“What a darling Sylveon! We don’t see a lot of the Eevee’s around here,” a woman said. “They’re extremely rare, and that always fetches top dollar. I’m surprised you haven’t hosted a bid for her yet!”
I was curious about the mechanics here--surely at some point the rich people have to stop swapping pokemon around and have one they want to keep, right? It can't be a constant cycle of auctioning off pokemon; surely at some point they have one or two they get to keep as trophies?
Two/three minds here--one, you want to show that she/the people at this party are shitty and materialistic, and are objectifying Enora in a way that horrifies Odette. I think this would phrase better as something like "What a darling Sylveon! We don't see a lot of the Eevee's around here. Is she for sale?" and then jump into the bidding--this would better convey that this woman wants to purchase a shiny sylveon, not that everyone who walks around with a shiny pokemon is trying to sell them.
[maybe have her mention it's even harder to find sylveon because it's so
hard to get them to evolve into the "finnicky" ones for some reason
the reason is that sylveon/espeon/umbreon have to fucking like you. a stone is much cheaper than kindness. what trainer did she use to coerce this eevee to evolve; can she have their number?]
Two, everyone who walks around with a shiny pokemon is trying to sell them. Odette notices this as the last party with people setting up impromptu auctions as she's walking around the dance floor or something. She notices that Isaur and Talonflame are more or less out of place as the only pokemon who are wandering around the party and aren't for sale.
Three, the rich people actually are constantly trying to sell their shiny pokemon because it turns out you need a
specific shiny pokemon to become a legendary sin pokemon, but for some reason they don't exactly know which one for sure so you have to keep cycling through them. This could play nicely into Odette accidentally fucking over Enora here--she
thinks they'll be fine because Odette was planning on using the "oh, my darling Enora? I could never sell her, the coloration is just so
exquisite" since Odette thinks that they're just collecting shiny pokemon for being rare, and then all the rich people are confused because their actual goal is to get through as many shiny pokemon as possible. Odette either doesn't make the connection there (because it's a pretty big stretch), or she actually gets new information (as a reward! for sucking up to rich people! actions have consequences)
She was much too snappy at the last gettogether, and while Dorien was apparently none the wiser to her distaste, she had to make sure she was still playing her part effectively...as much as it continued to trigger her gag reflex.
character growth!
*get together
(I think the one thing that would make this more complete for me is a bit of realization that there's consequences for failing to act the part, or rewards for playing along. Like maybe Dorien's obsessed with her and will creepily dote no matter how many times she throws him to the side (this is an assumption based on what he's sad; I'm not sure if it's true about him tbh), but she manages to swallow down the bile and schmooze up to him for four seconds and he lets some very important detail slip/invites her somewhere/shows her off to an inner circle and she realizes that she can get more info out of him effectively if he's
happy, not just
physically near her. it's really gross though so I get why she wouldn't do that--the converse though would be that she pisses off Dorien one too many times and isn't able to get the info she wants or something. Consequences for her choice here, good or bad, that lead her to make this decision, would go a long way in selling this character choice to me!)
Instead, she averted her gaze down toward his grey shirt sleeve. She focused on a faint and patchy blue stain just on the inside of the cuff, suppressing her own growl as Dorien leaned down and nuzzled his face into hers. She distracted herself by wondering what poor maid he fired for allowing such a stain to form.
I liked the foreshadowing setup here.
“No, I just didn’t like any of them and wanted to go with my friends,” Odette said sternly.
Dorien chuckled again. “She really just has high standards, so of course she decided that I was worth the time!”
In general I think this is my main sticking point with Odette-and-the-rich--I can't tell if she actually wants to schmooze up to them or not. In narration she says she does, and they keep going to these things with the goal of trying to get info out of them, but every time she's got the chance she's pretty aggro about reminding them how assholeish they are and she hates them, and then Dorien or Clovis smooths things over for her. So the agency feels a bit lost, I think.
And there's a lot of ways this could go,
especially in light of her background. I think her theater background would be really helpful for getting her to lie here--deep breaths; she reminds herself she's just playing another part, and that part requires her not to make a snarky comment in this exact moment. Or, as someone who's holding in a Lot of repressed trauma--it's pretty clear that she's got a lot of experience pretending like things are Fine, and she channels that.
