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teshamerkel · 3 years

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Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Seekers of Soul

[Chapter 24] (31 Pages)

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Will lays out the current state of the The Humans Movement, and our trio finally attends the long-awaited magic show!

“Welcome, everyone! To the first meeting of The Humans Movement!”

Nia perks up at Will’s words, and another wave of cheering and excited murmuring erupts from the crowd around them.

“What a warm reception!” Will says, smiling. The crowd bubbles with laughter. “Thank you everyone for coming to join us today. I never expected such a great turnout for our first meeting! For years I’ve wanted to unite the humans who have found themselves here in the Pokemon world, and as we can all see there are a great number of us now. Even more out in the world who couldn’t join us today! And as you likely know, my goal is to lead every single one of us back home.”

Nia has to stop herself from squeezing the rookidee in her lap, already feeling the tingle of tears building behind her eyes. This is it. This is how she’ll get back to everyone she left behind.

“Now,” Will says, with a clap of his hands. Even in the large space it seems loud, and it’s only then that Nia realizes how quiet everyone has grown, eagerly listening to the yamask speak. “While we’re still figuring out many of the details, I’m more than happy to share what we know so far about our situation. I’m sure most of you have wondered time and again how in the world this all happened. How did we go from regular, everyday people to living in a world entirely different from our own? And as unbelievable, magical creatures with fantastic powers, too!”

There’s a quiet muttering of agreement from the crowd, and Nia finds herself nodding along. Some days she wakes up and still can’t believe all of this is really happening. Pokemon, magic powers, stuck in a world entirely different from her own.

“While we are still in the process of figuring out exactly how we came to this world, we are positive that both our transfer to this world and our change in form is the work of a Pokemon.”

The crowd’s volume rises again, and Will raises his hands to calm the noise. “Everyone here has seen the amazing powers that Pokemon wield, and even the Pokemon themselves do not know the full extent of every individual’s abilities. Only a powerful Pokemon—or multiple Pokemon—could change the laws of nature itself and turn us into creatures so foreign to humankind.”

Nia frowns. Well, when it’s said like that it seems sort of obvious, but all of the Pokemon she’s spoken to so far have seem just as baffled by humans showing up in the Pokemon world as the humans themselves.

“While this may seem surprising,” Will continues. “We believe such an extraordinary power could only be held by the legendary Pokemon of this world. All accounts agree that these legendary beings had control over elements as great as time itself, that they held power over space and sky and sea. We are confident that the power of a legendary is the only one great enough to shift reality so completely.”

“But I thought the legendaries were dormant?” Someone shouts off to their right.

Will nods. “As far as most are concerned, they are. However, we have reason to believe that some legendary Pokemon are still active, and simply staying out of sight from the public.”

A nervous hush falls over the room, and Nia hugs Junie closer to herself. A legendary is the reason they all changed into Pokemon, and now they’re hiding away from everyone? But why? Didn’t they used to be, like…deities? Gods? Why would they be in hiding?

What would they be hiding from?

“Legendary Pokemon haven’t been seen for decades,” Tobias protests loudly to Nia’s left, standing to catch Will’s attention. Nia shrinks away from the hundreds of eyes that turn their way. “Even if they are hiding, what makes you think that they’re behind this? Why would they even want to bring humans to our world?”

Will nods, slowly, but doesn’t seem bothered by Tobias’ aggressive tone. “Yes, while it seems like an odd choice for such powerful beings to make, unfortunately we do have a…suspicion. As to why this might be the case. Keep in mind it’s just a theory for now, but we have very good reason to believe it a valid concern.”

Tobias grudgingly flops into his seat to listen, and the crowd falls into a tense silence.

“It is not a concern about all of the legendary Pokemon so much as it is about one in particular. There is a legendary,” Will pauses, almost hesitant. “Who is rarely spoken of, even among the Pokemon of this world: Giratina.”

Nia’s head snaps up, and she exchanges a look with Tobias. Giratina? The terrifying Pokemon they’d discussed with Fliss the day before?

“Giratina was once a revered legendary Pokemon,” Will explains, echoing the braviary’s words. “A guardian over the borders between different dimensions. Different worlds. But he was banished to the dimensional rift, his own realm, for violently attacking another legendary. He was the guardian of this world’s borders, and as such we believe that he guarded the Pokemon world from the human world as well. According to stories he still resides in the limbo between dimensions, fighting to escape and enact his revenge. As such, we suspect that he may be behind both the disappearance of the other legendaries as well as the appearance of humans in the Pokemon world.”

The crowd explodes into a babble of sound as Pokemon call out worried questions and turn to each other with fearful expressions. Nia frowns and watches Will patiently wait out the wave. She’d suggested something similar to Will’s theory on the flight to Ghatha, but she hadn’t actually thought it could be related to how they got here, or how they would return home. Could Giratina really be behind everything?

Eventually, Will once again raises his hands for silence. The noise slowly dies down.

“I don’t tell you this to alarm you,” Will says, tone soothing. “But just as a precaution. Giratina may be hoping to bring over enough humans to somehow weaken the barriers and his own curse so he can break free once again. We know very little for certain, but we do know that he cannot be trusted. Over the years, a few humans have reported glimpsing a large creature with red eyes following them through reflections—in water, in moonstone and metal and other reflective surfaces. Reflections are Giratina’s one window into our world. We suspect that he is attempting to contact humans, hoping to persuade them into helping him. Do not listen to him.”

Nia holds Junie closer, staring up at Will with wide eyes. Being stalked by an evil deity through reflections? That’s something straight out of a horror movie!

“Can he hurt us?” Someone calls, voice high with panic.

“We don’t believe he can physically touch someone through reflections, no,” Will responds. “The few reports we’ve gathered have only spoken of him watching the humans or, even more rarely, attempting to speak with them. We advise that if this happens to you, you leave the area of the reflective surface as soon as possible and contact me to let me know about the situation.”

Will’s assurance seems to soothe the worst of the crowd’s fear, and Nia slumps in her seat, relieved.

“However,” Will says, smiling once again. “While Giratina himself is certainly not on our side, he may still help us out regardless. I have been assembling a team, made up of both humans and Pokemon, in order to find a way back to the human world, and they suspect that if Giratina could find a way to bring us here, he may be the key to finding our way back.”

“That makes sense,” Nia whispers, exchanging a hopeful look with Junie.

The murmuring has picked up again, but noticeably lighter in tone this time. After a few moments, someone closer to the front of the crowd raises a hesitant arm—tentacle?—and Will nods at them with an encouraging smile. They say something too quiet to hear.

“Ah, yes,” Will says, loud enough to catch the room’s attention once again. “The issue of everyone’s missing memories.”

Nia straightens up.

“Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a foolproof method for recovering them,” Will says. “And considering that it’s a consistent issue for every human who shows up in the Pokemon world, we believe it to be a purposeful choice. Perhaps Giratina thinks taking away everyone’s memories would make them more susceptible to trusting him or helping him in some way.”

Nia feels a spark of anger light in her belly. Taking something as precious as their memories just to try and manipulate them is a special kind of low.

“Regardless,” Will continues, “While some humans have regained their memories over time, there doesn’t appear to be a reliable method for recovering them. We’re hopeful that they will either return to everyone with time as we figure out how to return home, or that our eventual return to the human world will reverse the process.”

“How long will it take before we can go back to our world?” Someone yells from the back of the auditorium.

Will shoots a sympathetic look in that direction. “While we believe we are well on our way to finding the answer, it will still take some time. I ask for your patience as we figure everything out. I know it’s hard, and many of us are still feeling far too alone in this strange place, far from home—”

There’s a dip in the mood of the room as everyone shifts and nods quietly at his words.

“—But that is part of the reason I wanted to form an organization for us humans,” Will continues. “While this is all confusing and at times frightening, it helps to have fellow humans around who understand. This way, everyone can know that they are not alone. We are new to this world, but as our numbers grow, so does our strength.”

Will pauses, something in his expression growing darker. “Even when the Pokemon of this world turn on us, we will always have each other. I’m sure you have all been made aware that humans have become a source of blame for the problems of this world.”

Nia frowns, glancing again at Tobias as August and Maggie’s words come back to her. She hasn’t really dealt with any harassment or blame in Bethoc’s Haven, but from the way that the Pokemon around her shift and wince, some even making angry growls of agreement, she’s the outlier here.

“While this region has been less affected by natural disasters,” Will says, floating across the stage as if pacing slowly from one end to the other. “The entire world is clearly being affected by something, regardless. Along with floods and earthquakes and droughts, there is the increasing number of mystery dungeons, the silence from the Pokemon legends, and everyone’s inability to evolve. The Pokemon who were born here are scared because of these changes. We, too, are a change—a strange group that began to show up just as these problems surfaced.”

“However,” Will continues, voice hard as steel. “Remember that none of this is our fault. Could we truly cause such widespread issues, when we didn’t even ask to be brought here in the first place?”

The crowd reacts to Will’s tone, many of them shaking their heads while a couple of Pokemon shout loudly at the stage. Will takes a visible, deep breath, and the crowd quiets to listen to his next words.

“We are not to blame,” Will repeats, softer. “We simply want to go home. However, until that can become a reality, I want to make sure every human has a place they can feel safe, somewhere they can call home. To accomplish this, I will be opening my own home here in the Pokemon world to all humans. If you have nowhere else to go, you will be free to join me and the others living and working at my side in our little community. You are not required to come, of course, but I don’t want any human to feel unsafe or alone if I can help it.”

Nia smiles, even more warmed by Will’s compassion than she was before. For a moment she imagines going to this community herself, being surrounded by other humans like Junie and Will and maybe even helping them find a way back home. But…

Nia glances at Tobias. The charmander is watching the yamask with a furrowed brow, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. Despite how annoyingly cynical he can be, she still committed to being Tobias’ partner while she’s in this world. Besides, she enjoys her job and all of the Pokemon at the Lexym Guild; she doesn’t want to leave them quite yet. She can just go visit Will and his group later on!

“However, for those of you who already have obligations or somewhere to stay, we are also creating a mailing list to send out updates and important information,” Will adds.

Nia perks up. Oh, she’s definitely signing up for that!

“The booths will still be running in the main hall for a while yet,” Will continues, “But there will be a new table set up in the center of the room once we are finished here. Go there to get the location of the open community or to sign up for our mailing list, where we will keep you updated on the developments in our research as well as with resources and news regarding The Humans Movement.”

The chatter in the room picks up again, excited this time, and Junie leans back to ask Nia, “You signing up for that?”

“Yup!”

Junie nods, smiling. “Then I will too! I like to stay in the loop on things.”

Tobias snorts, still watching Will like the ghost Pokemon will start attacking them at any second.

“You’re still suspicious of him?” Nia asks, exasperated.

“If anything, I trust him less,” Tobias grumbles.

“Why?” Junie chirps, sounding genuinely curious.

Tobias is silent for a few moments. Then, he shrugs. “He just…feels a bit too put-together. And he’s still being vague, too. Something about him just feels off.”

“Oh, that’ll hold up in court,” Nia mumbles. Tobias shoots her a glare while Junie giggles.

“I do have one more announcement to make before letting you all go back to the main hall,” Will calls with another clap of his hands. Slowly, the room quiets to listen.

The yamask’s smile is excited now. “I’m sure many of you have heard of the performance being put on in the plaza later this evening by The Fire Breathers. They’re an amazing magic and performance troupe, and just what we could all use after such a long, stressful day. I spoke with them the other night, and they were kind enough to offer a free, private showing beforehand for the members of The Humans Movement right here in the Convention Center!”

There’s an excited burst of applause and cheering at that.

Nia joins them. “Now we won’t even have to pay to see them!”

“At least he did something helpful,” Tobias grumbles.

Junie laughs and joins in on the cheering while Nia just rolls her eyes with a smile. Between Will’s confident reassurance regarding their eventual return to the human world and this news about the magic show, she’s on cloud nine! Even Tobias’ usual grouchiness can’t put a damper on her mood.

Will raises his hands for quiet, and the noise dies down to a low, eager clamor.

“The show will be held in this very room,” The yamask says, looking pleased by the crowd’s excitement. “Just as the sun begins to set in an hour or so. Until then, feel free to visit any booths you missed before, enjoy the delicious food, or even step outside for some fresh air! Just be sure to grab a tag from Nero out front so he knows to let you back in. He’s the large, purple nidoking you may have seen on your way in.”

At that, Will bows and turns to leave the stage, and the room fills with chatter again as Pokemon stand, stretch, and turn to make their way out of the room and back into the hall.

“C’mon, we need to sign up for the newsletter before the line gets too long!” Nia says, hurrying their trio into the flow of the crowd. “I don’t want to miss out on the new developments down the road.”

“Like he’ll have any,” Tobias growls. “He still didn’t give you guys any solid answers.”

“Just because he doesn’t have the answers yet doesn’t mean he won’t later on,” Nia counters, giving Tobias a frown. “He’s doing more than anyone else is to get us all home! And he sounded like he was pretty confident about it, too.”

Tobias makes a doubtful noise in his throat that Nia pointedly ignores in favor of leading them to the table Will mentioned to sign up for the mailing list. She’s getting better at writing in the Pokemon language, and writes Nia the Riolu in wobbly but mostly-readable handwriting. After that, she sheepishly hands the stick of graphite over to Tobias so he can write down the Lexym guild’s location without it taking ten minutes. Junie’s own handwriting isn’t much better, considering she’s writing with her beak and tiny feet. From there, the three of them make their way back into the main hall, then pause.

“I think we got to all of the booths,” Nia says, looking around. “What did you guys want to do until the magic show?”

“I’m going outside,” Tobias growls immediately, shifting away from a brown mule-like Pokemon crowding into his bubble of personal space. “Can’t even breathe in here.”

“Fresh air sounds nice,” Nia agrees, while Junie chirps her agreement and hops onto the riolu’s shoulder.

The three of them weave their way back to the entrance, out the front door and back into the late-afternoon sun. The warmth on her face is nice combined with the cool, salty air, and Nia smiles as she tilts her face up with a deep breath. When she opens her eyes, blinking against the brightness, Tobias is already speaking with the giant purple Pokemon guarding the doorway—a nidoking, Will said—and accepting three little tags that must be their ticket back into the Convention Center. Tobias rejoins them, handing over the tickets, and Nia takes hers with a word of thanks.

“It’s pretty busy out here, too,” Nia notes, looking out over the marketplace that’s been set up. It’s just as busy as it was when they arrived earlier in the day, with Pokemon moving between stalls, talking and snacking as they shop amongst the merchants. “Might be a good time to check everything out, though.”

“You can go buy cheap junk if you want to,” Tobias snorts. “I’ve had enough interaction for the next year.”

With that, the charmander turns back to the Convention Center, plopping down against the side of the towering building. His tail flame is bright against the heavy shade cast there. Nia can’t really blame him for being done socializing for the day and needing a break. Even she’s kind of exhausted, and she loves talking to people!

Nia hums, watching the charmander settle in for what looks like a short nap. “What do you want to do, Junie? You wanna rest with Tobias, or—”

“Let’s go check out the wares!” Junie trills, jumping atop Nia’s head and pointing a wing out towards the tents and crowd. “I wanna do some browsing without grumpy-pants tailing us.”

Nia laughs, calls out to Tobias that they’ll be back soon, and moves into the crowd to explore.

__________________________________________________

“Ugh,” Nia groans, flopping back into the cool, concrete seating of the auditorium. “I’m exhausted.” Junie chirps an agreement and collapses into a pile of feathers at her side.

Tobias snorts, taking his own seat on Nia’s other side. “Should’ve taken a break instead of traipsing around in the sun for so long.”

“But everyone was selling such cool stuff!” Nia protests weakly, slowly acclimating to the cooler air of the auditorium. “I had to see it.”

“And now you’re a useless lump,” Tobias drawls.

“It’s not like we’re going to be doing anything,” Nia laughs, sitting up and looking around as more Pokemon—the humans—file into the auditorium where Will spoke to them earlier. “We’re here for a magic show! Our only job is to watch, enjoy, and try to figure out how they do their tricks!”

Junie laughs. “They’re Pokemon—they already have magic powers. I don’t know how many ‘tricks’ there’ll really be.”

“I’ve heard they’re pretty good,” Tobias says. He sounds nonchalant, but Nia can tell his eyes are brighter than usual, shoulders relaxed as he scans the stage. He’s excited for this too.

The riolu smiles and idly looks around the room again. It’s darker than it was earlier, the harsh sunlight that had flooded the stage from the ceiling now a dim, evening dusk that leaves everything a bit hard to see outside of Tobias’ tail light. Nia feels soothed by the dark space and the fresh, clean scent of the foliage lining the walls and ceiling of the room.

Before Nia can ask if they’ll have something to illuminate the stage, like the guild’s glowing crystals, little wisps of flame suddenly flicker into existence around the outer floor of the stage, catching everyone’s attention. They hover in place like little fairy lights, a variety of different colors, and Nia sits up with an awestruck gasp.

“Are they starting?!” Nia whispers.

Tobias, leaning forward in his seat and not even bothering to hide his enthusiasm anymore, grins. “Must be.”

As they watch, the colorful wisps of fire dart into the middle of the stage, converging into one colorful pillar of flame and growing, growing growing until it’s a tall plume of twisting light.

“Whoa!” Junie breathes.

As quickly as the flames gathered, they vanish, leaving behind a cloud of embers and, at their heart, a Pokemon. It’s a tall, bipedal fox, standing in place with his arms held high, twin branches held in his hands, their ends alight in orange flame. The fox looks completely at home among the fire, fur patterned in warm yellows and oranges and reds and hanging around his frame in long tufts that almost look like a cloak.

“Good evening, and welcome to the show!” The fox calls, a bright, toothy grin on his face. The stunned crowd explodes into applause and cheers, and he bows low, branches sweeping around with an arc of flame. “I, the great Hugo, will be guiding the show for you tonight. Everyone sit back, relax, and enjoy the magic!”

With that, Hugo sweeps his arm forward, a cloak of flame enclosing him before vanishing entirely and taking him with it, only a few embers lingering in the air where he stood. Some of the crowd cries out in astonishment as everything goes dark.

A moment later, two fireballs ignite on either side of the stage, hovering in place a few feet off the stone ground. From somewhere around the back of the stage, what sounds like a violin begins to play a jaunty tune. To Nia’s astonishment, the fireballs start to float and move with the song, circling through the air in graceful, synchronized movements. As the tempo of the song picks up, the fire balls seem to stretch, long tails of flame trailing behind them until they’re moving like great, fiery dragons. They weave through and around each other, and then more fireballs light up along the stage—blue ones, purple ones, even green ones—before joining the first flames in a graceful dance.

Nia holds her breath, feeling goosebumps rise on her arms as she watches the colorful streams of fire cross and weave amongst one another to the music, creating a shimmering, shifting tapestry of color and sound.

Nia has never been particularly afraid of fire, but she doesn’t think she’s ever thought of it as beautiful, either. She usually thinks of fire as destructive, as an attack to be wielded by her aggressive partner, but technically Tobias could make flames like this, too, right? He probably couldn’t manipulate them, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be pretty! The purple flames of his dragon rage attack come to mind, even richer in color than the purple fire on-stage, and Nia spares a quick glance at Tobias.

The charmander looks entranced by the show, the colorful light of the flames playing across his face and shining in his eyes. He somehow looks much younger than usual, eyes wide with wonder and a small, awed smile on his face. Nia smiles too, chest warming with contentment. Happy is a good look on her grumpy partner.

Nia turns back to the show, eagerly watching as actual Pokemon make their first appearance. Illuminated by the colorful flames, two groups of floating Pokemon drift onstage in a dance of their own—some of them look like literal candles and lanterns with lovely purple flames and glowing golden eyes, and the others are round, pink Pokemon with purple patterns and long, trailing streams of pink mist that add an ethereal quality to their movements. The Pokemon weave between the flames, completely unafraid as they glow with what Nia guesses is psychic energy, dipping and spinning alongside the music.

It has to be difficult to keep such precise control over the flames, or even just to keep pace in a routine with so many small, intricate movements, but all of the Pokemon on stage clearly have a masterful control over their art, moving with confident, fluid motions as the fire twists and flares in graceful patterns.

Then, almost too suddenly, the Pokemon dip towards the edges of the stage and the fire vanishes with a flash, leaving the crowd in darkness once more. Before anyone can begin to applaud or cheer, flames light up the stage again, a ball of fire falling from above and bursting apart on impact. In its place stands a group of Pokemon arranged in a pyramid formation. Most of the crew seems to be made up of fiery cat-like Pokemon—little brown lions with red tufts of hair and bulkier striped cats with burning-bright bells at their necks—but the Pokemon on top is a cute white rabbit with orange-tipped feet and ears.

The pyramid disassembles in a series of impressive flips and rolls, and then the Pokemon themselves are leaping seamlessly through hoops of fire as they begin to move around stage. While they’re probably fire types and wouldn’t be too hurt by the flames, their movements are choreographed to be perfectly in sync, and they’re incredibly acrobatic as they leap and roll and springboard off one another to pull off increasingly complicated trick jumps.

As the movements increase in fervor, the crowd starts cheering and applauding, and Nia can’t help joining in on the excitement, whooping loudly as her heart pounds. The Pokemon onstage seem to move non-stop in a blur of color and fire, until suddenly, one by one, the pairs of Pokemon leap off the sides of the stage and the rings of fire all go out at once.

In the next beat, three round shapes roll on-stage, already lit aflame, before leaping up and revealing themselves to actually be Pokemon. Through the flames, Nia thinks they’re red, with orange markings around their faces, big grins, and stubby little limbs on their round bodies. The three are joined by a much larger Pokemon who looks like a possible evolution: the same red fur and giant grin, but with eyebrows made of flame and giant, powerful-looking arms.

The larger Pokemon scoops the smaller three up into the air. The crowd gasps as the three Pokemon hang for a moment, suspended like tiny suns, before falling back down. The larger Pokemon catches the first and second, then tosses one of them into the air once again before catching the third. Nia realizes the larger Pokemon is juggling the smaller, fiery creatures, anc can’t help but laugh, cracking up along with Junie and some other Pokemon in the crowd. The juggler is really good, too, keeping the little fireballs in a constant loop of motion.

In a blink, two other Pokemon stand on either side of the larger one, and the crowd murmurs excitedly at their sudden appearance. Both of them are fiery-looking monkeys, and in their hands they hold smaller fireballs. They too start to juggle, and when the smaller fireballs unravel in the air to pose for the crowd, Nia falls back into her giggle fit. The little fireballs are curled-up centipedes?

It only gets crazier from there as the Pokemon begin to juggle between each other, and then even more so when some of the Pokemon being used as props seem to vanish in thin air before shooting back into the fray from somewhere else off-stage.

“Teleport, you think?” Nia leans over and whispers to Tobias, eyes still glued to the performance. “Wait, can they even learn teleport?”

Tobias gives her a look, probably for trying to “solve” the logic behind the magic, but answers, “Maybe the psychic Pokemon from before?”

“Ooh, good point! Or maybe they’re just extinguishing their flames so we can’t see them in the dark?”

Tobias makes a noncommittal hum in response, clearly too invested in the show itself, and Nia happily goes back to watching and theorizing on her own.

Once that group moves off the stage in an impressive disappearing act (“Definitely teleport,” Tobias whispers), two Pokemon that look to be made of pure fire roll onto the stage before popping back up in a cloud of flame. They have duck-like beaks and a funny, amorphous appearance that Nia vaguely recognizes from one of her readings. They’re called…magmar, she thinks? Something like that!

