#they very much have the 'strong pokemon... weak pokemon... this is only the projection of selfish trainers' mindset

[wingsonghalo]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

Tagged by @cnnmonbimee! Thank you for the tag!! Read her awesome answers here!

1. How many works do you have on Ao3? 66! More than I thought were on there tbh!

2. What’s your total Ao3 word count? Uhhh apparently it's 684,757! Less than I thought!

3. What fandoms do you write for? In order of most fics to least: Ace Attorney, JSHK, My Hero Academia, Mob Psycho 100, Homestuck, Hunter x Hunter, Phineas and Ferb, and Supernatural. I've also written a lot of Pokemon stuff, but somehow that has escaped Ao3 despite it being my longest fandom LOL. Working on a Pokemon SV one currently though 👀

4. What are your top five fics by kudos? Project: Matchmakers (shocker, I know), Sleep (Too) Tight (It's always been slowly but steadily popular), Force of Habit (bit of a surprise there honestly), Project: Matrimony (less surprising), and The Stuff of Dreams. So what I am seeing here is that no one leaves kudos on my JSHK or MP100 or MHA fics :') Some of these fics are one-shots, so it's kind of surprising! I wish PlayWright had gotten more attention; that fic killed me while I was writing it. I'm not giving number of kudos because I'm not comfortable with that and it makes me feel bad about myself haha,,,

5. Do you respond to comments? I try to! I've fallen behind on responding to them in the past 2 years or so because life has been so busy, though…

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Probably A Practice, For Now?? LMAO it's also my first JSHK and the one with the most kudos HMM COULD THIS FANDOM BE ADDICTED TO ANGST PERHAPS??! I don't write angst a lot!! What can I say, I'm a sucker for a happy ending.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? Almost all of my fics end happily, LOL. Pick any of them that actually has an ending.

8. Do you get hate on fics? Not commonly. I've gotten anon hate before about them on tumblr on rare occasions, but usually my comments on ao3 stay pretty nice.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? I do sometimes, but I'm so shy about it that I rarely ever post it /)//w//(\ Usually I just share it among friends, haha!

10. Do you write crossovers? Nope, and I never will!

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Yes. Someone tried to run Project: Matchmakers through a translator to hide the word matches and sell it as an ebook on Amazon, but they only bothered to hide it for chapter 1 so someone reported it to me and then in retaliation I started actually selling it on Amazon for the lowest price I could because the thief was trying to sell the shittier version for like 7 dollars LSFJ;AKLD. Read about the whole debacle here.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Yes, quite a few! People have been great about asking me for permission! 💖

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Yes, here and there! Usually it's either fics where I have written one part and someone else has written another scene, or someone had me look over something they'd written and I added so much commentary or threw additional ideas at them so much that the story ended up changing and I somehow became a co-author, LOL.

14. What’s your all time favorite ship? Oh my god don't make me answer that ;alskdjfl;k. If I wrote a fic for them ever, they're my favorite. I have so many favorites that I've never written fics for, too.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? THE UNDERCOVER FIIIIIC [sobs] and also Left on Read hnnngh

16. What are your writing strengths? Emotions!! I'm super good at those! I'm also really strong at dialogue and banter, and making my writing kinda witty/funny.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Describing settings ;w; I write my scenes like I draw my art: in Descriptionless Blank Voids lkas;dlkf. I also struggle with the flow of action scenes sometimes, though I think they usually turn out okay if I spend enough time on them. I also probably use too many adverbs and adjectives, but y'know what? Fuck it I like my descriptive words thank you very much

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? As long as you're checking that it means what you think it means, or possibly asking a native speaker if you're unsure about context or need a sensitivity reader, I think it's fine. It annoys me if I have to check a footnote every other line, but if you can mostly understand it without a translation in context, it can be kinda nice! At least it says you're trying more than phonetically spelling out an accent, which--remember, kids!--is always cringe! 👍

19. First fandom you wrote for? On Ao3, it was Homestuck. On the internet in general, it was Animal Crossing and Pokemon, LOL.

20. Favorite fic you’ve written? Don't make me cHOOSE BETWEEN MY BABIESSS 😭 I dunno man! Project: Matchmakers is my magnum opus, but the PlayWright is lowkey kind of a masterpiece, I love so many of my JSHK fics to bits and pieces, a lot of my MP100 and MHA fics are very special to me, I've been trying to write a HxH one for YEARS and have poured my heart into making it beautiful, just UGHHH every single one of my fics I have vivid memories of conceptualizing and working on and most of them are my favorite to some degree!

I tag @carochinha, @kittykatz009, @toastytoaster22, @ittybittytoostormy, and anyone else who would like to answer these questions!!

[original-cat-showdown]

ROUND 1 POLL 1

Tabby (@cure-icy-writes) vs Murphy Laud (@much-the-millers-kid)

Tabby (Test Batch 11, Designation Null)

She/her

A chimeric lab experiment of team Rainbow Rocket, Tabby was an offshoot of the Mewtwo project created by scientists from a timeline where Mewtwo had never been successfully created. She managed to escape, but is extremely distrustful of most everyone in the outside world.

Her psychic powers are fairly weak in practice, but the energy signature is strong. and the reason most of her powers are functionally sealed off is trauma; she's mentally and emotionally stunted, unstable, and overall a very damaged kiddo. so this is connected to her powers, being psychic. Her full potential is... not the same level of power as mew, not quite, but it's a hell of a lot more than the average psychic. Learned helplessness is also a factor— she internalized the idea that she was weak and a failure from a young age, and lack of positive feedback basically strangled her potential. She could never live up to the expectations placed upon her, but she has the potential to become strong in her own right.

Fun facts about Tabby! Her hair functions as whiskers, so the longer it grows, the more sensitive she is to changes in her environment, and the better control she has over her powers. She's intersex, having mixed human XY, XX, and genderless pokemon DNA, and has to come to terms with what gender means to her. Her appearance is physically that of a prepubescent girl, but she lacks ovaries or a uterus and her endocrine system has a rather androgynous setup that doesn't naturally produce much estrogen or testosterone, meaning she cannot go through puberty without medical assistance. She named herself after the fact that she is, to put it bluntly, stripey. She was the only specimen of the batch to survive precisely because of her chimerism, and has striated skin and hair. She also has one normalish human eye and one eye that's designed for night vision, which is usually covered with an eyepatch. She has lost all of her fingers before, but they grew back. She's not yet aware that cutting hair isn't supposed to be immensely painful.

Murphy Laud

He/Him

Murphy is a generally happy kid, despite his shitty luck.

There’s actually 2 different versions of him: one he’s a human with more of an unlucky black cat motif (hair always knotted on top where there’s pointed ears, long black scarf that is reminiscent of a tail, etc.) as well as some cat like mannerisms (wary until he trusts you then practically circling your ankles, leans into physical affection, etc.)

In the Pokémon verse, he’s a Litleo that gets in over his head sometimes. He doesn’t mean to get in trouble. He just gets excited and doesn’t always watch out.

[spicyicetea]

So I once again got pre-occupied with my school work. I had a decently big test recently and I have two more on Tuesday and Wednesday so I’ve mainly been trying to revise. However in my down time I have done more work for the Pokemon stuff @witch-without-gender and I started [How you doing dude, hope you’re feeling ok]. I decided to make a separate post to cull the big chunky post a little.

✨So here’s the update✨

The region still remains unnamed but, from previous discussions in the longer reblogs, the region is connected to Unova and vaguely based on Canada. I haven’t put too much thought into the region itself, like it’s history as I wish to leave that to a group decision as it’s rather important information for me to decide it alone.

The Gym leaders for the region are chosen to be parallels for the Unova gym leaders, their typing being super effective against the BW2 Unova leaders. [Same as the elite four]. The types I chose are,

Fighting

Psychic

Fire

Ground

Water

Rock

Ice

Electric

And the elite four are,

Dark

Fairy

Bug

Flying

Ive only designed half on them so far,

One of the champions [This region has two] is the mother of one of the rivals I’ve designed. She plays many roles in the current main story that would be played if it were an actual game. In the beginning she gives you your starter as the regions professor is on a trip in Unova. The professor ends up being someone who works under her in an organisation she runs to keep an eye on the other champion who is rather scummy. Her organisation is framed as the bad guys by said scummy guy to keep her in line so he can keep control over the region. You would fight her as the champion but before you fight the other one to claim the title he would send you to take down her “evil team”. There you would face a second much stronger team of hers, only balanced by having a very large weakness to fairy, ice and dragon.

The rival and MCs have been a tad bit reworked since I last drew them but there’s no new context or information regarding them.

The biggest addition so far is this regions version of the battle tower, or I suppose the battle subway given I’m using Unova as inspiration for the entire region. [I do actually already have some ideas of characters who would get along/work with eachother across this region and Unova. My sister has been playing a lot of splatoon and I tend to listen to the soundtrack while drawing so I present to you, battle fest!

This would work as weekly in game battle tournament where you fight various trainers and then fight one of the leaders who has a full team and teams of rather strong Pokemon. It’s run by 5 separate trainers who all specialise in specific stats (hp, attack, defence, speed), although the actual leader has no specific stat and just builds their team around pokemon they like. Oh and they're all just different shades of autistic [I am autistic so I project onto them a lot, mainly the one I've drawn the most of so far]

If you can't tell, I adore these five. Levana is the one I projected onto the most (Oopsy) and shes designed to appear rather sweet and approachable but is feral, most definety tries to bite everything. Given these guys are new characters I'll give some extra information on them, or at least Levana as I haven't had too much time to dive into the others as I want to post this asap as I’m trying not to be inactive. Anyway, onto the information!

Levana was orphaned after the train line in their region was derailed by a wild Pokemon. Due to the Pokemon being protected and the area having no safe way to guarantee it wouldn’t happen again so it was never repaired. Being a small, at the time semi-non-verbal (not fully but after losing the only people she was comfortable around she struggled to talk to people). She was taken under the wing of the regional professor. She grew up around pokemon and were always comfortable talking to them, to a point where she seems to understand them and vice versa. Over time she gained a talent for battling as she would make mock battle situations with Pokemon she befriended around the lab and as she grew older she gained more confidence in herself and began speaking to people again at around the age of 15. By 18 she officially has her own Pokemon (A Noibat,King, and Honedge, Excalibur) and decides she has to do something with her life so buys a ticket to sinnoh to create the strongest team she can and attempt the gym challenge in her home region. In sinnoh she catches two sneasles, one being a strange discoloured version she wanted to bring back to the lab for the professor to research but she became attached to it. (Pringle and Bingo join her team) later she found a togepi while camping and she found it eating her toothpaste. She ended up feeding it and it followed her for a day before she offered it a pokeball and it joined her team (Colgate acquired) On the way back she has to go on a longer boat trip past other regions as she doesn’t like planes. She made friends with one of the other passengers who gifted her a charcadet called Wisp as a parting gift when she had to get off at her region. When she got back however, the professor was missing and she had no home to return to, after having a really harsh encounter she meets Briar, the water type gym leader who offers her a place to stay and they hit it off (they both autistic so they automatically click, if you know you know). Elesa comes to meet Briar regarding a modelling gig and meets Levana, who offers to let Briar bring her along to the studio so she wouldn’t be left alone (let’s be real Elesa is that one neurotypical friend we autistic people get somehow. She has experience with how the neurodivergent minds can work from Ingo and Emmet). While in Nimbasa, Briar bought her a cookie while they and Elesa did the shoot but a Joltik stole half the cookie while she was waving bye. She chased the Joltik into the subway station where she encountered the battle subway for the first time. The Joltik casually clambered onto her shoulder and she assumed, this was fate, and decided to try it to pass the time. She did decently well before encountering Emmet and getting her ass kicked. This however just inspires her to get stronger and she dubs him, and eventually Ingo when she meets him, her idols and she vows to beat them one day before heading home with Briar.[She was gifted the Joltik by the brothers and she dubbed him Crumble] With support from Briar she calls the friends she made on her travels and starts the BattleFest to get stronger and show her home region the joys of battling for fun and not just competition.

Thats all I have and this will prob be the longest info block about the battlefest people as she is important to the current story I have planned for the actual region. But uhh here have some fun facts about her:

She used to have a phobia of trains but after crumble basically ratatouilles her into the battle subway and she befriends Emmet it completely flips and now she’s obsessed with them. She has a model train in her apartment.

She sews small clothes and accessories for her Pokemon, Crumble have mini replicas of the Submas brothers’ jackets and hats.

She has to fight Colgate out of her bathroom because it likes trying to steal her toothpaste.

Pringle and Bingo are besties and often preform heists to steal Levana’s food.

Levana makes Pokemon friendly fur dyes/paints so she can make her Pokemon feel special and match her when she dyes her hair.

[This is all I have as of now but I will update by Wednesday and that’s a promise!]

[ginkgowish]

( @icyalabaster ) as someone else with a passing interest in sinnoh's older history, have you heard about those restoration projects for hisuian zorua and hisuian growlithe? you seem rather well learned in some of the more obscure myths from this region, so i assume you know a bit about hisui? i'd like to hear your take on people attempting to bring those extinct species back, i'm curious about others' opinions. i personally can only wonder if there's any niches left for them after they've been gone so long and the region has changed, but i do want to hope they can find a way to thrive.

Hmm. This is the first time I've heard of such a project. How quaint!

Yes, I do know quite a few things about Hisui—or Ancient Sinnoh, as I've been calling it previously. You've come to the right person regarding this topic! As for my thoughts regarding the restoration project...?

...The weak yield to the strong; there is a reason those species went extinct in the first place. Who knows what it was, but there was very much a reason. Logically speaking, it'd just be cruel to bring them back a second time, don't you think? Nothing but needless suffering; an encore of the performance that led them to all die off in the first place.

However. I must admit. I wouldn't mind those Pokemon returning if it'd give me the opportunity to study them up close again. Maybe solve some riddles and legends I haven't before.

...Beyond that though, that's all! Just my two cents on the matter, haha. Don't take them too terribly seriously!

[postgamecontent]

'Touhou Genso Wanderer -FORESIGHT-' Switch Review

Regular readers will know that Shaun likes him a good Mystery Dungeon game. The Shiren games in particular tickle my fancy greatly, but I've enjoyed many a spin on the basic concept. The Touhou Genso Wanderer games have been some of my favorite Touhou games because of this, and we've now got a third game in the series on Switch. I wish I could call it the best one yet, but Foresight has a lot of problems specific to this installment that keep it from being all it could have been.

As is generally the case with Touhou Project games, the story here is a nigh-unintelligible mess to anyone who isn't already a fan of the characters and setting. So yes, if you're new to all of this, you might as well check out on the narrative immediately. Reimu is a powerful shrine maiden who gets called in to deal with all kinds of supernatural problems. She has a lot of friends from both sides of the proverbial line, and you'll be seeing most of the popular ones pop up here.

The story kicks off here with a future battle where Reimu is defeated, and then we head back in time to a more peaceful point. Reimu gets tricked by some fairies into doing a tutorial dungeon, and then she's soon called in to investigate some incidents. That's about all I can offer you. It's not amazing, and it mainly relies on you being excited to see your favorite characters showing up. But again, this is pretty typical for Touhou Project games. They're quite literally fan games, and the stories reflect that.

In terms of gameplay structure, this is a fully orthodox take on the Mystery Dungeon concept, right down to keeping most of the same control conventions. The one big twist is that you collect Danmaku Points that you can use to fire off a variety of ranged attacks, and as big twists go that isn't much. Consequences for failure are minimal, much like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games. That doesn't mean this is easy, though. Indeed, one of the bigger problems with this game comes from the difficulty spikes at certain bosses. It's nothing you can resolve with good strategy. You just need to grind until you're strong enough to pass the test.

The tedious grinding really hurts this game over the long haul. The procedurally-generated dungeons aren't spicy enough to keep you entertained for all of this, and the enemies don't offer enough variety. There are only a handful of different types, and you'll quickly suss out what you need to do with each of them. The bosses often start showing up as regular enemies, but due to their level-check nature they rarely present much of a real threat by the time that happens. You don't get many of the interesting interactions that make the Shiren games so tense and exciting.

You won't find much of note in the character building, either. There's a skill tree system in play here, but it's a very dull one. Mostly damage modifiers that are specific to an enemy type, and you'll pretty much have to waste resources doing a respec for each new area and boss to take advantage of their weakness. It's functional, and I guess it's better than nothing, but it's hard to get much of a fever going over damage modifiers.

Touhou Genso Wanderer -FORESIGHT- has some ideas, but the way it implements them makes for a far more tedious affair than its predecessors. You can find far better choices in this genre at the same price point, so unless you've fully exhausted those or are a huge Touhou fan, I can't really give this game much of a recommendation. It's not dreadful by any means, but it falls into just about every trap that can make a game like this feel tiresome rather than invigorating.

Score: 3/5

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

what if joltik breeding is a joint endeavor though

[dragontamer22]

Here's another Pokemon IRL tabletop bestiary entry :) they're fun to write

Ditto (#132) Archikoproelefsia prototypos

General Information: Ditto are famous for their ability to transform themselves into any living or non-living thing that they can visualize. Individual Dittos often have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to their transformation abilities, with some having difficulty retaining their shape when they’re laughing, some struggling with faces, and many getting details wrong if their memory of the thing is off. When they sleep, Ditto turn into rocks to avoid harm. For some reason, Dittos tend not to like other members of its species, which readily explains why baby Dittos are rare. This is believed to be because Ditto are a social species who try to fit in with others by transforming, and since they cannot transform into each other, it leaves them feeling socially awkward around other Dittos. They average 1 foot (0.3 meters) in height, and 8.8 pounds (4.0 kg).

Habitat: Human settlements, laboratories, and other urban environments. Dittos are extremely rare in the wild. This makes sense, since they are not a naturally occurring species. It is interesting though, as Ditto could be highly effective at living anywhere if it transformed into the right Pokémon or object, but alas they seem to have a strong preference for urban ecosystems and abandoned laboratories.

Life Cycle: Good question! Dittos can reproduce with any Pokémon that is capable of reproduction which has the miraculous quality of exclusively laying eggs of the non-Ditto species, but they only make more Dittos when they reproduce with each other. And they don’t really like each other that much! Additionally, on-going research into Ditto longevity seems to indicate that they have incredibly long lifespans, as specimens from the original Mew-cloning experiments from the 1960s are still alive and thriving.

Behavior: Ditto are a very sociable but ultimately very awkward species, the horrid combination of being largely extroverts with terrible social anxiety and little self-confidence in their ability to be liked by others just as they are. They typically socialize with other Pokémon by transforming into them, which can make for exciting playtime. Which, as stated above, leads to them not really getting along with other Dittos, though if two Dittos were given enough encouragement and therapy, would probably actually get along great and be awkward together.

Diet: Whatever their transformed form eats, otherwise they eat berries and generic Pokémon food quite readily.