(And this could feet a little into how/why she admires Clovis so much--Dorien's such a POSER, he's always SMILING and POSTURING and PREENING because his family is full of LAME SOCIAL CLIMBERS
like she's pretending to be, and she hates that she has to channel it and that she's not terrible at it either, but Clovis is over here saying all the things she wishes she could say, but doesn't have the power/social standing to. Plus, her conversations with him just feel so much more REAL because she can finally speak her mind and this makes her swuwuwuwuooon)
I also get the feeling that you want her to
try lying and then be really bad at it because she's so short-tempered/anggy all the time, which is the other angle you could go for. But I think that comes in two flavors as well--she never really seems to
try, and the narration fails to punish her for it. She's clearly not from money/power, so I don't really get why people at these galas would give a shit about her if all she does is keep pissing them off (Dorien's obsessed with her because Plot and I get that part). But in general if the point is that she's good at
reading people but bad at
manipulating them because she can't lie convincingly, only see through them--then structurally it'd be helpful if her trying and
failing to do these things had actual bad repercussions, like the people at the table start to ignore her because she's literally this random poor nobody from nowhere and this is literally a crowd of people who
buy and sell people.
“Enora doesn’t have a taste for alcohol,” Odette said.
I thought this would be a good place to set up the Solene/memories returning thing--"Enora doesn't have a taste for alcohol. None of my pokemon do, actually, [except for maybe some do??? up to you]"--but this way there's a little seed planted for when she starts to question Dorien's story in the next part--Solene had been drunk?? That didn't make any sense; Solene
hated alcohol--and then maybe that can be used to get Noel to realize there's something up that might be deeper than head trauma.
He held his Vullaby in a baby harness, strapped to his stomach. The bird was in the middle of downing what looked to be a cupcake.
amazing. very glad the bird care route is going full circle.
“Do you know where I could find some water?” she asked. Dorien stopped in his sip, before nodding his head toward the bar that had been setup under one of the larger white gazebos. “They’ll certainly have some at the bar,” he said. “Is the wine too much, sweetheart?”
It'd be helpful to split the paragraphs here so that Odette/Dorien are on separate paragraphs.
If there was ever a time for Enora and her to be on the same page, it was now. She needed her to understand.
poor Enora :(
I think it's kind of rough that it's never really a question about understanding what Enora thinks here, and just being blatantly certain that Odette's decision is the correct one and she's entirely safe to do this (especially since, as we've seen with the whole Dorien in chapter 7 thing, she's definitely not!). It seems like the compromise/"on the same page" here is just, "we have to do it my way".
(sidebar, the "she needed her to understand" is a little tricky to parse as far as who's who)
A majority of them looked tired. Maybe not as tired as that Malamar and that Scizor had looked, but a lot of them walked with noticeably sluggish weight in their step. More noticeably, most exuded an aura of reluctance. They trailed behind their “trainers” with gaits that made it clear they wanted to be anywhere else but there. Smiles were sparse, and cheerful mannerisms were even sparser.
Odette wondered how she never noticed it at that gala. Or, maybe she had, it just didn’t register with her as abnormal until she saw that battle.
I struggled to relate this "she hadn't noticed it was abnormal" with the idea that Odette is hyper-observant and notices everything, to the point that this has been voiced by pretty much every member of the cast. This as a reader telegraphs as either:
- Odette
isn't actually hyper-observant and misses key details even when she's actively looking for things. She's good at observing things, and definitely above average, but not to the point that people are like "she reads the world like a BOOK"
- Odette
is hyper-observant. But she's seen pokemon who don't want to be where they are a lot, so this doesn't telegraph as unusual to her.
And I don't really think you want the second one (since that implies a dramatically more cruel world for pokemon than I think you're going for), so I think the first option is a little better? I also think it's okay for a character to be
good at something without being the
best, since then there's some room for failure and the narrative gets tension back.
(there's also ways to stretch this I think--
- there were fewer pokemon at the gala because it wasn't an auction gala; it was more of a socializing gala and the rich people didn't want to be bothered by their dumb POKEMON. the tea party here is for selling pokemon so there are way more of them around
- darkness/environmental differences at the gala. or there's a whole section of the gala that has a ton of shiny pokemon, but Dorien is actively keeping her away from that
- she
does notice but thinks that it's just rich people being dicks. this would double better if they're also dicks to her, or the waitstaff, or something--easy for her to be like, oh, they just run
everyone ragged, and then later she realizes, no, this is more than just exhaustion. it puts a middle ground between not noticing "this pokemon is behaving as I normally expect it to"/"this pokemon are literally on drugs" and "damn, that pokemon looks pretty sad and unenthused about the party"/"this pokemon is literally on drugs" that would be easier for Odette to exist in. She's correctly identified the symptom here but presents the wrong cause, which is fair, because it's a stretch to assume that the rich people would
want to drug their very expensive trafficked trophies without also knowing the connection between shiny pokemon/sacrilege/sin pokemon.)