The two of them engage in a mock-fight with impressive bursts of flame, dodging around one another in something more like a dance than a spar, and once the flames begin moving around in liquid-like motions, exploding in flashy, colorful bursts, it’s clear the “magic” from the beginning of the show is at work again. It’s beautiful, but Nia still can’t quite help trying to figure out how they’re doing it. Clearly the psychic Pokemon are helping—do they have some way to change the flames’ colors too, or do different Pokemon naturally have different colors of fire? Is it a temperature thing? Why—

The Pokemon on-stage suddenly stagger in the middle of their practiced routine, casting the room into near-darkness once again and snagging Nia’s attention. The two magmar seem alarmed as they turn to look at something on the side of the room. Nia follows their gaze, confused, only to see that a small patch of the foliage lining the walls has caught fire, just a tiny candle’s worth of flame. The audience, most of them craning to see as well, breaks into a low murmur of sound.

Nia frowns, shifting nervously in her seat and glancing back at the two Pokemon on stage, who she can only see due to their glowing skin. Is…Is this part of the routine? Another trick? But no, the two magmar look just as uncertain as the rest of the auditorium, frozen in place like this has never happened before.

The fire grows bright enough in the corner of Nia’s eye that she whips around to stare at it again, her stomach sinking. The flame is slowly starting to spread to neighboring plants.

“Something’s wrong,” Tobias whispers.

Nia glances at him, unease churning in her stomach once she sees the stricken look on his face. “Y-You think so?”

“Something’s wrong,” He repeats, louder, standing.

The fire seems to flare, then, growing larger as it truly catches and ignites. The crowd shrieks, some of them scrambling from their seats. Nia watches the flames, stunned, as they spread at an incredible speed, changing from a candleflame to a wall of fire in a matter of seconds.

The crowd is starting to panic, shouting out alarmed questions and cries, and a quick glance at the stage shows that the performers aren’t much better, scrambling around and looking to each other for what to do.

This definitely isn’t part of the act.

“Everyone, don’t panic!” Hugo’s voice rings out.

Nia feels relieved for a heartbeat, until she sees the fox himself. He has a good stage face and is holding his paws up in a calming gesture, but this close to the stage Nia can see the tension in his frame, the way his eyes flick to the wall and then the exits.

“Move calmly towards the exits, please, and head back out to the plaza,” Hugo calls. “We will try to contain the flames here and—”

The fire crackles, jumping and putting on a burst of speed as it connects to the wooden bits of the ceiling and spreads like fire on an oil spill, engulfing half the room in heat and light.

The crowd surges with fear.

Hugo is yelling something to his performers, the audience is screaming and yelling and shoving as they scramble for the doors, and Tobias grabs Nia’s arm, dragging her with him towards the nearest aisle leading to the exit. They’re jostled by the frantic crowd, and Nia squeezes Junie tighter to her chest as Tobias snarls and forces his way forward, making a path for them. Something heavy slams into Nia from the side, and she’s shoved to the ground. Junie falls from her arms and tumbles away among the forest of legs.

“Junie!” Nia yells, moving forward to follow before a panicked Pokemon accidentally kicks her, sending her rolling back with a yelp. Another foot steps on her tail, and just as Nia thinks she’s going to get trampled, a familiar warm hand grabs her arm and yanks her to her feet.

“Tobias!” Nia gasps. “I lost Junie!”

“No time to find her!” Tobias growls, glancing up to where the fire has continued to spread, consuming a majority of the room and heating the air to an uncomfortable degree.

Nia doesn’t have time to argue as the crowd at her back moves the two of them forward and out into the hall, almost knocking them off their feet.

“Oh, you have to be kidding me!” Tobias snarls.

Nia feels her heart drop as she follows his gaze and sees that the fire has already managed to spread out here, too, and is moving to consume everything at a terrifying pace.

“Go!” Tobias snaps, shoving Nia in front of him to follow the flow of the loud, panicked crowd towards the front of the Convention Center. She glances over her shoulder, terrified that she’ll lose him, but he stays right on her heels.

Nia’s heart is pounding in her ears, adding a steady tempo to the shouting and the quiet roar of the flames spreading to the entirety of the main hall. It’s almost like it’s following them, herding them, and Nia feels weak with relief when she spots the doors to the plaza ahead of them, cool purple-gray evening light like a drink of water in the desert.

They barely manage to make it outside without getting trampled, staggering into blessedly cool, open air alongside the other escaping humans. The Pokemon who were shopping in the marketplace are all watching the frantic crowd of humans with stunned expressions and concerned calls.

Safely away from the building, Nia’s legs collapse under her. She takes deep breaths of the refreshing air, flexing her fingers against the stone underneath her to help ground herself.

“You okay?” Tobias asks, crouching in front of her.

Nia looks up at him, unable to speak. The charmander still seems tense himself, eyes a little too wild, but he’s clearly trying to keep a hold on his emotions. Oh, right, he’s waiting for an answer.

“I-I think so?” Nia rasps. Her gut and her tail hurt where she was kicked and stepped on, but she’s in one piece, even if she feels like she’s about to shake apart at the seams. “Y-You?”

Tobias nods, then looks past her, brow furrowing with something grave.

Nia turns as well, staring in horror at the building in front of her, already brimming with flames and lit bright against the evening sky. Nia isn’t sure how quickly fire spreads normally, but it almost seems to be moving at an unnatural rate, growing uncontrollably and eating away at the structure’s wood and stone with an unstoppable hunger. It can’t have been more than a minute or two since the fire began, but already the majority of the building seems thoroughly engulfed in flames. The structure that had seemed so solid during the day starts to sag and crumble. Near the doorway, a bit of the frame falls to the ground with a loud noise that makes Nia jump.

“I-Is Junie still in there?” Nia squeaks, looking desperately at Tobias as if he knows any more than she does. “What if she’s stuck? W-We got separated, and I don’t—I don’t know where she went!”

Tobias doesn’t answer, staring at the flames with a furrowed brow and clenched fists, eyes flicking back and forth with racing thoughts.

Nia swallows hard and turns back to the flames as her stomach sinks, unable to do anything but tremble as she watches the fire grow. Absently, she notices the murmuring of the crowd at her back, then jumps as a loud voice suddenly commands, “Everyone stand back!”

Nia thoughtlessly follows the voice’s direction, stumbling back to join the rest of the crowd. A moment later, a familiar form bounds past them and into view.

“Keegan?” Nia whispers.

The ninetales looks completely different from his carefree self the day before, standing tall with a sharp, serious expression on his face. A fierce-looking red crustacean Pokemon with a golden star at her crown and a stripe of blue at her mouth is at his side, turning to look at the crowd with just as much authority in her posture.

A moment later, Nia notices the crowd of Pokemon stepping past her and the other civilians, lining up neatly in front of the two Pokemon. They all look strong, assessing the situation with calm expressions and confident stances. Some of them are clearly Seekers like her and Tobias, teams wearing similarly-colored scarves or bands, while the other half of the crowd all wear the same bright shade of yellow with a black drop of water imprinted on the fabric.

“Ghatha Guild, pair up with the fire rescue squad,” Keegan barks, fur gleaming gold in the light of the flames. “Buddy system, at least one water type required for each team. Report back to me or Audra any time you enter the structure or leave. First priority is finding any stragglers caught in the wreckage, second priority is to contain and douse the flames and minimize damage from the structure’s collapse. Clear?”

The crowd of Seekers—and fire rescue Pokemon, apparently—nod or call out their assent.

“Then get on it!” The crustacean, Audra, snaps, immediately turning to the burning building and beginning to fight the flames with powerful jets of water shooting from her claws.

The rest of the Pokemon jump into action with impressive speed, pairing up with minimal discussion. Some teams slip into the building itself through the gaps opening up in the walls. Some water types station themselves around the building where the flames are fighting to break free and move further into the plaza, dousing the fire with carefully-aimed streams of water.

Nia is relieved by the experienced groups of Pokemon tackling the problem, but she still feels like she can’t quite breathe right. Or maybe that this isn’t real, that she isn’t really here. She feels cold, despite the heat wafting off of the inferno in front of them. Numb, almost.

“How could this happen?” Nia whispers. “It...It was such a nice day.”

For a moment, Tobias doesn’t answer. Then, he takes their team bag off his shoulder, digging through it and pulling out his badge. He pins it to his scarf and pushes the satchel into Nia’s hands. “I’m going in too.”

“What?!” Nia whips around to stare at him. “Y-You can’t—”

“I’m a Seeker and a fire type,” Tobias retorts, eyeing the Seekers and rescuers still arranging themselves around the wreckage. “This is exactly what I signed up for.”

Nia latches onto his arm before he can run off, yanking him to a stop. “W-Wait! You can’t go in there! Sure, you’re a fire type, b-but the walls are caving in and, and—”

“Pokemon need help, Nia,” Tobias growls, pulling his arm free.

Nia tries not to let the panic overtake her completely. What if he gets hurt while she’s just sitting out here watching? And if it’s his job then isn’t it hers, too? What if Junie is still in there?

“Then I’m g-going too,” Nia says, her terrified voice making it more of a question than a statement.

Tobias is the one to look caught off-guard this time. “What? No you’re not. You don’t have the protection from fire that I do.”

“Some of the other Pokemon don’t either!” Nia bluffs, watching a Pokemon that may or may not be a fire type race by and dive through the flames wreathing the front door.

“But they know what they’re doing!” Tobias counters. “Look, I’m a low-level Seeker, but I have protection against the fire. I’m going. You are staying here so you don’t pass out from the heat.”

Nia whimpers, but can’t come up with a good enough argument against that. Tobias turns and runs up to Keegan, flashing his badge and saying something. The ninetales looks surprised, then pensive, as if unsure of whether he should agree to send the self-admitted newbie into such a dangerous situation. Nia’s heart lifts hopefully.

Then Audra snaps something to Keegan, and the ninetales looks torn. Finally, he sighs and says something to Tobias before running off. Tobias nods and dashes past the other rescuers and Seekers to run straight into the fire. Nia’s stomach turns as he vanishes into the flaming building.

“Please be okay,” she murmurs, voice cracking. Her heart is pounding, and all she can think of is Tobias getting crushed by the building slowly crumbling in front of her. Junie, trapped in the flames and choking on smoke. She worries the strap of their satchel between her shaking paws, almost tearing the fabric.

Minutes pass, and areas of the roof begin to cave in along with the walls, sending the Seekers and rescuers into a renewed flurry of activity. Nia paces in her place amongst the crowd, watching as the fire squad and the Seekers go in and out of the building with expert efficiency. Keegan is orchestrating the rescue effort with impressive control, directing the Seekers working underneath him and pointing out which areas to focus on next as well as receiving reports from the Pokemon who return.

Nia is only half-listening to the conversations around her, too busy stewing in her own fear, when she catches a snatch of conversation from the coughing, rocky Pokemon reporting to another rescuer to her right.

“Yeah, pretty sure it was a rookidee. Don’t know what happened to ‘em—one second they were there and then I lost ‘em again. Needed to get some air or I woulda passed out.”

Nia freezes, feeling like she might throw up as she stares at the rocky Pokemon, who hasn’t even noticed her. Their partner is reassuring them that the rookidee probably flew through an open gap in the roof, or another rescuer found them, but the rest of their words are drowned out by the blood roaring in Nia’s ears.

A rookidee, still trapped inside. Nia hadn’t seen any other rookidee all day. Only Junie.

Junie can’t fly high enough to get out—especially if she’s injured. And she’s not a fire type, not resistant to flames like Tobias is. She’s small, painfully light and fragile.

She’s scared, probably. Terrified. What if she dies in there because Nia was too much of a coward to try to save her?

It’s that thought that solidifies Nia’s terror into something sharper. Something like determination.

Pokemon need help, Nia.

“S-Sorry, Tobias,” Nia murmurs, dropping their satchel to the ground and taking a deep, shaking breath. Then, she sprints towards the fiery wreckage before she can second-guess herself. She doesn’t even bother to grab her badge, instead slipping past the guards when they’re distracted by a large, hacking Pokemon stumbling from the building with a couple of unconscious Pokemon tucked under their arms.

The heat hits Nia in a wave as she ducks through a large gap in the crumbling wall, into what used to be the front hall of the building. Immediately her eyes are stinging dry, the ash sparking a coughing fit as she tries to breathe through the sheer heat. Fire roars and crackles around her in a painfully blinding forest of flames, making it hard to tell exactly where she is or where she’s going next. The building is slowly crumbling around her, heavy walls warping and falling apart. The stone underfoot is hot, almost stinging against her paws.

Nia looks around through squinted eyes, untying the bandana from her arm and holding it to her mouth to try and filter the smoke somehow. Somewhere further in the building there’s a sudden rumble, loud enough to be heard through the roar of flames and distant yells of Pokemon. Nia recognizes it from earlier--another part of the roof must have caved in.

Nia moves further into the wreckage of the building, more quickly than she’d like to, but she doesn’t have the time to be thorough and careful when the building is already coming down. She just tries to keep her distance from the worst of the flames and the rubble.

The building, once easy to navigate, is a flaming, twisted shell of itself, a labyrinth of wreckage and dazzling light and flickering shadow. Is she still in the front hall, or did a wall fall down? She might be in the main hall, actually.

“Junie!” She shouts, cupping her hands around her mouth. Her following inhale triggers a coughing fit as she breathes in heat and smoke. Eyes squeezed shut as she struggles to breathe, she isn’t paying enough attention and cuts her leg on a particularly sharp piece of something—stone, or metal maybe. She bites back a pained cry, glaring at the offending rubble before moving forward again.

“Junie!” She shouts, her voice a weak, rasping thing cut off by another coughing fit. “Junie, are you in here?!”

The roar of the flames are her only answer, so Nia keeps moving. She scans the wreckage and shouts out the little bird’s name, feeling her heart sink a little more each time she gets no response. When a particularly harsh burst of flames brushes by her face, stinging against her skin, she pauses for a moment to try and get her bearings. Between the shimmering heat, the blinding spots of light every time she blinks, and the building being almost unrecognizable, Nia definitely isn’t sure which room she’s in anymore. Could she even find her way back out if she found Junie? She’s starting to feel lightheaded from the heat and smoke.

Shaking her head, Nia forces her feet forward. She thinks she hears someone shout, or glimpses movement aside from the flickering flames and wild shadows thrown over everything, but she doesn’t actually run into any Seekers. They must not spot her, small as she is.

If the Seekers don’t see Nia, what hope does she have for finding Junie? The little bird is smaller and darker than Nia herself, and if she was buried under any rubble—

Stop that, Nia commands herself, looking around a little more frantically. Junie’s fine. She has to be fine!

“Junie!”

No answer.

Nia takes a moment to rest the best she can among the smoke and fire, looking away from the blinding flames and up to the ceiling where a dark patch of sky can barely be seen through a hole in the roof. God, she would love to take a breath of fresh, cool air right now.

Nia staggers on her feet as another part of the building collapses somewhere nearby. She has to keep moving. She has to find her friend!

Nia pushes on, moving through what she thinks used to be a doorway, into another area. Her body is starting to feel heavy, but she tries to shake the dizziness from her vision and keep from stumbling over her own feet. She can’t pass out here. Not now.

She glances up at a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye, expecting to find another shadow playing tricks on her, but it’s—

Junie.

For a moment Nia thinks she’s imagining the rookidee. Maybe she already passed out and now she’s dreaming. But she blinks—once, twice, three times, and she’s still there. The little bird is pinned to the ground by her leg, where a few giant chunks of stone from the roof must have fallen onto her. She’s fluttering weakly, trying to lift off and away from the rubble, but falls back to the ground with a pained cry that reaches Nia even through the roar of the fire.

“Junie,” Nia whispers. Then, shouting, she runs towards her friend. “Junie!”

Junie looks up, face filled with a raw, animalistic kind of terror that Nia’s never seen before. When the rookidee catches sight of Nia, she blinks rapidly like Nia did just a moment ago, as if she isn’t sure she can trust her eyes. Then, her expression pinches, like she wants to cry but isn’t sure if it’s out of relief or fear.

“N-Nia! What’re you doing here?!”

“I’m here to rescue you, o-of course!” Nia says with what she hopes is a reassuring smile. Its effect is ruined when she immediately starts coughing again.

“B-But you—” Junie stops, looking like she isn’t sure whether to be upset or not. Then she shakes her head. “Fine! Just, help me get my leg free, please! I’m stuck!”

“Right!” Nia moves to the stones holding the little bird down, managing to roll a few of the chunks of rubble away despite the way the hot stone bites at her hands. Almost immediately she’s panting, vision blurring the slightest bit more as the heat and exhaustion catches up to her. She stubbornly shakes her head, forcing her legs to hold her up as she moves the rubble.

She tries to move the largest chunk of stone, almost as big as her, pushing first with her hands, then with her whole body, grunting as it refuses to budge. She takes a moment to rest and breathe, but immediately chokes again on smoke and heat. Her knee buckles, and she barely catches herself before falling completely to the ground.

“Nia!” Junie shrieks, before falling into a coughing fit herself.

“Don’t talk,” Nia rasps.

“Nia, y-you...you can’t move it,” Junie says, voice breaking. “You have to go.”

Nia blinks slowly at Junie, not understanding. Go? She can’t go yet. Junie needs help. “I can’t leave you.”

Junie furiously shakes her head, and when she looks up again her eyes are shiny, like she’d be crying if the heat of the flames didn’t immediately dry her tears up. “You’re going to die here too if you don’t run, you idiot! Go!”

Nia growls in response, pushing herself back to her feet. She wobbles, but steadies herself on the stone. “I-I’m not—I’m not just leaving you here!”

Junie shrieks something else at Nia, but she tunes the little bird out. Her head aches, and it’s getting hard to focus. She pushes again at the stone, hoping that all of those stories about adrenaline were true and will give her the boost she needs. Her muscles strain and sting, but the stone doesn’t move. Feeling her throat choke up with—with everything, with fear and desperation and tears and anger—Nia pushes harder.

If she could just use her fighting type moves, maybe she’d be strong enough! Maybe she could push this stone, or break it, or—or—

Nothing. The stone won’t move.

Gasping for air that’s too hot to breathe, Nia slumps against the stone, eyes stinging again with tears.

She can’t do it. But she can’t just leave Junie here, either.

Is this how she dies? In a foreign world, without ever seeing her family and friends again? Without even saving her new friend? Without keeping up her end of the deal with Tobias? She had so much she wanted to do.

She doesn’t want to die.

Nia sobs, claws digging into the stone.

There’s another loud rumble from somewhere nearby—above—as more of the ceiling caves in, shaking the ground as the stone crashes to the floor only feet away and kicks up extra ash.

“Nia!” Junie cries. She’s sobbing now, too. “Please, leave! Just go! You can’t do anything! The roof is going to come down on us any second and I can’t—you c-can’t—”

Nia swallows hard and pushes herself back to her feet. She staggers to Junie’s side, sitting heavily in front of the little bird.

“I couldn’t find my way back out of here e-even if I tried,” Nia croaks, the words petering off into something between a laugh and a sob.

Junie looks devastated, before her expression melts into something so, so deeply sad. So guilty. “I’m so sorry, Nia.”

Nia doesn’t know how to respond, especially when her vision is spotty and it’s so hot she can’t even think, the burns and cuts on her body stinging with pain. She just shakes her head, hoping that Junie knows she doesn’t blame her for this.

Nia sends up an apology to everyone she’s leaving behind. And maybe a prayer that when she goes, it’ll be quick.

Around them, the fire roars.

#pokemon mystery dungeon #pmd #darumaka #darmanitan #pokemon #pmd seekers of soul #tesha draws #tesha writes

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lulzyrobot · 4 years

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Pokemon Dynamorph AU Masterpost

Based on THIS POST

The short of this AU is that the climax of the Eternatus fight had an even more profound effect on the Galar region and its people. The excess energy made people fuse with their pokemon! Oh boy! So below the cut I’m going to outline all the ideas behind this AU thanks to everyone’s asks showing an increasing curiosity about all this! I’m used to writing original content, nothing based on an existing property so bare with me…

Events Leading Up to The Dynamorph Event

So for this AU, the events of the game leading up to the Eternatus conflict are the SAME except for some details.

Gloria/Victor and Hop never encounter Zacian or Zamazenta. The Rusty Sword and Shield were lost to time.

When Leon goes to confront Eternatus, he is joined by everyone up on the roof. The Gloria/ Victor, Hop, Bede, Marnie, the Gym Leaders (minus Opal because she’s back in Ballonlea enjoying retirement.)

This confrontation happens AFTER Gloria/ Victor beats Leon, for simplicity’s sake.

So when everyone confronts Eternatus, thanks to Rose’s eager impatience to do good for the Galar region, they are unable to stop it properly since Zacian and Zamazenta are nowhere to be found. Instead, the combined efforts of everyone force Eternatus to flee.

But not without releasing an overwhelming blast of Dynamax energy.

The blast rippled throughout a portion of Galar, and had a chain reaction with power spots and the dens of the Wild Area. When the dust settled, the pokemon everyone had out that they were using in the big fight were...gone. Not in their pokeball, just..gone. Naturally, people assume the worst but they have a lingering feeling that the Pokemon are still...here somehow. But they don’t know why. So when everyone’s calmed down, and clean up begins, they all go their separate ways.

About a day passes, and then it starts to happen. From the time of the blast and when the changes start to happen externally, everyone experiences some oddities superficially (better hearing, acute sensitivity to stuff etc.)

Leon was in his newly acquired office and the just obtained Battle Tower. He had the blind closed, sat in the darkened room thinking over everything that happened, and his loss of the Champion title. When the changes started happening, he nearly burned the office, leaving claw marks in his desk, the floor, and the walls. The noise attracted someone from the Battle Tower staff and he yelled at them in panic to call Sonia. His own phone started ringing. It was Hop.

Gloria/ Victor (I separate them cuz it's more of a ‘who you imagine in this role.’ Can only have one Champion) were being briefed on Champion duties and what that entails. It’s a boring meeting, but they excuse themself to go to the bathroom. In reality they duck away outside to just get a breather. They suddenly feel a sharp pain and start to change, probably biting into their arm to muffle any scream to prevent causing a scene.

Bede headed back to Ballonlea, distraught that Hatterine was nowhere to be found. He wanted to distract himself by continuing his gym leader training, but Opal sat him down for some tea to talk about grief and loss. She’s way older and definitely has experience in that field. What she doesn’t have experience in, is what to do when your protege starts growing traits of a pokemon…

Hop, after that whole ordeal, missing Dubwool, and having lost the gym challenge just had so many feelings to vent out, he wanted to just scream. So he heads deep into the Slumbering Weald to just scream out his frustrations. When he sits down after tiring himself out, his changes start happening. In pain, scared, and alone, he calls Leon.

Marnie went back to Spikemuth with Piers. Team Yell welcomed them with open arms and gave them the idea to have a tribute concert for the pokemon they believe they lost. Marnie declined, electing to stay at home and be alone for a while. She didn’t want to be around people right now. Then her changes started happening, and she uncontrollably let out a burst of electricity, causing an outage in Spikemuth.

Piers, meanwhile, was setting up for an impromptu concert. He dealt with his feelings by doing literally anything to distract him from them so yelling into a microphone for a couple hours seemed like a good idea. Just as he was about to test the mic, a huge power surge came from his place and shut down all of Spikemuth’s power. Concerned for his sister he runs off stage, taking alleys as a shortcut. In his adrenaline he doesn’t even realize his changes started until he tripped over his own new claws and writhes just outside their place.