Conservation: Least Concern

Relationship with Humans: Ditto have an intricate history with humans, as dittos straight-up did not exist prior to the 1960s when humanity began its first legitimate attempts at cloning Mew. For reasons that only the creators of Mewtwo could even hope to begin explaining, the Mew cloning process turns out to be extremely finicky and anything less than the acceptable tight margin of error results in a Ditto. However, Dr. Fuji, the pioneer researcher behind the original Mew cloning project, was a genius who (after producing 327 dittos of his own) succeeded in creating something other than a Ditto during his experiments, and created another new species, Mewtwo. After the explosion at Fuji Laboratories in 1969, the research data and notes that successfully created the Mewtwos were lost, and all subsequent experiments since then in cloning Mew have resulted in Dittos. Its to the point, where some scientists are no longer even trying to make Mew, and are just looking to make more Dittos. Several tens of thousands of Dittos are on record of having been created since 1961, with most being adopted out to respectable breeders, trainers, rangers, and scientists. This has not stopped some Dittos from getting into wrong hands. Lastly, the research behind why Dittos are created is not widely known, but its status as Top Secret Information ceased in 1991 because a reporter used their country’s Freedom of Information Act to demand that information on bioethical grounds.

Exactly 327 Dittos and several Mewtwos (it’s believed to be 4, but the records were destroyed) were created before Fuji Laboratories was ultimately destroyed in a great explosion that killed every scientist in the facility and destroyed everything within a mile of the explosion. To this day, Fuji Island (a made-up remote island in the Pacific otherwise uninhabited by humans because of its remoteness and dangerous fauna) is the only place one can consistently find wild Dittos. But good luck figuring out which of the highly dangerous Pokémon is actually a successfully disguised Ditto! Fuji Island is only accessible by a 4-day boat ride from the mainland and the only humans who live there are the nice (but weird) ranger throuple who man the lighthouse, and the only people approved to travel there are researchers. Otherwise, Fuji Island is designated as a nature preserve by its host country and the international community.

Ditto serve many roles in human society, but research and the arts are the most common professions. And as companions to Pokémon Breeders, as their ability to reproduce with any reproductively-viable individual is extremely useful—especially in captive-breeding programs of endangered species.

It is estimated that there are between 300,000-400,000 individual dittos in existence, with around 250,000 living individuals being confirmed by government records.

Classification: Pokémon taxonomy is complicated, but at the end of all the debates Ditto are considered to be a unique species from Mew despite them being weird failed clones. Dittos are in an interesting position of being the only member of the genus Archikoproelefsia that is available to the public to own, which is cool to many people because it’s well-known in popular science for being the genus that is the Last Common Ancestor Of Pokémon.

[theerurishipper]

This is the first time I've ever been prompted to actually post something, but what was that battle.

I looked forward to this for a while, and it fell short of my standards by a long shot. It wasn't bad, I enjoyed it well enough, but these are supposed to be the strongest trainers in the world. Why are they getting one shotted, or two shotted? Steven was built up as this awesome trainer who was kicking Alain's ass in TSME and this is how easily he goes out? I know that Ash is strong enough to beat him but it wasn't shown well, at all. The Masters Tournament and JN in general has a huge problem with the battles being stiff and lacking in creativity. Every now and then we have some gems, but other than that? The same formula of Ash being cornered and overcoming it, with one shots galore. This is no different. Lance vs Diantha and Iris vs Cynthia were so much better. And the battles were good in the beginning of the series too, but as it went on it became so formulaic and uninspired. And what happened to the animation? It's so stiff sometimes. I'm not impressed.

(Are the battles so bad because they're trying to be like the games? Because Goh is Pokemon Go, and so... is Ash gonna emulate game style battling now? I don't know).

More on JN in general under the cut because I'm a coward.

I won't say that JN is a bad series. But it has a lot of issues with its pacing. Why are we getting two Chloe episodes in the middle of the M8? Why didn't Chloe get any focus before this other than a few, admittedly well written, episodes? Why didn't we see Ash's rise through the other classes? There are only 3 characters to focus on ffs, it shouldn't be that hard to divide episodes between them. Sun and Moon had so many and yet even characters like Mallow who were a bit neglected had a strong character and focus. At least she appeared as a main character. Chloe doesn't appear in half the episodes though, so...what? And dont get me started on Project Mew. Good concept, bad execution. How many episodes did we even get on that? We spent no valuable time on it, and the episodes were so boring. Horace and Gary as rivals is a good concept but the episodes feel so far apart that I forgot what it was. It's good development for Goh, I guess, but is it? My feelings on Project Mew are conflicted and my most positive response is that it just bores me. And Team Rocket are a shadow of their former selves. They don't catch pokemon, instead they use that stupid machine. The one redeeming quality of Team Rocket is that they really love each other and that they really love their pokemon. And it's been taken away from them, so why are they here? It's nice to see them supporting Ash, but they've lost their essence.

Not to say that JN is bad as a whole. Every series has its strengths and weaknesses. XY had a Gary-stu Ash and he was boring, Serena didn't have much going for her either. It lacked great characterisation. Sun and Moon didn't know how to handle so many characters and its comedic timing needed work (this issue was resolved though, I can't criticize Sun and Moon too much, I'm sorry). And JN, to its credit, has very strong character writing when the character is given a chance to be written. As a whole, Chloe's arc sucks but the individual episodes are very good. Goh is honestly a well written character and has many good episodes that help him develop in a natural way. Admittedly his development is rushed but it is still solid. You can see how much he's grown and learned from Ash. But I'm not a fan of sidelining Cinderace and Inteleon after their evolution.

If you took any one episode of JN without context and watched it, you'd probably like it, other than a select few. The episode with the girl and her Cleffa was on par with Sun and Moon's episodes tackling the same subject. The episode with Goh and Drizzle was really good. The Alola episodes were amazing, as expected. JN does well with the worldbuilding and this is the first series that made me feel like there was a whole world of pokemon. The world feels alive and the characters feel real, and they have certain moments that actually made me think, that is, I feel like they actually have some complex thought processes which I didnt really get from other series (except of course Sun and Moon). The companion returns feel natural and their character and dynamics with the new cast feel natural too. Where they are now shows their growth and the way they are used as mentors for the new cast shows how far they've come. I think JN has a lot of good and natural interactions between characters too. I'm not a huge fan of how Gary has been doing in the series, but that conversation with Goh in 113 about why he's in Project Mew if taken by itself is pretty good.

But we shouldn't have to take it alone. And I can't say that all the returns got good treatment either. Iris got outstanding treatment. Her character was handled well, she mellowed out more which showed her growth, she was allowed to be part of the M8 as Unova Champion and go toe to toe with her idol Cynthia. Dawn too got a good return with her appearing in many episodes and being able to show off how far she's come with her dynamic with Chloe and being like a mentor to her. Lillie and Gladion got a beautiful end to their journey that began in Sun and Moon, and Sophocles got a good episode too. Gary is fine too, his character is well incorporated. I wish he interacted with Ash though. Paul was done well, with him clearly having changed a lot and grown. Greninja as a mentor to Lucario was well done and they nailed his character and his power. The cameos are great, I love the distinct battle styles they gave each Champion, but... Alain.

Fuck that, they massacred him. I'm not even Alain's biggest fan. I like him, and I was looking forward to seeing him, but not a huge fan. And even I think they ruined him. I don't mind that he didn't battle Ash. But I wanted him to be shown the respect he deserves, and he was given a mere half episode to shine and then demolished to show off Leon. I get why, but they could have treated him better. Alain is no pushover either. But this highlights the main problem with JN, great ideas, poor execution. JN has ambition but falls woefully short most of the time. I respect the writers for being bold enough to try this new formula but they didn't pull it off. JN is really not a bad series and it keeps me excited but not for the quality of the episodes. In no way are they bad but I'm more excited for the spectacle of nostalgia than for anything the series itself has done. I'm fond of this season because it gave me fanservice. I got companion returns which were done reasonably well, some nice episodes, the game champions duking it out in a tournament, Alola rights, and basically everything I love about JN is because of other seasons.

Again I will say that JN isn't bad. But it's not good either, and watching it after something like Sun and Moon feels like a downgrade. Sun and Moon had its own flaws as did every season, but JN has some that even I can't really overlook anymore. It's no Black and White, but it's no Sun and Moon or XY either. It's... there, it's reasonably enjoyable, it had some great ideas that excited Twitter, but it fell short of its own hype.

I really want to love JN. And for a while in the beginning, I did. I still like it, but it's not the same. Maybe after a while I can look back at the good and enjoy it for what it is. I've done it before with other series once I've accepted whatever happens. But the fact that I have to is sad. I'm not mad, just... disappointed, I guess.

[zoradementio]

Deltarune Theories and Observations Part 2

Since it’s been like three weeks and this game still hasn’t left my god damn brain, here’s some more things that I felt like noting or theorizing.

~Parallels of Noelle and Kris~

So, I ended my last Deltarune longpost with a comparison between Kris and Susie. But, interestingly enough, Kris and Noelle also have a lot of similarities. Both of them have an older sibling figure who was a very prominent crutch in their lives (Asriel for Kris, Dess for Noelle). Yet, in present times, this elder sibling is not present (though Dess’ is a bit more permanent, whether she died or went missing.) And compared to these older siblings, Kris and Noelle are the more introverted sibling, with Kris barely having a social life until the start of the game and Noelle being the biggest pushover since a card tower. Then, there’s their parental dynamics. Asgore and Rudy are both the carefree, laidback father figures, with Asgore immediately throwing Kris in a bear hug when seeing them and Rudy encouraging Noelle to ask Susie out and playing Dragon Blazers with her. This contrasts with the more proper, if strict mother figures. While Noelle’s mother is certainly the more egregious, if the fact that Noelle would rather stand outside her home’s gates likely for hours on end than to attempt to ‘bother’ her mother during work for a house key, there are a few signs of Toriel being a little strict in some areas. Apart from some dialogue from Bratty about her kissing Asriel and anything involving the big school dance being signs that Toriel does not approve of her kids, or any of her students for that matter, getting into anything even remotely romantic, the flavor text for the closet in Kris’ Dark World room being ‘You could wear whatever you want’ suggests that Toriel imposes some sort of a dress code on Kris and likely also Asriel when he was living at home. They’re also the two characters most susceptible to the SOUL, in other words you the player. Kris’ is a bit more direct, as they are the character we control in both their movements and what they say. While Noelle, considering she has such a weak will, she is fairly mailable if we impose our will onto her, as demonstrated in the Pipis Route. Finally, they both have a strong attachment towards Susie, though whether Kris’ is romantic or not is not entirely clear as of yet. Oh, and speaking of Noelle...

~The Return of Noelle~

In at least one of the future chapters, I believe Noelle will make a come back as a party member. I don’t think Toby Fox would make it this easy to just lose whatever equipment you put on her, especially if you give her the Jevilstail or if the Pipis Route has been fully completed you will lose a component of the Twisted Sword, which will presumably be available in future chapters. Therefore, I believe that Noelle will be playable again, at least at some point.

~Misanthropic Dysmorphia~

So, many people have seen the connections that Kris has to Chara (or The Fallen Child) from Undertale. They both love chocolate, are the adopted children of Toriel and Asgore, and seem to have an affinity for knives. But if there is one more connection they have, it’s that they both seem to hate humans. Now, while don’t know the reasons as to why Chara hated humans, it was enough for them to want to slaughter an entire village of people, going overboard with the body count when only 6 souls were needed to break the barrier. While Kris likely isn’t as genocidal as Chara was, their distaste for humanity runs just as deep. However, Kris’ misanthropy manifests as a form of body dysmorphia. As a child, they wondered when their horns would grow in like their brother and parents, showing that, at least at that point Kris didn’t understand the biological differences between themself and those around them. Not only that, but in Chapter 2, when going upstairs in the library and reading the book ‘How to Care for Humans’, when looking at the pages Kris immediately closes the book when seeing the pictures of humans in seeming disgust. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if Kris hates the fact that they’re human, seeing as that is the big thing that makes them an outsider to Hometown. It would also explain why they seem to hate the SOUL/Player, even if you play as pacifistically as possible and don’t do anything to intentionally upset Kris like throwing away the Ball of Junk in the Light World. After all, Kris’ description in the Dark World as soon as you enter it in Chapter 1 is ‘A body containing a human SOUL’. Apart from just generally being upset that some outside force is controlling their actions, Kris is also likely pissed that a human is the one controlling them, because, assumedly, you or anyone else that plays Deltarune is going to be a human. That could be just some extra salt in the wound, that even Kris’ own soul is not only human but not even their own.

~Darkner’s History(?)~

This is something strange that I don’t think a lot of people think about. So, I notice a lot of people point out that Ralsei knows that both his Dark Fountain and the Fountain from Chapter 1 are located in a supply closet and a classroom respectively. Most people point to this as evidence that Ralsei knows something, however Ralsei isn’t the only one with knowledge of the Light World. Queen does have a line or two about knowing that her Dark World is within a library. So clearly, Darkners have at least some awareness of the Light World, or at least enough about their enclosed spaces and possibly limited to appointed rulers or some such. What isn’t so clear is how long these Dark Worlds have lasted. Sure, portals to the Dark Worlds seem like only a recent thing, there is talk about the history of these characters. Just within Chapter 1 there’s King overthrowing the other three card kings and taking the throne all to himself, Jevil meeting a mysterious figure causing him to go mad and thus needing to be locked up by Seam, a presumably long series of puzzle makers syphoned out before Roulxs became the Duke of Puzzles, and some kind of falling out between Queen and King (which also brings up the question of when and why was Queen’s laptop in the abandoned classroom). My point being, despite these Dark Worlds being open for maybe a day or two at best, there seems to be almost years worth of history to these places. It could be a case of ‘one day passes inside, but only about an hour has passed outside’ thing or it could be that Dark Worlds still technically exists even without a Dark Fountain. So far, though, I can’t offer any concrete answers to this. And actually, since I brought up his suspicious behavior once again...

~Communication Issues~

I already talked about how Ralsei is suspicious in an out-of-universe perspective here, but in universe he is acting rather suspicious. Namely, around Susie. When Kris and Susie return to Castle Town, Ralsei tells Kris to gather everything in the adjacent classroom and bring it here. Everyone becomes their Darkner counterparts and Susie is naturally excited to see everyone, especially Lancer. Ralsei then says, and only says, that ‘when the Dark Fountain was sealed, that area returned to a normal classroom. And when Lancer decides to become one of you KEY ITEMS, Ralsei doesn’t explain that Darkners become regular objects in the Light World, causing Susie to think Lancer ditched them when Kris and Susie leave to work on their group project. And during the Chapter 2 epilogue, Susie even suggests finding a way to bring Ralsei and Lancer into the Light World, despite that seeming to be an impossibility. That’s not even mentioning the post Spamton NEO dialogue where Susie is the first to bring up the oddities of the whole scenario, and Ralsei immediately chooses to shoot down any questioning. Ralsei seemingly keeps Susie out of the loop on a lot of important things about how the Dark World works. Now, Susie doesn’t really question these things, but that’s mostly because 1. she is a very ‘only cares about the here and now’ type of person and is very excited about the whole Dark World shenanigans her, Kris and Ralsei get up to, and 2. this girl is dense enough to not immediately catch on the Noelle is crushing so hard on her a neon sign saying ‘SHE LIKES YOU’ would be a more subtle message. Now, it could be that Ralsei sees Susie in a much more ‘need to know’ basis, that since she is isn’t really the group plan-maker, she doesn’t need to know the intricacies of how the Dark Worlds, the Fountains, and everything works. It also could be that the player, and by extension Kris, are more important and thus will be needed this information more than Susie. However, I still hesitate to say that Ralsei is malicious in action. What I think would be the most likely reason, if his explanation of the Roaring and Queen’s reaction to it are any indication, it looks like Ralsei’s fatal flaw is assuming his knowledge is common knowledge. After all, he assumed that Queen was opening another Dark Fountain because she wanted to destroy the world, when that couldn’t be further from the case. In all likelihood, Ralsei could be overestimating how perceptive Susie really is when it comes to putting details together.

~Only One Ending...?~

This is something a few people have been debating for a while now. Back when Chapter 1 was released in 2018, Toby Fox said that Deltarune would only have one ending. However, with the addition of Chapter 2′s Pipis Route, many of us are wondering if that was a flat out lie or not. My assumption goes one of two ways. Option A: It was true at the time. During the three year development of Chapter 2 a lot, and I mean a LOT, of things about Deltarune have changed. Initially the game was going to be another mostly solo development similar to Undertale. But, with the larger workload and Toby Fox working on other projects like developing music for the Pokemon games, and on top of all of that going through some pretty bad wrist pains, Fox decided to get a small development team for Deltarune. There were debates on whether to switch Deltarune’s game engine to something like Unity, before settling back to Game Maker. And even when Chapter 1 was released, it was more of a proof of concept than anything, with barely any of the rest of the story being written down. It wouldn’t be too much of a surprise if Toby Fox decided to add some more endings because he thought that would work better for what he was going for. Or, Option B: It will be one ending, but in the same way the Normal Ending in Undertale is ‘one ending’. See, while Deltarune likes to emphasize that ‘your choses don’t matter’ and in Undertale ‘your choses do matter’, in actuality, the choses in both games have roughly the same weight. Sure, in Undertale it seems like your choses have more of an impact, but the basic story beats of the game are all the same. You will always fall into the underground, get quasi-adopted by Toriel, go through a wacky puzzle romp with Papyrus, get hunted by Undyne through Waterfall, guest star in Mettaton’s shows with Alphys as your guide, and finally make it to New Home. And there were still some minor questions in Undertale that really had no bearing on what you answered, such as Toriel’s question of if you prefer cinnamon or butterscotch. But because Undertale frames it with ‘your choses matter’ and Deltarune frames it in ‘your choses don’t matter’ we see it as such. So, when it comes to the endings, there really are only three endings in Undertale. The True Genocide ending, where you go all the way through with killing everyone and everything in the Underground, the True Pacifist Ending, where you SPARED everything you came across and completed the necessary friendship side quests, and the Normal Ending. Now, the Normal Ending sounds like a pretty narrow term, considering there’s like at least around 10 different variations of this ending, but the basic plot beats are still the same: You finish the fight with Asgore, fight Omega Flowey, and using the power of the other six souls you (as Frisk) are able to return above ground. Most of what makes this ending different is pretty much flavor text at the very end, with Sans and which ever other characters that are alive/befriended chiming in. I feel like Deltarune’s ending could play out in a similar vein, with larger plot beats being consistent, but specific character’s reactions and what not would change up the ending slightly. And, if we are only given one ending, I feel like there would be a good reason to word it like that. Similarly to what was said some time after on Toby Fox’s twitter about the True Pacifist ending, ‘This is the best ending, nothing more’ when people were wondering if there was a way to save Asriel from his fate in the end. So, if we are told there will be only ‘one ending’ that implies that there’s going to be something we’ll want to change. And what will this change be? Well...

~Don’t Forget, I’m With You In The Dark~

I believe that the ending of Deltarune will involve sealing the Castle Town Fountain. A lot of what’s set up in Deltarune seems to be leading to this. From the suspiciousness of Ralsei, to the premonition of the world ending if too many fountains are open, to the fact that Darkners are unable to consciously interact with the Light World. I’m pretty sure that we’re going to have to say good bye to Ralsei, Lancer, Rouxls, Seam, Queen, and all the rest of the Darkners by the end. And let’s face it, this ending would be the best punch to the gut that the game could offer. But I don’t think it will be all sad. After all, the Darkners will still be with us in spirit, will still be with us in the dark.