Odette could see Enora’s ears sinking lower and lower the more she spoke. Whether that meant she was getting to her, only time would tell. She yawned loudly, but wouldn’t let that break her streak.
I think Odette was yawning here but it's really hard to tell since the her could also be Enora.
“You know damn well that if you weren’t with me, going through whatever hell those ‘mon are going through, you’d want somebody to do something about it.” She sucked in a deep breath in order to level the haze that had started to cloud her vision.
I think this would land more easily with me if it was coming from Enora, instead of Odette--Enora's uncertain, but her eye catches on a shiny [pokemon] passing by that looks absolutely miserable, she and Odette stare at it, and Enora starts to shift her mind a little. This puts the ball more in Enora's court than just a lecture from Odette that's basically "look if you were a victim of trafficking you'd be upset, so go pretend to be a victim of trafficking for me."
The anger she’d managed to wade through previously was starting to flare back up again. She wasn’t quite sure why, though. She knew where his head was, and it of course made sense. She supposed she was getting so upset, because she couldn’t bear the thought of this man she liked so much viewing her in such a negative light. Right?
Knowing the reveal from the next chapter, I'm actually not sure why Clovis thinks she purchased Enora? He knows Bernard well enough to know that there's no way Odette could actually afford this, and it seems like he/Bernard have discussed Odette long enough for Bernard to reveal that Odette's interested in the sacrilege stuff + already had a shiny pokemon. I think if you want it to look like Clovis thinks she's trying to
sell Enora (instead of "then how did you" / "[caught her] the old fashioned way"), he'd be asking sarcastically about her bids, what kind of price she's setting, to get a feel for
that--but the shock here is that she
has a shiny, which doesn't make sense to me in light of what we find out later.
A nasty glare fell over her features as she looked back over at him. Her angered lips detached from her brain, and began to run before she could think it over. “I could ask you the same thing, Clovis. What’s a shut-in like you doing figure skate--”
oh no oh rip this is not the subtle plan she'd made last chapter lol
“Take the handkerchief,” he said in a whisper. But, what struck her is that he said it in Galarian. She considered it, before doing as he instructed. He sighed in what sounded to be relief as he removed his other hand and sat back down.
I thought this was a clever moment!
“How’d you even research without a last name?” she asked.
“I could ask you that,” he said.
Except he's Clovis LeClair, eldest son of megacorp mc megacorp, and she's not--I don't see why he's so impressed that she figured out his last name when literally
everyone at this party knows him and it's just a matter of asking.
“If it’s any consolation, I don’t know enough concrete evidence to blow your cover. I just know you fucked up.”
I'm unsure how cagey you want to convey Odette as being around him--if she doesn't fully trust him, why disclose how little she actually knows?
“Either you’re a fantastic actress, or you don’t despise your trainer.”
This is horrifying to me because it implies that Clovis sees a lot of pokemon who are fantastic actresses, and that they specifically
act as if they love their trainers even if they consciously don't, which in turn kind of collapses the whole "pokemon have an equal say here and we'd be able to tell if they're unhappy" because 1) trainers can't tell if they're unhappy because pokemon can lie about it and 2) they
choose to lie about it as opposed to doing anything else.
1) is horrifying because like, the implication that this is common casts all of the other pokemon interactions in a kind of ugly light--is Ange actually happy to be here or is he just acting? who knows??? has loic had a genuine change of heart or is he just acting this way so that Odette feeds him??? Odette sort of acting like this is the norm makes a lot of her interactions seem a lot less trustworthy.
2) suggests that there's nothing else the pokemon can do, to the point that acting like they like their trainers is the best option, which is pretty bleak. This in turn suggests that pokemon who don't like their trainers can't leave and have no options for leaving (because there's arguably very few situations in which it's
fair that you'd need to choose to act like you like someone you actually "despise"), which again, makes things look a lot uglier than I think you want in this world.