Raihan, being in Hammerlocke, wastes no time in helping with the clean up. While at the highest point in the city, he and his gym trainers were hard at work. Until Raihan collapsed, trying to hold himself up with his broom. His trainers looked on in concern and horror as he began changing, even starting up a sandstorm in the process. As a result, one trainer almost gets pushed off the roof but, bearing through the pain, Raihan leaps in and grabs them in time.

Gordie and Melony head back to Circhester. On the way, they had talked a lot about their issues and gripes that had torn a rift in their family, in earnest. The assumed loss of their pokemon worked as good common ground to remind them about the importance of family. They were both at Melony’s home when it happened. The heat and cold put a completely new kind of barrier between the two.

Bea wanted to get her mind off everything that happened by training in the outskirts of Stow-on-Side. She pushed herself too far, and her pokemon urged her to stop. But she fought them off. At first with difficulty, but then as her changes happened, more easily. Her pokemon backed off and started looking for help.

Alister, figuring that his Gengar maybe wandered off on its own again, headed to the graveyard during the night. One of Gengar’s favourite spots. For a moment, Alister thought he heard Gengar’s chuckle and it’s cry but turned to see nothing. Something compelled him to look down at himself and he could see himself becoming translucent and a suspicious shade of purple. He had always had an affinity with ghosts but becoming one was something else entirely. Ensue panic attack.

Kabu returned home to quietly meditate and think rationally about everything that happened. In a trance-like state, he could feel Centiskorch right there next to him. He felt at peace. The smell of burning snapped him out of it, however when he realized he, as well as a good part of the room, was on fire. He quickly escaped, realizing the fire didn’t hurt him.

Nessa just wanted to be alone, so back at Hulberry, she walked along the docks, shrouded in early morning fog. Her changes started happening, but she really only felt itchy as the scales came in. Upon checking her phone, did she herself in the screen’s reflection and freak out.

Life moves on and Milo had a farm to tend to. His family urged him to take a break but he smiled back at them and assured them he was okay. He wasn’t. While working was when his changes happened. His whole family rushed to his aid. And again, through a smile, he insisted he was okay.

Oleana was working feverishly on getting money together for lawyers and bail money to get Rose out of his self-imposed jail sentence. She knew all he wanted was good for the region, but he was just too blind to see the potential damage he was causing. She wanted him to have a second chance. But her changes slowed her down.

Rose, in a cell, reflected on his actions. How rash he was that he didn’t see the big picture. He should’ve listened. When his changes happened in his cell, he was horrified. Not at what happened to him, but what was no doubt, happening to the others. And probably more. What had he done? He needed to fix his mistake.

The ones present at the event were not the only ones to change, however. This was happening all over the region, closer to power spots (which includes the towns, but the morphs aren’t all as drastic) and the wild area (trainers fused with wild pokemon and went hostile. This is covered in depth in another section). After one of the quickest trials, Rose had offered to the court that instead of a full prison sentence, he spent his entire resources and wealth into funding on solving this new, now coined ‘Dynamorph Crisis.’ They agreed and the Macro Cosmos got to work.

How the Dynamorph Actually Works

Bare with me because this is where I kind of bend canon and make assumptions about things for the sake of explaining how this AU even works. So. Eternatus caused all this by basically converting things into energy. On humans, it would just tear them apart. On pokemon it would just turn them into dynamax energy temporarily. The normal situation is that dynamaxing makes the pokemon grow and change form, yeah? Well for this AU, the pokemon, seeing that their trainers are potentially going to die, decide to fuse with them to ‘fill in the gaps.’ Saving them. At first, it appears like they were able to change into the parts missing, but after a while, the pokemon traits start showing, which is my excuse for why the actual changes were delayed.

The severity of the dynamorph is dependent on proximity to the blast/ powerspot. And just personal preference if you wanted to make your own trainersona dynamorphed (which I totally encourage! It’s fun and I like seeing what you all come up with!!).

Dynamorphed trainers gain the physical traits, special abilities, movesets and odd quirks that come with the pokemon they are dynamorphed with. (Bonding with Morpeko makes you hungry, bonding with a Xatu lets you see the future, etc) Though, since the humanity is still there, they are able to curb some of the more aggressive quirks with diligence.

If the pokemon bonded is not fully evolved, applying the correct evolutionary method will evolve and change the outward appearance of the dynamorphed trainer. Normal level up are accomplished by fighting, not by age.

Since being part pokemon, the trainer is a lot more resilient and could, if they REALLY wanted to, fight other morphed trainers. Trainers feel the type weakness and resistances. They would faint just like a pokemon fight. Potions and pokemon centres would help them recover. Though death is still something that can happen.

Trainers fused with food-like pokemon are not edible please don't eat them, there's a place where the food stops and the flesh starts and we don’t need to find out where that is ok??

Normal pokemon that are caught and trained will REFUSE to attack a dynamorphed trainer unless absolutely provoked. So you can’t really have a pokemon battle where a dynamoprhed trainer is beating up a pokemon or vice versa. That’s messed up.

Dynamorphed trainers cannot be caught in any kind of pokeballs. That’s also messed up.

They cannot breed to make a weird hybrid plz stop asking.

Dynamorphed Trainers can NOT be Dynamaxed. Too much energy, man.

Trainers CAN bond with more than one pokemon, but that's where complications start to occur. The more pokemon bonded to the trainer, the harder it is form them to hold on to their humanity.

1 Pokemon = Okay

2 Pokemon = A struggle to keep humanity, but it’s possible.

3+ Pokemon = This is not a person. It is a hostile beast.

There are no legendary pokemon/ ultra beasts dynamorphed. They’re all in other regions and wouldn’t be in the Galar region when it happened so there just wouldn’t be. But if ya’ll make one with one anyway, I won’t stop you but the legendary pokemon may be too strong for a trainer to handle.

If the pokemon’s nature is different than the trainer’s than it might affect their personality. The extent of this is varied.

**No two dynamorphs look the same! If you have two trainers bonded with like...a Pikachu for example. One might get yellow fur, ears, and a tail while the other only gets a tail and the cheeks. Go nuts.

If the pokemon dynamorphed with the trainer is the opposite gender, the result is whatever you want.

Speaking of complications, that brings us to the next part…

The Wild Area Trainers

During this whole event, I previously mentioned that the Wild Area was significantly affected. Those unfortunate enough to be out camping during the blast had the chance of 1 of 3 things happening:

They dynamorphed with one of their pokemon.

They dynamorphed with with more than one of their pokemon

They dynamorphed with one or more wild pokemon Examples found HERE.

In the case of being bonded to a wild pokemon, this takes a heavy toll on the trainer’s mind as its constantly fighting with a wild pokemon. This causes them to lose their minds and become hostile, just like a wild pokemon. Unfortunately a large number of “Wild Trainers” roam the Wild Area. Their previously caught pokemon usually try to flee or stick around to protect their trainer out of sheer devotion. As mentioned before, they cannot be caught with a pokeball. But the region is working on a program to deal with this. …

How the Galar Region is dealing with the Dynamorph Crisis

Professors Sonia and Magnolia are appointed the top researchers, being granted the resources of the Macro Cosmos thanks to Oleana and Rose, wanting to atone for his mistakes. However the government, doubting Rose’s competence, sends out their own officials to oversee and make decisions. (I have no idea how the government of this region works. Is there a parliament? Is the gym league the authority? I’ll say for this AU there is actually a system of government…).

They have labs and rehabilitation centres set up to be able to study and help help dynamorphed trainers cope and eventually go back home. They are not kept there against their will. Most, anyway. The main cast were quarantined in a lab/ facility for the early stages of the crisis so they could learn/ test their capabilities in a safe environment. Shenanigans ensue. Because of this, the crisis put a hold on the gym challenge league entirely.

At first, the authorities wanted to keep this under wraps in case their morphs were an isolated incident but quickly realized that was going to be impossible. Travel to and from the Galar region became incredibly restricted. Dynamorphed trainers are not allowed to leave the region, for everyone’s safety (don’t want to risk an outburst that could harm anyone :c ), but unchanged people were free to travel once they were confirmed as ‘human’ by a mandatory test.

The Wild Area became a huge problem, what with Wild Trainers running about. Defenses were set up just in case to prevent Wild Trainers from wandering into populated areas and causing havoc, though a few occurrences still happen, what with flying pokemon and all. Eventually, a special force was assembled that consisted of consenting dynamorphed trainers that were tasked with going into the Wild Area and subduing and retrieving Wild Trainers to bring them to a more secured location to help study them and to try and find a cure. And to confirm to families the fate of their missing family member(s). The attempt is to be as humane as possible.

The special force (Do I really wanna call it Dynaforce? I feel like I’m abusing the prefix if I do), consists of all the current gym leaders, Piers, Leon, Victor/ Gloria and a bunch of other trainers who signed up who are 18+. (you don't want to send kids out doing this kind of dangerous work, I know pokemon is all about children taming powerful animals but you gotta draw the line in the sand somewhere. Gym leaders are exempt because they why not. They insisted and already proved their strength to the region. It’s an AU based off a fuckin game/ anime.) This force has two jobs:

Go into the Wild Area to subdue Wild Trainers and bring them home

Protect the towns in case any wild trainers get in.

So what happened to Eternatus if it just escaped? Theories indicate it might be living in a massive den in the heart of the Wild Area, waiting to strike again. There are a lot more Wild Trainers near this area, so excursions here are difficult.

Is a cure eventually found? Honestly this is just an AU so that's up to you. My personal answer is no. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. //Bear Grylls voice

So….this is a lot. This is just some silly AU that inspired me to expand on it for fun since you guys showed a lot of interest! I’ll edit this as I get more asks about things I may have missed, but I will be going in and deleting a lot of previous asks so I can clean up my blog a bit. I had WANTED to keep a lot of this ‘secret’ cuz I wanted to draw stuff for it. I STILL WILL DRAW for it, but realistically I don’t have the time or energy ahah. Especially for an AU of a published franchise aha.

If you want to make a dynamorph trainersona, totally go for it! Just tag me when its done! I love seeing what people do!

#dynamorph au #pokemon #pokemon sword and shield #pokemon swsh #pokemon au #dynamorph masterpost #long post

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stormtodoroki · 4 years

Text

Until Sunrise ~ Tokoyami x Reader

4,715 words

Warnings: Swearing, Reader can be a bit of a jerk

AN: Here’s another discord server prompt.

Prompt: Spooky

Summary: An unknown host has invited Class 1A to a Halloween party, when they arrive they soon find out everything isn't as it seems to be, is Class 1A being punked by Class 1B? Read to find out!

I hastily searched my room for my costume, all of us in class 1-A decided to go out for Halloween and I was going as a bad to the bone bounty hunter. I decided to stop looking and fix my hair, I looked in the mirror and smiled at my reflection, my hair looked good and my horror makeup was on point. I drew a scar from my left eyebrow down to my cheek, I blended eyeshadow on my right eye and under my chin to look like nasty bruises, I also used a cotton swab dipped in blood spray to make open wounds. I was about to continue finishing up the final touches when there was a knock at the door, glancing at the clock I was confused surely bird boy wouldn't be here yet. Would he? No… He'd be early by 2 and a half hours. I walked to the door and when I opened it I saw my best friend Aizawa, Beth at the door dressed in Eraserhead's attire.

"Really? Going as our teacher? I thought you said you were going to be something scary?"

Beth gave me a look and shook her head with a scoff. "Seriously? You don't think Mr. Aizawa is scary?"

Well, I do but I wasn't going to tell Beth that, so I shook my head and walked over to my mirror so I could finish my makeup, I allowed Beth to enter and told her to close the door and lock it so none of the boys peeked in. Once I heard the lock click I turned to her.

"Got the rest of my costume ready? I'm so ready to see what ideas the boys thought of." I smirked as I grabbed the bag from Beth and went to change in the bathroom. This party was going to be fun and I couldn't wait to win the costume contest, well if there was one…

An hour later I looked at myself in the mirror and was pleased with the outcome, I turned to Beth and shook my head.

"Couldn't you at least sleep deprived yourself to look tired so it'd look more realistic? No offense but you look like a knock off of sensei."

Beth rolled her eyes and opened the door, "Come on they're probably waiting for us." she walked out of the room and into the Hall. By the time I made sure I had everything I needed for the night, or may have a need for, I stepped out of my dorm and headed for the common area.

"Woooah, nice costume. You look amazing! How long did it take you to make that?"

I gave a triumphant smile and puffed out my chest with pride. "Oh, you know how creativity takes time to escape one's mind. I'd say this took about two and a half weeks to complete." Denki looked at me and laughed before he shook his head.

"Two and a half weeks to tear up some clothes and spray fake blood on them? Wow… how many times did you screw up (Y/N)?" He clutched his stomach as he laughed. "I wasn't even asking you, I was asking Beth. Her costume is just great, I bet she could walk around town and people would think Eraserhead was shrunken by a quirk."

"Tch… it's not even that good… You can tell that she bought it from the store and didn't even try to make it on her own." I shook my head and walked away and decided to go outside to get some fresh air, there was no way I was gonna be upstaged by someone who didn't even make their own costume, friend or not I was gonna be the best dressed at the party.

"Hey, what are you doing out here? Thought you'd be helping the others with their final touches before we head out to the party?"

I looked over to the voice and saw Tokoyami, he was dressed like a pirate, with Dark Shadow dressed like a parrot. It was kinda cute, I felt a bit of blush rise to my cheeks but quickly shook my head. "Nothing really that important, I just wanted to get some fresh air, it's getting kind of stuffy in there with everyone freaking out over each other's costumes. I just wanted to get away from it all."

Tokoyami merely nodded and held up his invite before pointing down the walkway.

"Did you wanna maybe get a head start and walk with me to the party? I'm sure the others will catch up when they are ready to get there."

I nodded and held up my invitation and put it away before we started to walk over to the party.

"True. Though it's kinda strange to receive an invitation to a party and not have any idea who it's from isn't it? I mean there was no signature on it, what if it's a prank from class 1B? I mean everyone from 1A was invited… doesn't that seem a bit weird to you Tokoyami?"

Tokoyami robbed his head in thought as we continued to walk and shrugged. "I do agree that it may seem a bit unordinary to receive an invitation without knowing our host, but it is possible they wish to remain unknown as part of the theme of the party. After all it is Halloween, our host must be playing their role without error to be more convincing."

I nodded, perhaps he was right, Halloween is a time for good scares, perhaps it was just part of a themed party, and I was overthinking everything due to the recent events that my classmates and I have gone through.

"Hey! Wait up!"

Tokoyami and I turned around and saw four of our classmates running towards us, as they got closer I scowled internally to myself. Izuku was dressed as All Might, go figure he'd dress as his favorite hero, Uraraka had dressed up as a bunny which was actually kind of cute,I had to fight myself from squealing out loud. I looked over towards the other two who ran toward us and saw Beth with Todoroki, who dressed up as a werewolf, it was pretty convincing to say the least and appeared to be homemade. I looked between the four and turned to Izuku, Uraraka, and Todoroki and gave the trio a smile.

"Oh hey you guys, great costumes. They look amazing, did you guys make them on your own?"

Uraraka and Izuku nodded while Todoroki shook his head, I turned to him and cocked my head to the side. But it looks so good and unprofessionally made, why'd he shake his head no?

"I didn't want to go to this, it seems childish to go to Halloween parties. But Beth practically begged me to go until I agreed." Todoroki looked to her unamused and shook his head. "It was quite annoying actually, I only agreed to make her shut up. I didn't think I'd actually have to wear a costume but everyone insisted, so I grabbed the first thing I found and went with it."

"Well, it looks great on you, you could have fooled me."

Uraraka, who was whispering to Izuku, turned to me before pointing to Beth.

"Did you know that Beth actually made her costume? She even got Aizawa-sensei to let her borrow some clothes. So cool right?!"

I scoffed and turned away to begin walking, I just wanted to get to the party and avoid those four for the rest of the night.

"Yeah, sure. He probably did it because he wanted her to leave him alone. Just like how Todoroki only agreed to the party because he wanted Beth to leave him alone."

After walking with Tokoyami, Izuku, Uraraka, Beth and Todoroki for about 15 minutes we finally made it to a rather large estate decorated as if it were old and abandoned. Windows were broken, roofing tiles were missing, the cobwebs looked like they were left unattended for months, different areas off the rain gutter were broken off and the paint was faded and chipped.

"Wow, someone went a bit overboard with the decorations this year huh? Oh well. I think it's cute!"

"Ura-uraraka… Y-you think it's cute?"

"Yeah, Deku. Whoever decorated was really committed to making the house look spooky. I find that determination kinda cute!"

"I-if you say so… I guess I could see what you mean… Whoever our host is they must really like Halloween…" Izuku kept muttering about the person and the possibilities for why they were able to make their house look so amazing and what may have driven them.

"Are you sure it's decorations? This place looks like it had been abandoned for years and decided to use it for the party… if that's even allowed."

"Whatever, FreezerBurn, let's just get inside and worry about everything else later when the others arrive. It's cold out here."

The group nodded and the six of them stood at the doors where Beth knocked and they opened on their own.

"Okay… that's not weird at all."

We walked in and gasped at the surroundings, more cobwebs were strewn about, broken photo frames that seemed to be at least a hundred years old hung crooked on the walls, dust had settled on most the lights and furnishings. The only modern things that stood out to them were the signs pointing to an invitation box in the wall and the two long tables filled with Halloween themed drinks and treats.

The six of them decided to eat and talk amongst themselves while waiting for the others to arrive. Izuku and Uraraka went straight to the snacks where the two marveled at how the treats looked so well done and delicious, while Beth and Todoroki went to serve themselves drinks. It was about 10 minutes later when the rest of the class arrived in small groups.

"Hey! (Y/N)! You guys got here kinda early huh? Man, this place looks so creepy am I right?"

Since he had approached us, Tokoyami and I were stuck by the main doors talking to Denki, who was dressed as a Pokemon or something, I didn't pay attention to his words. In fact I had been zoning out until the lights started to flicker a bit, we thought it may have been part of the decorations so we didn't pay too much attention. Not until the room was sent into a darkness, there were screams, shuffling and some curses thrown about the dark room. Soon the room erupted into light and the room let out a collective sigh of relief.

"Thank God that didn't last long, I don't like the dark." I looked to the voice and scoffed… Denki, of course he'd be afraid of the dark…

"Denki… your quirk is literally electricity… How?"

After a few seconds of silence from the boy, who I assume was either ignoring me or lost in thought, I decided to find Tokoyami, after all Dark shadow gets harder to control in the dark so I wanted to make sure that he was okay. It didn't take me long to spot him over by the snacks with an agitated Bakugou, who was dressed in a dress?

"Don't get any ideas dunce face, it's not what you think. I'm the God of War, Hades or whatever his name was."

"Like I cared about your damn costume Bedsheet Boy, I came to talk with the pirate."

I grabbed onto Tokoyami's hand and dragged him away somewhere a little less crowded, I took a breath to ease my nerves and looked into his eyes.

"Are you okay Tokoyami? Dark shadow didn't try to give you any trouble?" I rushed the words out but he had nonetheless nodded and gave my shoulders a pat.

"Thank you for the concern (Y/N), I assure you everything is fine and Dark Shadow has actually been quite tame this whole evening. He's been quite fascinated by all of our classmates' costumes and he keeps trying to figure what everyone is."

That's actually cute, who knew that dark shadow could be so adorable? I gave Tokoyami a grin as I was about to open my mouth to tell him what I thought of our Classmates costumes when a furry hand gripped my shoulder, inlet outback shriek and sighed in relief when i realized it was Todoroki.

"Oh uh… Hey Todoroki, what's up?"

"Have you seen Beth? She was next to me before the power went out. And I haven't been able to find her."

"Oh geez, what a bummer. Are you sure she didn't just go outside?"

"No, I don't think she would have gone outside, especially that fast. The lights were only out for about a minute. But I guess it wouldn't hurt to look out there. "

Tokoyami and I watched as Todoroki walked to the front doors, he gave a tug, no luck. He tried again but they didn't move and gave no sign of opening soon.

"Hey Half and half! Why don't you try pushing?"

"Already did Bakugou, if you were paying attention instead of eyeing Denki you'd have noticed that."

Shit… Bakugou was staring at Denki? Everyone's gaze turned from Todoroki to the hot head before looking to a stunned and flustered Denki, who opened his mouth to say something when the room once again was pitch black.

"Hello UA Hero Course 1A. I am your host tonight, Monsieur King. Tonight you have the honor of being a part of my game." The dark room was silent for a bit before chuckles bounced off the walls. "What game you ask? Let me just say, you have until sunrise to find your classmate I have stolen from you, if you don't you'll never see her again. Also to make things a little more interesting I have drugged you all with a powerful potion that will be taking affect any minute now. The potion has already disabled your quirks, the next step will be a painful transformation into whatever costume you have decided to wear tonight, you'll gain just about all the qualities of the costume as well. This potion can only be undone with the antidote which I have hidden somewhere in the house, if you fail to find the antidote you'll be stuck as your costume until next Halloween. Good luck young heroes, your journey starts now."

The lights turned on and everyone was silent until Mineta, Denki, and Mina began crying. I scoffed and shook my head, why was I stuck with such babies as classmates?

"Enough! We need to have a calm and level head. We need to separate into groups and work together to find this antidote and also find Beth. As it's clear to see she's the only one missing out of us all."

Everyone turned to Todoroki who sounded worried even though he looked as calm as ever.

"How are we gonna do that? If you haven't noticed I'm dressed as a . This isn't going to be good!"

I looked around at my fellow classmates' costumes, Kirishima dressed as the Crimson Riot, so like Izuku he was dressed as his favorite hero. Scanning the rest of the class I noticed more and more animal costumes than heroes or villains.

"Hey Tokoyami, does Todoroki seem a bit tense? He seems a bit agitated about this whole thing… More upset than scared, like everybody else seems to be panicking."

I looked over to Tokoyami and watched him nod before he tapped his foot in thought. We stayed silent for a few moments before he shrugged.

"Who knows what truly angers a man? If I had to guess, it might be because Beth was taken and now we're all going to be turned into our costumes. If he had said no to Beth he wouldn't be in this mess. It is also possible that Todoroki has feelings for her."

Ha. Right, Todoroki had feelings for Beth… like I'd believe that. I shook my head and let out a small laugh, for the next half hour or so the class separated into groups. Those who may be helpful, those who definitely weren't gonna be helpful and those who were going to need help if they gain animalistic traits.

Sero had dressed up as a mummy so he wasn't gonna be much help if his limbs started falling apart or if he wasn't able to use his vocal cords. Mineta had dressed up as Cupid, so we decided he'd be more annoying then helpful since he would have as he put it 'The power of Love' on his side. Denki had confirmed that his costume was actually the Pokemon Teddiursa, 'cute but deadly' was his reasoning so we decided to use him as a wild card, if we needed his help we'd try, but our only fear is that he'd be unable to control himself. Mina had decided to be laid back this year, she had dressed in pink baggy clothing and told us she was gum, guess that'd be useful for getting people stuck? Jiro was dressed as a Tasmanian devil so we figured we'd need someone to hold her down, which meant Izuku would have to try his best.

As the hour ticked to its end we all grew nervous, the potions didn't seem to have taken their toll on us besides for taking out quirks. We didn't know who was gonna turn on us and who wasn't, it felt like we were walking on eggshells.

"I swear if this was all a prank… SOMEONE'S GOING TO DIE!" We all heard Bakugou yell, but we couldn't see him, as the lights had gone off again. Soon cries of agony and sounds of movement reverberated off the walls, as one by one each class member of 1A was transformed into something they dressed up as because they thought was going to be fun.