[depressedhatakekakashi]

Pokemon AU Masterlist- Headcannons

Kakashi is the son of Sakumo Hatake, the current Champion of Kanto when Kakashi starts his pokemon Journey. He is also the grandson of Tobirama Senju, the Pokemon Professor of the Kanto region. As such, Kakashi is put under a lot of pressure to meet a lot of expectations and even before his pokemon journey begins he is followed by reporters and others who want to know all about him.

When Kakashi arrives at Tobirama’s lab to be given his first official pokemon and start his journey, he meets Maito Gai. The others who start their journey at the same time are Obito and Rin. (Genma, Ebisu, Asuma and Kurenai all start a few years before them since they are older. Iruka, Tenzo, shisui and Itachi all start a few years after them)

When it comes to choosing pokemon, Rin took squirtle, Kakashi took Venasaur and both Obito and Gai took Charmander. Obito is the only one who still has/uses his charizard for battles.

Gai notices that Kakashi is uncomfortable with the reporters that seem to be already following him, so he attaches himself to the other kids side and make sure to get between him and the camera’s whenever they try to focus on him, taking all the focus onto himself. Kakashi appreciates this and they decide to head to the first gym together.

Kakashi almost always does his gym battle after Gai so that he can get a feel for how the gym leader fights. Because of this, Kakashi is able to come up with a plan of attack by the time that he fights and is usually able to obtain the badge in one try. The only exceptions are Minato and Danzo. Minato he had to fight 3 times before he gets his badge, Danzo he gets it on the second try. Gry sometimes has to try gyms multiple times, but Kakashi is in no rush and thinks it’s fun to watch Gai train with his pokemon so he always waits for him.

In Lavander town, Kakashi and Gai meet a young kid still waiting a few years before he can start his own pokemon journey. Tenzo lives in a home with his adopted father, who is often away because he is also a gym leader, leaving Tenzo under the care of baby sitters. While they’re visiting, Kakahsi’s ivysor bonds with Tenzo so much that when they’re getting ready to leave Kakashi notices that Ivysor is sad to be saying goodbye to Tenzo. Because Tenzo doesn’t really have anyone else stable around with him, Kakashi decides to leave Ivysaur with him so that he has a friend.

Kakashi is one of very few trainers who is able to beat Fugaku in one try, and he is absolutely ruthless in the battle after hearing Fugaku bad mouth Gai’s training technique and bond with his pokemon, telling him he should focus on getting strong pokemon rather than working with weak pokemon. This is the first battle which Gai see’s Kakashi aim to absolutely destroy his competition, and the only battle in which Fugaku’s pokemon fail to faint even one of the challengers pokemon.

After his battle with Fugaku, Kakashi is presented his badge by a young Itachi. When Kakashi see’s Itachi looking at his Jolteon, he tells him he is welcome to pet Jolteon and that his pokemon won’t bite. Itachi has a lot of questions for Kakashi, but Fugaku rushes him and Gai out of the gym before storming into the back utterly annoyed that Kakashi defeats him completely.

The day after Kakashi’s gym victory and Gai’s lose, Itachi goes to the local pokemon center to see if Nurse Tsunade needs any help with the pokemon. There, he see’s Kakashi and Gai with their pokemon. Gai is in the back field training with his pokemon for his rematch while Kakashi is sitting on the sidelines with a small growleth in his lap and his Jolteon by his side. Itachi remembers the team that Kakashi brought with him, even though he only used Jolteon. Kakashi had released all 3 of the pokemon he planned to use so Fugaku could see them. They had all been Electric pokemon, leading Itachi to believe that Kakashi was an electric trainer, only to see him with a fire pokemon in his lap.

The next day, Gai and Kakashi show up so that Gai can redo his gym challenge. While Gai is doing his battle against Fugaku, Itachi slides up beside Kakashi in the bleachers and watches as he brushes Growlithes fur. While sitting there, he finds himself blurting out a question. ‘I thought you only used Electric pokemon?’ Kakashi laughs and explains that while he does only use electric pokemon, he has a certain fondness for dogs and likes to collect dog pokemon. He doesn’t use those pokemon in battle though, even though he does train them, because he wants to show people how amazing Electric pokemon are. He more likes to have Dog pokemon as companions that often play with and train with all of his electric pokemon. This is the first time Itachi has heard of anyone besides his mother keeping a pokemon as a companion and not a battling pokemon.

After Gai win’s his gym badge from Fugaku, Kakashi and Gai get ready to set off onto the next part of the journey. Before leaving though, Gai goes up to Itachi and lays a pokeball in his hand, telling him it’s from Kakashi before he runs off to join his friend. When Itachi releases the pokemon to see what it is, he finds himself faced with a beautiful Eeevee that Kakashi had caught on the way to Fugaku’s gym because he found it stealing food from his bag and decided someone had to take care of it.

Kakashi and Gai go on to face the Elite four together after getting all 8 badges and doing a lot of training. On victory road Shizune joins them until they run into Tsunade at the end. Tsunade challenges them to make sure they’re ready to take on the elite four, and when they prove themselves she gladly sends them on their way. Shizun chooses to stick around with Tsunade and learn from her, since she’s not only an amazing pokemon trainer but also a Pokemon Doctor.

Kakashi and Gai beat the elite four, but both of them lost to Sakumo. Of course, as soon as Gai see’s who the champion is he understands Kakashi’s aversion to reporters and cameras. He always knew Kakashi was the son of the champion since day one, but he never realized that Kakashi was the spitting image of his father.

After facing Sakumo, the pair decide to continue exploring Kanto to train up their pokemon and become stronger, going over to Johto about a year later to find new pokemon and try the league there. This is where they meet Professor Shikaku, who is more interested in getting the pair to help him with research projects than he is with helping them with their gym challenge. Of course, Kakashi gets a cute Chikoreta out of the deal (that he later also gives to Tenzo) so he’s not complaining too much.

A few years later, Shisui and Tenzo start off on their journey. Unlike Kakashi and Gai they decide to do their journey alone like most kids, though they do run into each other a lot on the way and have battles to see where they’re standing in terms of skill. Shisui chooses Charmander as his starter, and finds that he likes to collect a variety of pokemon. Tenzo, on the other hand, has a real love for grass type pokemon and has the Ivysaur that Kakashi gave him to start off his journey with.

Shisui first meets Kakashi and Gai in Celadon city. The pair is there to relax after getting back from the Johto region, and there’s a bit huff around the city about two top trainers being there. Shisui decides to check it out and ends up challenging Gai to a one on one battle thinking neither of these two look all that great. He is...pleasantly surprised.

Gai absolutely destroys him in battle with his Hitmonlee, and Shisui decides then and there that he’s going to train until he can beat this weird pair of ass kicking trainers.

When he has 8 badges, Tenzo heads to victory road where he finds Kakashi and Gai chilling outside. Kakashi smiles when he see’s him, having gotten word that Tenzo had finally gotten his last badge. As a reward, Kakashi lays a pokeball in Tenzo’s hand. It’s the Chikareta that Shikaku had given him a few years ago, and thankfully this time Tenzo has a pokemon to give Kakashi in return. The only electric pokemon that Kakashi had been unable to catch as of yet, because it’s a stubborn shit that keeps eluding him. Electobuzz.

Shisui and Tenzo both end up losing to Sakumo as well, though Sakumo is impressed by how many pokemon they manage to get through. Only Kakashi and Gai have managed to actually get close to beating him before.

When Itachi begins his pokemon journey, It’s Kakashi and Gai’s first year as Gym Leaders. Gai is the 7th Gym leader and a fighting type leader, while Kakashi is the 8th gym leader and the Electric type leader.

Kakashi quickly gets a reputation for being a ruthless gym leader. Not in the same way as Fugaku, who is known to insult challengers' training methods and skills. But rather because he doesn’t go easy on his gym challengers. If they want to win a badge from him, they have to earn it in every way possible.

The only person who gets a gym badge from Kakashi ever, Is Itachi. It gets Kakashi into quiet a lot of trouble with the league for not letting others have a chance at facing the elite four, but Sakumo is damn proud of his son and knows that Itachi facing him means this kid is damn strong.

Itachi doesn’t beat Sakumo the first time, but he does get Sakumo down to one pokemon which is terrifying.

Ultimately, both Kakashi and Itachi beat Sakumo. The difference is Kakashi beats his dad in a silly battle at his gym that’s not legal in any way and he’s happy with that. He never wanted his victory publicized. Itachi beats Sakumo on live TV for everyone to see and becomes the new official champion.

This happens 3 years after Itachi started his journey, and it’s huge because for years Sakumo was undefeated.

As the new Champion, Itachi gets to choose the elite four that will be working with him. He chooses Kakashi, Gai, Shisui and Rin. All absolute power houses in their own way will test a trainer's skill in brute strength, intelligence, quick reactions and adjustments and training style before they even get to Itachi.

To get past all four of them is damn impressive, but because it’s so hard it’s actually rare to see Itachi out as the champion, and thus not many people know what the champion actually looks like.

[eriisaam]

Something something Tarot Card Project something.

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Context under the cut, in order of appearance:

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Kyo - The Fool (  Hear me out.)

Symbolizing new beginning, adventure, opportunities, pleasure, etc. It reflects how when Lifonse and Kamui first met him (from his perspective), he suddenly took a drastic turn in his life with opening new opportunities (becoming a summoner, stabilizing his power to go from a ditto to a ditto-mew, getting his first legendary in Zacian and encountering others, finding his ex and making amends to be on surprisingly good terms with him, having lovers who immediately love him, etc), of which his stinkiness nearly self-sabotaged in his apprehension, his guardedness, and (more sympathetically) him managing his past experiences and traumas, of which had Lifonse and Kamui not been so patient, supportive and loving as they had, there were so many opportunities he could've ruined for himself. This incarnation of him even gained more lovers than his past self (in Eclair and then Kaze), and in a moment of humbling himself and realizing in full of the weight of his failings and foolishness, it had a profound effect in Zacian for her to knight him, proclaiming herself as his to officially train.

For the reverse, this also winds up heavily symbolizing his past-self, who became present-Kyo's fallen alt, who did wind up self-sabotaging things by causing a lot of trauma that lingered in Kamui and Lifonse, who went a completely different direction in life from the present Kyo, and was woefully apathetic and uncaring to Lifonse and Kamui as a whole compared to present-Kyo not only opening up and genuinely loving them more, but making strides to change himself for the better for their sake, too. There were many scars he left behind in Lifonse and Kamui that negatively impacted even present-Kyo’s relationship with them, and the only moment he had a saving grace was just before his death, and ruined just as quickly when Hel claimed him as one of her new cohorts. Worth also noting that unlike the present Kyo, whose power stabilized his ditto genes to be mew-like, past-Kyo didn’t develop nearly as pronounced a bond to do the same, and thus, lacked their connection to a mew.

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Ephrel - The Chariot

In reverse, the feeling of defeat, being vanquished, lost, etc. Were all feelings that reflected how Ephrel was in the eyes of Sparrow's Order of Heroes prior to Sparrow's official status as summoner (of which Chrom's was unofficial before her). They were completely forgotten to the point they didn't even have a name attached other than "former summoner/previous summoner", the circumstances of why they were gone were almost entirely unheard of or guesswork, and there seemed far too much haste to try to forget them as much as possible in favor of moving on with Sparrow, satisfied to keep their fate unknown with very few to give a fuck otherwise (like Chrom, then Sparrow based on Chrom's own unwavering hope to find out what happened once learning Ephrel had a life after their robinsona).

The process of finding Spectabilis, then deciding to redeem them rather than kill them (which would be far easier and inconsequential), was what flips The Chariot upright: Reflecting the long, rocky road Chrom persevered to press forward to, and meet up to free Ephrel from a fate of stagnancy, rather than just leave it at accepting his replacement Robins and moving on without them like everyone else. This action was what allowed Ephrel's live to continue forward, and to reveal more of themself they didn't flesh out even in their robinsona days.

Initially, I debated on whether or not Chrom and Ephrel fit to be literally riding something, but I find it even more fitting that Chrom himself served as “the chariot”, having carried the toils and burdens from the point he lost Ephrel, to the long, exhausting journey to retrieve them again. 

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Erin - The Hanged Man

As her supports (but especially Lif, Ryoma, and to some degree Camilla from the start) knew too well (and Hrid eventually caught up on and was rightfully horrified of and clingy afterwards about), Erin came from a very harsh life prior to being a summoner, where she was suffocated, controlled, manipulated, and worked to the ground, to the point she nearly made a very costly, risky mistake of her own self prior to her Breidablik summoning her (of which I'll remain brief and vague here as it's not the biggest point this time). The damage was still done, as she still was left a broken shell, fully welcoming anyone to pull her strings as she was heavily conditioned to expect, all with a weak will, self-worth and agency. All of which line up with the reversed Hang Man's meaning of useless sacrifice, unwillingness to change, and knowingly heading on to bad decision after bad outcome. The arms of her past try greedily to drag her back to the life she had once escaped from.

The upright version of this reflected readjustment, improvement, and rebirth: All of which carried the same elements to how her supports could see she was a completely different person underneath the broken mess she was initially left as, and needed support, love, and gentle coaxing to come out in her own accord. This then led to a very massive shift to what she later turned into presently from where she started off before: As someone bold, brash, more willing to show herself, and more engaged as her own self with her own decisions. Even in free-fall, she gained her freedom, and more, thanks to her supports, gained her wings figuratively and literally (as a manakete) to take flight by her own will.

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Teru - Death

In reverse, Teru had indeed followed a lot of relationships that couldn't fully serve him or be as realized as he needed them to be at the time he needed it most (Kyo, before The Incident nearly ruined even their friendship, and definitely ruined their relationship. Then Ryoma, before Garon took that away from him as well.). His Order of Heroes failed him, his initial Askr was doomed, and he had to be a pillar of strength and protection to his pokemon and them in a time he himself desperately needed someone to rely on and protect him instead in his ailing strength and health. In the form he took prior to decimating his former connected World of Fates, one prominent feature in the missingno form he took at the time was carrying the fragmented headgear of his fallen past lover.

Upright, even in the point where Teru changed his life for the better, it took massive sacrifices and struggles on his part to get there. He has a chronic illness that can make him incredibly godly in power in the best of times, but also worryingly and critically frail and weak in most other times, all through his missingno powers he's still not able to entirely control. He had done the impossible in cheating death so many times from being a missingno, to surviving Conquest, to taking the Heart's Rite head on and living to tell the tale, but such bragging rights rang hallow for the sacrifices he made and the unspeakable levels of agony and pain he endured while subjected to them. He cheated death, yet at what cost? But even when he reached his lowest, his life did start anew as he grew past his traumas just enough to learn to grow and feel again, and for the better. After all, "third time's the charm".

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Sparrow - The Star

Where she started, she was homeless, abandoned by the world, and left to die. Forgotten. Uncared for. Unconcerned. Just another number and another sad life wasted. Like the reverse, she started in a point she was made acutely aware how little her skills mattered (it certainly didn't spare her the life of poverty), how bad her luck was (despite her best efforts, she still failed), and her only future was one that was coming to an end (crushed dreams unrealized in favor of being left to starve to death to the harsh elements outdoors). In her hands were the concept of a Crest of Fate bestowed to her, marking her as a digidestined. But even this “blessing” was in actuality a fake crest of the Grimeal, and what led to long-term damage to her and her digimon when the ruse was up.

It was Chrom who summoned her, and it was because of his patience to help save her and get her on her feet again did her hopes turn around, and her card meaning with it. Upright, she had a second chance in a new life, a new environment, and with opportunities she only barely touched the surface of that were fully realized in looking to it again in Askr (her digimon, who she didn't physically interact with until Chrom upset her digimon partners upon realizing why Sparrow didn't check up on them (of which she downplayed her life cuz, well, she thought it was a game), revealing themselves in full). She found love, she found insight, and she found a new power she learned to harness to make a better use of her skills when she thought a more direct approach was lacking (a healer, when she wasn't physically strong enough to take up another weapon yet). She stayed calm, positive, hopeful, and tried to extend the same hope Chrom shared to her to others she found along the way, which led to Robin, Lyon, and then Ephrel finding their own hopes as well. In her hands was a digi-egg of Destiny (sometimes alternatively known as the digimental of fate), which manifested itself when Breidablik resonated with both Sparrow and Ephrel. As a united force, they finally gained the hard-earned role of digidestined as a duo legendary-mythic unit.

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Eclair - Judgement

A lot of Eclair's point of major growth in power and character all fell back on Thorr's most powerful ability: Judgement. This power was the power that could completely and utterly decimate entire countries with the single swing of her hammer, and she isn't afraid to flex, and in ways Eclair saw for himself are fickle and self-righteous (particularly as she and Teru declared war on one another for the sake of protecting Nohr or wiping it off the face of Fates, but did nothing to interfere with the Nohr Teru himself destroyed in his own world). This fickle nature, this self-serving attitude and logic path Thorr decides when to enact her judgement or not, struck the biggest fear in Eclair and caused untold amounts of stress, worries, and panic attacks of being his greatest failure of seeing everyone wiped away from his life (like the fate he himself escaped as a forma) if he couldn't successfully stop his own mother. All of which are fears of the reverse Judgement. Even when she left her mark in other timelines and what-could’ve-beens, she struck fear in Eclair’s supports making such outcomes prominently known for them to stew on. Including an alternative outcome of her taking hold of some manner of Alfonse and overloading him into a temporal threat.

But upright, it also reflects awakening, renewal, a better health and mind fully realized. The point Eclair began fearing his mother and aunt most was also the point his powers started manifesting the most when his family, friends and supports made their own will clear of wanting to protect him. It was also the point he fully realized that form of will that comes from love and the power it held that heavily contrasted the will Thorr took interest in that comes from despair. This eventually was fully realized in his fully powered form, Magni, and his power as the Divine Shield to completely cancel out Thorr's Judgement attack, and thus, force her to bring herself down to the same even footing as the mortals when she can't simply delete them off the earth with a swing anymore. This resolve is also what resonated with why Zamazenta similarly trusts him, and thus, fully established Eclair's mythic alt.

[ashiversary]

If We're Honest - Chapter 1

Read the full fic on ao3!

Blanche took a deep breath and straightened their jacket. Then they ran their hands over their hair to double check that it hadn’t gotten mussed when they were overseeing the introduction of a new shipment of Tentacool to one of Team Mystic’s training pools. It was the end of their first week on the job, and Professor Willow had summoned them to his office so that he could introduce them to the representatives from other teams.

Blanche had dreaded this meeting from the moment their assistant, Annie, had entered it in their schedule days ago. While they were capable of carrying out the duties required of their position, Blanche had an unfortunate but notable weakness with social interactions. Annie had worked under the previous Leader of Team Mystic prior to his retirement, and she stressed the importance of good relations between the teams to Blanche in preparation of this meeting. While there was a certain amount of rivalry encouraged between Teams Mystic, Instinct, and Valor, a lot of their research duties required cooperation. Team Instinct, for example, ran most of the hatcheries in the Opal Region, and had contacts with other hatcheries overseas where they could obtain rare pokemon. Therefore, Team Instinct’s cooperation was needed in order for Team Mystic to be supplied with new hatchlings for their research.

Annie had warned them of the type of backlog that could occur when relations were not good, as they had been until Leader Spark took the position with Instinct a handful of months ago.

As for Team Valor, their specialty was pokemon battling and combat. Some pokemon only evolved in battle, and while Mystic could do this themselves, Team Valor was the expert and results were often better when they assisted.

