, at least on the fic.thousandroads.net mirror, where I was reading it - it looks to be about the Markdown parser, at least the one the site uses, having certain rules about when it parses asterisks as italics and when not, in concert with the way you're using italics for Mewtwo's dialogue and then unitalicizing some words for emphasis. You may want to look into trying to make sure the parser can handle this case, one way or another...
Thanks for pointing this out! I believe this is actually a bug in the Markdown parser used to generate the thousandroads version of the chapter (the Python parser used to do the FFN version seems to be fine). Unfortunately to get the updated version that fixes this issue it looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade my extremely outdated OS, which should be happening... very soon...
I was sort of surprised the child in un-empathy-mode manages to figure out they must have left because of that, though I guess the notion of "word of attacks spreads, others who might be attacked flee" is not a human-specific one.
Mmm, yeah, it's kind of borderline too theory-of-mind to work. The child probably has some conception of people passing around information even in this state, and normal-child has long been worried about the potential for word about Mewtwo to get around and cause exactly this kind of problem. As it is here, though, the protagonist probably wouldn't put much stock in that, and having it go there immediately is probably questionable. I'll think about whether it needs to raise this objection here.
Enjoying the general sense of friendly banter (and the oblique Simpsons nod).
Simpsons reference completely unintentional, lol; I only changed the song's inspiration to "a cartoon" very late in the editing process, and at the time wasn't thinking about the actual song's name, so the fact that it lined up is a total coincidence. I'll take it, though!
Aww, I love Heracross there a bit hurt her friends really don't enjoy her music.
Can't have been fun to have Mewtwo describe it as an ordeal her friends had been suffering through, ouch.
Definitely a lot of interesting theorycrafting here. You're definitely on to something. There's a couple things that don't line up--Mewtwo is not a shadow pokémon, although you make a good point about the similarities, and likewise Red's pokémon, while looking much more like shadow pokémon than Mewtwo, are distinct enough that an expert like Professor Krane would be able to tell they aren't quite the same thing. But the shadow phenomenon is definitely linked to Mew and Mewtwo somehow.
The funny thing is when I went back to it that thought process felt immediately familiar, like an "OH YEAH, that was a thing I was thinking," but there's no trace of this theory whatsoever in the review I wrote of 48, which has me like ???. Either my brain is déjà vu-ing extremely hard or I thought of this and just never mentioned it for some reason or maybe I mentioned it somewhere else? I don't know, point is, this definitely feels like pieces fitting together.
Some pieces are definitely fitting together! I'm tickled that Hypno's comment about the Purification Chamber triggered your thoughts on that, since it was really an offhanded comment on her part (she does view Mewtwo as similar to shadow pokémon in many ways, but knows he isn't literally one) and not particularly supposed to be a clue about anything. Chapter 48 is where I thought most of the juicy hints lay! This is the first time I remember you mentioning this, but definitely not surprising if you were thinking along similar lines after 48.
I'm also driven to suspect that Mewtwo's insistence on having the child do the killing is due to a newfound reluctance to do so in Mewtwo, thanks to the Musketeers' purification activities, for all his talk about how he just wants to see if the child is reliable.
I don't know if he's reluctant, per se, but there does seem to be some inner turmoil there...
(Is the child being affected by being in Mewtwo's presence a lot for a while now? Well, it sure does feel a lot more anxiety these days... but I think that's unrelated and it's probably immune to the actual Shadowfication effect by virtue of the bit where it's constantly transforming the composition of its brain from one state to another, so the connections that would be atrophying over time keep getting forcibly refreshed?)
Well, psychic-types in general are considered dangerous to work with given the potential influence they can have on the people around them, and we know that Mewtwo in particular can have rapid and severe impacts on other people's mental states (see e.g. Chapter 20, 35). On the other hand, the protagonist heals rapidly and is frequently rewiring its own brain. Not *everything* about its brain changes when it shifts states, though, or else it wouldn't have any e.g. persistence of memory between them. So, the protagonist is a lot more resistant to psychic influence than most people, but not immune. Whether it has to do with shadowfication or not, hanging around with Mewtwo is probably not great for the child's mental health!