The lights turned back on, they felt brighter than before, (Y/N) reached up and rubbed her head in pain. Her hand felt sticky so she looked at her fingers and groaned. Of course she had to add injuries to her bounty hunter costume, why couldn't she have just been basic?

Looking around she saw that her classmates all began to do the same as her. Confusion strewn about everyone's faces before the animals, well they became animals. Bunny Uraraka had to run away from the once tame Jiro and now was a raging Tasmanian devil, Izuku now All Might had swiftly pinned down side Tasmanian devil, but he was struggling.

"G-go! Find the antidote, f-find Beth...Quickly!" Izuku struggled to keep his hold but looked at us and gave us an All Might smile before turning his attention back to Tazzy Jiro.

"I think we should go find Beth, she's dressed as EraserHead, maybe she could use his quirk and maybe stop some of these guys from freaking out."

"Eh… Do whatever you want Todoroki, I am looking for that antidote first.Come on Tokoyami, off we find that antidote everything will go back to normal."

Tokoyami agreed that it was better to search for the antidote, after Beth could hold her own. He and (Y/N) were practically tearing apart the house to find the antidote. Though it had been easy at first they soon saw that Jiro had gotten free and was charging at them, the two of them ran as fast as they could but came to a halt went they were met with a Teddiursa.

"D-Denki?"

The small Pokemon let out a shrill cry and launched into attack, clawing and biting at Tokoyami, who struggled to get him off due to Dark Shadow now being a parrot and him being a pirate with a missing arm. How (Y/N) didn't notice that at first she didn't know, quickly she grabbed a nearby lamp and smashed it upon Denki's head.

"Sorry Kaminari, but you were hurting our friend."

(Y/N) didn't see it but Tokoyami had the slightest bit of blush on his face, he urged her on seeing as they'd somehow lost Jiro. He stole glances over her way as they moved from room to room.

"Thanks, fer yer help back der. I appreciate it Lassie."

(Y/N) simply nodded, she didn't know how to respond, especially when Tokoyami's pirate voice had given her chills. They had been searching for what felt like days, the two of them were growing tired, they leaned against a nearby wall and let out a breath.

"Tokoyami…You're welcome. I didn't say it earlier because I heard your voice and thought I was gonna end up giggling. There's nothing wrong with it, I just wasn't expecting the pirate talk."

"Thas quite alright Lassie. Yer right it be weird. Me own voice has done crossed me."

(Y/N) looked over shyly and let out a soft laugh before facing Tokoyami fully.

"If you'd be alright with it, after we get through this that is. Would you perhaps like to go out on a date? I-its fine if you don't want to… I-its just I really like you Tokoyami and I enjoy spending time with you."

Tokoyami's face grew red and he grew nervous as he looked away, he mumbled a few curses and turned back to (Y/N).

"Ah, ye beat me to me own question Lassie. Thar be no one I'd rather chose. I accept yer date. I really like ye too Lassie."

The two stared at each other lovingly, the dim lighting in the room made it feel rather romantic around the two of them. (Y/N) and Tokoyami both slowly eased in, their lips ghosting each others. They pulled away when they heard a shout, followed by what seemed to be explosions, they stared at each other confused until they remembered what's been going on.

"Stay still damn it!"

The shouts grew louder as they grew closer, making it back to the others they were surprised to see Bakugou, holding actual fire in his hands as he threw them towards Mineta. Mineta was crying countless apologies as he ran, heart shaped arrows in his hands as he tried to escape Bakugou's reign of terror.

"What the Hell? Bakugou what's the meaning of this?"

"He thinks it's funny to try and shoot us with those damned arrows. He already hit Uraraka, which seeing as she's a literal bunny and she's been going after Al- Deku, who is holding off Jiro you can see how badly that can go. Now he's trying to hit anyone who comes past him."

"Maybe he's learned his lesson, if not we'll hold him down and you can do whatever it is you're trying to do."

Mineta stopped running and looked between (Y/N) and Bakugou before giving up, he threw down the bow and arrows. "Not like it worked anyways. She didn't fall in love with me, I'll just have to try something different."

"Ye think we be back to normal before Sun rests above thar trees over yonder."

(Y/N) blinked for a moment before realizing what he had asked, she frowned and shook her head.

"I don't know Tokoyami, but I sure hope so. Sunrise is already near and we have no antidote to turn us back to normal."

"You forgot the part where we also don't have Beth. What if she's the key to finding the antidote?"

(Y/N) let out a sigh and shook her head before turning over to Bakugou.

"I didn't forget about her, I just didn't think it was important to include her. She's a big girl she probably could have gotten out on her own, especially since she dressed up as our Sensei."

Bakugou scoffed and turned around, walking away from the group.

"I'm going to help that half and half bastard before I have to be stuck like this with you losers until next Halloween."

Shortly after the words left his mouth screams pierced through the air… weird that kind of sounded like Beth.

Tokoyami, Bakugou and (Y/N) ran to the screams and stood shocked, their classmate was chained to a wall and Todoroki, at least they hoped the werewolf in front of them was Todoroki, stalked around Beth. She looked like Eraser Head but still sounded like her normal self did it not work on her? But if it didn't work why didn't she just use her quirk to escape? (Y/n)'s train of thought was broken when they werewolf slashed out at Beth, Bakugou stepped forward and threw a fire of ball at him.

"Hey! Leave her alone! Beth, where's Todoroki? Stop crying damn it! We are running out of time!"

Beth sent Bakugou a glare, she was definitely mad at the boy, but she let out a sigh before she spoke.

"Katsuki, that is Shoto. H-he was fine a few moments ago, he was trying to pick the locks when he got a headache. Next thing I knew he transformed into a werewolf."

So it is Todoroki, this may have made things a little harder but that's fine.

The lights in the building flashed again and the sounds of applause surrounded them, as if it were coming out of the walls.

"Well done Class 1A! You have found the antidote and your fellow classmate. Though you're running out of time, the clock is ticking better hurry up."

"Wait… who found the antidote? Get back here and tell us more before I burn this house down."

"Easy there Mr. Bakugou, Katsuki I will explain. After you deal with your little predicament with that werewolf. He looks mighty angry, not to mention a bit hungry."

The lights powered back on, now instead of facing Beth, werewolf Todoroki was facing us. His large teeth exposed as he snarled, he stepped closer and closer.

"Hey guys wait up! Don't leave me all alone down there I'm sorry!"

Running in came Mineta with his bow and arrows in his arms, (Y/N) smirked and looked to him.

"Shoot the werewolf with your arrows, now Mineta!"

"What! No! No way, what if it like I don't know, falls in love with me?"

Bakugou sent him a glare and prepared to throw more fire his way.

"Do it or die!"

"Geesh no need to be so mean… I'll do it."

He took aim and released, the arrow zoomed past (Y/N) just barely grazing her before it hit it's mark. Werewolf Todoroki looked down and pulled the arrow out and growled before charging at the group. He chased them out of the room and around the house, the group kept running until they crashed into someone.

"Hey guys, where's the fire?"

"Denki!? But you were a Pokemon! What happened?"

"Well after you knocked me out (Y/N) I found a secret entrance to the basement I think, and I found a long table of food. Then I passed out and when I woke up I was back to normal."

Denki froze up before he sparked up his hands and threw his electricity towards them, it zapped past them and hit Todoroki, knocking him down and out.

"Uh, was that Todoroki?"

Yeah, but we need to get the antidote before we are all stuck like this till next Halloween."

After dragging the unconscious Todoroki down to the basement, each classmate took from the table, eating the antidote. They then went back upstairs to Beth and used their quirks to release her. They then promptly left the estate and made it back to the UA dorms, where they promised to never go to another Halloween party unless they knew who their host was.

(Y/N) and Tokoyami were sitting in the common room on the couch, (Y/N) who was leaning on Tokoyami, she looked up to him with a small smile.

"Hey Tokoyami, when do you want to do this date? Just let's not do anything Halloween related for a while. Okay?"

Tokoyami stared into (Y/N)'s eyes and thought to himself about how lucky he was to have her, he gave her a kiss on the forehead and held her close.

"I couldn't agree more. Let's go to the mall this weekend, we can go see a movie."

#bnha x reader #bnha tokoyami #x reader #tokoyami x reader #bnha #my hero academia #mha x reader #mha tokoyami #mha #bnha fanfiction #tokoyami fumigake

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worldofpokemonimagines · 5 years

Note

yo! For the prompt list, could you please write A, C , and I for either Red or Silver from the game ( i can’t decide i’m sorry—)

((No need to apologize! Decided to do both if that's alright with you anon! ^^ Also, I have this headcanon that Red is usually silent because of the lack of talking from being up in Mt. Silver, so after leaving the place, he doesn't even recognize his own voice and can't really find any words for anything.))

Prompt List can be found here.

Red

A - Asking you out

It's honestly going to take a bit before he asks you out because he can't figure out how to. He's been so out of touch with people for a while, so please be patient. He's doing his best. Red just wants to make sure he does this right for you.

He'll probably ask Blue or Leaf (better to ask her than Blue to be honest) for some advice on properly asking you out. The brunette tells him to just be himself and drops some hints to start off slow. So that is what he did.

The hints were very subtle; glancing at you more often than a normal person should, he walks closer to you to the point your hands practically brush against each other, he once asked if you liked this one cafe and if you would want to visit it sometime. He mumbled how nice it would be to go there with you, looking off to the side.

You eventually catch on to this. "Red? Are you asking me out?"

"... " Nod.

C - Celebrating your/their birthday

Your Birthday

Red will be upfront with you (in his own way) and ask what you'd like for your birthday. Because honestly there's nothing better for someone's birthday than to do what they want. He's willing to do whatever you see fit for this because hey, it's your day. It's all about you; you're the star. Red won't care where you want to go or what you want to do and insists that you do not hesitate on being a little selfish on this day.

If you're having trouble choosing and ask him for help, he'll suggest anything relating to your favorites. Red wants you to be doing the things that make you happy because your happiness means a lot to him. The day is overall spectacular which makes Red extremely proud of himself. Successfully making his s/o gleeful is a thing he cherishes the most and a fine moment in life.

His Birthday

Red doesn't really want a big, flashy party for his birthday. Probably a small one with his very close friends (+ you and his mom). Later he'll want to be with you, alone and just chilling on the couch. Watch some movies that are airing or go on Netflix.

It's a quiet, but heartfelt time between you guys and he loves that. He just wants to have some peaceful quality time with you. No distractions, no trainers challenging him, no people to bug him. Just a comforting day, with his favorite person in the world; you.

I - Inviting you to team up/join their organisation of heroes

The invitation isn't per say straight forward, but Red makes sure to let you know if he would like for you to team up in a double with him. He'll ask if you're okay with it because he doesn't want to pressure you into battling if you do not wish to. Sometimes he'll gently tug at your shirt/sweater/jacket or poke your shoulder to get your attention so he can ask.

Silver

A - Asking you out

Silver is not the best with his emotions, I mean, it was already hard enough to accept the fact that he had gain romantic feelings for you. But to ask you out? That's a challenge. He doesn't even know where to begin. Should I battle them?

He's rough around the edges, but that's not necessarily a bad thing... Sometimes. Though you two are friends, he sometimes has the habit of making snide remarks now and then, but they're not harsh enough to actually hurt you in anyway; just for you to brush/laugh it off. Silver cares though, even if it doesn't seem like it.

So, his way of asking you out would go along the lines of this:

"Hold it. You have some time to spare? I have to talk to you about something that's been bothering me." He had the same ol' resting bitch face as he requested for your time. You agree and wonder what he could want to talk about.

"This feeling has become something of a pain, but not in a bad way. You seem to cause this, you know. So, I feel like things will only settle if... You accompany me somewhere, wherever you like." He turns away from you, his expression read annoyed, but his lightly flushed cheeks say otherwise. "Take responsibility for this... "

C - Celebrating your/their birthday

Your Birthday

This guy needs help for this. Silver hasn't really celebrated birthdays as much as a person should, so he's a bit lost on how to spend time on your birthday. He reluctantly asks Lyra and Ethan for help, to which they respond with doing whatever makes you happy and giving you whatever your heart desired at the time. Lyra cheekily teased Silver on how this was out of his persona but sweet nonetheless. Basically stating that he was a softy deep down.

Silver scoffs with a blush softly painted on his cheeks. Since he had been so busy with planning, you didn't get to see much of the trainer until late in the afternoon close to dusk. He found you and took you out somewhere that you've been wanting to go to. The whole time was spent just for you and your enjoyment. Silver would be lying if he said that he didn't have as much fun as you. Call him cheesy, but he felt as if things were better with you around.

As the day comes to an end and night emerges, the two of you stand at Cherrygrove City's beach. Your eyes were glued to the ocean and how it sparkled due to the reflection of the stars. A thank you escaped your lips which caused Silver's head to turn towards you. His gaze was intense before it softened as he spoke out a 'Happy Birthday' to you, as he handed your gift.

His Birthday

As stated above, Silver has not celebrated many birthdays in life; this does not exclude his own birthday. As a result, the grey eyed trainer expects nothing when his date of birth comes along. It's sad thinking about it and you could not allow this to happen. You wanted to break the cycle of Silver's missed birthdays to make him feel cherished.

You know the guy does not like being crowded, so you decide to visit him alone. In your arms is a cake you had put your heart into and tickets to a movie. There was a film that did catch his interest (though he denied it but you know better) and you wanted to surprise him with that. Silver certainly did not expect his s/o to be here and asks what they're up to. The cake and tickets are presented which he simply stares at for a good two minutes. He takes the cake and a slight smile appears on his face. Was that a tear? Who knows.

I - Inviting you to team up/join their organisation of heroes

He's abrupt when requesting your assistance in a battle. Look what happened when you two had the opportunity to have a double battle with Lance and Clair. Pretty straightforward if you ask me. He knows that battling alongside you gives the best results in battle due to your bond with the Pokemon you have trained. That does not mean Silver is just using you, no no. He just... Feels better battling with you; about himself and deep down. He feels like he can do anything with you at his side.

#pokemon #pokemon imagines #pokemon x reader #trainer red #trainer silver #rival silver #pokemon red x reader #pokemon silver x reader #red x reader #silver x reader

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culturechroniclesblog-blog · 5 years

Text

Neon Genesis Evangelion & Making Arthouse Work

There is a lot of arthouse media out there. Anime certainly has its fair share, and who hasn't watched a Lynch or Jodowrosky film solely to lord your cultural sophistication over your inferiors? Most of them share a common thread of being “art for art’s sake”: impressive on an aesthetic or thematic level while a little lacking in character and narrative, which leaves its wider appeal, ah, limited at best.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show that cannot escape its ending. The show’s final stretch is totalizing in the popular discourse - everyone knows it "goes off the rails" in its latter half. Evangelion becomes an arthouse show, throwing reality to the curb in exchange for an assault of abstract and introspective setpieces. At age fourteen when you inevitably first see it, your mind is blown by it all, which is fair if it’s your first taste of the genre. However, coming back to it over a decade later like I did, having seen way more avant-style media than is probably healthy, I expected to enjoy the show but also see it just-another-entry into the genre.

Instead it held up masterfully. Evangelion is replete with flaws if you look at its whole picture, but in the execution of its arthouse appeal I saw it soaring past its competition in so many ways. In hindsight it had to - why else would an entire generation of fans trumpet it as one of the most successful shows of all time despite all those rails it went off? Evangelion, through undoubtedly sheer luck and insanity, stumbled on a way to make arthouse work for audiences beyond its niche, and I think that is the key to what makes the show as a whole function so well.

A World Without Uncertainty

As previously mentioned, most avant animation & film privileges aesthetics first in its visuals. The goal is to evoke a mood or feeling, and whether or not it really connects to the narrative is pretty secondary. I am certainly not bashing that - the way this challenges the viewer creates a unique experience. But even I will admit that sometimes it makes it, well, a bit hard to care about what’s happening on the screen.

Evangelion dodges this problem pretty much completely by making so many of its visual elements extremely direct. Honestly if you look at the majority of the more out-there sections of the show sequence by sequence, they would barely qualify as out of the ordinary! To choose one, take one of my favourite moments from Episode 26:

This sequence is not a mind-boggling piece of animation, at all. The concept of an outer frame that contains fast-moving images that reflect the nature of that frame is not new - ever seen this before?

--- It even has a red background, the hacks! ---

Not exactly the peak of avant-garde cinema here. Evangelion adds to the directness because this sequence is playing to illustrate that, literally, Shinji's identity is composed of the people in his life, and his desires are shaped by how they see him. It’s one of the core themes of the show - other people's conceptions of you are, in a way, just as much "you" as your own conception of you. What better way to illustrate that concept visually than having those people flashing through the frame of your body? While still an abstract animation sequence, it is not at all "art for the sake of art". It’s tied directly to the narrative, with a clear meaning - there is even dialogue partially explaining it.

This clarity exists for most of the more out-there sequences in Evangelion. The show's real "challenge" to the audience comes in how it strings sequences like these together, often at a breakneck pace. While in isolation they are only borderline abstract, when thrown together you are pounded down by the mix of themes and aesthetics. Look at Asuka's breakdown in Episode 22:

The scene has a cool visual design with the color contrast, to heighten the faceless crowd vibe - which it should, because Asuka is constantly fighting to not drown in a sea of anonymity, to stand out from the crowd and be the best pilot, to rely on no one but herself - and yet she constantly fears she is doomed to fail. This pretty-clear sequence, though, jumps quickly into this:

Then goes into this:

--- Eat your seizure-warning heart out, Pokemon ---

And in 20 seconds the show has thrown a half dozen thematic ideas at you via abstract representation. The viewer is absolutely overwhelmed on their first viewing from this, it becomes an aesthetic and you get that unique “arthouse experience”. But almost none of it is art for art's sake - you are watching a plot, a narrative, it almost all has dialogue explaining it. If you slowed it down you could get almost all of these scenes on the first watch, and on a rewatch you will probably pick it up fully. It’s this merging of abstraction and concreteness that elevates Evangelion above most other arthouse animation I've seen; you are constantly challenged, but never so much as to surrender and give up.

(Note: When I say that these scenes are “direct: or “clear”, I don’t mean that they have only one meaning, or that everyone will agree on the meaning. Their meaning is based on many other scenes, each with their own ambiguities and layers, and those differences will multiply out over the course of the show to result in varied interpretations. That process is different, however, from scenes having only aesthetic content, with no or little inherent narrative grounding.)

Realizing the Obvious Over and Over

Okay, the art itself walks the clarity/abstraction line, but even if it is connected to the narrative, why do this? Why would an audience want something that was a "typical" show to move in this direction? A lot of viewers have commented on the severity of the "shift" in the later episodes of Evangelion (generally starting around episode 16), a disconnect the fandom has not failed to capitalize on:

This split has its own meta-narrative, based on the production history of the show. Anno's growing mental illness - always present from the beginning - and huge production woes involving having to scrap already-complete episodes, caused a "breaking point" around this time where he threw caution to the wind and let capital-D Depression take the wheel. While there is some truth to this in the meta-sense, I have never liked the idea that the show itself has such a split. I instead see the more arthouse final stretch as more-or-less a natural outgrowth of the narrative, not a meta-split. In particular, the arthouse second "half" only functions as a reflection of and continuation of the more traditional first half, and without that first half it would fall on its face.

To show why that is the case, I want to explain a type of narrative arc that really hits my personal aesthetic in long form media that I am calling now and forever more the "Multifaceted Character Arc". Essentially, these are when characters have a core arc, and over the course of events they resolve this arc - but the show or book or what-have-you is only halfway done. They could just have a second, different arc, but instead the resolution of their previous arc proceeds to be undermined, picked apart, and exposed as a partial lie, and the character realizes they haven't resolved anything yet; and so the same arc continues, but from a different angle.

Evangelion embodies this trope on turn-it-up-to-eleven steroids. Episode 16 might be the "split" point in the meta-sense, but I always looked at Episode 12 as the narrative split-point, where the first half "ends". Episode 12 wraps up with Shinji, Misato, Asuka, and Rei having a ramen dinner together after beating an Angel, and so many of their previous arcs are "resolved". Shinji has opened up, comfortable with his surrogate family and no longer pushing them away, Asuka is letting her guard down and actually thought about Misato when choosing where to eat, something early-Asuka wouldn’t be caught dead doing, Rei is socializing, and so on. Shinji even admits why he wants to pilot the Eva (praise from his father), which has been one of his "arc" question up until this point, and he seems to have finally figured things out.

--- This might actually be the last happy expression Shinji has till the finale ---

Of course, the directing will have none of that, because this is a false peace. Misato, who is wise to the wider narrative, knows exactly on how shaky a ground this is all built on, and gives Shinji the side-eye to prove it.

--- The “we call those daddy issues, Shinji” face ---

Episode 13 is a Ritsuko side-story, and episode 14 is a recap episode....look, I never said Evangelion was perfect, okay? But once episode 15 rolls around all of this narrative build-up starts being completely undone: Shinji and Asuka's stable-ish friendship gains some very-unstable romantic overtones, Misato has a full-on emotional breakdown, and we are off to the races in episode 16 as Shinji's newfound confidence and masculine need to wave his dick around for Asuka's benefit results in one-way ticket to psycho-analysis mind-screw station:

I could go into how these themes develop from here, but that isn’t the focus of this essay. My point with all this build is instead to focus on two core narrative elements: justification, and engagement. All of the out-there elements and pyscho-analytic themes of the second half of Evangelion are present in the first half, and were presented in a typical way - character interactions, dialogue, plot events, and so on. Remember that scene I mentioned before from Asuka's breakdown, of her being swamped by ghostly forms, and how it referred to Asuka’s desire stand alone from the crowd through her skills as a pilot? I know what it meant thematically, cause here is Asuka, implying to you, in dialogue, what that scene is going to mean 8 episodes earlier (“it” is “pilot the Eva”):

And this isn’t even the first scene this theme has come up in, I could pull up a number of screenshots if I needed to of her either implying or directly stating this desire, its conflicts, and having resolutions around them.

The avant latter half of Evangelion can throw half a dozen themes at you in sequences of abstract animation because you have already spent half a season thinking about these issues in normal terms. It’s the multifaceted character arc - they have been continually struggling with these issues and exploring different solutions to them, solutions that seem to fail. On this backdrop, to repeat these themes again using traditional narrative tools would be, well, boring. Evangelion isn’t an essay, it’s a visual medium; the show has set the stage with the regular visual tricks of the trade for exploring these arcs, but in the latter half of the show it pushes what that visual medium can do. With that grounding, unlike in so much avant work, you can fully follow along with it. Essentially, Evangelion made you do your homework before the test.

The Ones You Love Mean More Than Anything

This groundwork is true on an intellectual/comprehension level, but it is also true on an emotional level; not only do you understand better these abstract elements, you also care about them, because they are not just referring back to factual elements but human moments. To take an example, Shinji and Asuka have several fight scenes that occur in abstract-head-space, and in one of them Asuka (wanna guess who my favourite character is?) is ripping into Shinji for how he fails to reach out to her, to make her feel wanted, and she mentions this:

The image here is one of many flashing across the screen at the time, but it’s a flashback to the aftermath of their kiss in episode 15. The “hold” here isn’t metaphorical; it’s a direct reference to how he didn’t hold her during the kiss. If you didn’t think it was clear, look back at the actual episode 15 footage - how the kiss scene focuses entirely on Shinji's hand in all its not-holding-Asuka glory. Like, really:

--- This shot is held for over 15 seconds, with only Shinji’s hand moving. Also a penguin walks by, don’t ask. ---

This is a really impactful call-back, part of the multi-faceted arc, as Asuka continually tries to figure out her feelings for Shinji and fails. Except, the scene being referenced here is not shot as a dramatic relationship moment, it’s a comedy scene. Its honestly hilarious, one of the worst first kisses ever on screen, to the point where Shinji almost suffocates to death because he is such a wuss and Asuka is such a tsundere. And at the end of the show they take this moment and transform it into part of Asuka and Shinji's relationship implosion.