While Annie didn’t say so outright, she implied that Leader Candela of Valor was headstrong and hard to deal with.

It was time. Blanche knocked on the door. “Come in!” Professor Willow called from the other side.

Before Blanche could, the door was opened by a smiling blond man. “Hey! You must be Blanche. I’m Spark.” Blanche’s hand was seized and shaken. “Sorry for not dropping by Mystic HQ to say hi to you. I’m still new too, so there’s a lot to do.”

As he spoke, Spark pulled Blanche into the room by the hand he refused to let go of despite Blanche’s attempts to tug it free. “And here’s Candela!”

Spark gestured at the woman leaning against Professor Willow’s desk. Blanche took advantage of his distraction to yank their hand free.

“Hello! Don’t worry about Spark. He’s enthusiastic but harmless. Mostly, anyway.” Candela’s lips stretched in a grin like she knew something Blanche didn’t.

“I’m Blanche from Team Mystic. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you both,” Blanche said, slipping into formality to soothe their nerves.

Professor Willow smiled at Blanche. If they weren’t mistaken, he looked a bit harried - there were pens stuck behind both of his ears and his glasses were shoved to the top of his head. Blanche wondered if he knew.

“Blanche! Right on time. Thanks for coming,” he said with his warm smile. “Since everyone has been introduced, we can go over a few things…”

The meeting lasted for an hour. The three leaders exchanged contact information and discussed ongoing mutual projects that had been in the works since before Blanche was hired. Blanche took notes on their tablet, asked pointed questions, and was satisfied overall with how the meeting went. Of course they would rather be in the lab, but they understood that a leadership role required a certain amount of bureaucracy.

As the meeting wound to a close and Blanche gathered their things to leave, Spark’s hand clasped their shoulder. Blanche flinched - they had never been overfond of physical contact from anyone other than their twin. “What?”

“We should all have dinner together!” Spark said. His most characteristic expression, if this meeting was any indication, was a wide grin. It was on his face now. “Candy, you too. It’s good for team relations and stuff.”

Candela rolled her eyes at the nickname, but smiled. “Sure, Sparky,” she retorted.

If she intended to come across as rude, it didn’t seem Spark registered it that way. “Great! Whaddaya say, Blanche?”

Blanche brushed his hand from their shoulder. “Perhaps some other time.” Blanche knew that it was important to get along with the other team leaders, but they had used up all of their ‘socializing with new people energy’ to get through this meeting. “It’s still my first week, and I have a lot to get caught up on.”

“Aw, you’re not planning to work all weekend, are ya?” Spark frowned.

Candela laughed. “As if the both of us won’t be doing the same thing! I don’t think I’ve had a proper weekend in…” she counted on her fingers. “Four months?”

“Is that when Silas quit on ya?”

“Yeah. He left the catalogue system a disaster. Charles and I have been working on it whenever we have time, but there’s so much other work-”

While the other leaders were distracted, Blanche took the opportunity to duck out with a last nod to Professor Willow. The door clicked shut behind them, cutting Spark off mid-sentence.

Blanche held in their sigh of relief until they were alone in the elevator. Annie wanted Blanche to go home after the meeting. “Get a proper rest! We can’t have you burning out after your first week,” she’d said. But there was some work Blanche wanted to finish up. There was a clutch of Vaporeon that had evolved that morning, and Blanche planned to assess them in one of the training pools to calculate their stats. That counted as a break, right? They wouldn’t be at their desk.

But Annie, after knowing Blanche for a week, seemed able to predict them.

She was on the deck on the training pool tapping her foot when Blanche entered after changing into a rashguard and swim shorts. “I thought I sent you home,” Blanche said with a frown.

Annie’s hands were planted on her hips. “And I thought I told you not to come back after your meeting!”

Blanche grew up with a strong-willed twin and was not to be pushed around. “The Vaporeon need to be worked with while the evolution is still fresh, so that I can compare their performance now and track how it changes over the next few days and weeks.” As Blanche spoke, they marched past Annie and set the carry case that held the four pokeballs next to the pool. Annie turned to track their movements, but said nothing. “It is best done now. Besides, it relaxes me and I enjoy it.”

Blanche glanced back to see if Annie had further arguments, but she didn’t appear to have heard their arguments. Blanche paused in the act of removing a pokeball from the case. “Problem?”

Annie jolted and a strange look crossed her face. Blanche didn’t know what it meant, but before they could ask, it had been replaced with a sheepish smile. “Oh, no, not at all! I was just looking at your soulmark.” She bit her lip. “I didn’t realize you had one.”

“Oh.” Blanche released the first Vaporeon from its pokeball. It landed in the water with a splash and bobbed to the surface with a smug grin that reminded Blanche of their own Vaporeon, Sushi. Perhaps they could incorporate Sushi into the training later. “It’s not very interesting. Experts estimate that about 80% of the population has a soulmate.”

“I don’t. Have one, I mean.” Annie’s voice was quiet.

Blanche had been about to slip into the pool. At Annie’s words, they froze. They looked back. Her brown eyes were still locked on the complex star marked in blue on Blanche’s left calf. Ah. Their previous words had been inconsiderate. It hadn’t occurred to them that Annie might be among the 20% of people who did not have a soulmate. “I apologize. I didn’t mean-”

Annie was shaking her head. “It’s fine!” She smiled, but it was strained around the edges. “Can I see yours? If you don’t mind. I know some people are very private about them.”

“I don’t mind at all.”

Blanche extended their left leg a bit so that Annie could see better as she came over. She traced the swirls and geometric shapes inside the outline of the star with the tips of her fingers. Then, as though she just realized what she was doing, she snatched her hand away. “Sorry! I should have asked.”

“It’s fine. Are you done looking?” At Annie’s nod, Blanche withdrew their leg and swung into the pool. They tried to do it carefully, but some water still splashed up and soaked the edge of Annie’s coat. “Sorry.”

“No problem.” Annie said cross-legged at the edge of the pool without seeming to care about the water that lapped over the edge as Blanche clapped their hands to call the Vaporeon’s attention to them. It was frisking in the water and did not come when called.

“What’s your soulmate like?” Annie asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t met them.” The water was hip deep, and the Vaporeon swam away as Blanche waded toward it. Such mischief could be endearing, but not when there was work to be done. “Annie, please throw me one of the poffins in the case.”

Annie leaned over and pulled out the resealable plastic bag of poffins. “Which flavour?”

“It would seem it has an impish or naughty nature. Let’s try spicy to start.” Blanche caught the poffin Annie tossed them and waggled it at the Vaporeon. The pokemon poked its head above the water, nostrils flaring as it scented the treat. It drifted closer and licked its lips.

“If you want a reward, you must do as I say,” Blanche said as the Vaporeon rolled over to its back to attempt to charm Blanche out of the poffin.

“There are sites where you can post photos of your soulmark. They’re supposed to scan the pictures and find if someone else has posted the matching mark,” Annie said, watching as Blanche cajoled the uncooperative Vaporeon through its paces.

Blanche grimaced at the Vaporeon splashed them in the face as it made a grab for the treat. Blanche held it well out of reach and was unmoved by the Vaporeon’s whining and pitiful expression. “No, you haven’t earned it yet,” they scolded. To Annie they said, “I know. I’m not interested.”

After that Annie let the subject drop. Blanche wondered if they had been unkind again, telling her that they had no interest in finding their soulmate while knowing that she did not have one. But such things were personal. And she had been the one to bring up the subject in the first place.

Annie let Blanche go through all of the Vaporeon, but then she insisted that they go home. Maybe Blanche could have pushed the issue, but it didn’t seem worth it. Besides, they wanted to stop by the library on their way home. One of the holds they’d placed at the beginning of the week had come in, and they needed to pick it up.

It was an unpleasant surprise to find their twin, Noire, lounging against their motorcycle when they went down to the parking garage. Blanche stopped under one of the lamps and grimaced. Noire hadn’t noticed Blanche yet, so they had a moment to decide what to do.

Blanche loved their twin. Noire was one of the few people Blanche could say with certainty that they *did* love. The pair of them were found, battered and bruised, in an alley in Orre some 20 years ago with no memory of how they’d gotten there. They’d been inseparable ever since.

Well, until Blanche had decided to pursue a Bachelor’s degree and then acted as an assistant to Professor Oak for a couple years. Noire acted like that had been a huge betrayal, Blanche leaving Noire, and made no secret of the fact that they disapproved of Blanche’s life choices.

Since Noire had chosen to join Team Rocket and lead a life of organized crime, this was extra insulting.

There was no helping it. Blanche’s pushy assistant was doubtless still lurking to make sure that Blanche left the building. Noire had gotten comfortable on Blanche’s means of transportation. Blanche would have to remove them.

The echo of Blanche’s heels caught Noire’s attention and they sat up to watch Blanche approach. “What are you doing here, Noire?” Blanche asked once they were within hailing distance.

Noire rolled their eyes. “I came to see how the new job was going. You said you’d call me, and you never did. What, I’m good enough to help you move into your condo, but not good enough to chat with?”

Blanche winced. “I’m sorry. I got caught up and forgot.” It was the truth. That, and Blanche had gotten out of the habit of calling Noire after years of the silent treatment. Noire hadn’t taken Blanche’s defection from their guardians at Team Rocket well.

“Yeah, okay.” Noire pushed off Blanche’s bike and tucked their hands in the pockets of their slacks. “I just wanted to make sure the science-types hadn’t melted you in a vat of acid or something.”

“No, everything’s fine.” Blanche cursed their own vagueness. “Well. It’s going well.”

“Good. Where we going?”

“You don’t have a helmet.”

Noire nudged a helmet into view with their foot, then kicked it up and caught it. Out of arguments, Blanche put their own helmet on and swung their leg over their bike. They waited for Noire to put their own helmet on and settle behind them. Blanche never liked riding double, but Noire was the only one they’d make an exception for.

When they stopped at the library and pulled their helmets off, Blanche caught sight of Noire’s disgusted face. “What?”

“The library? *Seriously?*” Noire jogged up the steps after Blanche. “What century are we in? All this stuff is digital these days.”

“I prefer physical books.” Blanche held the door open so that Noire could follow them in. They automatically lowered their voice as they moved further into the library. “I also believe that it’s important to support local libraries as they provide important resources and services. Part of that support is checking out books.”

Noire was rolling their eyes at Blanche again, but Blanche turned their back and refused to look. They went to the holds shelf and found the books held under their name. As they tucked the books under their arm, they caught Noire bending and squinting to make out the title.

“Oh, it’s that trashy sci-fi series you like,” Noire said, losing interest as they straightened.

Offended, Blanche retorted, “I don’t make fun of you about your cheesy housewife dramas.”

Noire leveled them with a look. “Yeah, you do.”

Well, maybe they did, but Blanche wasn’t about to admit it. Instead they let Noire haul them out to dinner like they hadn’t allowed the other Team Leaders, and made polite conversation with Noire’s partner, Amelie.

Unlike Blanche, Noire cared about soulmates. And Amelie was theirs. The two of them met in the ranks of Team Rocket and now wrought havoc as a criminal power couple.

Blanche supposed that was a soulmate thing.

It was late by the time Blanche managed to squirm away and go home. Even so, they stayed up an extra hour (or two…) in order to start their book. They did not wait a week for it to not read it right away.

Blanche’s head buzzed with exhaustion when they hauled their butt to work the next morning. While they were not required to work weekends, Mystic Laboratories never truly closed. There was someone working on a project or writing a report or analyzing data at all hours on all days. Therefore, Blanche had decided to make it a priority to be at the labs for at least part of every day in case there was anything that needed their personal and immediate attention.

It was a good thing they did. Just before lunch, which Blanche wasn’t intending to take anyway, one of the techs knocked on the door to Blanche’s office and burst in without waiting for a response. “Leader Blanche!” she blurted out before Blanche could tell her not to do that in the future. “We just heard that the shipment of Snom eggs from Instinct is being delivered now instead of Monday.”

“What?” Blanche’s hands froze on their keyboard. They checked their schedule. Damn it. That shipment wasn’t scheduled to arrive until Monday at 2 p.m. “Why now?”

“Leader Spark says that the eggs are about to hatch. As our project requires newly-hatched Snom, waiting two days to send them to us could skew our results. Leader Spark is delivering them personally and should be here in about ten minutes.” The woman fidgeted as she talked. Her anxiety was unnecessary. Blanche wasn’t going to scold her because something urgent cropped up. That was the nature of this profession, sometimes.

Blanche stood and grabbed their jacket off the back of their desk chair. “Understood. I’ll go meet him and get the Snom settled in.” There was no choice. Although there was always someone here, it was a skeleton crew on weekends. Even Team Mystic liked their weekends.

By the time Blanche arrived, Spark and another trainer in Team Instinct yellow were unloading incubators of eggs from the back of a panel van. Spark spotted Blanche and grinned. It was a sunny expression that suited his golden blond hair and sky blue eyes. Blanche couldn’t return it, though. Such expressions weren’t in their nature.

“Heya, Blanche! Sorry for the change in schedule. But the babies hatch when they’re gonna hatch, and there’s nothing humans can do about it.” Spark passed the last incubator to his assistant and jumped down.

The greeting was informal for Blanche’s tastes, but they let it go. Team relations were important, and Spark had held the position of Team Leader longer than Blanche had. It would be presumptuous to scold him after only a week at the post. “That’s fine. Thank you for bringing them so promptly,” Blanche said instead. They bent to inspect one of the eggs through the clear glass of the incubator. A visual exam revealed nothing, but Blanche was not the expert in pokemon breeding. They would have to take Spark’s word for it that they would hatch soon.

“When do you believe that they will hatch?” Blanche assumed that it must be today or he wouldn’t have brought them in such a hurry.

“Oh, within the next half hour, for sure.” Spark’s easy reply filled Blanche with horror. They weren’t set up for the hatchling Snom yet.

“Annie!” Blanche called. She was never far. Sure enough, her head popped around the corner.

“Yes, Chief?”

“We need the terrariums set up for twelve hatchling Snom. Time is of the essence.”

“Got it!” She gave a salute and vanished.

The tech fetched a cart and they loaded the incubators onto it. Spark hung around, and even though he told his assistant to head out, the young man in yellow stayed as well. When Blanche asked, Spark said that he wanted to make sure the eggs were settled in and hatched safely. Blanche didn’t like the sensation of being hovered over but could not fault him for wanting to see a task through to completion.

The cooing, however, baffled them.

“There we go, baby, let’s get you all settled in,” Spark crooned to the eggs as he got the incubators settled in the room designated for them. “There, see, all nice and warm. What good babies.”

Blanche was embarrassed just listening to it, but they continued to organize the terrariums for the Snom when they hatched and coordinated contacting the Mystic scientists in charge of the Snom project and telling them they needed to come in. It was easier to pretend they couldn’t hear when they had so much to do.

But it was amazing to watch a baby pokemon come into the world. Two of the researchers arrived just in time to record the data, so Blanche set their tablet down and leaned back to witness the miracle now that they were not required to be the one to document it.

The shells cracked and Snom crawled out one by one. Without disturbing the newborn pokemon, Spark reached in to hit the release on the incubators. The glass slid open and it wasn’t long before the hatchlings crept out of their incubators to explore.

The terrarium was set up as a natural Snom habitat with non-intrusive dividers so that each pair of Snom was kept separate from the others for control purposes. But there were leaves for them to chew on and branches to climb.

Spark lifted out the incubators as the Snom vacated them and set them on the floor. “Go, can you go load these back up in the truck?” he asked his assistant. If not for Spark’s cheeky grin, Blanche may have missed the pun. But from the look of tired exasperation on Go’s face, this type of joke was not uncommon.

“Got it. You want me to wait for you?”

“Nah, I can find my own way back.”

Once Go and his cart of incubators had gone, Spark turned to Blanche with the grin that they were starting to become familiar with. “Have you had lunch yet?”

Blanche wasn’t expecting that question and answered honestly on reflex. “No.”

“Great! It looks like your people have things under control here.” Spark gestured at the techs bustling around the terrariums. “How about we go grab a bite to eat? My treat.”

Blanche wanted to refuse. They had so much to do! But Spark had done them a favour by personally arranging to bring the Snom to Team Mystic two days ahead of schedule. An hour or so of team bonding wasn’t such a bad trade off. “Did you have a place in mind?”

Spark’s grin broadened. “Yeah! You good with spicy food? There’s this Unovan place me and Candy go to all the time. It’s so good.”

“Spicy food is fine.”

There was just enough time for Blanche to shove their tablet into Annie’s arms and inform her that they were taking their lunch break before Spark slung his arm around Blanche’s neck and steered them out the door. When they were on the first floor crossing the reception area through the door, the whispers started.

“Look. It’s the Rocket brat.”

“What? How can a former Team Rocket member be allowed into the Go Program?”

“They need to up their background checks for this place. They’re letting all kinds of scum in.”

Blanche flinched. Their shoulders stiffened, and their hands formed fists at their sides. Ah, so it had gotten out already. Blanche forced themself to take a deep breath. Well, it didn’t matter. Let them talk. Blanche had dealt with stares and whispers often since leaving the care of Rocket Executive Sabrina.

Spark stopped dead in the middle of the reception area with his arm still looped around Blanche’s shoulders. In an instant his grin had vanished to be replaced with a stone-eyed stare. Blanche flinched again, intimidated despite themself.

“You wanna come over here and say that shit?” Spark said, voice low and dangerous.

The reception area went dead quiet. Nobody moved.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. C’mon, Blanche.”

Despite their resolve that it didn’t matter, Blanche’s hands were shaking when they made it onto the sidewalk. “I must apologize,” they said, pulling away from Spark’s arm but sticking close to him on the sidewalk. He sent them a puzzled look, but Blanche continued staring straight ahead. “It’s true that I was raised by Team Rocket, but I left the organization when I was a teenager. I-”

“Blanche.” Spark stopped. Blanche continued for a few steps before they stopped and turned to look at him questioningly. Spark’s face was uncharacteristically serious. “They were talking about *me.*”

“What?”

Spark shrugged like it was no big deal. Maybe to him it wasn’t. “My parents died in a raid Team Rocket was involved in. There’ve been rumours since I was a kid that they were part of Team Rocket. I was raised by my Uncle Surge, who is a member of Team Rocket. People say all kinds of shit about it.”

“Oh.” He was an orphan, like them, who had been taken in by Team Rocket. In his case it had been an actual family member, but Blanche supposed it amounted to the same thing.

Spark was still standing in the middle of the sidewalk. “So…?”

“So?”

“We still gonna have lunch?”

“Yes? I am waiting for you,” Blanche said, confused. “I don’t know where the restaurant is.”

Spark looked startled for a moment. Then his grin reappeared, slowly and full of relief. “Okay. Follow me.”

The restaurant was a cozy family-owned affair. The staff greeted Spark by name and asked who his ‘new friend’ was as they led them to a table. Blanche let Spark handle the social pleasantries and browsed the menu. As Spark had warned, most of the available fare was spicy. But Blanche could handle spicy.

“What do you recommend?” Blanche asked once the server left them.

“Oh, the curry for sure. It’s amazing.” Spark leaned over to point to the appropriate section of the menu. “They’ve got a few options depending on what flavours you like and your tolerance for spice.”