I'm also pondering the implications for the protagonist itself and its two selves... maybe the inhuman self really is basically a Shadowfied version of it?
There are some similarities, for sure! But it seems like we have a number of characters wandering around here who have shadowy qualities but aren't quite that thing, hmm.
I'm very excited to have you post this, since not a lot of people have commented on how all this Orre stuff might tie in with Mew, so it's hard for me to gauge where they're at with it. I think you're pretty close to figuring out what's up with Mew, and generally in a good place with what you're theorizing. At this point we're about five chapters out from the reveal of how the shadow stuff intersects with Mew, and the majority of the clues have been put on the table; we'll get a little more about shadow pokémon and what it's like to be one from Hypno, though, as well as a little more about Red.
Lovely chapter generally, some Rats being good and the Musketeers are a delight as always. Just loved their interactions throughout here and the way they keep humouring Mewtwo and the way it actually slowly gets through to him. What good eggs. And the bit where Heracross loves a genre of music and her friends don't like it at all but still enjoy listening to it with her and riffing on it and bantering is just good, genuine friendship stuff. Love them.
I'm glad you enjoyed these bits! I was a bit worried that this chapter felt pretty blah--similar to the last several chapters. After this, the rising action kicks off, so there will be Something Dramatic happening in pretty much every chapter through the end of the arc. But there will be plenty of the Musketeers just Musketeer-ing around, too!
also I do enjoy when a fic has a chapter 53 in which a protagonist does a murder
Okay, now that was a connection I didn't make, heh. I guess I'd better make sure that in Chapter 54, somebody... watches TV? Has a burger? Has their life threatened? We'll see. :P
Thanks for some lovely reviews on the last couple chapters; 52's made a lovely birthday gift! <3 Lots of tasty speculation here, too. Your comments always brighten my day--thanks so much for keeping up with this fic after all these years!
I remember you saying you'd read some Salvage before! Do you remember how far you got in the old version? I'm just curious about whether you made it to the part where I think it picks up or not.
I'm glad you like it! tbh the beginning is a bit too mysterious for my tastes... My conception of what the fic would be changed radically after I got a few chapters in, and as such the earlier bits are rather different in terms of tone than the later ones. Unfortunately I haven't really been able to come up with a better way to start things off, so they stand as they are, but I always worry that the heavy mystery and confusing style choices in the earlier parts of the story turn a lot of people off. Now I can only hope that you won't dislike the rather different actual majority of the fic! :P
Oh no I missed whatever this is and now I don't want to find out about it!
Heck yes for shapeshifting! If I was going to make one of those author bingo card things that would absolutely be the first square I put on there. I can guarantee that you'll see plenty more of that, at least, and it's great to hear that you enjoy the prose and the details! I try especially hard to find vivid details when I'm writing, so it's really flattering that you mention them, heh.
Thanks for coming back to take another look at this, and for dropping another nice review. Good luck keeping up!
kintsugi
Thanks for checking this one out! I try spend a lot of time polishing my prose, so I'm glad that it really works for you. The early chapters of this story have some of the most stylish moments, but I try to keep it interesting throughout.
Whoof, wow, I can't believe I missed that multiple times. You're right, that should be in third person... Probably the reason I glossed over it so many times is that it's hard to get such a punchy effect in third person and I don't envy myself trying. I'll see what I can do!
That is indeed what the sentence is implying. And we'll see this chapter. :)
I like that one, too! Although I think my personal favorite is the line that has "glitter-slick" in it because it's the most fun to say.
I have no idea how to make the eyes emoji but it definitely applies here. Those things are all my jam, so if you put a lot of them into your own stories, I need to get caught up posthaste!