Which means that you care about it! Because you are going to care about two kids’ fumbling attempts at romance far more than an essay on isolation and connection, for all the reasons those narratives traditionally work. Real people never have endless strings of introspection - introspection is something you do on a life that you have otherwise been living, with moments of seriousness and moments of hilarity and dumbness. Evangelion can show that, because it isn’t drama 24/7. Its first 15 episodes have comedy, action, slice-of-life, the works.

I think this is the element that really makes Evangelion stand out - that it can push what is happening onscreen to the limits of abstraction, and you are not only going to understand it, but also remember the human beings it is all happening to. It not only put in the time to make these characters fully-fleshed out, but connects back its new later elements to the moments that made them so fleshed out. It justifies going as far as it does through its arcs, and engages you emotionally as it escalates, while so many attempts at arthouse media either fail or don’t bother with either of those key elements. Evangelion is a show that starts as a highly traditional narrative, ends as an arthouse film, and by binding it all together so tightly makes you think it couldn’t have gone any other way. Which, it turns out, is a pretty good way to make the arthouse elements actually work.

....

Oh yeah, so Neon Genesis Evangelion: 10/10. Like the score? We are supposed to do that, right? That’s my score.

-Tim

---------

Final Notes: I have a bunch of other thoughts on Evangelion, and so while I imagine a lot of the shows we watch are going to get one cohesive essay, I will almost definitely have some follow-up posts - this post is just the main one that connects so many of my biggest takeaways together. I definitely want to write a few on the plot issues and their (non)relevance, the ways Shinji’s arc is perceived by fandom, and some other topics, but I do want to put up a few essays on other anime so we don’t have a massive Evangelion dump starting out the project. Hopefully I will get some inspiration on more topics from all the great ~discourse~ going on around Evangelion right now, and we will see what gets written.

#evangelion #neon genesis evangelion #art house #avantgarde

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musashi · 5 years

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jessebelle fucking sucks and i wrote a whole multichapter just so i could kill her with my own hands, but baggage has stopped me from admitting to myself that she’s probably my second favourite villain in the whole of pokeani. there is no part of me that thinks she has any depth or worth as a person and in some weird way that is WHY i enjoy her. not Her, but the place she has in the story.

abusers in media tend to fall into the realistic and unrealistic categories, with more realistic abusers being cunning and manipulative, sweet and doting in public and utter monsters behind closed doors. popular and well-liked and hiding the wicked they do to their victims WELL. jessebelle is definitely not that, which i think is why i can handle her. it’s hard for me to see type 1 in fiction because, inevitably, fandom ends up charmed by them and taking their side more often than not. it’s hard to watch, because not only is it reflective of real life, but it shows that even when an audience is clearly shown the terrible things an abuser will do, they will still often try to defend those things if a fictional abuser is charming enough.

so jessebelle being more on the unrealistic side is nice, she’s just unabashedly fucked up and cruel. no one’s charmed by her. we’re all in agreement that she’s horrible, with rare exceptions. she’s allowed to remind me of my own abuse without the caveats of me being weirdly indirectly gaslit by fandom as a whole.

and with all that said, i really like her being this expy (if you want to get technical, jessie is the expy of HER) because it pulls bits of realism into the unrealistic abuser. it speaks volumes of james, who constantly teeters on the edge of retraumatization. he fell for a girl who traumatized him so thoroughly that he ran from his millions, and one of the first things he did when he got out was fall for a girl who could pass for her twin. we don’t know if he did this consciously, how many memories he repressed, how far he’d wiped his ex’s face from his mind. either way, it speaks truth to the way victims tend to naturally hover toward what is comfortable and known, even when it might be unsafe.

similarly, his abuser used a grass/poison type to assault him more than once. james spends the entirety of the anime catching grass types & poison types, most of which are quick to turn him into a chew toy.

none of those facts would have weight without jessebelle, but because she exists, they go from basic facets of his personality to some of the most well-thought depth in the whole anime. james has these themes of reclamation and second chances woven into every part of his life. he takes these ideas, that the abused struggle to truly escape their abuse entirely, and tips them on their head. as a character, he says ‘maybe i can’t escape in a way that is typical, but i can take what i know as pain and turn it into something beautiful and mine.’

and he does. his partnership with jessie is one built on love and trust, loyalty and freedom. his pokemon turn their teeth on him not to shape him into what they believe he should be, but because they love him so wholly for who he is that their small bodies cannot contain that love. people love to point out the irony in james’ personal story--‘haha, he ran away from his life of luxury to get away from his domineering partner and stifling existence but nothing has changed!’--and they completely miss the point that actually, everything has changed, for him. he took the glass bottles his history threw and fashioned them into church windows.

i think this post was supposed to be about jessebelle. uhhhhh. yeah. i enjoy fucking hating her. i enjoy, like, seething with rage over the fact that every hardship my deepest and longest comfort character has gone through is her fault. but she works as this catalyst for james to rise above like the phoenix he is, and if my multichapter and their treatment in it is any indication, i uh. kinda dig that.

#wordy wendy #pokemeta #wendy rambles #im thinking a lot about her lately

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pokeshippingflashfic · 5 years

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sequel Pocky Game

(Follow-up to “Pocky Game”, which many people requested! @chumpyamigo, @miyatoriaka, @thealexxa123… Tagged because their request asks for this fic weren’t used to post it.)

A resounding thought crashed down on her as they slowly drew apart from each other, breath so shallow she wasn’t sure it was enough to sustain consciousness much longer.

“You… didn’t know, did you?”

It was a ludicrous marvel to watch Ash scramble for his escape, doing his utmost to look anywhere except for at her as he ran upstairs, claiming he needed to use the bathroom right away. Pikachu followed loyally after his distressed trainer while Misty watched in heart-aching awe.

That was just before the earth-shattering quake of righteous fury began to overtake her - partially at Ash because wasn’t it her who should be the one to run away in mortification? And partially at the third party duo she just knew had been behind it all.

“It was you two, wasn’t it?!” she whispered breathlessly, practically hyperventilating as she rounded on Tracey and Brock. “There was no way Ash had even heard of that game before tonight and you tricked him into playing!” She would have been screeching if she wasn’t so concerned it would draw more attention from the wrong person (i.e., Ash).

“Whoa, wait a sec, Misty!” Brock shouted, backing away on his knees, hands up in front of his face to ward her back. “C’mon, it was just a joke, right? No big deal! Ash didn’t expect it but he’ll get over it by morning! Probably forget the whole thing!”

“I - I don’t want him to forget the whole thing!” she responded too quick to better phrase her response with a stomp of her foot.

“I knew it!” the future doctor exclaimed with a confident smirk and the snap of his fingers.

“O - or maybe I do! I dunno! It’s just… he didn’t ask for this and… it’s not fair it happened this way!” she attempted once more. But of course it was even more than that, though her outrage made it impossible to string the proper words together in that moment.

“But you did want it to happen, didn’t you?” Tracey pointed out next with a nod in her direction as if hoping to coax her into a confession.

His perceptive nature was enough to cause her to clam right up. She knew she would have been better off running away like Ash had done. She knew it was all too good to be true.

It wasn’t just about Ash of course, though she had felt some misguided need to defend his ignorance in this case. At the end of the day, she also had to think about herself…

“I don’t know what you two were really trying to pull, whether you thought you were helping or thought it wouldn’t really matter once it was over somehow… but it’s not a joke to me. Now I have to figure out how to convince Ash that it didn’t mean anything special to me when, even if he didn’t know about how the Pocky Game works, it definitely did.” Misty huffed, turning on her heel and launching around the couch and upstairs.

In his room, Ash’s head was abuzz, questions flurrying about so quickly inside his head that he couldn’t find the time to form a single answer.

“Pika…? Pikapi?”

“O - oh, uh, hey buddy,” the teenage boy stuttered with a resigned sigh, staring at his Pokemon through his reflection in the vanity mirror. “Thanks for checking on me. I’ll be okay, of course. That was just… unexpected.”

It wasn’t his first kiss. It wasn’t his first unexpected kiss. It wasn’t his first kiss on the lips. It wasn’t even his first kiss on the lips with an audience present. But there’d been something so entirely overwhelming about the situation, about the closeness of Misty’s flushed and freckled cheeks, about her half-lidded blue-green eyes and her fluttering eyelashes and the intimate rise and fall of her chest from less than a foot away…

“Gah!” he exclaimed in retaliation, jamming his palms over his own eyes as if that would block the imagery creeping up from the back of his mind. This was nothing, nothing new, he’d been there a few times before so why was this particular kiss so much… more somehow?

“Ash?” a familiar voice that he wanted absolutely nothing to do with at the present time drifted softly from behind his closed bedroom door. “C’mon, we gotta talk about… what happened downstairs.”

“I’m, uh… I’m sleeping!”

“Obviously you’re not!” Misty shouted immediately back, a slight twinge of ire obvious in her tone.

“I’m sick, very sick, gotta get some rest to feel better now!”

“Pikapi!” Pikachu admonished from his spot on the corner of his bed before the redhead could reply again.

“Fine!�� the teenage boy groaned, caving to their combined demands, “C - come in, Mist…”

He joined his Pokemon partner on the bed, sitting stiffly, his spine straight as a lightning rod, nerves on end in panic over what would happen next. Misty cautiously opened the door, caught sight of him, stepped inside. He still couldn’t look her in the eye, instead hyper-focusing on her bare feet as she came to stand in front of him.

“Ash, I’m sorry about what happened back there. I… To be honest, I don’t know what else to say to you,” the redhead shrugged, beating back the small part of her that wanted to hone in on his cowardice and mock him for it like normal. She really missed their normal right now.

“It’s just… Tracey and Brock taught me the game but…” he wistfully shook his head, commentary faltering.

“Yeah, I figured that one out for myself, and trust me, I’m gonna get ‘em,” the redheaded girl muttered through gritted teeth, fists clenching at her sides. Then her overall posture relaxed once more as she stared down at him where he sat, Pikachu sitting bipedal at his side in support. “I promise I wouldn’t have let things go the way they did if I’d known that you didn’t know.”

There was a pregnant pause as the three occupants of the room braced themselves, steeped in silence. Misty’s face was aflush with a complicated ratio of appropriate embarrassment and unbecoming fulfillment. In the back of her mind, a part of her subconscious cheered through the guilt and anger and confusion of everything. Finally… something had happened between them, even if it hadn’t gone as planned.

Unfortunately while she was busy suppressing that part of her, Ash’s expression was pivoting over another realization entirely.

“Misty,” he began, finally looking her in the eye for the first time since the incident, “you said you would get Brock and Tracey back for what happened.”

“Uh… yeah?”

“‘Cause they put us in this position by not telling me that… the kinda thing that could happen if we both played the game to that point.”

“Right?” she responded blankly.

“But you also… when I brought up the game to you, you also asked me if I knew what the game was,” he continued pointedly, internally putting the puzzle pieces together so quick he felt a headache coming on from the pressure build up, “as if you knew how things might go at the end.”

“Oh…”

“And then you agreed to play it with me.” He stared the magenta-faced redhead down, daring her to deny his suspicions. “So that must have meant you wouldn’t have minded a kiss with me at least. You knew it was possible. M - maybe you even wanted it. Is that right?”

You’re out of your mind! she wanted to screech at first but her sandpaper tongue wouldn’t allow the syllables to form. What makes you think I’d ever want something like that with you?! she tried next but the secondary statement fared no better past her lips than the first.

Ash Ketchum watched the poor girl struggle, so pink in the face she looked just ready enough to faint from her internal brawl. Pikachu stood gaping at his master’s side as the situation unfolded before them.

The younger of the two trainers didn’t know what he expected (nor wanted) to hear but he was on the edge of his seat with bated breath until the girl standing in front of him finally buckled and mutely nodded her head after a solid few minutes of wringing her hands out around her night shirt.

Cotton filling his lungs and throat, Ash was barely able to get the next question out of his mouth. But he was in too deep not to go the distance now.

“Why is that? Why would you wanna kiss me?”

Misty mustered a shrug of indifference while her nerves burst alive in trepidation. However even she knew the situation wasn’t going anywhere and he wasn’t likely to let the subject drop until he heard her speak.

“I just… I’m sorry, Ash.”

“I don’t want you to apologize, I want you to tell me the truth!”

He was on his feet instantaneously, his hands grabbing her fitful ones and softly turning them palm up, gliding his thumbs downward and easing her fingers open, her tangled shirt hem falling away. He swore he could feel an erratic pulse in the blue of her veins as his thumbs trailed over them but the humming faded just as quickly, replaced by a profuse need to know greater than he’d ever thought he’d experience.

Any other day, Ash would have willed such a weird, sappy topic away, choosing ignorance in a heartbeat.

“I’ve wanted it for a long time, to kiss you,” she finally confessed in a murmur just loud enough to hear. “I only did it tonight because… I thought you wanted it too, and that was why you asked to play the pocky game with me. I guess I should’ve… known better, huh?” she finished with a wry grin, cheeks splotching red after holding back her breath and tears. “It was dumb of me to think you’d figured me… my feelings out to that extent.”

It took the teenage boy far longer than it probably should have for him to decipher the emotion filling him up was joy. How was it possible he was happy to hear that Misty had wanted so long to kiss him? How long had he even liked Misty in that way without knowing it…?!

“Ash…” The aforementioned female began in an aggravated tone, “… why the heck are you smiling? That’s not… I should kick…”

Of course only Misty could follow up her confession of love (as it more or less was) with a physical threat but that seemed to impress upon him all the more how strongly she felt somehow and he reassuringly squeezed her hands in response.

“Heh, Mist, it turns out that I might like you too! And,” he paused here as the redhead went still, eyes as wide as his had most definitely been after kiss earlier in the evening, swaying unsteadily for a moment as she came to terms with his statement, “next time you wanna try locking lips we don’t gotta play a game… unless you want to.”

#pokeshipping #flash fic #fanfiction #aaml #ash x misty #requests #word count: 1807

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ask-henry-yugi-tudor · 5 years

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Just story ideas I have and wrote about a little I guess

.....

Just vote which ones you like xD

#1: Unnamed - unfinished not even 200 words of some sort au where yami is an animal

#2: King Yamir, King of illusions - unfinished Is a story where Yugi got kidnapped from his home and is now traveling back after 50 years with a dragon, a knight and two centaurs and their friend. However once he arrives, he realizes things have changed and he isnt sure if the life with the humans might have been better off, even if they got rid of his wings.

#3 Mermaids - unfinished An au where Yugi gets himself into trouble by swimming too close to the surface and he ends up getting hit by the blade of a boat propeller. Kaiba ends up taking care of him but pegasus wants to put him on display. Atem meanwhile is furiously searching in every corner of the sea to find Yugi back and will stop at nothing to find him.

#4 Untamed - unfinished Prince Yugi is in search of a mythical beast in the woods that bears the fruit of life on its antlers which can save his grandfather, and the current king’s life. if he fails however, his evil uncle Aknaheden will assend the throne and plunge the kingdom into destruction. Meanwhile he kidnaps a child, befriends the most sarcastic cook ever and insults a young prodigee mage along the way.

... tbh i think shiirojasmine would love what i have in store for that one but im too afraid to tag anyone in this long post.

#5 Aelves - unfinished This story was created before King Yamir. It centered around Atem and his family which were orphans that lived on the streets before getting taken in by townspeople. Atem was the apprentice of a blacksmith bullied by a fierce adventerous knight who told him he would never make good swords, Timaël (Timaeus’ counterpart) was a sheperdboy who was afraid of sheep and Heba worked in a bakery. They find out their parents have been killed by Aelves and plan on finding these Aelves only to befriend Yami, Yugi and Timaeus because they saved one that almost drowned in the river while the other two were unnable to swim.

This was the original idea, but there were too many characters and though i havent really written a good amount on it, this hasbeen revised into number 6

#6 Aelves - unfinished Atem finds himself in a bind when he befriends a young Aelf when another thinks he is going to be Yugi’s candidate for the wild hunt. The wild hunt involves humans having to run as the Aelves chase them riding deer. And the human has the marry the Aelf that captures them. Also Yugi hits Atem with a frying pan because why not.

#7 The Time we Share - finished Probably the only fanfic i have ever finished. Resolves about Yami, a social awkward young man that is in love with his introverted neighbor and has no idea how to handle it. A short oneshot. Nobody understands it. I dont even know myself.

#8 Words better left unsaid - unfinished Another Neighbor Au Where Yami is a serial killer that partakes in weird human sacrifice rituals. Yugi is so dense however he doesnt notice it. Meanwile Yami keeps stalking him around, always knowing an excuse to be in the same place as Yugi. Eventually Yugi just takes him along because reasons he doesnt find suspicious at all. But having an infatuated serial killing stalker is a good thing when the world finds out you are in possession of an ancient artifact made of solid gold and everyone wants to kill you.

#9 Mirror Immage - unfinished (this is an old one) What if there was a life on the other side of the mirror that was the entire opposite of your own yet still looked exactly the same? And what if you fell through? What if your Mirror Immage was right beside you, instead of being a mere reflection? #10 We create this world - unfinished Based on an old fanfiction of mine called Need A Second to Breathe- basically it is a rewrite of this- In where Yami, Atem and the other egyptiantied cast are the incarnated gods of Egypt. Yami is not allowed to enter the Human world but does so anyway, finding Yugi. He uses his godlike powers to make Yugi happy and angers Atem further. However Atem once made the same mistake of falling in love with a human called Heba, and Yugi looking like Heba is not helping in the slightest. Yugi keeps having viseons of Heba, whos ghost has returned from the underworld, however at the terrible price of being possessed by an evil spirit. And yugi has to choose between giving up his body to save Heba, or not doing so, in turn losing Yami.

#11 A Shadow’s cast - unfinished I think I was either very tired or sick writing this one because it doesnt make any sense. Basically Yugi wakes to find a visitor in his home that is trying to hide from an organisation that is trying to hurt hus guest. Needs a desperate rewrite.

#12 The Cecaelia - unfinished but up for reading Here What do you do when you find a little creature out on the beach being attacked by seagulls? Chuck it back into the ocean, or take care of it? #13 Mob Boss Yugi - unfinished This kind of was based on Shiirojasmine’s 3 gods au and it sort of formed into my own concoction I suppose. An au where Yugi often blacks out and becomes Yami, one of the greatest mob bosses the world has ever seen. Mai and Joey being undercover agents. Yugi gets scared and writes letters to his other self, finding out that he is a mere puppet that is to serve Atem. Atem is being captured by an evil organisation and has year to pay all his depts using Yugi, or he will be killed. A heist takes place at school and Yugi can no longer determine wether he is a high school student or a wanted drugdealer.

#14 Beast Assylum - unfinished A creepy Au where Yugi and Atem have been subjected to Lycanthropy and are being locked away so they cant hurt any innocent people ever again. Instead they are being used to get rid of people society doesnt want and or need. Atem is a crybaby. Yugi has been planning his escape for a long time now, why has he started to care for the other, this was not supposed to happen! #15 Baby And a Pharo - unfinished A spoof fanfiction where Yugi solves a puzzle as a baby and somehow it is a portal to the past. The Egyptians think he is son or Ra and Atem takes Yugi under his wing. However Time in Yugis verse moves faster and He has to make the disission wether he wants to stay with Atem forever or not. #16 Two Necromancers - unfinished Two necromancers. A prince and a thief. They both get resurrected to life to stop big threat to the world.What the two necromancers didn't account for was that they were sworn enemies. #17 Darkness beast - unfinished This one is too long to explain so enjoy the short version Kaiba and Dartz open up a portal to a knight-and-dragon Era and get the kings of the land they opened the portal on at their sides, Dartz tries to provoke a war, Yugi tries to stop him, Atem goes missing and then Yugi has to take care of a shadow like creature, until Dartz decides to put it onto the chessboard and use it as a threath to Kaiba and his alliences.

#18 Demons - unfinished Demons. When the world discovered that demons could be summoned to do one’s bidding, they didn’t quite understand what that meant. People were naïve and greedy. And it wouldn’t be long before one would summon something that nobody could control. Basically Ludus’s origin story. Needs a good solid rewrite.

#19 Mewtwo Yami - unfinished A stupid crossover where Yami ends up being raised by Mewtwo, thinks he is a pokemon, meets Yugi and wants to compete in pokemon battles (bullies Yugi into being his trainer so he can compete) to prove he is the strongest “pokemon” to make Mewtwo proud of him.

#20 The Assylum - unfinished Another one of these fics. basically what you would expect. Yami has the ability to see monsters that disguise themselves as humans and exterminates them, Yugi thinks he is just a mentally sick, cold blooded killer. Truth is Yami is also a monster.

#21 Chasing You - unfinished Ai Atem gets the task to find Yugi, so Atem can hold him in his arms, but Ai Atem has his own sights set on Kaiba. Feeling conflicted because he is more than a mere replica. He is better than that real Atem! Yet he wants to know what Atem and Yugi’s relationship was like. Was it love? Is that what he is feeling?

#22 The God Bird Au - unfinished One Day Harpies descended from the skies to terrorize the little village that Yugi lives in. When one sets his sights on Yugi, the youngster ignores him. He has bigger problems than listening to the flirting of an overgrown bird. And who is this snowy owl-creature that sounds so familiar?

#23 He’s not a retard - unfinished What is it with me and Yami being a killer? oh dear... Yami is an intelectually impaired, wheelchair-ridden person however he is what goes bump in the night. Yugi is his caretaker and never bargained for any of his shit. Not the part where he saves a plane from getting hijacked, and not the part where they get stuck in a tomb in egypt!

#24 Yami’s Angel - unfinished I think this was like my first Yugioh Au Yami finds a small, unconcious Angel and befriends the little guy and takes care of him. Yugi loves strawberries and chaos ensues because Yugi ALWAYS gets lost in public places. Later in the story he finds out Ryou has the same problem. Except he has a little devil. #25 The Wheelchair Au - unfinished A combination of the two ideas above. Atem, after a suicidal attempt which caused him to lose both his legs and a finger, refuses to undergo any opperation which could make him use prostetic legs in order to walk again. With nobody to care for him, he stays at the hospital. However one night he hearsa small voice, which is Yugi, his guardian angel, and if they fuse, Atem regains his legs. However if they remain fused for longer than 3 hours, Yugi will disappear.

#26 Dancing in Eternal winter Yugi gets stuck on a mountain with a jock who doesnt understand any language Yugi knows. Spirit Animals are there to help. Yugi then realises that Yami is unable to reintigrate into society, because he has been living on his own all this time, surviving, and his spirit Animal would be much too dangerous. No matter how nice Gulo is.

#27 The Levitated Mansion - unfinished Atem Lives in a wealthy family and loves to look at the stars with his telescope. However one day he sees a levitated mansion, the owner of said mansion has an eye on him. #28 Shapeshifters - unfinished Yugi is working at an orphanage when he meets an old Ijiraat, a shapeshifter that you forget after seeing him. However the more time Yugi spends with him, the more he keeps remembering. #29 Sphinxson Yugi - unfinished Atem lives in a village that has deemed him crazy because he swears he sees monsters. Kaiba is a monster hunter and decides to exploit the scared youth. Yugi is a Sphinx that cant wait for his human grandfather to return, but how long has it been? Just a few days, right?