“All right.” Blanche decided to try the green curry and set their menu aside. Spark was a regular at this restaurant and already knew what he wanted. While their orders were sent to the kitchen and the server brought them tea, Blanche and Spark made small talk.

“You’re not from Opal, right? Have you settled into your place?” Spark asked.

“Yes. I’m from- well.” Blanche stopped, sighed, and rephrased. “Originally I’m from Orre, but I don’t remember it very well. I grew up in Kanto. Opal seems quite different, but I like it so far.”

“Hey, I grew up in Kanto too!” Spark leaned forward in excitement. “Where abouts are you from?”

“Saffron City.”

“Ahhh. I’m from Vermilion City. Man, we grew up so close together. Small world, huh?”

“Indeed.” Blanche sipped their tea.

“Did your wife come with you?”

Blanche choked, slapping a hand over their mouth to keep from spewing tea everywhere. “My what?”

Spark looked confused. “Your wife? The short, busty redhead? I’m sure I’ve seen you two together before.”

Ohhhh. “That’s Amelie,” Blanche said, grabbing a napkin to clean up their mess. “She’s not my wife. She’s the soulmate of my twin, Noire.”

“Oh!” Spark’s eyes went wide. “There’s two of you?”

“No. There is one of me, and one of Noire.” Blanche didn’t quite keep the impatience out of their voice. They glared when Spark laughed. The server looked between them curiously when she set down their steaming plates of food, but she seemed to know better than to ask.

“Sorry. You get that a lot, huh?”

“Yes,” said Blanche with emphasis.

“Sorry.” There was a brief silence. Blanche wondered if they had offended Spark, but sampled their curry while they waited for him to speak. It was delicious.

“What about you?” Spark asked. Seeing from Blanche’s questioning look that they didn’t know what he meant, he elaborated. “Do you have a soulmate?”

This conversation again. Soulmates seemed to be all anyone ever wanted to talk about. “I have a mark. I have not met the person who bears the same one.” They hoped that would be enough to shut down the conversation, but it was not.

“I haven’t met mine either,” Spark said, and took a generous bite of his own curry. His face flushed from the heat, but he didn’t seem to mind the spice. Then his eyes lit and he leaned across the table again. “Hey! Can I see your mark?”

“No.” Blanche was startled into instant and complete refusal. It wasn’t even as though they viewed their mark as private like some did - after all, they hadn’t minded Annie seeing it. But people usually saw it by chance rather than asking boldly like this.

“Why?” Spark’s head tilted like a bird. “Is it somewhere private?”

“No.” Blanche didn’t want him assuming it was on their butt or something either. “It’s on my leg.”

“Really? Mine too!” Spark seemed pleased. “Which leg?”

“…My left.”

“Okay, now you’ve gotta show me,” Spark said.

Blanche almost asked why, but then realized. His mark must be on his left leg too. Oh no. This was awkward. But they were being ridiculous. There were only so many places for a mark to appear - with the billions of people in the world, there had to be thousands upon thousands whose soulmark was on their left leg. There was no need to jump to conclusions. “I-”

“Wait, scratch that. If you’re not comfortable, I can just show you mine. You can tell me if it matches, ‘kay?”

Blanche nodded. Their throat was too tight to speak.

Spark braced his left ankle on his right knee and began to roll up his pant leg. It took an agonizing amount of time because Spark liked his pants tight. In the meantime, Blanche waffled between wanting to know and wanting to get up and run. It couldn’t be Spark. It would be too much of a coincidence.

But the bottom of the design became visible on Spark’s calf as he continued to work his tight leather pant leg up, swearing under his breath. Blanche recognized the bottom point of the star, the same one that had appeared on their own leg when they were fifteen. They had gone off to college, early, because they’d been home schooled by tutors Sabrina hired, and it was their first night in the dorm. Their first night away from Noire.

The mark hadn’t been there when they left home, but it was there when they got out of the shower to get ready for bed that night. Blanche saw it and stared in disbelief before they collapsed on the floor sobbing. No. They couldn’t have a soulmate. They weren’t even sure if they were human. They didn’t remember enough to know if they weren’t.

It had shocked them to be so devastated by the mark. Noire’s soulmark had appeared on their bicep three years earlier and it hadn’t been horrible. True, Blanche had been a little jealous that someone else was going to be the closest person to Noire, but that was part of growing up.

The feelings had dulled over the years, but had never disappeared.

The mark on Spark’s calf was fully visible now. There was no mistake.

“It matches,” Blanche said when Spark looked at them. They hoped their anguish didn’t show in their face or voice.

Something must show, because rather than beaming or grabbing them, Spark laid a gentle hand over theirs. “Want a ride home? We don’t gotta talk about it now if you don’t want to.”

“Thank you.”

It was testament to Blanche’s state of mind that Spark managed to get away with paying the whole bill. Although it was an awkward ride home in Spark’s jeep, Blanche wasn’t sure they could control their motorcycle in their emotional state.

When they arrived, Spark offered to walk them up. Blanche declined. “Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” They hesitated before closing the Jeep door. Spark seemed like a good man. They didn’t want to leave him hurt, as he must be knowing that Blanche was not thrilled. “Thank you again, Spark. And I’m sorry. I’m not upset that it’s you, it’s just…”

Spark smiled at them. “Hey, it’s okay.” He couldn’t pat their hand while sitting in the driver’s seat with them standing on the sidewalk, but his fingers twitched like he wanted to. “These things are personal, so it’s emotionally-charged for a lot of people. Don’t worry about me, ‘kay? We’ll talk another time.”

“All right.” Blanche let the door fall closed. Spark didn’t drive away until Blanche had unlocked the front door to the condo building and closed it behind them. He was a good guy, Blanche thought again.

Blanche just wasn’t sure if they were a good enough person to deserve him.

[narutoaus]

Pokemon Au Masterlist- Headcannons/Story

Kakashi is the son of Sakumo Hatake, the current Champion of Kanto when Kakashi starts his pokemon Journey. He is also the grandson of Tobirama Senju, the Pokemon Professor of the Kanto region. As such, Kakashi is put under a lot of pressure to meet a lot of expectations and even before his pokemon journey begins he is followed by reporters and others who want to know all about him.

When Kakashi arrives at Tobirama’s lab to be given his first official pokemon and start his journey, he meets Maito Gai. The others who start their journey at the same time are Obito and Rin. (Genma, Ebisu, Asuma and Kurenai all start a few years before them since they are older. Iruka, Tenzo, shisui and Itachi all start a few years after them)

When it comes to choosing pokemon, Rin took squirtle, Kakashi took Venasaur and both Obito and Gai took Charmander. Obito is the only one who still has/uses his charizard for battles. 

Gai notices that Kakashi is uncomfortable with the reporters that seem to be already following him, so he attaches himself to the other kids side and make sure to get between him and the camera’s whenever they try to focus on him, taking all the focus onto himself. Kakashi appreciates this and they decide to head to the first gym together. 

Kakashi almost always does his gym battle after Gai so that he can get a feel for how the gym leader fights. Because of this, Kakashi is able to come up with a plan of attack by the time that he fights and is usually able to obtain the badge in one try. The only exceptions are Minato and Danzo. Minato he had to fight 3 times before he gets his badge, Danzo he gets it on the second try. Gry sometimes has to try gyms multiple times, but Kakashi is in no rush and thinks it’s fun to watch Gai train with his pokemon so he always waits for him. 

In Lavander town, Kakashi and Gai meet a young kid still waiting a few years before he can start his own pokemon journey. Tenzo lives in a home with his adopted father, who is often away because he is also a gym leader, leaving Tenzo under the care of baby sitters. While they’re visiting, Kakahsi’s ivysor bonds with Tenzo so much that when they’re getting ready to leave Kakashi notices that Ivysor is sad to be saying goodbye to Tenzo. Because Tenzo doesn’t really have anyone else stable around with him, Kakashi decides to leave Ivysaur with him so that he has a friend.

Kakashi is one of very few trainers who is able to beat Fugaku in one try, and he is absolutely ruthless in the battle after hearing Fugaku bad mouth Gai’s training technique and bond with his pokemon, telling him he should focus on getting strong pokemon rather than working with weak pokemon. This is the first battle which Gai see’s Kakashi aim to absolutely destroy his competition, and the only battle in which Fugaku’s pokemon fail to faint even one of the challengers pokemon. 

After his battle with Fugaku, Kakashi is presented his badge by a young Itachi. When Kakashi see’s Itachi looking at his Jolteon, he tells him he is welcome to pet Jolteon and that his pokemon won’t bite. Itachi has a lot of questions for Kakashi, but Fugaku rushes him and Gai out of the gym before storming into the back utterly annoyed that Kakashi defeats him completely. 

The day after Kakashi’s gym victory and Gai’s lose, Itachi goes to the local pokemon center to see if Nurse Tsunade needs any help with the pokemon. There, he see’s Kakashi and Gai with their pokemon. Gai is in the back field training with his pokemon for his rematch while Kakashi is sitting on the sidelines with a small growleth in his lap and his Jolteon by his side. Itachi remembers the team that Kakashi brought with him, even though he only used Jolteon. Kakashi had released all 3 of the pokemon he planned to use so Fugaku could see them. They had all been Electric pokemon, leading Itachi to believe that Kakashi was an electric trainer, only to see him with a fire pokemon in his lap.

The next day, Gai and Kakashi show up so that Gai can redo his gym challenge. While Gai is doing his battle against Fugaku, Itachi slides up beside Kakashi in the bleachers and watches as he brushes Growlithes  fur. While sitting there, he finds himself blurting out a question. ‘I thought you only used Electric pokemon?’ Kakashi laughs and explains that while he does only use electric pokemon, he has a certain fondness for dogs and likes to collect dog pokemon. He doesn’t use those pokemon in battle though, even though he does train them, because he wants to show people how amazing Electric pokemon are. He more likes to have Dog pokemon as companions that often play with and train with all of his electric pokemon. This is the first time Itachi has heard of anyone besides his mother keeping a pokemon as a companion and not a battling pokemon.

After Gai win’s his gym badge from Fugaku, Kakashi and Gai get ready to set off onto the next part of the journey. Before leaving though, Gai goes up to Itachi and lays a pokeball in his hand, telling him it’s from Kakashi before he runs off to join his friend. When Itachi releases the pokemon to see what it is, he finds himself faced with a beautiful Eeevee that Kakashi had caught on the way to Fugaku’s gym because he found it stealing food from his bag and decided someone had to take care of it.

Kakashi and Gai go on to face the Elite four together after getting all 8 badges and doing a lot of training. On victory road Shizune joins them until they run into Tsunade at the end. Tsunade challenges them to make sure they’re ready to take on the elite four, and when they prove themselves she gladly sends them on their way. Shizun chooses to stick around with Tsunade and learn from her, since she’s not only an amazing pokemon trainer but also a Pokemon Doctor. 

Kakashi and Gai beat the elite four, but both of them lost to Sakumo. Of course, as soon as Gai see’s who the champion is he understands Kakashi’s aversion to reporters and cameras. He always knew Kakashi was the son of the champion since day one, but he never realized that Kakashi was the spitting image of his father. 

After facing Sakumo, the pair decide to continue exploring Kanto to train up their pokemon and become stronger, going over to Johto about a year later to find new pokemon and try the league there. This is where they meet Professor Shikaku, who is more interested in getting the pair to help him with research projects than he is with helping them with their gym challenge. Of course, Kakashi gets a cute Chikoreta out of the deal (that he later also gives to Tenzo) so he’s not complaining too much. 

A few years later, Shisui and Tenzo start off on their journey. Unlike Kakashi and Gai they decide to do their journey alone like most kids, though they do run into each other a lot on the way and have battles to see where they’re standing in terms of skill. Shisui chooses Charmander as his starter, and finds that he likes to collect a variety of pokemon. Tenzo, on the other hand, has a real love for grass type pokemon and has the Ivysaur that Kakashi gave him to start off his journey with. 

Shisui first meets Kakashi and Gai in Celadon city. The pair is there to relax after getting back from the Johto region, and there’s a bit huff around the city about two top trainers being there. Shisui decides to check it out and ends up challenging Gai to a one on one battle thinking neither of these two look all that great. He is...pleasantly surprised. 

Gai absolutely destroys him in battle with his Hitmonlee, and Shisui decides then and there that he’s going to train until he can beat this weird pair of ass kicking trainers. 

When he has 8 badges, Tenzo heads to victory road where he finds Kakashi and Gai chilling outside. Kakashi smiles when he see’s him, having gotten word that Tenzo had finally gotten his last badge. As a reward, Kakashi lays a pokeball in Tenzo’s hand. It’s the Chikareta that Shikaku had given him a few years ago, and thankfully this time Tenzo has a pokemon to give Kakashi in return. The only electric pokemon that Kakashi had been unable to catch as of yet, because it’s a stubborn shit that keeps eluding him. Electobuzz. 

Shisui and Tenzo both end up losing to Sakumo as well, though Sakumo is impressed by how many pokemon they manage to get through. Only Kakashi and Gai have managed to actually get close to beating him before. 

When Itachi begins his pokemon journey, It’s Kakashi and Gai’s first year as Gym Leaders. Gai is the 7th Gym leader and a fighting type leader, while Kakashi is the 8th gym leader and the Electric type leader. 

Kakashi quickly gets a reputation for being a ruthless gym leader. Not in the same way as Fugaku, who is known to insult challengers' training methods and skills. But rather because he doesn’t go easy on his gym challengers. If they want to win a badge from him, they have to earn it in every way possible.

The only person who gets a gym badge from Kakashi ever, Is Itachi. It gets Kakashi into quiet a lot of trouble with the league for not letting others have a chance at facing the elite four, but Sakumo is damn proud of his son and knows that Itachi facing him means this kid is damn strong.

Itachi doesn’t beat Sakumo the first time, but he does get Sakumo down to one pokemon which is terrifying. 

Ultimately, both Kakashi and Itachi beat Sakumo. The difference is Kakashi beats his dad in a silly battle at his gym that’s not legal in any way and he’s happy with that. He never wanted his victory publicized. Itachi beats Sakumo on live TV for everyone to see and becomes the new official champion. 

This happens 3 years after Itachi started his journey, and it’s huge because for years Sakumo was undefeated.

As the new Champion, Itachi gets to choose the elite four that will be working with him. He chooses Kakashi, Gai, Shisui and Rin. All absolute power houses in their own way will test a trainer's skill in brute strength, intelligence, quick reactions and adjustments and training style before they even get to Itachi. 

To get past all four of them is damn impressive, but because it’s so hard it’s actually rare to see Itachi out as the champion, and thus not many people know what the champion actually looks like.

[crystalmaeson]

Official Readme by Maeson

Pokemon Crystal Maeson - Public Version 1.0 - Internal Version 15.0.3

IT IS RECOMMENDED TO READ THIS WITH NOTEPAD++, BUT YOU DO YOU.

o--------o |Sections| o--------o

[1]  Installation [2]  Introduction [3]  General List of Changes [4]  Patch Differences [5]  Pokémon Changes [6]  Type Changes [7]  Move Changes [8]  Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits [9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes [10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns [11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House [12] Visual Changes [13] Credits

o-----------------o |[1]  Installation| o-----------------o

Patching a game is usually a very easy process, specially with IPS Patches.

There's a variety of programs that work with IPS files, but the most famous one is named Lunar IPS, also called LIPS.

This hack is to be patched on a Pokémon Crystal 1.1 ROM file.

More specifically, this rom: Pokemon - Crystal Version (UE) (V1.1) [C][!].gbc CRC-32 : 3358E30A

You open your patcher, and then point to it to the IPS patch and the original, unmodded ROM. It will apply it and inform you when it's finished, it should be quick.

Now, there's two versions of this hack, and each one has also two varieties.

CHOOSE ONLY ONE. To know which version you want, check the details at the not-surprisingly-named "Patch Differences" section.

And yes, the patch weights almost 75% of the original game.

o-----------------o |[2]  Introduction| o-----------------o

Hola, welcome to another ridiculously long readme of mine.

I go by the name Maeson and I made other hacks for a handful of other RPGs. For the most part what I usually aim for with these hacks is to create a different experience, tweaking what I can to give games that I've played time and time again a gameplay facelift to keep them fresh for me, sometimes also trying to improve aspects of a game that I think could make it more fun, varied, better paced or just more challenging after many playthroughs and knowing stuff by hand.

These hacks are made for me in first place, so they're shaped in a very personal manner and of course through my own tastes and ideas, but it should goewithout saying, I hope.

But anyway... What can I say about Pokémon?

My feelings toward the main series of Pokémon have changed a lot since its inception. Just like millions of other fans of video games, I lived the Pokémon craze back in the day, and I grew playing most of those games. I was there without fail up until the fifth Generation, then I started to get tired of the series gradually, and I sort of stop caring with time.

Thing is, I really didn't stop liking the Pokémon themselves, and I still enjoy spin-offs like the Trading Card Games or Mystery Dungeon games, and some like Pokémon Conquest and Pokken are quite cool crossovers, so there's still some appeal to me, even if it's waning with each day.

And hey, then you get things like Pokémon Snap, which it's one unique and very memorable game, one of the very, very few games about photography. it's a really chill, fun time overall.

...What it does not appeal to me all that much since a long time, though, is Game Freak and The Pokémon Company. The choices and "philosofies" they've been doing and following for several years now have been some of the most frustrating ones I've seen besides Square Enix, and their interviews equally leave some wonderfully baffling pearls of "wisdom".

They've done a remarkable job at making me wanting to distance myself more and more throughout this last decade, to the point that I lost pretty much all my appreciation for the franchise.

And it's not just with the main games, their choice of pushing aside console spin-offs for more and more mobile based Games As A Service (that usually failed and died quickly) also left us without many interesting games that could at least keep us somewhat happy.

And the less we talk about the lies, misinformation and the worrying use of younger audiences as a shield to deflect criticism from their business decisions, the better.

I... Just can't support or stand that anymore. I feel drained.

And I would have been completely away from this franchise, barring some old games, if not for one day finding that a collective of people were working on disassembly projects of older games.

I found them to be really interesting, and my mind kinda played with the idea of having a version of one of those old games with changes that I've been wanting and waiting to happen for many years. Who knows, I could even *attempt* to improve what was already there and even add more stuff to it.

Checking the available games with disassembly, I chose Pokémon Crystal, as it seemed the most complete and evolved project of all, in combination with also being one of the longer games thanks to the large post-game it originally had, plus being an earlier Generation game also gave me more room to do changes and improvements.

So little by little, with no idea of assembly, I kept hitting walls and messing around for a time, and what you downloaded is the result of spending the free time I had working in it... For quite some time. In fact it has been over 2 years of constant work, this started in 2018.

The aim of this hack is simple:

Create a new "balance", make the game more challenging, and iron out stuff I find could be improved, or I have the ability and knowledge to do while I add more value to certain aspects of the game. Make a version of Pokémon that I'd like to replay and have every monster be a fun addition to the team and a foe I just can't roll over with little to no thought, so I want to try all of them.

If you were expecting a new story, or a new region, or whatever pipe dream that most probably would end up incompleted and not stable, sorry to disappoint, but you won't find it here.

And no, I don't really care if this hack doesn't have an "epic" name. There's so many other more important things to care than that...

o----------------------------o |[3]  General List of Changes| o----------------------------o

Here you have a quick list with some of the biggest changes all around, but there are sections for most of them to talk more in detail.