Thanks again for stopping by and leaving a review. I hope you enjoy the rest of the story.
Author's Notes: Here's chapter two! Hope you enjoy.
Chapter 2
The first thing you do is stop home. A moment's concentration takes you from cold and dark to the warmth of your living room. Even the dim, leaf-edged light is too much for your eyes after the total darkness of the cave, and you open them slowly, blinking away tears.
That gives Rats enough time to hide whatever she was chewing on, so when you turn to her it looks like she's just relaxing in her nest, half burrowed under shredded pieces of newspaper and drifts of insulation. "Uh, hey, Boss. Back early, aren't you?"
"It was easier than I expected," you say. You were smart, this time. You were ready to die. "Come on. I need you to help me with Titan." There will be time to scold her about dismantling furniture later. "Is Absol back?"
"Dunno." Rats is out of her nest in a great rustling of detritus. "I haven't heard her, but you know how she is." Rats stands picking scraps of paper out of her fur while you head deeper into the house. You glance at the couch in passing, but Absol isn't there, just the impression in the cushions where she usually lies.
"So. Titan, huh?" Rats asks, waddling after you on her hind legs and grooming her whiskers as she goes.
"Yes." You toss her the pokéball and stop at your desk, grabbing your pokédex and flipping it over. You have the back hatch open in a practiced instant and exchange the data card inside for the one you've been clenching in your palm, warm now from the heat of your body. You left Nicholas Garret's pokédex in the cavern, as empty and cold as his corpse. Its soul is yours now, as is everything else that once belonged to him.
"Looks rounder than I remember," Rats says, examining the pokéball between her claws.
"That's just his pokéball, Rats," you say, giving her an incredulous look while the pokédex boots up. You relax when the screen comes to life with your information. It's best for things to be official, for your life to be somewhere it won't get lost, in case you need it. It can be hard to remember who you are, sometimes. You haven't been Nicholas Garret long enough to get the details right.
"Joke, Boss," Rats says with a sigh. "Looks like it's the same old pokéball, anyway. Talk about your years of service, huh?"
You dig around for her own ball, just in case, and add it to your belt. Nicholas Garret's pokéballs you pull off and dump in the bottom drawer, making a mental note to release them later.
"So, should I?" Rats asks, making as if to throw the ball.
"Not inside. Come on." You don't want anything flammable around, in case something goes wrong. Not that anything will go wrong. You've pored over your memories of Titan so many times they've grown dull and distorted, as much fantasy as fact. But there's no question that he was always the most loyal of your team. He swore with you, just like the others. He'll come around, and it won't be long before you can finally set out to fulfill your promise together.
You lead the way down to the beach, the jungle crowding at your back. Knot Island lies somewhere to the south, no more than a speck far off across the waves. You nod at Rats, and she lets the pokéball go. All of a sudden Titan's standing in front of you, stretching his wings up to the sky.
You forget everything you were going to say. You knew he evolved, of course, but somehow you were still thinking of him as that gawky, earnest charmander. Now he towers over you, arching his long neck and letting out a lazy streamer of smoke like he was never knee-high and afraid of his own shadow.
"I thought you said we were going to Cinnabar," the charizard says as he looks around, sniffing at the air. "Where are we?"
"Titan," you say, and his head snaps around, his eyes fixing on you.
"Who?"
"We are not going to Cinnabar, Titan."
"Why are you calling me that?" The charizard tucks his wings in close and stares at the beach around you like he's expecting someone else to be there. "I don't like that name."
"Why not? It is your name. You remember, do you not?"
The charizard snorts out a puff of smoke and returns his gaze to you, the whites starting to show around the edges of his eyes.
"You understood that? You can hear me? How do you know about that?"
"Calm down, Titan. I am your trainer, remember? I know this is confusing, but you do not have to be afraid."
It takes all your self control not to flinch when the charizard's head swings down, stopping inches from your face. He snuffles and sniffs at you, then draws back in confusion. "You smell like Nick. You look like him, too. But you don't sound like him at all. Who are you? What happened to Nick?"