#30 Pokemon - unfinished Another Pokemon Au. Yugi is an Eevee that has been taken in by the Kaiba brothers, but after a mishap in the trophee room and Evolving into a Vaporeon, What will happen to the young pokemon? #31 We Are Not Alone - unfinished An Alien Refugee gets mistaken by the Egyptian people as a god, and teach him their ways, however another of his kind is on their way to kill him. Can Atem and Yugi fight this evil Alien or not? And Where is Atem’s family? #32 Safe and Sound - unfinished A comfort/hurt oneshot fic where Yugi scolds Yami for hurting people, even if it is for protecting him. Basically the idea was that this event is what made Yami stop his evil penalty games.

#33 On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red rose between his teeth - unfinished Yugi is a werewolf that mistakingly kills a sheep of Yami and Ryou’s farm. However Yami and Ryou do not seem to realise who their guest is until Yami finds Yugi’s bloodied clothes on the floor one day as he returns home. thinking th beast that fled out of the window devoured him whole. Yugi tries to keep running, not wanting Yami to know he is a beast, but Yami keeps hunting, dead on bringing the beast down. #34 Bone Datem - unfinished A schooltrip to Egypt turns into chaos when Yugi gets trapped into a tomb and tries to make his way out. However when he finds a living Mummy that follows him around and wants him to steal the millennium puzzle from the Museum, he finds himself in an even bigger hastle than he bargained for.

#35 Unnamed genderbend Yugi Blindshipping Au - unfinished Yami and Atem are two gang members that hate each other. However yami is a playboy and gets cursed by a witch. Everytime the sun is down he transforms into a girl. But this girl doesnt remember anything and thinks her name is Yugi. One time, yami does not get home in time and this leads to yugi meeting atem who instantly falls in love with her. Theres little things though like yami being able to see everything yugi does and sometimes controlling her body or mind. At one point when atem tries to kiss him, she punches him bc yami in no way is gonna kiss that bastard xD atem mistakes it as hes gone too far and yugi is just superconfused why she did that xD I already know what i want the end to be but its kind of a sad part on yami's part? Also there is a part where atem finds out yugi is actually yami or something

#36 The Superhero Au - unfinished Yugi is in a happy relationship with his boyfriend atem but what he doesnt know is that Atem is also the Supervillain Yami. And Atem himself has no control over it whatsoever. The rules of the world is that one who can summon strong monsters are either superheroes or villains. However Yami can only summon a small little Kuroboh, and giving Yugi more trouble than ever. Atem on the other hand claims he has never been able to summon a monster before.

#37 Demon boyfriend Atem This was supposedly a parody idea where Atem lost his temper way too quick and started yelling in a demonic voice (ind of like Aggretsuko lol) And Yugi wasnt really phased by it at all because at the end of the day he knows atem loves him xD Even if it scares his friends a little.

#38 I wanna steal your heart (and eat your brains) - unfinished Title was based on a song. Yugi is a zombie and has been dating Atem and chaos ensuess. Kaiba also is a zombie and has been experimenting on himself and discovered some odd perks of being a zombie. (honestlyno plot just shenanigans and lovers quarrels)

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zageekyunicorn · 5 years

Text

Banette X Fem Reader Pokehumans x reader

My shrieks of fear echoed through the dark forest as I ran away from a scary pokemon. "Please, Banette! I'm sorry I disturbed you! I tripped on a root!" I tried reasoning with the angry pokemon and no change occurred. I was focused on escaping or hiding from the ghost type but the darkness made it difficult. I was focused on not being hit by Banette's shadow ball that I didn't notice the steep cliff and the last thing I remember before blacking out was immense pain. "Ugh...where am I? I'm not dead?" I groaned as I sat up and saw that I was in a huge room with vintage decor and furniture. I sat up and looked around the room some more; everything seemed to be very old and covered in a thick layer of dust. "How did I end up here? Who brought me here?" I asked myself as I stood up and made my way towards the door and opened it. "Hello? Anybody here?" My voice echoed through the dark hallway as I mentally shuddered from how creepy everything looked. I built up enough courage and walked through the hallway until i reached a stairway. "Man...can these paintings be any creepier or what?" I shivered as goosebumps appeared on my body while looking at the portraits of people with almost sadistic smiles; they seemed to stare into my soul. "C...could I be in the haunted mansion near the forest's edge?" My stomach dropped as I noticed the old furniture around the mansion and the thick layer of dust and Spinarak webs that covered everything in sight. A low laugh echoed through the room sending shivers down my spine as I quickly ran down the stairs and towards the large door which i presumed was the exit. I was about to taste sweet freedom when a certain pokemon appeared in front of the door, blocking my path. "B...Banette?!" I stuttered as I paled and backed away slowly from the scary ghost type. He eyed me menacingly before his creepy slits moved to the chair and back to me. I obeyed and sat down on the dusty chair, trying my best not to cough or sneeze from the cloud of dust particles entered my nose. Banette disappeared for a split second before he appeared in front of me causing me to squeak with shock and fear. I noticed he was holding something out for me; I removed my gaze from Banette's face and towards his claws. He was giving me an Oran berry. I took the berry with shaky hands as the puppet pokemon waited for me to eat it. It suddenly clicked in my head; Banette gave me the Oran berry as a sorry for getting hurt and scaring me. "Thank you, Banette; I'm sorry for falling on you. I'd be scared and angry too if something like that happened to me." I smiled as i finished the berry. Banette turned out to be a very sweet and caring pokemon, despite his past. Turns out Banette was just very lonely due to his friends leaving him behind after they found trainers who captured them. Soon enough, the pokemon accepted my offer to join me on my journey in finding the perfect place to live in and call my home. It was turning out to be a very difficult task due to Banette being over protective of me and scared anyone who came close to me. After weeks of searching with no result, the two of us decided to stay in the mansion that Banette lived in before until I figured something out. "Please, Banette! I will never find a place if you keep scaring anyone who talks with me." I said to the ghost type who was floating above my head. The pokemon shrugged his shoulders and floated down towards my lap as I sat on the couch. "At least allow me to go alone and then I'll come back for you when I find something." My words seemed to make Banette angry as he growled and shook his head. I sighed in defeat as I stood up and made my way towards the balcony in my room. It's not that I hate the mansion; it's just...the mansion is very old, rusty, dusty, the stairs are a death trap waiting to happen, the appliances don't work, and everything around us is dark. I felt Banette grab me from behind before hugging my waist. "I know, I know...I am not going to leave you and I care about you too." I smiled at my puppet pokemon not noticing the the slight frown on his face as I made my way towards my bed and slept. The nest morning, I woke up to the sun's rays shining down on my eyes. I rubbed my eyes and stretched before I sat up, but something warm and strong was stopping me from moving. "What the..." My eyes went to my waist and my heart dropped when I saw an arm, a very muscular arm. I trailed up the arm until I saw a man sleeping next to me on my bed. I screamed slightly before jumping out of bed and called out for Banette. The man's eyes shot open and I gasped at the familiarity of the red eyes that I have gotten used to throughout the weeks. The man jumped out of bed and stood in front of me while scanning my room. "What is it, (Y/N)? I don't sense or see anything...Was it another nightmare?" The man spoke in a deep and smooth voice which caught me by surprise. The man's eyes widened after that and he gasped. "What the...How am I talking?!" The man asked with a shocked expression as I stared at him with a 'are you mental' expression on my face. "Who the hell are you? What did you do with my Banette? Why are you dressed like that? Are those contacts? Whe..." The man silenced me by placing his hand over my mouth. "I can't believe this!" The man breathed as he ran towards the mirror in my room and stared at his reflection as if he never saw himself in the mirror before. I was really freaked out now and ran out the room to find Banette and leave. I was about to exit the mansion through the large doors when I was grabbed and held in place by two strong arms. "Where do you think you're going, (Y/N)?" A deep voice sounded near my ear. I hate to admit it but i got goosebumps from how good his voice felt; curse woman hormones. "Getting away from you and searching for Banette!" I said angrily which earned a slight chuckle from the weird man. "(Y/N); I am your Banette." The man said with a smirk. "Are you mentally ill? Did you escape from an asylum or something?" I asked as I glared at the black haired man when he turned me around to face him. "Look at me, (Y/N); look into my eyes and tell me what do you see..." The determined tone that laced his words had fixed as I stared into his eyes which do seem very familiar. I felt like I knew those eyes, but i refused to let my guard down. "If you really are my Banette then tell me something that only my Banette would know." I said as i stared hard at the man who held me captive in his warm and comfortable arms. The pale man sighed before he answered. "There was this one time when I possessed a guy and used him to follow you and purposely ruin your date with Mathias. Another one is when you always cry at movies such as The Pyroar King. Another is when you hate wearing your swimsuit out in public because you are very self conscious about your body. Another is when you said that Banette, who is me, has a crush on you. There was this other time when you failed to notice me and you started undressing in front of me..." I stopped Banette before he could continue with the embarrassing memories. "How...?" I breathed as I stared at my now poke-human. Banette just shrugged his shoulders and smirked his famous smirk as he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me closer to him. "I heard something on the news about an outbreak of Pokemon turning into humans. Apparently pokemon turning into humans is considered a common occurrance and I am one of those luck pokemon." Banette explained as his face inched closer to mine. My cheeks reddened and heated from how close our faces were. "L...lucky?" I paused for a second when something Banette said clicked in my head. "Wait a second...I never told you that I thought you had a crush on me." I gasped before playfully glaring and smacking the human Banette. "You've been reading my diary again! How many times am I supposed to..." I was interrupted by a pair of soft and warm lips against my own. My eyes widened before they fluttered closed and i wrapped my arms around my former pokemon's neck. Since I was caught off guard, my lips were slightly parted which gave Banette the opportunity to explore my mouth with his very talented tongue. Our tongues danced to a beat that only the both of us knew as we lost ourselves in the kiss. I reluctantly pulled away to breathe but I kept my forehead touching Banette's. "So can I assume that you feel the same way?" Banette asked as I smiled. "I have a crush on you too, Banette." I sighed happily as we remained in each other's arms for the remainder of the day. Fast forward a few months; Banette and I decided to live in the mansion but bruce it up a bit...make it more modern; plant a few flowers and trees, repaint the walls, buy new wallpaper, carpets, appliances, and voila! Now, the mansion looks more lively and elegant with a modern twist. Sometimes tired trainers would ask if they could stay the night, but as usual Banette remained protective of me and would still scare off some guys he deemed suspicious. Why did Banette have to keep his powers? I would just sigh and lightly scold the former pokemon before we would continue enjoying the other's company. "And then you wived happwy eva afta! Wight mommy?" I smiled at my two yeard old son as he clapped his cute little hands. He loved that story of how I met his father. "Yes, Kiba. We lived happily ever after...that is until we had you and Kiara; we became even happier after you two came into our lives." I kissed the little boy's chubby cheek as he giggled. Kiba looked exactly like his father with his red eyes and pale skin but he had my hair. Kiara had my looks except for her eyes which she took from Banette. The door to the living room opened and in came Banette with Kiara in his arms. "What are my two lovelies doing here?" My husband smiled as he sat beside me and wrapped an arm around my waist to pull me closer to his body. "Mommy was tewing me the stowy of how you two met." Kiba and Kira giggled as Banette kissed my cheek. "And did mommy tell you how much daddy loves her?" Banette said as he pulled me even closer to him; i was almost sitting on his lap as Kiba and Kiara stood in front of us. "We're going to bed, now. Good night~" Our two children ran out the room and to their bedroom for they knew the look that Banette had as he looked at me. "I love you." Banette kissed me and I happily kissed back with the same amount of passion. "I love you too." I said before I was engulfed in the kiss again. I was suddenly carried by Banette and lead out of the room. "Where are we going?" I asked my love as he smirked at me and looked at me with those soft red eyes that I have come to love. "To continue in the bedroom, where else?" Banette smirked as he kissed me again before he closed the bedroom door behind us. Let's just say that the rest of the night was a blast! ;)

#pokemon #pokehuman #fanfiction #banette #gejinka #story #love #romance #fiction #literacy #anime #manga #xreader #reader #chubby reader #chubby #plus size #fat #pokemon x reader #human pokemon

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horsegirlhob · 5 years

Text

Dan and Phil are actually outside for an extended period of time cause Pokemon Ch. 2

Summary: When he was 18, Phil Lester decided not to go on a Pokemon journey. But now he’s graduated university and he has no idea where his life is headed. So he decides to get a starter Pokemon and fly to the Kalos region to collect all eight badges and maybe figure out what to do with himself.

Dan Howell just graduated from high school and is not hesitating to start his Pokemon journey. He just wants to escape the little town he grew up in and maybe actually become something worthwhile.

Lets see what happens shall we?

word count: 2534

chapter 1 is here

if you prefer ao3

Warnings: None that I know of?

a/n: So here’s the second chapter of this incredibly self-indulgent fanfic. We meet Dan in this chapter who I think I write better than Phil? But idk, tell me what you think. Also big thank you to my beta @theflowerybean! reblogs are really appreciated

Dan hated the mornings more than anything else in the world. And that included himself, which was saying something. That being said, this was one thing he refused to be late for. He had waited 18 years for the chance to get out of this godforsaken town and he wasn’t about to throw away that chance because he slept in and the professor lost patience.

Slipping into a pair of black skinny jeans, Dan glanced at his reflection in the mirror leaning against his wall. No fringe gaps, no stains on his favourite eclipse t-shirt, and he had taken a shower last night. He was ready.

“I’m going into town!” Dan yelled back into the house, slipping on his shoes and throwing on a hoodie. There was no response but Dan didn’t yell it again. His parents knew where he was going anyways.

Walking out into the spacious yard, Dan let out a sharp whistle. Before long, pokemon started creeping out of the bushes and trees. “Hey guys,” Dan smiled, kneeling down next to an old flareon that had been nuzzling at his foot. “Hey girl, how’ve you been?” The flareon made a noise of contentment and Dan smiled, scratching behind her ears. “That’s good. I’m glad.

Before long, Dan was surrounded by almost twenty eeveelutions. His family ran a breeding and wellness center for eevee and their evolutions, and Dan had been helping out since he was old enough to walk. If there was one thing he was going to miss from this place, it was the eevees. Although…

“Where’s Loki?” he asked a nearby umbreon. The umbreon didn’t reply and Dan frowned, confused. Until that is, he was nearly knocked over by a ball of fluff that descended upon him from a nearby oak.

“Oof! Hey there Loki.” Dan managed to grab the eevee clinging to his hoodie by the scruff of their neck. Loki squeaked indignantly and tried to nip playfully at Dan’s fingers. Dan dumped Loki unceremoniously on the grass in front of him. “You know, if you keep attacking me like that, I might just leave you here,” Dan threatened jokingly. He would never actually leave Loki here. He had raised Loki from an egg, and the thought of leaving his best friend behind was preposterous.

Loki, despite knowing this, whined and drooped his ears in a way that they knew Dan found adorable. Dan sighed, ruffling the fur on top of Loki’s head. “Oh don’t you start with that innocent act. We both know you’re a little demon.” Then again, Dan was sure he would be glad for Loki’s violent tendencies when he started challenging gym leaders.

“We should be going.” Dan grunted, pushing himself back into a standing position. Loki perked up immediately- the little faker – and clawed his way onto Dan’s shoulder like he was some kind of glorified tree. “Oh, so now you want to be friendly. Let’s get going then. Don’t want to leave the professor waiting.” As Dan made his way down the long path to Aquacorde town, he zipped up his hoodie against the chilly morning air. He never did like getting up this early. But it was a small price to pay for a proper starter pokemon.

Dan’s family was a liaison of the Kalos science association. They helped with research on eevee and it’s evolutions. Though their part in that research came mainly in the form of providing large quantities of eevee to study. It did come with perks though. Turns out one such perk is professor Sycamore making a slight detour through Aquacorde town with three starter pokemon for Dan to choose from.

He needn’t have bothered bringing all three considering Dan had made his choice four years ago. But if the man wanted to carry around two extra pokeballs, Dan wasn’t about to tell him how to live his life.

Finally, Dan started to see the beige sandstone that made up literally all of Aquacorde town. Dan unconsciously picked up the pace, his heart beating faster in his excitement. He had gotten his trainer card a few days ago, and once he got his registered starter,he would be able to leave. He could finally go somewhere, anywhere else.

Making his way down the sandstone streets, Dan prayed he wouldn’t see any of his old classmates. It was early enough in the morning that there were only a few people wandering around, but you never knew who could be lurking about. You’re almost gone Dan. This time tomorrow you’ll be gone and you won’t have to see anyone from this town ever again. He repeated his little mantra to himself as he made his way to the café where he had agreed to meet Sycamore.

He spotted the professor immediately upon walking into the town’s main square. He was seated at one of the café tables, sipping some hot beverage that Dan could really go for right about now. Then again, he was probably jittery enough already without caffeine in his system.

“Professor Sycamore?” Dan asked,startling the professor out of his thoughts.

“Ah, yes! My apologies. You must be Daniel?” Sycamore stood hurriedly, shaking Dan’s hand rather aggressively, in his humble opinion.

“Just Dan is fine. Thank you for meeting me here.” Dan tried to keep professional, despite feeling severely underdressed. Sycamore was wearing a full on lab coat, and Dan couldn’t help but remember that the professor came from Lumiose city, and Dan was born and raised on a glorified farm. Sycamore didn’t really seem to mind Dan’s appearance, shaking his head dismissively.

“Oh, it’s no trouble, truly! It’s quite exciting to be the one to see a new trainer off on their journey. And your parents have told me nothing but good things about you.” Sycamore reassured. Although Dan was not entirely reassured, because if his parents had told Sycamore about him, then that meant that he had something to live up to. And historically, Dan was not good at living up to expectations.

“Come here my boy, have a seat. Do you want anything to drink? The cappuccinos here are delicious!” Dan sat down awkwardly across from Sycamore, who seemed way too enthusiastic for 7am.

“Um no that’s okay. I don’t really have any money on me so I can’t-“

“Oh don’t worry about it Daniel! I can buy your cappuccino. You must be very sleepy getting up so early in the morning.” The professor offered, before Dan could even finish his sentence.

“Just Dan is fine. And you really don’t have to, I’m not that sleepy, and I don’t want to be an inconvenience.” Despite Dan’s protests, Sycamore flagged down a nearby waiter and ordered two cappuccinos, seeing as he had finished his and apparently had some kind of crippling addiction.

“Now Daniel,” Sycamore started after their waiter went to fetch their coffee, “I’m not just here to drink cappuccinos by the river. I’m here because you just turned 18.” Dan nodded, leaning forward just a bit in anticipation. He had been looking forwards to this since his birthday a few weeks ago. It was hard to believe it was actually happening right now.

“And as we all know, when you turn 18, you are given the choice to receive your trainers license and start your pokemon journey. But of course, to do that you need an official starter, which is why I’m here today. To give you said starter.”

Sycamore reached down under his chair to pull out a very worn looking briefcase. He placed it on the table just as the server arrived with their cappuccinos, which they both thanked her for, before turning their attention back onto the matter at hand.

Snapping open the latches on the briefcase, Sycamore continued his explanation. “Now I’m sure you already know what three starters we offer here in the Kalos region, but I am legally obligated to tell you, so I’ll keep it brief.” Sycamore opened the briefcase and removed three shrunken pokeballs, which he placed on the table between them.

“Try the cappuccino. You’ll love it.” Sycamore said, taking a sip of his own and letting out a sigh of contentment. Dan took a sip of his impatiently, almost burning his tongue. It was admittedly very good. But Dan wasn’t here to drink coffee, and he was starting to get a little bit impatient. “So, as you can see, there are three starters. The fire starter fennekin, the grass starter chespin, and the water starter froakie.” Sycamore listed off the starters as he released them each from their pokeballs. Dan had to move his cappuccino to avoid it being spilt in his lap by fennekin.

“Do you already know which one you want Daniel?”

“Dan’s fine.” Dan replied absentmindedly, “And yes, I do actually know which one I want.”

When Dan had started actually thinking seriously about becoming a pokemon trainer, the very first thing he had done was look at his starter choices. At first he had wanted fennekin. It was cute, and Dan already really loved fire types. But, comparing it to the other two, fennekin and its evolutions fell short.

Dan had considered chespin as well, and while he thought that it would be a decent choice, Dan ultimately decided that chespin just wasn’t very suited to the battling style Dan was starting to develop with Loki and the other eevee.

Froakie however, fit the bill perfectly. Not only did he seem like the most logical choice for Dan, he was also a frog. And you could never go wrong with a frog, is something that Dan has never said before in his life but is probably very true.

Dan reached out his hand to the little blue starter, smiling down at him. “Whadda ya think Froakie. Would you like to come with me?” Froakie croaked in excitement and jumped onto his arm, climbing up to sit on Dan’s only vacant shoulder. “I’ll take that as a yes then.”

“Do you have any plans for when you’re going to head out?” Sycamore asked, returning the other two pokemon to their respective balls, rifling again through his suitcase.

“I think I’m going to spend the rest of today packing and getting to know froakie a little bit better. Then tomorrow I’ll start making my way through santalune forest.” Dan had considered leaving immediately, and he had to admit it was tempting to just up and go. He had been waiting for this day for so long, and the thought that he had to wait any longer to get out of this stupid town was an unhappy one.

But he did have things he wanted to say goodbye to. Also, he still had a few things to pack before he left. He had waited this long, he could wait one more day.

“That sounds like a good plan Daniel. Now, here’s your pokedex and froakie’s pokeball. Although, he seems pretty comfy where he is. And here are five other pokeballs for you to use along your way.” Sycamore slid the objects across the table, and Dan picked up the red pokedex curiously. He’d seen them before, but he’d never had one of his own.

Dan and Sycamore talked for a while longer as they finished their cappuccinos. Sycamore seemed very interested in Dan’s plans, and Dan had to scramble to come up with anything meaningful. His plans consisted of “Leave home, go train pokémon, beat the gyms, elite four?” But that was starting to feel exceptionally juvenile.

He had no guarantee that he could defeat the gyms. He especially had no guarantee he could challenge the elite four. He was just some kid with no friends, no money, and no experience. He also had no backup plan for if this whole pokemon trainer thing ended up being too much for him. And god, he had just accepted a pokemon. A pokemon who could have had the chance to go on a journey with a trainer who knew what they were doing. A trainer who wouldn’t have days where they couldn’t do more than roll over in bed. What had he just gotten them into?

Dan felt a familiar warmth press against his left cheek, grounding him. Loki rubbed their face affectionately against Dan’s , and he felt a small smile slip onto his face. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing. But, he had Loki. And this new froakie, that he was going to have to figure out a name for very soon. They could get through this. He would figure something out.

“You have a good day Daniel.” Professor sycamore stood after paying their bill, sticking out his hand for Dan to shake.

“Just Dan is fine. And thank you for going out of your way to be here. And for the coffee. You’re very generous.”

“It’s no trouble. No trouble at all. I look forward to seeing how you progress as a trainer from here on out Daniel. You should come by my lab when you go through Lumios city, and we can catch up,” Sycamore gave Dan’s hand a good final shake before letting go to collect his briefcase.

“I would like that professor. I’ll see you then.”

With one final wave outside the café, the two went their separate ways. The sun had risen significantly while Dan had been talking to Professor Sycamore, and the streets were getting steadily more crowded. On a sunny Saturday morning like this, tons of people were going for morning walks, and Dan was weary of running into anyone he knew, especially from school.

Dan took a slightly roundabout route through a few shady alleyways, before he finally reached the edge of town. Froakie had abandoned his perch on Dan’s shoulder en lieu of hopping jauntily alongside him. Loki however, was used to Dan’s walking patterns after so many years and stayed put, apparently too lazy to walk.