· Attempt to reach a new balance. This has been said above, but what   it actually means is that elements as Types, Moves, Pokémon Stats and   such have been changed deeply to move away from the conventions of the   original games, making many species feel entirely different gameplay-wise.

  Among other things, this means no more disappointing creatures with bad   typing and many weaknesses, or low Base Stats filler. It also means parity   between the Types, with each one having the same number of Weaknesses and   Resistances. The intent is for every Fully Evolved Pokémon to feel useful   or, at the very, very least, usable in a way where you don't feel handicapping   yourself to the point you ask yourself if it is even worth doing it.

· Moves and TMS have been changed a lot in order to accomodate the Physical & Special Split,   each Type now has both Physical and Special moves of different Power tiers.

  Many old attacks have been removed and many others have been added. What moves each   evolutionary line learns also has been changed, in order to make all Pokémon have   decent movesets depending on what their archtype is.

· DVs (IVs on later generations) No longer matter on Stat Calculations. This means that   every member of the same species will have the same potential. This also means you can   have female Pokémon with good Attack, and Shiny Pokémon with good stats, what a novel concept.

  This way any monster you come across will be equal, so you can focus on having   fun, while still having to care of it by training, feeding him vitamins and fruits,   choosing the best moves for it in a given situation, making a balanced team, and   you know, the actual RPG bits instead of the RNG ones.

  If you liked the eugenics experiment experience the original games give you,   sorry but that's not here. I apologize for nothing.

· Trainers changed all around. Better AI than in the original game, more varied teams,     their Pokémon have Stat Exp, meaning that the further you go, the better trained their   Pokémon are, and better trained your own monsters should be. I also removed several   limitations imposed on NPC trainers to make them factually inferior to you. This is   made trying to make the game more challenging instead of the usual cake-walk.

  There's no ridiculous stuff like giving Hyper Beam to everything or illegal moves   for NPC trainer's Pokémon (although bear in mind, many Pokémon have changed types,   and many have changed movesets so their moves are the new "legal" moves, but   again, nothing impossible for you to have or to add fake difficulty).

  If you're asking yourself this, no, in this hack NPCs do not change Pokémon constantly,   that tends to drag the game too much. They still do it occasionally, but not at every   time Type matchups that go against them.

· Quite a few changes related to Items, from how strong some Healing Items are, to changing   Kurt Balls, changing the effect (or power of the effect) on several Held Items, new   types of berries, and others.

  Healing items are no longer useable in battle, neither for you or the NPC Trainers.   Battles must be won only with your Pokémon, their held items, and strategy.

  ...Or well, over-levelling through mind-numbing grinding.   We can't exactly get rid of that.

· Added a whole LOT of improvements here and there to make the game flow, feel and   play better.

  Things like changing how Item Storage works to have more space overall, much faster   egg hatching speeds, making every monster available in this hack, having the Pokédex   show you a bit of meaningful game information, as now it shows a species Base Stats   and also the Shiny variations, make saving a faster process, making TMs infinite   (but not abusable), improving the scrolling while moving around making the game   feel and look much better, large improvements on the Battle Tower, expanding the   Trainer House to be more interesting end-game stuff, adding Rematches, making   PokeGear rematches better, a way to change PC Boxes remotely, move tutors and   quite a few others.

There's many things more, but that's what the individual sections are for.

o-----------------------o |[4]  Patch Differences | o-----------------------o

Now, there are four patches, so let's explain this quickly.

First, we have the Original versions, and the Alternative versions, these last ones offer a tweaked experience in case you want to play this hack again with some differences.

In which ways it is different?

Well, the Starters have been swapped, so when you begin a new game, you get to choose between Bulbasaur, Charmander and Squirtle.

MUCH bigger difference, though, is that all the Gym trainers, the Leaders, other important NPCS and the Elite Four no longer have their teams limited to following the thematic "Type" standards.

Other trainers such as the Rival also have different teams, (and like the original patch, he develops a different team depending on the starter they steal).

Without that restriction each of those trainers have way more varied teams, making the game less predicable because you can no longer coast on the Type disadvantages most of the Pokémon of a Gym Leader share.

This of course changes how you make your teams. You no longer "have" to bring "this or that Type" because later on the road there's a Gym weak to it. It's more about making a team that you feel it can withstand anything it may come.

The order of certain Ingame Trades have also been changed.

There's other smaller changes to make the bigger ones sit well, such as small text edits or change the order of the Pokédex.

But Original and Alternative are divided in two too, one that I'll call "Intended Versions" and the other two are "Items in Battle" variations.

The "Intended Versions" disables healing Items in battle and it forces Set options, meaning you don't get free switches after knocking out a foe Pokémon. You can't change the option, because it's not even there anymore.

That's how I'd like people to play my hack, but knowing how some people can be, there's an extra patch, "Items in Battle", that gives you the possibility of using Items and to change the battle option, but there's a price to pay.

If you choose to play with enabled Items/Switch in battle, a few Items will be unavailable to you, the price of several Items will increase, and the HP they restore will be lowered. Also, NPC Trainers will also use Items.

That's simply because Items can be easily abused, and that is the opposite of what I wanted in this hack. If you choose the "right" to abuse Items during battle, then I have the right to make adjustments to annoy you with your choice.

It's not like Hyper Potions will heal 1 HP or anything crazy like that, but because in my hack you can't use Items in battles, they're more powerful than the usual vanilla items so you could recover better between battles.

The items you lose access to are all new, by the way. A set of consumable Held Items that raise a stat whenever the holder is attacked or under other circustances, similar to the berries in the Third Generation, albeit they're activated differently.

Another change is limited access to a team-healing item that I made, and restores all your Pokémon to perfect shape. Intended to be used in a pinch, like being lost in a cave, or between hard fights, but you can only have in small amounts. In the Original patch, you can carry 3 of them, but only 1 on the "Items in Battle" versions.

You're free to choose how to play. Of course, you only apply one patch.

If for some reason you started a game with one version, for example, with the patch for Items in Battle, and you later on want to go to the No Items in Battle version, you can actually use that save file and not start again.

But I recommend you to save first in a Pokémon Center before doing so. Once you did that, patch a clean ROM and rename the .SAV file into whatever the new patched rom is. Now you can continue with your game. Remember to always make backups before doing anything of this sort.

I do not recommend changing between the Original and Alternate versions.

Lastly, trading and battling with vanilla Pokémon Crystal is not going to work. Not only many of the fixes made already impossible to be compatible with Vanilla Pokémon Crystal, but the gigantic load of changes I made to the game would render any attempt become a glitchy mess.

But you can trade and battle with other copies of this hack, and the four versions of the patches should be compatible with each other for both trading and battling. I'd recommend using the No Items versions because it gives you access to those extra Held Items, though.

o--------------------o |[5]  Pokémon Changes| o--------------------o

Probably the most obvious and central change, these creatures are the core of the franchise after all.

As you may imagine, there have been changes to most aspects of them. While some of those have their sections to talk about, Base Stats are probably the most important one here.

That is because for the most part there is parity in Base Stat Total for all evolutionary lines in this game.

Pokémon to me has become a rather painful series of games to look back, because there has never been that much of an interest to improve or balance out their creations to make a more varied, balanced and fun experience, and when they try to do something is more on the lines of "adding" to fix instead of improving what's there already.

And don't get me wrong, trying to get "perfect balance" is impossible with such a large amount of creatures, but at the same time, Game Freak has done very, very little in this regard, most other developers would at least try something, specially if they had the decades of game releases Game Freak has had.  

But back on track. This is why in this hack, almost every non-Starter, non-Legendary fully evolved monster has a Base Stat Total of 650, making each all of them feel have the same potential overall.

This means there will be no "early useless Pokémon", nor so called "Filler".

And yes, this means your beloved Tyranitar, Dragonite, and such have the same potential as a Raticate or a Wigglytuff. On the other hand, this also means you don't need to train a Pupitar or Dragonair to ridiculous levels to have them evolve into their final forms.

If you ask yourself "why such high Base Stat Total", well, its simple: The higher the roof, the more space you have to scale stats. The more space you have to scale stats, the better you can "personalize" stats for the different species.

Besides, the Base Stat Total stops being important when everybody is at the same "level".

Now, that's for "normal Pokémon". The first two Generations had two trios of "pseudo-legendary" monsters, those being Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, and Raikou, Entei and Suicune. These critters have 660 Base Stat Total.

Starters also have a total of 660. This is mainly because starters are usually the back bone of most player's teams (although I usually roll without them), and I saw fitting for them to be slightly stronger. But fear not, because those extra points don't really make much difference, as they're used to make them more well rounded instead of just dumping them on their highest stats.

Finally, true Legendary Pokémon keep their 700 Base Stat Total of the original games. To this day I never used legendaries beyond wanting to see their back sprites, never cared about them, so they have the least number of changes, really.

Some other changes are:

·Many Pokémon had their overall archetypes changed besides their Stats improved.  Furret is now a Fast Special Attacker, for example.

·Almost every Pokémon now has a 50% Male/Female Ratio, except for the Nidorans,  Tauros and Miltank. Pokémon like Blissey, Chansey, or the Hitmon-family  now can be both male and female. Magnemite, Voltorb and such are still genderless.

·The two Legendary Trios have genders and can in fact breed, thus they can be  seen almost as normal Pokémon.

·The Pokédex had the entries for each Pokémon modified. This is because now it shows  actually useful information instead of the continuously repeated "scientific" info  that usually is full of lies and ridiculous stuff that could make an Indian Elephant  have a headache, but hey, it may not be the Pokédex info, it may just be a bit too  close to a Magcargo and it's experiencing how one feels being next to the Sun.

 Happens to us all sometimes.

 Now, the first page of each species shows its Weaknesses and Resistances while  the second page of each one now points out the Base Stat spreads it has,  which is a much, much more useful ingame data, specially when this hacks  aims to change heavily most things related to battling and "the RPG elements".

 Oh, and by the way, if you press Select while looking at a Pokémon's Data,  you'll activate "Shiny Mode", and every Pokémon shown will be seen with their  Shiny Colors!

·Talking about Shiny Pokémon, those are far more common. While I personally don't care  too much about them, specially nowadays when they've become so... Uneventful and common,  not to mention how much they've been related with hacking and cheating, Pokémon being  shiny lost appeal to me, yet they're still a big thing for many players, so why not make  them easier to obtain?

 The means for finding a Shiny Pokémon in Generation II were rough. REALLY rough. With  the way it works now, you should find quite a few of them throughout your adventure, and  also finding female shiny Pokémon should also be a more common occurrence than before.

 You're bound to find a fair share of them. This being a modded game, it doesn't really  matter if they're not as rare or hard to find.

 NPC trainers will have Shiny monsters here and there, so you should also have the chance!

·As you already know, wild Pokémon may be holding items. In the original game,  many species had nothing with them. Now, most species have them, and the variety  is much, much bigger. Not only that, the chances for finding Pokémon with items  has increased.

 Now there's a 50% of not having an item, 40% of having a "common" item, and  10% of holding a "rare" item. Better than the 2% on the original.

 Lastly, I've made another improvement in held items. Now, whenever you battle  with a wild monster that has an Item, an little icon (similar to the one in the party menu)  will appear on the enemy's HUD. Specifically between the Pokeball icon that appears  when you fight a monster that you already have in your Pokédex, and the Gender icon.

 Again, only for WILD creatures.  If monsters have items in trainer battles is a secret to everybody!

·A big one, already mentioned in the introduction:  DVs (or IVs, if you rather call them that) NO LONGER FACTOR INTO STAT CALCULATIONS!!

 This means that now only Base Stats and Stat Exp matter in each Pokémon statistics.  Oh, and by the way, the formula to calculate stats has changed very slightly.  Remember that +5 bonus at the end of the calculations? Now it's a 6.  That means that a 100 Base stat (Not HP) of a fully trained monster is 300 and not 299.

 This also means you can now have Female Pokémon with good Attack power, and Shiny  Pokémon no longer are weak, two rather big things for me at least.

 No more you will have to waste hours of your life breeding and abandoning  dozens if not hundreds of Pokémon for good DVs (what a great lesson!).  NPC Trainers also get good Pokémon too, making things better for everybody.

·Evolution has been streamlined and homogenized. This means that Pokémon that  evolved by trades, special events, and such have simpler, more direct ways  to do so now. But also, all Pokémon evolver on similar levels.

 After all, if they are supposed on equal footing in Power, they should  also be on the same level on this matter too.

 Here's a few examples:

 Pokémon with three stages evolve at levels 20 and 32.

 Pidgey evolves to Pidgeotto at level 20, and to Pidgeot at level 32.  Chikorita evolves to Bayleef at level 20, and to Meganium at level 32.  Dratini evolves to Dragonair at level 20, and to Dragonite at level 32.

 Pokémon with two stages evolve between levels 22 and 24.

 Rattata evolves into Raticate at level 23.  Venonat evolves into Venomoth at level 24.  Rhyhorn evolves into Rhydon at level 24.  Hoothoot evolves into Noctowl at level 22.

 Of course, there are a couple of exceptions. Caterpie and Weedle  are still the fastest evolving lines, and of course Pokémon that  evolve through stones can do so anytime you want.

 Oh, and by the way, in this hack, you WANT to evolve when Pokémon want to.  You won't get much from stopping an evolution, and with Pokémon that evolve  through stones and such, you should do it before too late.

 This is because many species learn better techniques at the same level they evolve,  and it would be a waste to not learn them.

 You can find at which levels are recommended Pokémon to evolve through stones in  the specific Pokémon Stat list txt. But if you want to make it easy:

 If the Pokémon has two evolutionary stages > Use the stone at Level 22 or 23.  If the Pokémon has three evolutionary stages > use the stone at level 30 or 32 (to reach the last stage).

 That said, if you feel like not evolving for whatever reason, you've not lost everything.  The game has a Move Reminder, and you'll be able to remember freely any move from a species  learnset.

 Oh, and the Time Capsule seems to work as long as you of course follow the rules.  But a few notes:

 Any Pokémon you bring from Generation 1 may have their moves changed upon  arriving your game. The moves may turn into a very uncharacteristic one for  the Pokémon, because I repurposed many moves into new ones.

 The stats of the Pokémon will change from Gen 1 to Gen 2, and most notably,  the HP of any Pokémon that reaches Gen 2 will not be fully healed, because  of the change in stats, but there's no problem at all as far as functionality,  just heal.  

 That said, have in mind there's NO NEED to use the Time Machine.  You do so under your responsibility.

o-----------------o |[6]  Type Changes| o-----------------o

Yet another big shake to the, in my personal point of view, rather badly balanced formula.

I'm not going to discuss or waste time with this. This is how it works here:

Defensive wise, each type now is weak to two other types, while resistant to three, one of them being itself. There are NO immunities. Every type is equal as far as weaknesses and resistances, except for Normal.

Normal has no weaknesses or resistances, period.

Offensive wise, each Type is effective against two Types, and is resisted by three, one it being itself. Normal does not hit for Super Effective damage nor does it get resisted.

So, among other things, Ghost will get hurt by Normal and Fighting moves, Normal will get hit by Ghost, Dragon is no longer weak to itself, and Ice is not such an awful and pathetic defensive Type that exists to be mocked.

Oh, the Fairy Type has been added too, but how it works doesn't exactly resemble the original game, just like the other Types.

Now, because I know how certain part of the community can act (and let's not kid ourselves pretending it doesn't happen), to make myself clear and blunt:

 I don't care if you think Type X should be weak/resistant to type Y.  I don't care if you don't want to learn new Type Matchups.  I don't care what Game Freak does with types now or in the future.

I'm not Game Freak and I have made this wanting to break away from their norm, I don't have to follow any rules, not theirs, not yours.

Making a more even ground for all types, trying to make each monster good, so I could play with all of them and have fun was one of the important things for me, and to reach that goal I made as many changes as I saw fit.

You're free to stop reading and go look for another hack if this will bother you that much.

End of the "serious" moment. Good? Great, let's continue!

With this change, every Pokémon will always have more good points than bad points, not to mention that the maximum number of weaknesses a Pokémon can have is 4, and if it has 4 weaknesses, to compensate it will have 6 resistances.

Another thing I want to point out is that the number of Normal Type Pokémon has been lowered. While there are still a bunch of them, it's a way lower number, making many of these previously Normal Pokémon have completely different Type Combinations. I mean, I'm sure you won't miss all the Normal/Flying types. I hope so at least.

If you think Normal Type not having weaknesses could be "broken", far from it, specially since, as I said, in this hack having *more good points* is a given for any non-Normal Pokémon. But of course that's just talking. They can make for great members, in one of my several test-playthroughs, a Furret was one of my best Pokémon all thoughout the game.

There is an image in the RAR file with a Type Table to show you how Types work now, but beyond that, in Violet City's Pokémon Academy, there are two books that teach you the differen Types and their strong and weak points.

And then, if you're so lazy to figure it out, the weaknesses and resistances for each individual species is listed on the Stats text file.

And theeen, if you're even lazier than that, you can also check the Pokedex Entry of a given *captured* Pokémon, as it gives you useful info such as this.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that you have a number of ways to find out how types work. Use them to your advantage.

Oh, lastly, in this hack there are NO Pokémon with double weaknesses. I've never liked them to be honest, and to me just show how unappealing some types were designed to be that they make such awful combinations.

I still remember how excited people were for Aurorus until they saw its typing, and then it all turned into either jokes at its weaknesses or pure disapppointment.

No fun.

o-----------------o |[7]  Move Changes| o-----------------o

Alongside the previous two changes, the Moves have been changed A LOT too.

Instead of just "copying" what Game Freak has done in later generations, this hack had in mind to actually modify moves in ways to make them more interesting based on the limitations of the GBC games, and also another little thing:

There is a Physical/Special Split in this hack, so one of the big changes of this hack was to give each Type a number of both, Physical and Special moves to cover different Power levels so Pokémon can have good STAB moves that go along with their stats.

After all, that was probably the best thing Generation IV did for me. While it took some toys from some Pokémon (like Elemental Punches from Alakazam), it really was a big change for the better for most species.

So for example, we have Rock Slide for Rock Pokémon with high Attack, and Rock Launch for Rock Pokémon with high Special Attack. For this, many old moves were removed and reworked into new moves, mostly moves that were redundant and exactly the same as other moves (Like Whirlwind and Roar, or Wrap and Bind, they're the exact same thing).

While this gives every type and every Pokémon solid Stab moves, the limitation of 254 moves makes it so I can't add many "wild" and unique moves, but oh well, it's already much, much better than what it was originally on Generation II.

...No, really, I forgot how rough and unfair the move list was in old Generations, with some Types having almost no good moves at all, or moves that Pokémon couldn't take advantage of because their Stats and their Types didn't match. Hoo boy...  

Another big change is that most attacks now have secondary effects, and very often, the lower the Power of a move, the higher is the chance to inflict those secondary effects.

For example, Fire Breath (New move) has a 15% Chance of causing Burn and 70 Power, but Flamethrower only has 10% chance of causing burn and 95 Power. This makes moves with lower Power a bit more useful.

As you may imagine, Pokémon Movesets have been changed tremendously, not only for those critters that had their Types and Stat distributions changed, but also to accomodate all the modifications related to Moves.