"I am Nicholas Garret," you say. "I am your trainer."
"No you're not!" Titan rears up again, his tail flame leaping and dancing with his agitation. "Who are you? What happened to my trainer?"
"I just told you. I am your trainer," you snap. You are Nicholas Garret. You are Titan's trainer, twice over. "Listen, Titan. Calm down. I will explain everything if you just--"
"No! I'm not listening to anything you say until you tell me where my trainer is!"
"Here, Boss. Let me handle this," Rats mutters.
"Go ahead," you say with a scowl, crossing your arms. "Obviously Titan is not going to listen to me. He is completely overreacting."
Rats pushes past you and cautiously approaches the charizard. He watches her come, dark smoke wreathing his narrowed eyes. "Titan, this is Rats," you say. "I am sure you remember her."
"That's right," Rats says. "Been a long time, hasn't it, big g--whoah." Titan bends down so far his snout nearly presses up against Rats' face, staring at her in utmost suspicion. She starts backing up, then throws herself sideways as a gush of fire shoots from Titan's mouth.
"Hey. Hey! Is that any way to treat an old friend?" the raticate grumbles, taking off as another flamethrower rushes her way. "What, don't you remember me, you stupid lizard?"
"I don't know you," Titan says in a low, volcanic rumble, twisting around to keep the raticate in his line of sight. Rats dances from paw to paw, on guard for more fire. "You think I can tell the difference between all the raticate I've ever met? You all look the same, like big, hairy--big, hairy rats!"
"Ooh, so that's how it is, huh? Well, how about this, Titan, would just any raticate remember that time you got beat up by that magikar--oof!" Titan's tail snaps around, catching Rats off guard and knocking her onto her side. The charizard comes at her with teeth and claws and flame, and Rats shrieks disparaging comments about his parentage while struggling to defend herself.
Titan pins the raticate under one foot and stares down at her, smoke streaming warningly from his nostrils. "You say we're old friends?" he growls. "A real friend would tell me what happened to my trainer."
"Well," Rats wheezes, "that's actually a bit of a difficult question. Maybe if you could let a rat breathe a bit here, we could--" Her voice cuts off in a squeak as Titan leans down on her, and then she glows red. Titan's foot lands heavily in the sand, Rats pulled safely back to her pokéball. You frown down at it for a moment before clipping it back to your belt. Well, that was a big help. You need to get Rats back in battling shape before you start your journey; she's spent too long lazing around at home.
"Now tell me," Titan says, and you look up to find him standing with mouth agape, white-hot saliva dripping around his teeth and sizzling in the sand below. "This is your last chance. What happened to my trainer? What happened to Nick?"
You've had enough of this. One hand balls into a fist down at your side, fingernails digging into your palm, longing to shift into claws. "Nicholas Garret is dead," you snap. "He drowned in the Seafoam caverns. Now I am him, and that makes me your trainer. It is as simple as that."
Titan stares at you, the ominous black smoke pouring from his mouth cutting off to a pathetic wisp. "He's dead? What are you talking about? Why do you look like him?"
"I just told you. I look like him because I am him, now. He does not need his life anymore. Now it is mine. And now I am your trainer again."
The charizard sits back on his haunches, staring at you around with wide, white-rimmed eyes. "Again?" He starts to pant, whining slightly with each exhalation. "Again? You, again? You--"
"Titan. Titan, calm down," you say, taking a step forward with one hand raised. "You remember me, do you not? You remember the promise you made with us. Rats was there, too. And War and Thunderstorm. You know all of them."
"I don't, I don't--My trainer's dead!" the charizard says tearfully, his too-short arms reaching up like he wants to bury his face in his claws. "How? What happened? I don't understand."
"He drowned. He slipped and fell in the river and then he drowned. Now, as I was saying--"
"How do you know?" The charizard thrusts his face into yours, so close you can smell the sulfurous gases on his breath. "Where's your proof? He can't be dead! You're lying!"