As they made their way back up the winding dirt road, Dan turned to look down at his starter pokemon, who was looking around frantically, trying to take in all that he could of the scenery.

“I think we need to give you a name, don’t we?” Dan pondered, and froakie croaked in agreement. “Alright, how about Fenrir. No no, that’s weird, uh… Collin? No that’s also weird…”

Dan spent the rest of the walk listing off dozens of names. Often times, he would veto them himself before they were even fully out of his mouth. And a few of the ones he did like didn’t seem to work quite as well for froakie himself. By the time the house started coming into sight, Dan was on the verge of loosing hope.

“Ugh, god I don’t know. How about Dante?” It was a little strange, Dan had to admit. It was more a human name than a pokemon name, although that didn’t much matter to him. And if froakies excited croak was anything to go by, he also liked the name.

“So we’re gonna go with Dante?” Froakie croaked in agreement and Dan grinned a little bit. “Finally, we’ve got you a name. Welcome aboard Dante. Let’s hope I don’t mess this whole thing up.”

Tag list:

@burnt-sienna-soup-ladles, @secret-society-of-bread @phanunsolved, @ocotopushugs, @dans-mistletongue, @amarytaile, @littledrummerdan, @rosecandy2005

If you want to be added to the tag list just lemme know:)

#Dylan says things #phanfiction #phanfic #dan and phil fanfiction #pokephic #that's just like what im tagging it so i can find it in the future

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sad-goomy · 6 years

Text

Lonashipping Week 2018 - Day 6

Soulmate!AU

Head on over to @lonashippingweek to see some other great stuff with this prompt and others!

"Where's your mark?"

The question pierces her chest and leaves a trail of frost to bite at her in its wake. Moon freezes in place, the hand that was petting Silvally's neck now dropping uselessly to her side.

She knew it would come up eventually, but she never expected Gladion to be the one to notice.

Silvally cocks his head at the lack of attention, watching as she slowly turns to look across the office to where Gladion stands, leaning against his desk with his arms folded. Still, she can make out the black smudges that line his fingers – a common spot for marks. As they've grown closer over the past weeks, she's found herself checking his marks more and more frequently, and she can't quite explain why she's always relieved to find that they haven't transformed into bursts of color.

She stalls for time, crossing her arms as she chuckles half-heartedly. "Why? Looking to touch it and see what happens?"

His eyes widen for a fraction of a second and then he's looking down and away, bangs falling to cover the blush on his face. Something tells her that answer hit a little too close to the truth, and it feels like Jumpluff are trying to escape her stomach, crawling up her throat and making her mouth go dry. Moon's grown worryingly used to the feeling whenever she hangs around her not-quite-rival.

He clears his throat, playing off the moment of awkwardness with a shrug. "I've just been thinking about them more, ever since Lillie and Hau..."

Though it was nearly a month ago, the memory is still fresh in their minds. She had been training with Hau when Lillie and Gladion decided to visit Iki Town. With the sun beginning to set, the four decided to grab dinner, heading down a familiar path as they chatted. Lillie, not watching her step, managed to stumble, and in a flash Hau caught her, and Moon gasped, the first to notice the change.

The black smudges on Lillie's forearms and Hau's palms had bloomed into brilliant brushstrokes of pastels and jewel tones.

Lillie and Hau stayed behind, left to have an awkward conversation that ended in laughter and hugging and exciting realizations according to them both.

Gladion and Moon proceeded to have the world's most uncomfortable dinner, in which they both had to pretend they didn't just witness their sister or best friend find their soulmate.

Moon nods, biting her lip. "Yeah, hard not to." While she'd been overjoyed for both of them, the entire event still served as a bitter reminder to her.

She gets lost in her thoughts and lets silence settle over the office. Gladion shifts, not sure what she's thinking and feeling himself grow more anxious, wondering if she's finally seen right through him.

"Not that I'm even sure I buy into the concept," he argues with no one, watching Moon snap back to reality.

A ghost of a smile tugs at her lips. "No, you don't seem like the type who would." It's comforting to hear, knowing she isn't the only one who feels like an outsider about something that seems to define everyone else's life.

"I just...everything about our lives is so random. It's hard to believe that we're just destined to be with one person out of the thousands we'll meet – and then what about all the people we'll never meet?" She can't help but chuckle when his rant picks up steam, Gladion beginning to gesture with his hands and scowling. Hearing her laugh, his body immediately relaxes, and he can't help but smirk at his own seriousness. "Sorry, I don't mean to be so negative."

"All part of your charm," she assures him. Behind her, Silvally lays down, deciding that if he isn't going to get attention that he's instead going to take a nap.

Gladion rolls his eyes, not quite wanting to believe her (but liking the thought that she might be right about it). "I digress. Life just seems a little too unfair for soulmates to really work."

Unfair, huh? Moon takes a deep breath, realizing that though she hadn't pictured it happening this way, if there's anyone she's going to tell, it's going to be Gladion. Still, she's not entirely sure how he'll respond, since he's managed to surprise her plenty of times as they've gotten to know each other.

She bites the bullet.

"I don't have a mark."

He blinks, his eyes growing wider by the second as her words fall in the space between them. Moon holds her breath, waiting for his reaction.

"...oh."

She waits for him to continue, but he fidgets – comforting people isn't his strong suit, but he tries his best and so she can tell he's still trying to figure out the right thing to say. She quickly assures him, "It's not a big deal to me. At least anymore. I've heard about other people without marks, so it's not like I'm the only one."

"Still," he interrupts her, sensing the tension that she tries to hide underneath the surface. He takes a few steps forward, not sure what he's trying to do but feeling like he should be closer when he says, "I'm sure it doesn't help that everyone around us talks about it nonstop."

Moon shrugs, feeling the typical discomfort around the topic crawling up her neck. "I've gotten used to it."

The silence weighs heavy on their shoulders, and Gladion frowns when he sees her curling in on herself; she's meant to bloom, not wilt. "I think it's kind of cool, actually."

She raises a brow. "Really?" she chuckles, and he smiles because this so much better than her frowning at the floor.

This is probably the most upset that he's seen her since they've started to get to know each other, and Gladion immediately dislikes it. Her laugh makes him straighten, and he keeps going, trying to get her back to the bright state that he knows and loves. "I'm serious, it adds to your mysterious air."

"Watch out, maybe I'll come for your bad boy image."

"I'd like to see you try."

The two begin exchanging quips at lightning pace, and don't notice that Silvally has grown restless behind Moon. The Pokemon stands, wanting attention and quickly realizing that he's not going to get it with the two trainers so wrapped up in each other. A gentle tap of his head against Moon's back only gets him a quick pat on the head, so he decides that it's time for desperate measures.

Moon squeaks when Silvally licks half of her head, giving her the world's worst cowlick.

Gladion tries not to laugh as he scolds his Pokémon, Moon giggling as she tries to fix her hair once more. Silvally looks pleased with his handiwork, retiring to his bed in the corner and allowing Gladion to turn back to Moon.

She stops fussing with her hair, and the second she lets her hands drop, half her hair sticks up straight in the air, causing Gladion to snort. "Here, let me help," he mumbles, stepping closer and carefully running his hands through her hair to put it back in place. Moon holds her breath when she catches his green eyes, wondering if he knows that there are brilliant flecks of gold scattered in the emerald.

His breath hitches and he withdraws his hands from her hair like it's a hot stove, staring with wide eyes.

Her brows furrow. "What are you -"

But then her eyes flicker to his fingers, and where once there were black smudges, now there's a blur of rainbow. She looks just past him to catch her reflection in the window and staring back at her is her face with a new head of rainbow hair.

They stare at each other for a long moment, the beat of their hearts nearly loud enough to break the silence.

Moon says the only thing that she can think of in this moment, when she's finally uncovered the mystery of her mark only to immediately learn that one of her best friends is deestined to be her soulmate.

"Well shit."

I’ll try to link the post if I find it but this is absolutely based on that one post that circulated about people having a black smudge where they’ll first touch their soulmate that turns into a rainbow.

#lonashippingweek #mahinashipping #gladion x moon #lonashipping #enforcer gladion #trainer moon #pokemon fanfic #this isn't entirely original but hard to be with soulmate!aus so we're just having fun here #silvally is technically the greatest wingman in this #and tbh same moon

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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Anime in America Podcast: Full Episode 2 Transcript

Hello, and welcome to another fine transcript of Crunchyroll's new Anime in America podcast! Those in need of a different way to access and enjoy the podcast, as well as those looking to research further or simply take note of some interesting facts that were mentioned, we've got you covered on an episode by episode basis. Following up on the episode 1 transcript, we've got one for the second, so enjoy it in full below!

The Anime in America podcast, hosted by Yedoye Travis, is available on crunchyroll.com, animeinamerica.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts.

Episode 1 Transcript: In the Beginning There Was Fansubs

Disclaimer: The following program contains language not suitable for all ages. Discretion advised.

[Lofi Music]

As I made very clear in the last episode, it was once a massive undertaking just physically getting anime from Japan to the US. Just imagine if I told you in 2019 that you had to go anywhere but your own couch just to watch anime. You would call the police.

Once anime was here physically, it still involved an insane time commitment from fans just to make it intelligible to American viewers. Whether it was painstaking hours encoding text onto video, or being tricked into live translating for your friends; in short, it was impossible, and yet people did it, so we have them to thank, at least partially, for the huge presence of anime in the modern zeitgeist.

But there’s a lot more to localizing than just taking Japanese words and turning them into English words. In practice, localization means making whatever changes are necessary to make a show marketable to the local audience. Using the language of that audience is a good start, but it doesn’t encapsulate the full scope of the practice from a marketing standpoint.

Of course, over the years, people have severely misunderstood the extent to which changes actually need to be made, and so there are good examples of localization and then there are times when the producers decided Americans can’t grasp the concept of a rice ball and Pokemon ends up full of unnecessary jelly donuts.

This is Anime in America, brought to you by Crunchyroll and hosted by me, Yedoye Travis.

[Lofi Music]

If you're still not sure what I'm talking about, there are plenty of things in the American lexicon that you would have never guessed were from Japan. In fact, the 60s gave us a lot of anime that wasn’t recognizably Japanese, and this was because both Japanese creators and American distributors thought that maybe Japanese IP wouldn’t be the easiest sell immediately after World War II. So they just made it not Japanese. Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy began a lasting trend in anime of heavily anglicized characters that minimally reflected the culture they came from, and were therefore believed to be more marketable to western audiences.

[Music from Astro Boy plays]

By the 80s though, as we inched further away from wartime tensions, anime became more acceptable in its unedited state, attracting American distributors who wanted to capitalize on the space opera craze following the release of Star Wars. In fact, by this time, the cultural exchange between Japan and the US was already starting to blossom, with an agreement between Marvel and Toei that brought a successful tokusatsu adaptation of an American series to Japan in 1978. That series was Spiderman.

[Japanese Spider-Man opening plays]

And for reference, tokusatsu is a Japanese word that literally means “special effects,” so tokusatsu in its simplest form is just that--a live action show where some of the stuff is not real. For specific examples, think Ultraman, Kamen Rider, the Super Sentai series, which I’ll get to in a second, or something we’re all familiar with--the classic foam rubber Godzilla that came long before the tiny headed Bryan Cranston version.

[Godzilla roar from GODZILLA VS MECHAGODZILLA]

Marvel and Toei’s deal was made before Dragonball Z became Toei’s crowning achievement, and long before Marvel joined the Disney family and fell into constant conflict with Sony over the very same property. The deal gave each party rights to use the other’s characters in any way they saw fit, and in fact, Toei originally planned to make Spiderman a secondary character to mythological Japanese prince Yamato Takeru. They eventually backtracked and left Spiderman in his primary role, but then they did all this other weird shit with it. They threw out Peter Parker entirely, and so Spiderman’s alter ego became Takuya Yamashiro, a motorcycle racer who gets injected willingly with blood from the spider alien Garia, giving him spider powers and allowing him to carry on Garia’s fight against the evil Professor Monster.

[Japanese Spider-Man opening continues]

I’m sorry, what? They also gave him an arguably unnecessary giant robot named Leopardon, a concept Toei would later incorporate into their Super Sentai series, which you may not know by name, but is actually one of the most popular American series of all time, with literally billions of dollars in toy sales in its first 8 years.

[Opening theme of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers begins to play]

And if you’re thinking “Hey what if I’m too dumb to Google that?” Well that is what podcasts are for. Even though I guess you had to Google… this podcast to find it.

Not knowing Super Sentai doesn’t make you dumb, it just makes you American, and THAT makes you dumb.

[Power Rangers theme continues]

But only for systemic reasons that can be broken down in one of many other podcasts. But In this one, I’ll just accept your manufactured ignorance and move on.

[Power Rangers theme continues to “Go go, Power Rangers!”]

You might know Super Sentai by its American name, Power Rangers, who you might know by the aforementioned giant robots--known as Zords--or by the first iteration’s problematic color coding of its main characters: blue for boy, pink for girl, yellow for Asian girl, black for black boy, and red for lead boy. Later colors would include white for Native American played by white guy, and green for all the money they made in spite of this.

Power Rangers is an American localization of Super Sentai originally adapted by Saban Entertainment in 1993 using entirely new footage and storylines interwoven with battle scenes from the original series, and I don’t know if it’s better or worse that the American cast was decided after the costumes were made, but I do know that it’s not surprising.

The Power Rangers are undoubtedly the most popular Saban property, having sold over $6 billion in toys for Bandai in its first decade on the air, and Saban have continued to adapt Super Sentai series beginning with Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger in 1993, all the way up to Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters in 2019.

The rights have changed hands a couple times, with a brief stint at Disney, before returning to Saban in 2010, and ultimately to Hasbro in 2018, in case you thought the series was created to do anything other than sell toys. Power Rangers has since been distributed internationally and chaotically redistributed in Japan using the original voice cast, and I can’t begin to explain to you how that works legally, but as an actor, all I can say is take the two checks and run before they figure it out.

I bring all this up as an example of what can happen when international properties are used to their full potential. It gets confusing at times, when you get into the weeds regarding licenses and producers or the fact that Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was banned in Malaysia for supposedly promoting mighty morphine to kids--real fact, look it up--but ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, all parties involved, at least on the corporate level, made money and built up pretty rock solid brand recognition.

In contrast, let’s talk about Harmony Gold.

[Lofi Music]

Harmony Gold is an American television production company and real estate developer lol whose founder, Frank Agrama, narrowly escaped prison just a few years ago, and whose Wikipedia page contains an alarming number of references to famously corrupt Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. And I don’t mean in passing. I mean in 1976 Frank Agrama sold broadcasting rights from Paramount pictures to Berlusconi’s Mediaset company, which at the time was just starting, but years later was found in a study by the American Economic Association to have made young Italians more vulnerable to populist rhetoric and therefore more likely to vote for Berlusconi who, for reference, would later be convicted of soliciting sex with minors, for which he would later be acquitted because why wouldn’t you be able to do that? And I’m not saying Frank Agrama is responsible for, or in any way directly involved in any of the +20 legal battles Berlusconi has been through, I’m just that he definitely was and in fact his home was raided in 2006 in connection with an Italian investigation claiming that he had inflated prices of the rights he originally sold to Mediaset so that, through means I do not understand, Mediaset could pay huge dividends to its top executives. And Frank only avoided jail time due to a technicality based on his age.

Of course, all this info is better suited for a way more in depth political conspiracy, and maybe famous pedophile podcast? But the fact that Harmony Gold is so deeply rooted in the dealings of a massive propaganda empire run by an egomaniac really sets the stage for why everyone seems to hate them so much.

So what is Harmony Gold as it pertains to this story? Well, as I said, it began in 1983, four years after Frank took a trip to France, where he met and agreed to partner in distributing international film rights with Paddy Chan Mei-Yiu and Katherine Hsu May-Chun, two businesswomen from Hong Kong, the former of whom is the owner of the Wiltshire Group of Companies. And I’d like to think the two of them held some significance before the events in this episode, but if they did, they’re SEO game is trash, cause all searches yield results after the year 1979 when Chan founded the Hong Kong-based Harmony Gold and Frank founded Agrama Film Enterprises in LA, only establishing Harmony Gold USA a few years later.

Harmony Gold USA’s first project was a miniseries depicting the life of Shaka Zulu--chief of the Zulu people from 1816 to 1828--which a 1986 piece in the LA Times said reduced Shaka and the Zulu people to violent barbarians, noting that the story was mostly told through the perspective of an Irish doctor and not Shaka Zulu himself and basically challenged its audience to ask what would have come of South Africa if it weren’t for the intervention of white settlers.

So if the series can be summed up in a word, I guess that word would be “controversial,” only because Frank himself staunchly denied that the film was racist at the time, despite claims from South African literature professor Mazisi Kunene that it was “like Hitler doing the history of the Jews.”

And long story short, these are the people that made Robotech.

As is the case with Power Rangers and most other series brought to the US, the main hurdle in localizing for an American audience is the content itself, whether that means it violates some perceived standard of acceptability, or more simply that Americans misinterpret the intended audience and end up repackaging a show with very adult themes to be marketed to kids, which may explain why I’ve seen Endless Waltz about a dozen times and couldn’t tell you a single detail of the story.

[Mobile Suit Gundam Wing - Endless Waltz theme plays]

In the case of Robotech, however, the biggest hurdle was American syndication laws. When Carl Macek was hired to adapt anime for Harmony Gold in the mid-80s, he immediately settled on Super Dimension Fortress Macross, as I mentioned in the previous episode--and had they followed their original plan, it would have been the first legal anime home video release in the US. But they abandoned that plan and decided to air it on TV, and American rules required that a syndicated show be able to run at a minimum of five episodes a week for 13 weeks, because as we all know artists are at their most creative when they have strict production minimums, like an 8 episode anime podcast, to give a non-specific example.

So, in similar fashion to Japanese Spiderman and Power Rangers, Carl Macek took the rights he had and did whatever the fuck he wanted. Macross had aired weekly in Japan for only 36 episodes, so Carl took two unrelated giant robot series--Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Southern Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, the longest title I’ve ever heard--and he just tossed them in with Macross like an undergrad student using 15-point periods in a 12-point essay. And he made a hit. Robotech was hugely popular at the time and plenty of people will tell you it was their first window into the world of anime as a whole. But beyond that, Harmony Gold didn’t really have a lot of success.

There were spinoffs, including the aforementioned Robotech: The Movie, which was shown in 1987 at the Animation Celebration Festival, where Jerry Beck worked with a man named Terry Thoren, who refused Jerry’s requests to pick it up for further distribution, yet another person who viewed it as a “Saturday morning cartoon,” and first of all, I have to stress that you can watch cartoons on any other day. Yu-Gi-Oh! played on Sundays, I don’t know what this Saturday morning shit is. I don’t know where it comes from. But I digress.

In probably one of the most significant events in early anime history, Jerry Beck and Carl Macek met during the screening of Robotech when they both snuck off to watch the crowd’s reaction, and realizing how excited the audience was, they immediately decided to team up and establish Streamline Pictures, where they were committed to producing anime dubs that were true to their source material, preserving all the original music and sound effects, and producing more faithful translations, and I can’t stress enough how insane it is that that was revolutionary, but it was at the time and they, along with contemporaries like RightStuf, set a precedent that anime was most valuable when it got to just be anime. I can’t say with 100% certainty that Jerry’s boss would have been more receptive to anime if he had seen Macross in its original form, but I am also dumb, so take everything I say with a big grain of salt.

Regardless, looking back at Harmony Gold’s reputation in comparison to Carl Macek the man, all signs suggest he left at about the right time. Carl only lasted long enough to produce 85 episodes of the original Robotech, along with the way way way lesser known Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years, also adapted from unrelated series Captain Harlock and Queen Millennia, both by Leiji Matsumoto, both of which were comprised of 42 episodes, which I probably would have confirmed in advance if I had already gone through the trouble of combining three whole series into one, but that’s just me, a person whose experience informs his actions. Of course, given the success of Robotech, I’m sure Carl was very optimistic about his ability to crank out another successful chopped and screwed anime, so I can’t really blame him for overlooking that, but Harlock ultimately didn’t perform nearly as well as its predecessor.

Carl also attempted a Robotech sequel, Robotech II: The Sentinels, of which only three episodes were produced before it was canceled. And that’s kinda where Harmony Gold as a legitimate institution went out the window. Carl left to start Streamline, and you can so clearly picture the alternate timelines branching out from that point in history. Streamline was the antithesis to Harmony Gold in just about every way. Its first projects were theater screenings of Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Twilight of the Cockroaches, and it’s unclear whether they were officially a company at that time, but that’s kinda where Streamline’s illegitimacy ends. They opened the first Streamline Pictures office in 1989 and took off from there, while Harmony Gold was offloading employees to none other than Saban Entertainment, which may explain that company’s almost identical production strategies in Power Rangers.

I think taking a quick look at Harmony Gold’s website can give you a lot of perspective on the direction they’ve gone in since Carl left. And I encourage you to pull it up and follow along as I break this down, cause it’s hilarious. First of all, it looks like it was designed by Frank Agrama himself. From the soft 90s fonts to the basic flash animation, if you asked someone who had never heard of Harmony Gold to describe this website, I’m confident they would peg this as the work of an African immigrant trying to convince his parents he’s doing well in Hollywood. From left to right, the home menu lists “Theater,” a good enough start, considering they do own and operate the Harmony Gold Preview House in Hollywood. It then moves on to “Entertainment,” a category under which the word “theater” might fall under some circumstances, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, considering it is a specific space after all.

Dead center, directly under their logo where you’d never expect it, is “Robotech” which, again falls under “entertainment,” the most entertaining thing about it being that if you click on it, it just redirects you to a better website, Robotech.com, where you can find all the merchandise and modern web design that frankly just wouldn’t make sense on Harmony Gold’s main page. Just to the right of that is, quite ironically, a hard left turn to “Real Estate,” which redirects to HarmonyGoldProperties.com, and I’ll admit perspective is key here because the phrase “Harmony Gold kinda fell off and started doing real estate” sounds way worse than “Yo my landlord produced the Shaka Zulu mini-series, that’s crazy!” But that’s neither here nor there. Finally, one more space to the right, you’ll see “About Us,” and your impulse might be to say “No I think I’ve seen enough,” but there’s so much useful information in there like the fact that Tobey Macguire is attached as a producer on the live action Robotech, which I’m only adding in hopes that you’ll respect the deep commitment required to bookend this long setup with Spiderman-related content.

[Japanese Spider-Man theme returns]

So all that might seem very unfair to Harmony Gold and Robotech, especially considering they served such a key role in introducing so many American fans to anime. Why should you care what their website looks like if they’re responsible for one of the greatest anime adaptations of all time? Well it’s not really about what they did at the time that fans are uptight about. It’s all about how they’ve conducted themselves since. The key difference between Streamline Pictures and Harmony Gold really comes down to their emphasis on money.

[Lofi Music]

Jerry Beck told us repeatedly that he and Carl’s work was something they did because they wanted to see anime in American movie theaters. They did that and they were defunct by 2002 which, if you look at a rough timeline of how anime got to where it is today, is the perfect amount of time to help set the industry in motion and then just let inertia take over. Streamline produced dubs to get them out and then relinquished the rights to those properties, most notably handing the rights to Studio Ghibli distribution over to Disney in 1996.