Movesets in this hack are in no way attempting to copy later generations of official games, specially since Generation 2 Movesets were incredibly sad to look back.

Instead, they're focused on attempting to give what that certain species needs. So no Pokémon will be let without good STAB moves, and you also won't see Pokémon that are obviously Physical attackers getting Special moves or viceversa.

A handful of moves also got their priority changed.

Safeguard, Haze, Mist, Transformation and Bide now go before other moves. This change actually shakes up battles a bit, it was fun to see the AI read my moves from time to time and prevent Status, and hey, with Transform having priority now Ditto is more usable too!

A list of the moves, what they do, and their other data is in its own TXT file, although with ingame descriptions, it is not necessary.

As far as TMs and HMs, things also have changed.

TMs no longer get consumed when used, so they have infinite uses. The Moves they teach have also changed for the majority of TMS, with most of them teaching both Physical and Special "end-game" moves. There's also a total of 55 TMS now.

None of them can be found in shops, you must find them by exploring or obtained from an NPC.

HMs have also changed a bit, making them more useful. Cut now is a 70 Power Normal move with a High Critical Ratio, and Fly is a strong move with 110 Power that causes Recoil damage. Flash causes damage and can lower Accuracy. Strength is now is Fighting type and causes Flinch. And Whirlpool is a bit more powerful and now takes more HP at the end of turns, so its a rather cool combo alongside Toxic on bulky Pokémon.

Also, HMs can be forgotten like normal attacks, so you can swap attacks easily in case you want, and unlike in Gen. 1, because you can't drop them, you can't get stuck.

Or rather, you wouldn't get stuck, because there's another change. These moves:

Headbutt Rock Smash Cut         Surf Strength Waterfall Whirlpool

Don't need to be known by a Pokémon to be used in the overworld! You only need a Pokémon capable of learning such move, and the needed Medal in the case of the HMs.

That only leaves Flash and Fly out of that list, right?

About Flash:

I also added an item that will let you light dark caves so you don't need to have a Pokémon with Flash, but you get it quite a bit later than the HM. Just look around Mahogany after things calmed down.

It can be assigned to Select for quick use, too!

About Fly:

There's a small sidequest you can do later in the game that will net you a special object. This item will let you use a different version of Fly. Mechanically, it's the same, you can fly to places you've explored. Animation-wise is different, though.

Because all of this, you no longer need to have any HM on any Pokémon unless you want it (because most of them are actually respectable attacking moves), which gives much more freedom to parties and movesets!

o----------------------------------------o |[8] Stat Experience, Vitamins and Fruits| o----------------------------------------o

TLDR VERSION: Use Vitamins, use Fruits. They improve your Pokemon's stats, and          you need to take care of your team to withstand other trainers          which have properly trained monsters. Use them intelligently,          don't waste them with Pokémon you don't want to have in your team,      at least early on when you have limited resources.

         Vitamins are no longer as limited in effect, or as expensive.          Fruits are new, and are twice as good as Vitamins.

Pokémon games have a system in which, through adquiring certain points through different means, a creature can improve its Stats. In Generations 1 and 2, these are called Stat Experience. This is a system Game Freak has never informed the players about at all, and the games never came even close to mention it in any trully useful detail, so bare with me if this is your first time with this stuff, although I doubt you found this hack knowing nothing about it.

Stat Experience points can range from 0 (Empty) to 65535 (Maximized). Unlike later generations, In Gen. I and II, you can maximize the experience of all the stats.

Stat Experience points are divided and exclusive for each stat. HP, Attack, Defense and Speed have their own Stat Exp Table. Special Attack and Special Defense share the same Stat Exp Table. So reaching 65535 Stat Exp in each Stat will make your Pokémon perfect stat-wise. Even Pokémon at Level 100 can get Stat Experience, but to gain the effects, they need to be stored on the PC so their real Stats can get updated with the current Stat Exp. they have at that moment.

The ways you get Stat Exp are these:

By battling -Each time one of your Pokémon defeats another, the Base Stats of the enemy's species          is added to your Stat Exp in each stat. This is the slowest way, but it's also free,          and will raise your stats by just playing through the game.

     If you defeat, let's say, a Caterpie, it has these Base Stats:

HP 75, Attack 60, Defense 70, Speed 95, Special Attack 90, Special Defense 70.      As I said, Special Attack and Defense use the same Stat Exp Table. The game takes      the Base Stat related to Special Attack, so in this case, your Pokémon will be      awarded 90 Special Stat Exp Points, alongside the rest.      Training only through battles is not only pointless when you have other means,      but also incredibly tedious. While in my hack Pokémon have higher stats that make      training this way faster, battling for Stat Exp should only be relied on when      you've already fed your Pokémon Vitamin and Fruits, to get those last Stat Exp Points      needed for a Perfect Stat.

     But of course, any Stat Exp gained through battles is benefitial, just don't battle      *only* for the Stat Exp unless, as I said it's to finish Stat Exp training!      By the way, there's a special condition named Pokerús, which is a benefitial virus      that will double the amount of Stat Exp you get from battles. This is very rare      to get, and you will be noticed by a PKMN Center Nurse. The games don't tell you  what it does exactly either...

     It can be very useful, and it propagates through your Pokémon team, and disappears      after some time. If you ever get Pokerús, try to keep a Pokémon with active Pokerús      on your PC so you can pass it to other Pokémon. But as I said, it's very rare!

By Vitamins -Vitamins in the original game were pretty useless. They raised very little, and they      could only be used up to some point, which is less than half way the Stat Exp total.

     In this hack, though, they're much better, and even necessary, as the people living      in Johto and Kanto have *actually* trained their Pokémon properly and they have Stat      Exp, so they'll be stronger and more challenging, and after a certain point, all      trainers you'll find will have maximized Pokémon, like any trainer worth their salt      would be doing.

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp Points per use, and they can be used until the      Stat Exp of the Stat that you want to raise reaches 51.456, at which point, the      Pokémon wont get any benefit from it (it won't be wasted, so don't worry).

     To make it easier to understand, let's put it this way:

     An untrained (either just catched, or just hatched) Pokémon will have 0 Stat Exp on      everything. If you feed it HP UPs, it will be able to eat 6:

     10.240 1 HP Up      20.480 2 HP Up      30.720 3 HP Up      40.960 4 HP Up      51.200 5 HP Up > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one.      61.440 6 HP Up > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!               You can get the rest by battling.

     If you're used to Effort Values from Gen 3 onwards, let's make it even easier:

     The way it works, each modern EV means 256 Stat Exp, so if it's easier for you, just      divide Stat Exp by 256:

     Each Vitamin gives 10.240 Stat Exp, that means 40 EV.      The limit of Stat Exp is 51.456, that means 201 EV.

     So with a Pokémon without EVs, you can go from 0 to 240 EV through vitamins.

     You can obviously give Vitamins to a Pokémon you've been battling with no problem,      but an untrained Pokémon is better to use as an example.

     Their price is much lower so you can keep up with enemy trainers, although they      cost enough to make each purchase a bit of an investment early into the game.

By Fruits   - Fruits are almost exactly the same as Vitamins, but they give twice the Stat Exp.

     Each one gives 20.480 Stat Exp (Or 80 EV if you want it that way), and the limit      is 41.216 Stat Points (or 161 EV). This means that your Pokémon can eat up to      three Fruits in a stat to jump for 0 Stat Exp to 61.440 (or 0 to 240 EV) and      almost maximize it. Let's again use an example of raising HP with Fruit now:

     20.480 1 Salty Fruit      40.960 2 Salty Fruit > Doesn't go pass the limit so you can eat another one      61.440 3 Salty Fruit > Passed the limit, so you can't feed more, but it's almost Maximized!

     Thus, fruits are much better overall than Vitamins, but they're scarce, and should      be better used for Pokémon you know they have little to no training in a certain Stat.

     You can combine Vitamins and Fruit without problem, but if you do, first use your      Fruits, then the Vitamins so you don't waste Fruits unnecessarily.

Why the limit - If you're asking why the limit is 51.456, or 240 EV for Vitamins, and 41.216 or 161 EVs for Fruits, it is simple to answer: If you feed a Vitamin/Fruit to a Pokémon in a way that would go over 65535, a bug would happen and the Stat Exp of that Pokémon would roll back to 0. I think it's obvious why that would suck. So, by putting these limits you're safe from that to happen, but you also get very close to maximize a stat. It's the best balance I could achieve.

o--------------------------------o |[9]  Mechanic & Gameplay Changes| o--------------------------------o

Already said that under the hood, there are many, many other changes. Some (not all of them, not by a long shot) changes are as follows:

· The Clock Reset function now has a much easier button combination to open it.  The combination is like this:

 1: Hold    Select + Down  2: Release Down while holding Reset.  3: With Reset Held, now hold Up too.  4: Release Select. The Reset Clock menu will open.

 It requires less buttons, making it easier to do, or able to do at all  depending where you are playing. You still need to input the password,  though, removing that would let you abuse certain things very easily.

· Prices for several things have been lowered on the "Intended" Versions of this hack.  Because you no longer can abuse Items to progress, I saw no real reason to  make you pay as much as usual. You're still going to need them, because the  need for healing between battles is still a thing.

 Another reason to do this is because you will also spend much more money than  usual on Vitamins and other stuff to properly train and prepare your team.  

· Catching Pokémon grants you Experience now! The Exp. is the same as if it was  defeated, and every Pokémon that fought in said battle will get a share of it.

· The Odd Egg will always give you a Shiny Pokémon between 7 ramdonly selected  species, and both genders. Each Species get a unique move, instead of all of  them getting the same (now non-existing) move.

· Talking about Eggs, Pokémon now hatch much, much faster, so there's less  walking up and down through Goldenrod. Not only that, but Egg Moves also  changed all around. Pokémon also lay Eggs faster, and Nidorina &  Nidoqueen can now breed, alongside both "legendary" trios.

 Now each basic species has between 3 or 4 Egg Moves for the most part  they are different from vanilla, and basic Starter Pokémon have 5 Egg Moves.

· Trainer AI has been much improved. Now they know much better what they do, and they  can priorize stuff like Status Effects, they take better advantage of weaknesses and  resistances.

 They also carry Items with them, if you play with the patch that lets you  items in Battle, of course.

 Trainers also have properly trained monsters, with Stat Exp increasing throughout  the game. Feeding your team vitamins and fruits is now important to stay on toes  with them. Of course, there is more variety in species of monsters used by NPCs,  their levels are higher, and team sizes have increased a bit.

 Making each trainer a full 6 Pokémon team would drag the game, though, and probably  couldn't fit, I already was suffering the lack of space with what I added, because  when adding Stat Exp, custom Movesets, and such the space gets used way too fast.

 Also, the game was very, very unfair to the NPC trainers.  Not only were they hard-coded to fail more often, have mediocre AI, and Low-Level Pokémon,  you also got your Stats and Types boosted as you got Badges, so they became completely  inferior and disappointing... At least, if you want to have any challenge.

 That's why any bonus that Badges give you was stripped down. No Stat Boost, no Type Boost.  This will make the game far more fair and chalenging, in turn making it more enjoyable if  you look for having to think and put a bit of effort, which is, you know, the point of  this entire hack.

 Another thing changed is the money that many types of trainers reward you by beating them.  In this hack you have many more things to buy as mentioned above, from Vitamins, to  Held Items, to Decorations, and more Healing Items because of the higher difficulty,  so a better income was needed.

 On the other hand, if you lose, which is much more plausible now, you won't get your money  halved. Instead, you lose money depending on the number of badges you have, like more recent  games. It's much more fair early on, specially in this hack since it is expected of you to  buy vitamins and held items for your monsters as you go through the game, besides all the  other items.

· Stat increase percentages have been changed.

 Stat-improving moves like Accelerate or Meditate, and Stat-decreasing moves like  Growl or Scary Face can go from Level 0 (normal stat), to Level +6 or -6,  depending if it increases or decreases a stat.

Before o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  28%  35%  45%  50%  66%  100%  150%  200%   250%  300%  350%  400%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o Now o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o |Level -6   -5   -4   -3   -2   -1   0     1     2      3     4     5     6   | |Perc. 25%  30%  35%  45%  60%  75%  100%  130%  160%   190%  220%  250%  300%| o-----------------------------------------------------------------------------o

 This has been changed for one main reason: to make better balance between critters,  Stats are now higher. With stats being higher, stat-increasing would get too broken,  specially with +1 bonus being a whole 50% increase. So bonuses are softer now, but  so is stat-reducing -1 Level, so it's not too harsh.

· Item Storing Changes

 For starters, there's two new pockets, one for Berries and Fruits in which 13 kinds of items go in it,  the already known berries, plus the new Fruits used for powering up your monsters. Fits all of them.

 The other new pocket is for Battle items, specifically Held Items. There are several dozen of them,  and having such type of items be mixed with consumable and healing items was a bit of a mess,  even more if you have an organization obsession and want everything neatly grouped.

 Every item of this type fits in this pocket, that's over 50 different types of Items!

 Apricorns are now stored in your Ball Pocket, and there's space to have every ball plus Apricorn,  so they will never become a nuissance to you by filling your bag like before.

 Item Pocket now can store 35 different objects instead of 20, and because Berries/Fruits, Apricorns,  and Held Items do not take space in this pocket anymore you have much more freedom.

 There's one catch, though, now you can only store 30 types of items in the PC, instead of 50.  It won't be much of a problem because you don't need to store any Berry, Fruit, Apricorn, Ball,  or Held Item, so I think it's a good compromise.

 Another change is, as mentioned above, about wild Pokémon. Now, many different species will  hold items. These range from Berries and Fruits, to sell-able Items, Apricorns and a few others.

 This not only will make getting new monsters more interesting, but will also make way, way  more useful the move Thief, and also the new Peck, which also has the effect of taking the  item the foe holds.

· The Pokegear Map has seen a huge facelift. Not only is a bit prettier to look at,  it's also more informative, with standout places or landmarks pointed out in the  map. I even added different little icons to quickly see which poblated areas are  Towns or Cities, just because why not.

· A new Building in Goldenrod has been opened. This place will sell to you all  the Decoration items you previously would get through Mystery Gift or through your Mom.

 Some of the dolls also have been changed, to offer something new, because the game  now is not limited to the original Pokémon icons for the Party Menu. This is also  true for the bigger dolls.

 Talking about that, your Mom will no longer buy you Decoration items, and the items  it buys are now much more useful and simply put, better than Super Potions and such.

· A Move Reminder has been added to the game, but unlike how Move Reminders work  in vanilla games, here it will let you remember moves from a species, as many times  as you want, for free.

 This is because this hack, having higher difficulty than your usual Pokémon game, may  require you to reshuffle your Movesets or try different strategies, and I WANT you to  do so, punishing you with constant farming of Items to change Movesets so you can try  different things sounds very counter-intuitive to me.

 To make this even more useful, each fully evolved creature can remember a number  of Moves from prior evolutionary forms too.

 The types of Moves they'll retain from earlier forms are usually moves related to  Stat changes, Status Effects, and Attacks that may have special traits or effects.

 Basically, Pidgeot won't be able to remember Wing Attack, which is a simple, straightforward  Attack move, but it will remember Quick Attack and Peck, the first one having Priority,  and the second one having the new effect of stealing Items from other Pokémon.

 You can find the Move Reminder in both Johto, and Kanto.  In Johto, he lives with the other useful NPCs, Name Rater and Move Deleter in Goldenrod.  In Kanto, you can find a similar group of NPCs in Lavender Town.

· Pokegear Rematches are now much stronger, they have more Pokémon and more varied,  and often enough their Pokémon have nicknames.

 To give you an idea, many Pokegear trainers will end up with teams of Lvl 80 Pokémon!  So be very careful when fighting again these trainers, they may surprise you!

 Also, a big change in how they work: Originally, if you didn't rematch a trainer  and you kept playing, when you came back to it, it would challenge you with a very  outdated team.

 This is because they only get better if you fight them earlier each time.  This is no how it works anymore. They upgrade their teams as you advance through  the game, and you could very well meet them for the first time after battling them  originally and find out they have a full team of very strong Pokémon.

 This makes Pokegear rematches far, far more interesting and better paced.

 Talking about rematches, I added end-game rematches to the game.    Once you beat Red for the first time, a whole bunch of new battles gets unlocked:  The Pokémon League levels get bumped, with some changes on their teams.  Counting your Rival's rematch, levels range from 80 to 85.

 All Gym Leaders end up their training, and they await you to fight in Lvl 100 Rematches.  If they didn't have originally, every Leader will have a full team, and all of them have  some changes to their teams.

 The default trainer in the Trainer's House in Viridian City also goes from Lvl 70, to Lvl 100.  And there's a few extra Lvl 100 battles that I'll let you discover, although they're  not precissely hidden!

 If you ask yourself why Lvl 100, well, that's to make sure you don't win by overlevelling them.  Once you beat Red, you also unlock a way to Level Up your Pokémon much faster.  Just check the Battle Tower once you do so, although be warned, it requires some effort!

· Buena's Password had its rewards changed, now it's more useful overall.

· Ingame Pokémon trades are different, and they ask for hard-to-get monsters, but give you  very nice ones in exchange, I hope you like them.

· Bill's grandfather has seen some neat changes. His time killer of seeing Pokémon you bring  to him stays, but not quite the same as it originally was. Now he'll tell you riddles that  talk about a certain Pokémon, and if you guess them correctly by showing him the right  species, he'll gift you some very neat Held Items for your pals!  He put quite of effort in those riddles, they even rhyme!

· Fishing has been tweaked a bit.

 Now the chances for Pokémon to bit are higher (who wants to press Select several times for nothing?)  and the Pokémon available by fishing are much more varied, yes, even the Old Rod.

 Levels are also higher. Old Rod ~10, Good Rod ~20, Super Rod ~40.  

 Talking about the Old Rod, now you can get it sooner, before even getting the first Medal.  The Fishing Guru has moved to the gate that connectes Route 31 with Violet City.  This expands which Pokémon you can get early on, and more options is better.

 ...Unless you're me, then it just makes it harder to choose which monsters you want to have.

· Fruit Trees now give 2 Berries/Fruits/Apricorns each day!

· On Violet, Azalea and Goldenrod cities you can find the new Berry Scouts.  These green-cladded folks will sell you the basic Status-Healing Berries,  in order to help accomodate you a bit on the higher difficulty of this hack  compared to the usual stuff.

 The price on the "Items in battle available" patches are a bit higher.

· While there's absolutely zero intention of creating a new "story" or "region", there  are new maps here and there. For Example, there's an actual Viridian Forest again,  with trainers, Items and such, even!

 Other maps got extended a bit here and there, maybe to hide something...!  Some areas also have changes made to look or feel better to explore.  Others have been extended to feel more like a full place.

 The Gyms also had changes. It's interesting how... "small", and simple most of them where.  I expanded most, give some light puzzles to most of the ones that didn't have anything  going on (I even rescued unused map movement for one of them!) to make them slightly  more interesting.

 Of course, please don't expect Zelda-level dungeons or anything like that.  ...Although that could be a pretty cool thing as its own game!

· Because I made quite a few changes in the Types of the Pokémon,  I reformatted Bill's PC a bit. Now when browsing around your monsters,  you can see their types on the upper left side of the screen.