"I am standing right here, am I not?" you snap. "I have your pokéball. I have Nicholas Garret's pokédex. Your trainer is dead, Titan. I was there to see it. And I am your trainer n--"
"You were there?" Titan's smoking again, breathing out dark, suffocating clouds. "You saw it all, is that it? You did it, didn't you? You killed him! Murderer!"
"I did not kill him," you say indignantly. "Why would I do that? It was his time to go. I did not have to do anything at all."
"But you were there!" the charizard roars. "You said you were there, but you didn't help him? You didn't even try?"
"I did not do anything. It was not my place to intervene."
Titan's roar splits the air, and with a jolt you remember Rats is injured. There's no one to defend you. "Titan," you say slowly. "You would not attack your trainer, Titan."
The charizard answers with flame rather than words, and you fall clear over backwards, a streamer of fire cutting through the air overhead. You grab for Titan's pokéball, then pull your hand back. No. Delaying this isn't going to help anything. He needs to learn to obey you, and the sooner the better.
"Come on, Titan, let us just talk about this."
"Talk? Talk?! My trainer's dead! And you were there! You know! Stop pretending!"
"I am your trainer! I am not dead!" Another flamethrower sizzles through the air, but this time it washes up against a wall of energy, fire spreading inches from your face before dissipating into thin air.
Titan lets out a snort of surprise as you get back to your feet. "Fine," you say, nursing a ball of blue energy in one hand, water droplets running between your fingers and pattering to the ground. "I wanted to settle this like a human. But if you will not listen to me, we can settle this like pokémon instead."
You toss the ball of energy upwards, and Titan's gaze follows it higher, higher, until it explodes in a burst of blue light. The beach turns dark and cool as sudden storm clouds block out the sun, and Titan flinches as one fat droplet splashes on his snout. Dark patches appear in the sand as more raindrops fall, and in seconds the island is gripped by a full-on rainstorm.
Titan tents his wings over his head and tucks his steaming tail flame tight against his chest. He peers at you with dark, suspicious eyes, but the rain's taken the edge off his fury. "What are you?"
"I told you. I am your trainer. That is all that matters now." You shift a little, taking a more solid stance. You're twitching with the old battle restlessness, sizing Titan up without even thinking about it. You like a fight as much as any pokémon, after all. "Now are you going to listen to me, or do you still want to fight?"
Titan lunges, claws rippling with blue dragon flames. The rain is making him sluggish, though, streaming off his scales and dampening his tail flame. His claws dig into your side, but you manage to catch him, wrapping your arms around his neck and pulling him to the ground.
"Why won't you listen to me?" you ask, trying to hang on despite his thrashing. "Why do you not want to help me? I am your trainer. Do you not want to help your trainer?"
"My trainer's dead!" he chokes, struggling to reach you with another dragon claw. "You said so! You're just someone who looks like him. You're not even a real person! What are you?"
"I am Nicholas Garret!" you insist, feeling hot blood from your wound mix with cooler rain as it rolls down the inside of your shirt. Ugh. You only just bought these clothes.
"You're not! You're not! Liar!" His voice is hoarse now, more rattle than sound. You might be hugging his throat a bit too tight. The thanks you get when you loosen your hold is a flamethrower that rushes past your head, setting your hair on fire and immolating the edge of your ear.
You let go with a hiss of pain, landing hard in the wet sand and putting a hand up to the side of your head. "I am not lying," you insist through gritted teeth, and you're not. You are Nicholas Garret now, or all that's left of him, anyway.
Titan staggers to his feet, head rearing back and stubby arms reaching for his bruised throat. He takes a couple of deep, panting breaths, then sucks in one great gasp of air and lowers his snout again, spitting a fireball straight at you.