Which, again, maybe what you want? I think we discussed back in the beta read for 3 how a lot of worldbuilding and character perception is intertwined--people do horrible things. Protagonists can do horrible things too. Or, there's a lot of directions to take this that don't necessarily have to end in "wow the real villain in this fic is literally anyone who owns a pokemon":
- Odette is horrified at the implication that pokemon would ever have to act like they like their trainers, for the reasons above, because in the society that she's from, pokemon can leave whenever they want and there's no pressure for them to
act happy--being friends with someone means you're open to their opinions. She voices this in disgust and Clovis shrugs, takes a dreamy drag from his cancer stick, and points out that she's been acting like she likes the people at this party even though she
clearly despises them; he wouldn't judge if Enora was a better actress than she was ("Sprinkle's got a real
cool poker face that I could never hope to match tbh"). Odette has Thoughts about how you can be coerced into doing things that you don't want to do without actual threats of violence, and Odette sympathizes even more with the shiny pokemon because she can see her own behavior reflected in them--but she can afford to slip up a few times and piss off some rich people because Dorien/Clovis will cover for her; the shiny pokemon have to be 100% acting all the time, and the alternative? being turned into the snake from before? that's so fucked, she realizes. That's what's on the line for them though. And maybe this inspires her to be more careful in her acting now.
- Clovis doesn't say this. He is confused by Enora and glances around the garden. Odette notices another shiny pokemon looking crestfallen while two rich people shake hands. Clovis glances back and exhales, and says he believes Odette. Odette's confused but grateful--really, he believes her so easily uwu? And Clovis looks back at the shiny pokemon, who is now actively sobbing or something as it's being ushered away by a new owner--"the people here don't actually care about their pokemon. if they did, none of them would be here." Odette realizes that this must be how Clovis saw through her as well, and realizes that it's not too hard to tell if someone's sad--but you have to
look for it, and no one at the garden is
looking.
Or something! There's a lot of options here, but I think as with the initial draft of the shiny trade, Odette sort of nodding and taking it into stride implies that it's
normal to her, when the fucked-up implications there might not be the ones you want to incorporate into your world.
“Do you have your phone on you?” As Clovis spoke he was digging into his pocket again. He withdrew the same Applin phone he’d dunked in the vase at the gala. The thing had to have been waterproof, because he clicked it on, and it appeared to still be working like nothing was wrong.
I love that the idea of him just having a billion dollars and as such buying a new phone doesn't occur to her here.
Odette frowned, then began to scratch her behind her left ear. “It’s okay. Thank you for helping me argue with him. You really tipped the scale.”
her/her stack was tricky
She briefly wondered if anybody had ever been attacked by a Gyarados while they were attending a fancy gettogether like this one. Perhaps it did happen, and it made the signs necessary. She wondered why there were even Gyarados in the lake in the first place, only to remember that Magikarp eventually evolved.
This setup is hard for me to follow--why woudn't they have a tame pretty pokemon that doesn't evolve into a killer monster, like goldeen or finneon?
From a meta perspective, I get why you want gyarados in the lake, but I don't understand why the rich people would but then would have signs for 'Beware of Gyarados'--which implies they know the danger and are willing to put themselves at risk for no real reason than that they like magikarp but can't stop them from evolving (which is silly--rich people defang tigers and shit. it'd be so easy for them to slap everstones on them, or just kill them and get new ones; these guys are literally drugging their super expensive pokemon to death). I think a different angle you could take that would still let you have the lake full of gyarados for later would be to make it a huge spectacle--there's a fancy fountain in the middle; Odette approaches and is horrified to see that there's not one but
two gyarados in the lake, holy shit, that's so dangerous, what the fuck? But no one else is afraid; someone even tosses a stone at the gyarados or something--something to establish that the rich people a) think that the gyarados are an empty threat and b) know that this isn't the norm. She looks closer and she's able to see that the gyarados are drugged, or there's a super powerful force field at the top, or they've got shock collars on (these are things that the adrenaline orb can negate later), and Odette is disgusted. But it's just another display of these asshole rich people doing something needlessly cruel and dehumanizing because they
can, and the exoticness of being able to flex on what would normally be a force of nature is just too appealing to them.
(And if you really want to drive the point home, Dorien pulls her away from the lake with a skeevy grin, touches her shoulder, makes jokes about marrying her, whatever. Odette's temper flares up. In the background, someone tosses a stone at the gyarados again or starts pulling on its whiskers. She sees the
rage in its eyes but the collar around its neck fizzles dangerously. Dorien follows her gaze and remarks that it's no fun once they've become so broken that they stop fighting back. Then he pulls on her again, and Odette has to make a choice.)