Harmony Gold on the other hand have notoriously kept a vise grip on the rights to Robotech and its underlying IP and clearly have no plans of letting go any time soon. If you Google “Harmony Gold,” the search results are not kind. A lot of them come from Reddit, which should give you all the information you need, but the SparkNotes version is that Harmony Gold has used their rights to Macross and adjacent titles to box out any lookalikes, copy cats, or most notably, the original Macross itself, from setting up shop comfortably in the US, and knowing their relationship with Berlusconi’s Mediaset in Italy, it’s not really surprising that their actions would mirror those of a European propaganda machine, the only difference being that Robotech was popular, but certainly not the only thing you could watch in the 80s. So they really only managed to corner the market on what they *sort of* owned.

For context: Harmony Gold were given rights to SDF Macross, Southern Dimension Cavalry Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada from Tatsunoko Production in 1984 and, as we now know, Carl Macek was charged with editing and scripting these series into the 85 episode arc of Robotech. Simple enough so far, but of course it gets worse. Robotech was first released in 1985 and it’s since been declared that Harmony Gold maintains the rights to the Robotech brand in perpetuity, to do with whatever they so choose, and yet they’ve also held onto the rights for all its constituent properties for the past 34 years, renewing them once in 1998 and again in 2002, which pushed the expiration date to March 2021, and in all my research, I haven’t seen a single viable reason for why they need to last that long. In short, they ain’t doing shit with them, and yet, at Anime Expo 2019, they announced once again, that their rights would be extended indefinitely.

As I said before, Harmony Gold started production on Robotech II: The Sentinels, which was canceled, ending Carl Macek’s tenure, and they did later produce Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles in 2006, which according to their own website, is incredible. But other than that, what do they really need those rights for? At first glance, it looks like they’re whole MO is just to litigate competitors out of existence, which thankfully they haven’t always had the power to do. But if you take a closer look, that doesn’t have any affect on their approach. It really seems like they’re just holding onto their one successful property for the sake of brand recognition and money. I mean if you Google the words “Harmony Gold lawsuit,” the number of results are very telling.

Really, outside of almost certainly tossing out my rental application when I lived in LA, it seems like Harmony Gold does nothing but litigate. And to be honest, I can’t say that I really understand all the details of their legal troubles, of which there are so so many, but let’s see if I can sum it up without staring at my notes for an hour.

Basically, I want to say around 2003, it was determined by a Japanese court that Tatsunoko Production may have never had the power to hand the rights to Macross over to Harmony Gold in the first place, because they apparently didn’t have the approval of their co-producers Studio Nue and Big West in Japan, and technically the rights to 41 of the original character designs still belong to Big West. But because we are America and our word is law, and because we renew our anger about Pearl Harbor only when it is convenient, a different judge said “fuck everything Japan stands for” and I guess that ruling was ignored in the US and a judge determined that Harmony Gold has the rights to use Macross for some period of time just short of forever. A 2016 case between HG and Tatsunoko, in which the latter claimed Harmony Gold was sublicensing Macross without paying royalties, was ruled in favor of Harmony Gold but also dialed back the whole perpetuity thing and upheld the 2021 expiration date on their Macross license, and that date held until July of this year, when Harmony Gold’s deal with Tatsunoko was extended for another, as of yet undisclosed amount of time, that is presumed to be another 35 fucking years.

To sum up all the implications of this very confusing, three-headed dog of a case, basically Harmony Gold’s rights to Macross have a very shaky foundation, but they objectively own Robotech at least and can do with that whatever they want, as long as any sequels they produce use original designs outside of the original 41 that were dubiously given to them without Big West’s permission. Also Harmony Gold was somehow given all distribution rights for original Macross footage outside of Japan, but they still need permission from Tatsunoko to actually exercise those rights, which Tatsunoko seem unwilling to do for a company that sued them as recently as three years ago. I wonder what that’s all about. Also, because the grounds by which Big West actually owns those characters is so confusing internationally, Tatsunoko will probably just keep renewing Harmony Gold’s license just to say “fuck you” to Big West, while still never letting Macross see the light of day aside from Blu-Rays shipped directly from Japan, which conveniently have English subtitles because they know exactly what they’re doing.

This whole mess, paired with the fact that fighting an American ruling from overseas is prohibitively expensive and not in your favor, means that Studio Nue and Big West are heavily discouraged from pursuing their rights to a show they don’t really believe has an audience in the US anyway, so even if they could win, the likelihood of them trying is very slim. But because Harmony Gold has nothing to coast on aside from their production from 1985, they’ve been reduced to filing suits against anyone who even looks at an original Robotech design, which so far includes Hasbro, who incorporated an also shakily acquired Macross design into their Transformers line because they had no Robotech licenses and Macross didn’t exist here at the time, and also Piranha Games, a Canadian video game designer who believed they had legally acquired the designs from Big West for their Battletech game series. Unfortunately, Harmony Gold disagreed and another confusing lawsuit began.

The weirdest thing about all this is that, as important as Robotech is, a lot has happened in the anime world since then, and Harmony Gold don’t seem interested in branching out into any of those other ventures. They’ve been acquiring IP throughout the years but haven’t produced anything of note since around 2006, although a live action Robotech has been licensed to Warner Brothers, but even that feels weird since Pacific Rim already happened, but I guess another lawsuit can settle that. I don’t know.

Watching the steps Harmony Gold have made since canceling The Sentinels really adds a lot of perspective to just how big a bullet Carl Macek dodged by leaving, and granted he had since gone back and was working with them again when he passed away, but the potential damage to his reputation had come and gone by that time. Of course, he is still a controversial figure considering his creation is still at the root of this whole conflict. But he is also responsible for introducing a whole generation of viewers to anime for the first time, and his work at Streamline Pictures, where he helped bring so much untouched anime into the mainstream, more than makes up for keeping one, albeit very important, series out of the public eye.

The legacy of Akira and its Studio Ghibli dubs, in my opinion, makes Streamline a much stronger contender for valued contributors to anime history, and the fact that they only made money by putting out a quality product makes it that much better, not to mention the fact that they were so content to pass on licenses when their time was up. In fact, according to most fans, knowing when to pack it up is really the one thing Harmony Gold could have done to save their reputation. That said, Streamline has thrown a lot of fuel on one very divisive fire over the years, whether intentionally or not.

That fire, of course, is the sub vs. dub debate, which has driven a wedge in anime fandom for years. There are the people who believe there is never a reason to watch dubbed anime and there are the people who work from home, writing anime podcasts, and don’t have time to learn Japanese just to feel superior to casual fans.

For anyone unfamiliar, there’s been a debate raging for as long as anime fandom has existed over whether real fans should watch anime with subtitles or with English voice actors. I would personally like to plant my flag in the ground and say that if you don’t speak Japanese, it doesn’t matter. The argument I hear most often is that the Japanese voice acting is just better, and to that I say: how the fuck do you know? If you don’t speak the language, there’s no way you can discern good Japanese voice acting from bad English. If you can, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you speak Japanese. So good luck with your new job at the UN, I guess. Congratulations.

Also, just consider a point Roland Kelts made to me: that the Japanese artists themselves, in many cases, prefer fans to watch the show in their own language so they're not focused on reading while the art they worked so hard on is just passing by. Also, consider a point made by me: that subtitling eliminates the need for voice acting and editing jobs and, and as we learned in the previous episode, subtitles can be done with a very quick turnaround and a small team. So what I'm saying, is that dubs create jobs and stimulate the economy in the countries where they're produced, so regardless of how you feel, they are a necessary evil.

Also, back to a legitimate point by Jerry Beck: people who don't already watch anime aren't really interested in reading subtitles. To return to the argument on what goes into localizing anime, the whole point of the process is to sell it to a new audience, and part of that process is presenting it to them in their own language, which is exactly why Streamline Pictures only produced dubbed anime--to attract new fans to something that doesn’t feel threatening or antagonistic, which anime fandom often does. So sure, you can individually decide that you prefer to watch anime with subtitles. Maybe you have a lot of free time, I don’t know. But maybe take into consideration that when you have an elitist attitude about who’s a “real” anime fan, you’re not only being a weirdo edgelord, but you’re also keeping anime away from fans who are just as deserving as you are which, I would argue, makes you the Harmony Gold of people.

Harmony Gold itself has maintained its loose grip on the anime industry by exploiting people’s interest in a single franchise, knowing that a lack of access to the original Macross and related merchandise will inevitably drive people to their Frankenstein version of the original product. Meanwhile, Big West and Studio Nue have effectively given up fighting for it because the legal fees would be prohibitively expensive to reclaim a franchise that has technically never had an audience outside of Japan anyway. And the fact that companies like this survive because of legal confusion, while the Streamlines of the world come and go, is a travesty and ultimately only hurts the anime industry. And my point is that if you force subtitles on new fans, you are as bad as that.

This has been another episode of Anime in America. Come back next week, when we’ll be diving into the first anime conventions to hit the United States.

[Lofi Music]

Thank you for listening to Anime In America, presented by Crunchyroll. If you enjoyed this, please check out Crunchyroll.com/animeinamerica for free anime, with ads, or get a 14-day free trial of Premium.

You’ve heard it before, but please leave us a review and rate us so more people can discover the show, or just share it with a friend.

This episode is written and hosted by me, Yedoye Travis, and you can find me on Instagram at ProfessorDoye or Twitter @YedoyeOT. This episode is edited by Chris Lightbody and produced by me, Braith Miller, Peter Fobian, and Jesse Gouldsbury.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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silhouettesandsalsa · 7 years

Text

June Eleventh

Dan did not like birthdays. He didn’t have anything against the desserts, or the presents, or the scent of birthday candle smoke. He quite liked all of those, actually. One of his first childhood memories was going to his friend Christopher’s third birthday party. He remembered the velvety chocolate cake, and thinking that one day, he would have that same cake on his own birthday. His mother had always bought vanilla cake for birthdays, and he’d never had the heart to say he’d prefered chocolate. But despite all that, he liked nearly all aspects of birthdays.

For other people. Not for himself.

As a kid, Dan had liked his birthdays. Heck, he even looked forward to them, the presents and candy and pinatas. But gradually, as he grew older, he noticed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Winnie the Pooh themed decor start to disappear, until themed parties were deemed only for “losers.” In fact, it was on his fifteenth birthday that he realized-- he was no longer a kid anymore, and all birthdays did was tell you that you were a year farther away from watching Sesame Street and playing Pokemon, and a year closer to the adult world and boring office jobs and worrying about bank loans and dating, which he thought was disgusting, and inevitably, he realized, death. That day, he excused himself from his French classroom and ran to the boys’ bathroom. He stood in front of the foggy mirror, peering at his pale reflection tinged with green from the faulty bathroom lighting, wondering when he’d suddenly become so old, and exactly when his childhood had slipped from his desperate grasps until it only existed in his memory.

That was why, on June 11th, 2017, Dan did not want to wake up. He had though, a few rays of sunlight beaming in through the windows in his room, shining directly in his eyes.

This, he thought as he pulled the grey covers back over his head, was not a good way to start a day. Having your eyes directly assaulted by a sunbeam. He wished it would rain, or at least be cloudy, as a way of watching his already somber mood. But upon checking the weather app on his phone under the covers, the light illuminating the creases of fabric, he was informed that his birthday was going to be, as he muttered to himself, “bloody brilliant.”

The sky was an exuberant shade of royal blue, with puffy clouds almost resembling marshmallows inching proudly across. The sun was shining brightly, and the birds outside his window were trilling a morning sonata.

“Bloody brilliant,” he repeated. It was as though the entire world wanted him to be happy today, when all he could think about was the inevitability of death. He felt like lying on his bed for the rest of the day, curled into a lump of bitterness and regret.

He knew that at any moment, Phil would come bursting in with some silly cake and party hats, or a messily-baked pan of homemade brownies, or cupcakes from the bakery down the street in some exotic flavor like “avocado” or “mango-chili” or “dark chocolate-bacon.” The thought of Phil brought a small smile to Dan’s lips. Even on days like these, somehow, Phil was always able to make Dan happy. He remembered when he’d been in college, horribly unhappy with his life, in what he liked to describe as his quarter life crisis, and Phil would randomly grab his hand and pull him out of the apartment on mystery outings. Sometimes they’d go buy ice cream cones and eat them in the park nearby. Sometimes they’d buy weird board games from Japan or Italy and spend the night trying to figure out how to play. Sometimes they’d just wander around, their fingers almost touching as they walked side by side. Whatever it was, Phil would always manage to make Dan laugh, even if it was just with a stupid pun.

Dan lay on his bed, letting his eyes shut. His breath became even, and after a few minutes, he was fast asleep again.

Dan woke with a start. He pulled the hot covers off his head and grabbed his phone from his bedside table. It was three o’clock! He’d been asleep for hours! He scrambled out of bed. Phil must be worried sick! He grabbed a pair of dirty jean off the floor and pulled them on over his pajama shorts.

“Phil!” he called as he hurried downstairs to the lounge. His voice echoed off the walls, mixing with his heavy footsteps. He opened the door to the lounge to find… no one. He checked the kitchen. Nothing. Phil’s room. The bathroom. The gaming room. The balcony. Phil was nowhere to be found.

Huh, Dan thought, brewing himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen. He must be out, he reasoned, pouring coffee into a large mug. He took a sip and sighed. Perhaps this wasn’t so bad. Dan never liked big celebrations for his birthday. He always tried to act happy and upbeat, when really, he just wished that he could sit alone in silence, mourning another year closer to death.

He padded back to the lounge, where he scrolled through Tumblr on his phone. Birthday messages from his friends and followers filled his screen. He sighed and tossed his phone aside. He couldn’t escape from his birthday. Any other day, he’d appreciate those posts, but today he couldn’t stand them. Mindlessly, he grabbed his phone to tap out a thank you tweet to everyone, knowing it was the nice thing to do. Still, he couldn’t help feeling like his somber mood leaked into the tweet as he reread it before posting it. Everyone would notice his lack of enthusiasm, he worried, before realizing it was hard to ever sound enthusiastic over a tweet without overusing all-caps and emojis. Oh well, he thought.

He pulled out the Nintendo Controller and launched himself into a game of Mario Kart, hoping it would take his mind of off everything.

Hours passed.

Dan finally looked up from his hundredth game, realizing it was already six o’clock. Phil hadn’t bothered to text or call or leave any signs. No DMs, no Snaps, nothing.

But as Dan refreshed his Twitter feed, a tweet caught his eye. It was Phil’s. Just random gif of a birthday cake.

Dan thought nothing of it until he noticed Phil had tagged his location. Someplace called “Bob’s Boba.” Dan remembered walking by it a few weeks earlier and agreeing to try a bubble tea from there at some point with Phil. Now, as his stared at his screen, he almost felt betrayed. Sure, it was small, but they had agreed to go together! And now Phil was off galavanting with who knows to get bubble tea!

Dan frowned. Phil wasn’t one to go back on his promises. What if Phil couldn’t help that he was at Bob’s? What if-

No, Dan shook his head. It was too impossible. But what if? Dan bit his lip, and couldn’t help but let the thought flood his mind.

What if Phil had been brought there by a kidnapper? He hadn’t told Dan about any plans he’d had today.

The hairs on the back of Dan’s neck stood on end. Phil, poor innocent Phil. Kidnapped?

Dan couldn’t stand thinking of his best friend being dragged around by some huge thug, tweeting random gifs to make it seem like everything was normal, against his own will!

He should phone the police, Dan realized. His finger hovered over the nine on his phone’s keypad. No, he thought. He wasn’t even sure that Phil had been kidnapped. He would go to Bob’s, he reasoned, to find Phil for himself.

He ran upstairs and quickly changed out of his pajamas and old jeans into a pair of clean, nondescript ones and a shapeless black hoodie. He couldn’t be bothered to be recognized today, not when he was on a mission. He grabbed his headphones, his wallet, and his keys, shoved them into his hoodie pocket, pulled on a pair of worn black Vans, just in case he needed to run, texted Phil a few hundred times with no response, and headed out the door.

He passed the cute hipster cafe, the grocery store, and the Starbucks. After a while, the buildings began to blur together into a jumbled mess. He was sure he was going the right way. Right? He looked up at the street signs, but they all seemed unfamiliar. He turned to his phone to check Google Maps, but suddenly realized, to his dismay, that he was over his monthly data limit, only eleven days in. He muttered curses to the sky, which, he noticed, was looking grayer than before. In fact, it looked positively cloudy, the cheery sun from before blotted out by ominous masses of cloud.

It started raining a few minutes later. Dan groaned, cursing his earlier self for wishing it would rain. This wasn’t a light rain, either. At first it was a few drops, but then, just like that, it was pouring. Dan was soaked to the bone in an instant, water sloshing around inside his drenched shoes. He shivered in the dark light, ducking under awnings in an attempt to keep dry. His teeth chattered, his hunched figure dripping and dark. His hair stuck to his forehead, and his fingertips grew freezing in his pockets. The rain stung his arms, coming down almost sideways in the wind.

Finally, he came to a street called Borrows Avenue, which sounded familiar. He could’ve sworn Bob’s was nearby, so he picked a direction and walked in it for a while, hoping he was going the right way. After a few minutes, a glowing neon sign came into view up ahead.

“Bob’s Boba.” Dan grinned, breaking into a run. He flung the foggy glass door opened to find a nearly empty shop. A woman with blue hair stood at the counter, a few years younger than him, looking boredly at her phone. A pretentious-looking older man sat by the window, stroking his pointed beard and scratching away in a small leather notebook. Beside those two, they were alone.

“Um, excuse me?” Dan approached the woman at the counter. She looked up, snapping gum in her mouth, and raised an eyebrow, as if to say “what do you want?” Dan bit his lip and continued. “I was just wondering if you’d seen a tall guy come in here, about my height, with uh, black hair? Blue eyes? Pale skin?”

“Nah,” she mumbled through her gum. “I didn’t see no one lookin’ like that come through here.” She looked thoughtful for a moment, or as thoughtful as one could look while blowing bubbles with their gum. “Wait, actually. Black hair, right?” Dan nodded. “He left, like, twenty minutes ago, or somethin’. He was with a tallish guy and a shorter woman. Blonde, I think. They went that way.” She pointed out the window.

The man sitting in the corner looked up from his work. “I could’ve sworn they went thataway!” He gestured in the other direction.

The two argued for a few minutes while Dan used the Wifi to check for new tweets. Indeed, Phil had tweeted another gif, this time a bowtie tying itself. Again, he’d tagged the location, somewhere called “Pixel.” Dan loaded Google Maps, thanked the woman as she yelled, “No, you’re wrong, you bloody twit!” at the man, and hurried out the door.

Another ten minutes in the rain and he arrived at the store. It was a video game store that Dan made a mental note to return to. Again, he asked the cashier if he’d seen Phil. Again, the guy described the same group of people as the woman at Bob’s, and directed Dan in their direction. Again, Dan checked Phil’s tweets and found another gif. This one, however, was not tagged with the location. Dan sighed with defeat as he stepped out into the rain. Phil, wherever he was, was definitely not kidnapped, and was obviously avoiding Dan. Surely he’d gotten his hundred texts! Surely he knew!

Dan wandered dejectedly home. What was he even doing with his life? Twenty six whole years of what, chasing his friends who clearly didn’t want to be found? He sighed. Another birthday went wasted. Dan hated birthdays, but even he couldn’t help feeling the slightest bit annoyed with his friend. Deep down, he knew that he really didn’t hate the silly cakes and streamers and party hats. Deep down, he liked knowing that his friends cared, even if he didn’t like knowing he was a year older.

Dan was shivering by the time he reached his building. He rubbed his red nose, thinking about Phil on the elevator ride up.

Phil was the one person he knew he could depend on. Phil, who would bring him little gifts without any real reason. Phil, who had supported him for years. Phil, with his clear blue eyes and brilliant laugh that could light up any room. Phil, who, Dan realized, he desperately wanted to be with. He wanted to spend his birthday with Phil, he realized. He wanted to spend today with Phil, and tomorrow with Phil, and, he realized he sounded a bit like a strained fanfic writer, everyday with Phil. He couldn't erase those eyes, that smile, those eight years of companionship. And yet… he thought, as the doors opened to his floor, there was something missing. Some little piece of the puzzle that was Dan and Phil… gone. Had it ever been there? He trudged to the apartment door, dripping, sultry, and alone.

A sliver of light shone onto his feet from under the door. He must have left the hall light on. He pushed the key into the lock, leaned into the door, and…

“SURPRISE!” The light blinded him for a moment, and suddenly Dan realized he was facing his friends. There was PJ and Chris and Louise and Cat and Joe and Alfie and Casper and even Tyler Oakley in the back. And then, popping up right in front of him was Phil. His glowing face, his shining blue eyes, his dark hair falling in his eyes. And suddenly, Dan grabbed Phil into a huge hug. Phil, his Phil, had been planning all this for him! Phil leaned in Dan, even though he was getting wet from Dan’s jacket.

They both pulled away after a moment, realizing their hug had lasted a little long.

“Happy birthday, Dan!” Phil grabbed Dan’s hand. It was warm and reassuring. Dan was too busy grinning to speak.

“Thank you guys so much!” He finally said after a moment of standing there, awestruck. As his friends started to mingle and chatter, Phil explained that he, Louise and PJ had gone to Bob’s and Pixel to get presents, and to get Dan out of the house so they could set up for the party. It touched Dan that Phil had done all this for him.

The party started to wind down a few hours later. Dan’s friends stood in small clumps, talking and eating slices of rich, velvety chocolate cake. (How Phil had known that Dan loved chocolate cake, Dan had no idea. Lucky guess, he assumed with a smile.)

Dan had wandered away from the friendly conversations and up to the second floor with the balcony that looked out over the city. The rain had stopped, but the scent still lingered in the night air. Dan sighed, staring up at the huge, glowing moon. A few small clouds scuttled across it, but otherwise, the night was clear. The stars formed criss-crossing constellations above, and the street lights did the same below. For once in his life, Dan felt truly happy. He hadn’t known this feeling in a long time. He wasn’t worrying about the future or wishing for the past. He was thinking about now. He was living in the moment, like Phil had to always remind him to do.

The door creaked open, and as if on cue, Phil slid onto the balcony beside him. Neither one of them said anything for a while, but instead, they stared out at London in silence, their shoulders touching.

“Beautiful night,” Phil finally remarked, breaking the silence.

“Kind of like you,” Dan blurted out before he could think. He blushed, looking away.

“Or you.” Dan looked back at Phil, surprised. He’d never really been the flirty type. They were flirting, weren’t they? Dan’s heart began to flutter without any reason to. He didn’t need to be nervous around Phil, right?

“Thanks so much for everything, Phil. I mean it. The party, the cake, everything,” Dan looked into those familiar blue eyes for a moment before he realized the were getting closer to him.

“How about this?” Phil’s voice softened as he leaned into Dan. They grew still for a moment, their lips almost touching. Then, as if he’d played out the moment many times in his head, Dan brought his lips onto Phil’s. It was so natural, their bodies intertwining together, their hearts beating as one. They finally pulled apart, smiling and blushing. Their fingers remained intertwined.

“I should probably go back inside,” Phil smiled up at Dan. “They’ll wonder where we are.”

“I’m going to stay out here for a moment,” Dan beamed back. Phil shut the door quietly behind him, leaving Dan to stare up at the sky. For some reason, his cheeks ached, and then he realized it was because he was grinning so hard. He brought his fingers up the his lips. He could still feel the pressure of Phil’s lips upon his own. The puzzle that was Dan and Phil was complete. He laughed out loud, knowing he was the only one who could hear it.

And that was how, on Dan’s twenty-sixth birthday, on the balcony on a flat in London, on a cool summer night, Dan suddenly realized-- he had loved his birthday.

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