You only have a second to bring your arms up, crossing them in front of your face with palms out towards the charizard. You scream as the fire blast explodes into a sheet of flame, your arms shaking as you try to keep them in place. Then Titan's the one screaming, his roars drowning you out as he tries to shield himself with a wing. A glittering barrier hangs in the air in front of you, brilliant streamers of light peeling away from its surface and arcing towards the charizard, searing his scales and flashing raindrops into steam.
Titan falls to the ground, hiding his face behind his claws as scalding energy roars around him, rippling the sand in molten waves and letting off a hideous stink. You hold the mirror coat in place for a few seconds more, but at last the sheet of light cracks, then crumbles away to nothing as your arms flop down by your sides.
After a couple of minutes you gather your strength and stagger over to where he Titan lies, falling to your knees in front of him. The charizard's breathing harsh and shallow, his eyes unfocused. His tail shudders in the hot muck, burning lower now, but not low enough to be dangerous.
You reach down and lift the charizard's head, and his arms shudder as he tries to raise his body with it. You bring his face to eye level, close enough that he could engulf your entire head in flame with just a breath. You'll have to watch his eyes closely to know when to pull away.
The charizard's scales are feverish to the touch; he's weak enough now that he can't control his inner fire, and it's starting to eat him up from the inside. He's powerful for the moment, but he won't be able to stand it for long. "What... are..." His voice is hardly more than a croak.
"What do I have to do for you to accept me as your trainer?"
"I don't... You're not my trainer. My trainer is dead."
"Enough!" He flinches, something wary in his expression. His gaze is trying to slip away from yours, but you wrench his head around to keep his eyes on you. "What do I have to do?"
"Can't... You can't make me."
"I don't need to 'make' you. I'm your trainer. Stop trying to deny it." You don't even bother trying to speak human now. If Titan notices, he doesn't react.
"But you're dead," he says, weak and plaintive.
"That's what you wish, isn't it? You wish I was dead!" You're screaming now, and Titan's wings flare open in shock, beating wildly as he tries to pull away from you. You see in the tensing of his muscles that the moment is now, and you push his head down even as fire starts to gush out around his teeth. The flamethrower is lost as you force the charizard's face into the sand, and he thrashes harder, gagging as a gasp of shock sucks grit into his mouth. You wrench Titan's head up again and stare into his tearing eyes.
"Stop pretending! I know you remember. You promised the same as the rest of us. Someone has to save Mew. We failed last time, but we can't give up. I'm your trainer, Titan. I say we're going after her. Are you with me?"
The charizard's eyes show white. "I can't."
You let his head drop back to the ground, and he just leaves it lying there, the rain washing tears off his muzzle. While the charizard tries to control his sobbing, you try to control your temper, digging clawed fingers deep into the sand. You're glad you're human right now. It's hard enough to keep your head when you've been fighting, but as a pokémon, it's even harder. "What do I need to do?" you ask at last, and it even comes out sounding calm.
"Please. I don't understand. Who are you?" You almost can't make him out for the hitching in his voice.
"I told you. I'm Nicholas Garret now. I used to be somebody else. I could be someone else tomorrow. But right now I'm Nicholas Garret. What doesn't change is that I'm your trainer, and I need you to help me. What will it take for you to accept that?"
Titan takes another one of those great breaths, but you don't bother preparing for an attack. He only chokes on it, turning it into a sob. "Please... You told me you would save her."
You punch him in the snout as hard as you can, hard enough to shatter teeth. "You idiot. I can't do that without you." You push yourself to your feet, woozy and lightheaded, and stagger off towards home. Titan keeps his eyes on the ground, blood leaking from his mouth. It might be a while before he realizes you've left.
It only takes a few seconds for the dragon claw wound to scab over and vanish, the hideous bubbling burns to fade, but you still feel gray and drained as you stumble up to the house. Too much excitement. Too much blood lost. Duskull emerges from under the porch as you trip up the steps, making grumbly noises of concern, but you wave him away. All you need now is sleep.
--
Hours later, when the child's resting in bed, it hears the door bang open and something large blunder inside. It smiles and clutches the sheets tighter around itself. It knew Titan wasn't in any real danger, not with how short the rainstorm was, but it's glad he managed to find his way here, where he will be safe.
The kitchen table falls with an incredible crash, and the child imagines the soaked and muddy charizard slipping around on the tiles, searching for somewhere warm to curl up and dry off. That's fine. It doesn't mind the damage. It'll see the charizard in the morning, when it's feeling well enough to walk again. And then, at last, they can truly begin.
Turns out I did read the the first chapter after all (I have an unorthodox reading style due to ADHD/Anxiety but you get the point)
Present is a tricky tense to use and I speak from experience. I think the reason why present tense is so tricky is because the description game becomes totally different when writing a story in real time. You have done a great jon in showing how present tense should be utlized. It can't just be shoehorned into any story in the place of past tense. The drama and tension carry a sense of immediacy and urgency and you have multiple instances of evocative descriptions which is always a big plus to me.
You offer the woman a smile, and her eyes get kind of big. She shrinks back against the wall and calls out, "Hy-Hypno? Are you up? There's... There's someone here to see you."
Ahaha, guessing this smile wasn't very convincing.
To your relief Hypno appears a couple seconds later, moving much faster than you'd expect from someone who was supposedly just asleep. Her arm's up, pendant swinging from her fingers, its flashing arc drawing your eyes. Something about you gives Hypno pause. "Yes?" she ventures. "How can I help you?"
Oh boy, I'm guessing Hypno picked up Alina was kind of freaked out and came out there ready to fight.
"It's seven o'clock in the morning," Hypno says.
There's a big illuminated clock outside a drugstore down the street, glowing through a high-up window. "It's 6:49 AM," you say. There! That was helpful.
Hypno looks towards the door as though expecting to see the clone there, waiting behind you. And that's scary enough that you turn to look, too. But no, of course no one's there. "Mewtwo?" she says. "Really?" Her grip tightens around her cup. "He's not a shadow pokémon," she says quietly. "But he had something similar happen to him. And you're right, maybe some of the same things could help him."
"He's awful," you say vehemently.
"That's not what I meant." For a moment you're frozen, transfixed by the fury in Hypno's expression. Why is she so mad? Mewtwo is awful. Even she must see it.
"It's more than that, though. The shadow process wears off over time. Shadow pokémon start to get flashes of emotion—fear, anger, sadness, even something like happiness or contentment. They don't know how to handle them, even the positive ones—they're strange, and they're scary, and they can make a shadow pokémon lash out. That's why they seem unpredictable and violent, and they actually get more dangerous the closer they are to being purified. They're closer to being 'normal,' but they don't know how to process what's happening to them."
Boy, this sounds like it might be involved with Mewtwo. The getting the child to do a murder last chapter in particular is something that's striking me as possibly a symptom of this.
Oh man. What a chapter. Love the child's sheer traumatized terror throughout it all, always convinced Hypno's about to tell them to leave when really she senses that they're terrified and need somewhere to be. Hypno is so good.
The bit about memories locked away doesn't sound like Mewtwo but does sound like the child a bit, as they mention. Wonder if Celebi will play a role in revealing more of how the child came to be by letting them recover memories they can't access. Sure would have to be some of those if indeed the child is Mew.
Possible flaws in the child's plan:
- Absol might be able to find the Master Ball via Fate, and if she does she'll dig it up because Fate trumps everything else.
- I don't recall if this fic has established exactly what happens when a Pokéball is destroyed with a Pokémon in it, but it seems a not-unreasonable assumption that the Pokémon would be automatically let out? In which case burying it under the pressure of a mountain of sand might not be great.
- Or maybe the pressure would just plain press the button in?
Either way, looking forward to seeing this all go horribly wrong.
Foar a second you consider staying anyway and talking to whoever this is