· I changed a few textbox frames, some to fix them up a bit,  and two of them are entirely new. I like Frame 5 myself.

· The order of the Pockets in your Bag differs when youre outside  Battle and when you're in middle of one.

 This is to make the Poké Ball pocket right next to the default  Item pocket, instead of being 3 pushes away to the right.

· Status Effects no longer are shown with 3 letter "words".  Now they have their own little Icons, which make things cleaner  both in Battle and specially on the Party menu.

· Of course, I decapitalized all the text I found.  What a tedious thing...

· Smashable Rocks now can give stone-type Items alongside  being a way to find certain Pokémon.

· Once you heal Moo Moo, one of the twins opens up a  little shop!

 She'll be able to make Berry Juice for you, and  you have two ways of doing it, for convenience.

 Talking about Held-healing Items, RageCandyBar have  been also reworked to be eaten during battle.

 They're more powerful than Gold Berries, but less  than Berry Juice.

· Many things have been fixed. For example:

 Daisy's Haircut was buggy and could in fact reduce Happiness, has been fixed.  Magikarps in Lake of Rage were in fact smaller than normal and not bigger,  and other Magikarp related bugs also existed all around. Fixed.  A bug where Defense could be lowered by attacking a Substitute with a -Def move existed, now is fixed.  A bug where Mirror Coat and Counter would damage foe after they used an item existed, now is fixed.  A bug that made supposedly fleeing Pokémon not able to flee is fixed. Now Fast Balls are more useful.  A bug that made a foe under Nightmare's effect still be hurt if it was healed with items is fixed.  A bug where the HP Bar would deplete way slower than intended existed. Yes, you're reading right.  The speed at which the HP Bar emptied, specially at higher levels, was not intentional, making  high level battles way, way slower. This has been fixed and is much better, albeit not Gen. 3 "fast".

 Other bugs and stuff has been fixed too.

There's more things I could put here, but when you spend so long doing something you start to forget each individual thing...

o-------------------------------------------------o |[10] New Kurt Balls, new ways to obtain Apricorns| o-------------------------------------------------o

Yes, every Kurt Ball has been replaced. Why?

Well, actually, for the first year and a half of "development" of this hack, Kurt Balls were pretty much as they were originally, with exception of changing one for more utility, improving their effects to make them overall better and fixing the quite-a-few glitches related to them.

But during the many tests I (and a few friends) did, all the feedback I got is that they did not use them much, if at all, because how situational they are, and because you can only get them in limited amounts.

So I decided to create a new set of Balls with very simple yet very effective effects. Each of these new Poké Balls offer a x3 Catch Multiplier if used on a certain Type of Pokémon, with each new Ball being useful for 3 different Types each.

For example, the Poké Ball made with Red Apricorns (named Red Ball to simplify things), will work best while trying to catch Fire, Fighting or Ground Pokémon! Other example would be the Pink Ball will do so with Poison, Psychic, or Fairy ones.

There's no tricks, nor complexities. If the types match, you get a stronger effect than an Ultra Ball. This makes each one way more versatile, every Apricorn as useful as the rest.

Descriptions of each new Ball points to which types are most effective.

Now, because I want people to use these Balls more often, there are a few more ways to obtain these Items. The first and most simple is getting Apricorns from Trees, from which you get two for every one each day.

Pokémon themselves also carry Apricorns, as many species hold them randomly.

But I also added a new face to Johto, a traveling monk! He's easily recognizable thanks to his sandogasa (a traditional traveling hat). Because he travels around Johto, each day you'll find him in a different spot, and each day will offer to trade 5 Apricorn of a certain color for one specific Item. The Items he ask for can be obtained from wild Pokémon, and sometimes found somewhere lying on the floor.

For Red or Green Apricorns, he asks for a Tiny Mushroom. for Blue, Yellow or Pink Apricorns, he asks for a Pearl. For White or Black Apricorns, he asks for a Stardust.

Tiny Mushrooms can be held by Pokémon such as Paras, Ledyba, Oddish, Vulpix and others. Pearls can be held by Pokémon such as Shellder, Horsea, Seadra, Octillery and Corsola. Stardust can be held by Pokémon such as Geodude, Jigglypuff, Phanpy, Staryu and Tentacool.

Of course those are just a few examples, there are more. I hope with all this, Kurt's custom Poké Balls are more useful all around.

o--------------------------------------------------------o |[11] The New and Improved Battle Tower and Trainer House| o--------------------------------------------------------o

The Battle Tower was the first time Game Freak offered anything sort of similar to a Challenge Mode inside the main games. We got Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2, which were great little things, designed to be a battle simulator, with different rules and difficulties, among other things like mini-games.

But the Battle Tower was a bit... Lacking. And HARD.

This is because, for one, the trainers you met here had a quite low variety of Pokémon, so it kinda became a bit boring (I guess Game Freak knew most Pokémon had middling stats!).

On the other hand, the monsters here sported pretty much PERFECT stats, and with strong moves along with them.

This last sentence is worth noting because in older generations, training your Pokémon to their fullest potential, A.K.A. giving them the max Stat Exp. was a total pain and a ludicriously slow process. And trying to get good DVs (old IVs) was a much, much, much worse process than that.

You couldn't make use of ANY mechanic to get Pokémon with good DVs, they were random, and unlike more recent Generations, you could not improve a Pokémon DVs by using items or such. You had no control besides soft resetting ad nauseam. If it sounds bad it's because it is.

So to have a chance not only you needed High DV monsters (pretty much impossible by normal rules), but also fully trained and with the best moves possible.  And you only got ONE SINGLE TM for many moves, and Pokémon learnsets were for the most party pretty lacking if looking at them from a competitive point of view, so you were screwed there, as you may imagine.

All in all, it was often seen as unfair and just not very fun. And if you wanted to try it anyway, add to that that the rewards were laughable. Vitamins that you could buy, and didn't help you at all because they became useless quickly, they only helped for less than half of the Stat. Exp total!

But here's the thing: I love the concept! The idea of having 3 monsters each, with the same level, where only your strategy, knowdlege and adaptibility can take you out of trouble, sounds great!

Even more, maybe if you got something worth your time as a reward it could be even more fun!

That's why a good chunk of the effort of this hack was about trying to balance types, moves, Pokémon and such. And also why the Battle Tower got so many changes!

So let's list the changes:

For starters, each of the ten Levels of the Tower got their Pokémon changed, both to update the new stats, but also to give much, much needed variety to the types of monsters you would see, as originally the game sported just a small number of different species.

Instead of 7 battles per round, now you have quicker rounds of 3. This makes for a much more brisk pace, a far less frustrating event if you lose, and easier to pick up and play.

About difficulty, it should still be a good challenge, although this time, there is some balance, as now you can properly train your monsters through vitamins and fruits, TMs hold a good selection of high-Power moves and they're infinite and of course DVs/IVs are the same for everybody.

Oh, and you can remember old moves, too!

There's also two Shops available for players, in which you can buy a selection of Held Items so you can prepare yourself to challenge the Tower, or to progress through the game, as trainers will start using Held Items more and more once you reach this point in the game.

Up to that point is the basic stuff... But the Battle Tower has also opened several shops and services, and there's even a bit of a progression system built into it, too!

Whenever you participate in the Battle Tower and come out victorious, you'll be rewarded a new type of Item: Battle Medals!

You get three for each victiorous round (so each three battles).

These objects are, basically, the coin of exchange for almost any service inside the Battle Tower. They are stored in your Item Pocket and can be used in a variety of ways.

For one, they're pricey objects, each one sells for 12.000P, thus they can cover costs for training Pokémon. Selling all 3 you win nets you 36.000P, which is pretty good if you realize you can buy enough Vitamins to fully feed a Pokémon in three different Stats (or four if you use Special Atk/Def Vitamins!).

So two good rounds of Battle Tower lets you set up the Stat Exp. of a Pokémon really, really quickly! Or you can buy other stuff with it, too. But that's just a bonus compared to their real use!

In the Main Hall of the Battle Tower, a new Receptionist hangs out close to the Battle Tower's usual lady that takes you to the battles themselves. This new NPC can reward you with a Silver or Gold Trophy in exchange for a number of Battle Medals. They're shiny decorations for your room... And hold some use.

The Battle Tower has been expanded and now there are new rooms that host several services. One of them, and one I'm rather excited to manage to put in the game is a Reward Shop that exchanges Battle Medals for Special Eggs!

Do you remember the event Pokémon from the Stadium games?

They were gifted to you after accomplishing something, and in Stadium 2, they had moves they couldn't learn normally. It was a nice little thing, and always made me feel curious about Pokémon with Moves that couldn't learn normally. You know, what new strategies could I come up with and such.

This service is located in a room behind the Main Hall. There, a Receptionist will take one of your Battle Medals and will gift you an Egg with a special Pokémon that knows a unique move!

There's a total of 50 different species you can get through these Eggs, and the one you get for each medal is selected at random. And every species has the same chances, no dishonest stuff like 0.0001% to get a certain Pokémon, like a Gatcha game.

Oh, and if you're one of those, don't waste your time resetting trying to get Shiny Pokémon from these Eggs... Believe me, it won't work.

Another service is the inclusion of Move Tutors!

There are two Tutors and each one can teach 4 Moves each. Seven of those are unique to Tutors, with an Eighth Move being Toxic, a TM you get veeery late, so I added it for earlier access, as some Pokémon (like defensive ones) do benefit from it or need it to work well.

Tutor Moves can only be learnt by Fully Evolved Pokémon, and you can do so only in exchange for one Battle Medal.

The move selection is composed of Non-Damaging moves to give more utility and so they can be applied to all Pokémon in one way or another, unlike damaging moves, and I would have liked to have more, but I hit the limit before the entire game gets corrupt, so these will have to do!

Both of these features not only offer much, much better rewards for your victories in the Battle Tower, ones that not only can be enjoyed throughout the rest of the game making it more entertaining, but also give you a chance to get a few monsters earlier and gives new possibilites to make teams to challenge the Battle Tower too.

...And that's not all you can do here now!

Besides normal Move Tutors, the Battle Tower has also hired a very special NPC: The Egg Elder... Or in other words, an Egg Move Tutor!

Basically, in exchange for 3 Battle Medals, this old man can teach a Pokémon an Egg Move that its evolution line can learn through breeding with other Pokémon!

And yes, any member. Pidgeot and Pidgeotto can learn moves that a bred Pidgey could hinerit, so no worries on that front!

This way you won't longer feel like your early-game teammates (or any Pokémon for that matter) feel gimped or "lesser" because don't have this or that move only available through breeding.

In a way it's like every species has its own specific Tutor Moves!

But let's continue.

The receptionist in the main hall (the one who gives trophies) also offers a new Key Item: The Box Changer. It does what it says, it gives you the ability to switch the Box on Bill's PC anywhere you want. Just remember that you still save your game when changing boxes this way.

Once you reach the "endgame", meaning, after defeating Red, two other Receptionists will open up new services. And are neat ones!

The first one is a Rare Candy shop! You will be able to exchange one Battle Medal for 5 Rare Candies. This will let you manage the Levels of your Pokémon faster, either to battle the new Lvl 100 Rematches, or to Level up your monsters to reach the Levels required for Battle Tower Rooms.

The other, it's quite different but way more interesting too.

You see, a new group of candies capable of changing the Level of a Pokémon to a fixed one now exist! There's Candies for Levels 10, 30, 50 and 80!

No matter what Level the monster is, it will change into the Level of the Candy!

If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 4 Pokémon, it will become Level 30. And If you give a Level 30 Candy to a Level 82 Pokémon, it will also become Level 30!

This is mostly for a reason: To be able to use your favourite pals in any Level of the Battle Tower!

Once a Pokémon Level goes up, it no longer can access the Battle Rooms of lower Levels, and if you wanted to use a monster of a specific species you already raised, you were forced to train another one. But no longer you will need to do that!

Now any Pokémon can battle in any Battle Room by using these new Candies in combination with Rare Candies, and you can perfectly control the level of your team for this challenge while also needing a bit of a resource (Battle Medals) to make use of it.

Not to mention, Level 80 Candies can make HUGE time savers for training Pokémon for those Level 100 Rematches, specially if we're talking about bred Pokémon, or Pokémon from Battle Tower's Special Eggs!

Now, be warned, you CAN NOT make use of all these features from the beginning!

Remember those Trophies I talked about? Yeah, they do more than look nice in your room. Each one unlocks features of the Tower!

Once you win the Silver Trophy, you unlock: Move Tutors  (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Rare Candy Shop  (You need to beat Red too). Level 30 Candies (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 50 Candies (You need beat the Elite Four too).

Once you win the Gold Trophy, you unlock: Egg Move Tutor   (Accessible the moment you get the Trophy). Level 80 Candy   (You need to beat Red too).

So yeah, you must prove yourself and get the Trophies to use all the Battle Tower has to offer.

But don't fret! There's not really much grinding to do. You'll see that the number of Medals needed to obtain each is pretty reasonable for what they unlock.

The game does not ask for hundreds of them for each, not even close! I know how tedious is to collect Battle Points for an Item or one-time use TM back in Generation IV.

And hey, if for some reason you still need a bit of a push, you can win Battle Medals by participating on Buena's Password.

They cost 2 points, you can get one Medal every two days. It's a much slower pace than actually fighting, but it certainly adds up if you play often.

And you also get a handful of them in Kanto, a certain NPC will gift you a bunch if you manage to do something, and some Gym Leaders will gift you one too.

Lastly, also in Kanto, there's the Trainer House.

Originally it was a cool little feature in which you could battle the Pokémon Team that a friend had when you two did a Mistery Gift.

Because I don't expect people going around doing IR connections with a Romhack, the Trainer House has been changed around.

I really don't want to say much, but here's this:

Normally, you can battle a special Trainer daily in this building. But once you've beaten the strongest trainer in all the land, levels are raised, and you can take Lvl 100 battles... With the difference that the Pokémon used in these new battles change depending on the day of the week!

And if you win, you also obtain Battle Medals!

It's a little extra end-game thing alongside the other end-game additions.

o-------------------o |[12] Visual Changes| o-------------------o

Many, many visual changes have been made throughout the game to make the world a bit more cohesive, to make Pokémon look better, or to simple improve stuff here and there.

Pretty much every Pokémon not named Unown got their colors changed, for ones that look better, closer to the original colors of a particular species, and also got their sprites touched up and cleaned up.

Because the games were originally designed to be displayed on the tiny screen of a GB, the graphic artists would try and take advantage to use the 4 colors available to a Pokémon sprite to give it more details. With the advent of the GBC, now they could use colors too, and because the screen wasn't backlighted, they needed to use stronger, more saturated and often darker colors.

The issue is that nowadays these games are pretty much always played on backlighted screens that are also much, much bigger than the original Game Boy's screen, so these graphics that originally looked fine now I don't find they've aged as well with the ways we play them today.

Now, let's be fair here. This is not a criticism for the sprites or the artists. These sprites were made to be seen under a specific hardware, and they worked with what they had, and the gigantic jump in design quality from Generation 1 to Generation 2 is to be applauded.

But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that there's nothing that says they can not be revised and/or improved. That's why I took the horridly tedious job of cleaning up every single sprite (and each of their animated frames) to make them look more clean when played on bigger screens.

I also took the liberty to tweak many of the colors used for Shiny Pokémon. This is something I've seen many people point out throughout the years, and it's true that the use of color for Shiny palettes leaves quite a bit to be desired, with many Pokémon being painted with what I saw called "Puke Green", and others having really dark and simply not appealing combinations of colors that sometimes would make the sprites look worse.

Several of those examples could be Blastoise, Raichu, Aipom or Golbat, and this last one even gets its shading screwed up. Or something like Rhydon, that looks exactly like the official art, while its normal color is much darker; with Pokémon like Phanpy, Sunkern, Xatu, Scyther and others looking very similar to their default colors.

Just have in mind I'm working with the limitations of the GBC and 4 Colors per sprite, so I do what I can do, although it's surprising what nice colors the GBC can display compared to the ones they used, but of course, I'm not doing this to be seen on real hardware, so I do not have that limitation.

You can check a couple of examples in the pictures inside the RAR file for both, sprite improvements and Shiny changes.

I also improved all the Back Sprites too, to keep consistency. And some Pokémon got entirely different sprites, such as Mr. Mime, or Wigglytuff, as there was better designs elsewhere, like Mr. Mime's Silver sprite. It's so much better in my eyes. And yes, they have animations.

Oh, and a handful of Pokémon got redesigns here and there. Don't panic, the changes where made only to humanoid Pokémon to remove incoherent stuff like Machoke and Machamps' underwear or the boxing gear of Hitmonchan.

This is because as time has passed it "snowballed" into a gigantic ball of nonsense. Now, it's not that I hate Pokémon with human-made things on them, for example we could make logical arguments on why they have them in the first place.

Very early Pokémon (back when it was Capsule Monsters) had a lot of very... morally dubious stuff in it. Trainers had whips, the monsters were sold in cages and there was a pretty clear aura of animal abuse in it all. The artwork was intriguing... And a bit worrying.  

When you find out about that stuff it can make sense that humans would put things to restrict their Pokémon like the "strength-reducing" underwear for the Machop tree. Who knows, maybe that's why Pokémon such as Primeape have what looks like shackles on their limbs too.

And back in generation 1, there was only ONE Hitmonchan, given to you by a human. We can simply think the objects it wears are given to it by that person, and it would make sense. Jynx is also another Pokémon which can only be received once, also given by a human and looks like one, maybe there's something going on too.

And all those examples would be fine but then they're turned into nonsense when you can find these Pokémon living in nature with all that stuff on them, or they magically appear when evolving. It just feels... dumb to me, it is something that I could see other developers adress in different ways, but here they just where completely forgotten.

Because this thing is tailored-made for me, I decided to change it.  

And talking about Jynx, when the beta sprite leaked from Red & Green leaks among others, it was pretty exciting to see that this Pokémon once upon a time was very different, with more of a yeti-like design, which can be traced to  japanese Kaiju tv shows, like many early Pokémon designs such as Nidoking (look up Baragon). It apparently had a name that was a very easy to see nudge at Ultraman.

You can read about it here (and also see a bit of the darker Capsule Monsters stuff I mentioned above, but you can also search for early concept art):

https://helixchamber.com/2019/02/16/what-dreams-may-come/

During the development of the hack I went so far as to create sprites to change Jynx into this Yeti-thing, but as time went on I did not feel very satisfied, it felt like a random addition that felt out of place.

I thought of going back to the original Jynx, but I ended sending the entire evolutionary line away and substituting it with another Ice Pokémon from the third Generation.  

...Anyway, moving on from that, each species has its own unique icon on the menu and the overworld too, which is a great thing to give flavour to the game, and seems like a new standard for Pokémon Crystal hacks (with good reason).

The overworld also got some big changes to improve visually, and sometimes, gameplay wise. Besides visuals, some places also changed in design a bit, for a number of different reasons.

For example some Kanto cities had their design changed to look more on par with Johto, as if you compare maps between places, and Gen. 1 and 2, you'll see they kinda look off and weird, as if it didn't have the same time and effort put into it compared to Johto (they didn't).

Places like Celadon and Fuchsia City for example look rather different, although they keep their overall structure, they just got a bit more going for them.

Also there's a few improvements on sprites. For example, I drew new sprites for when you're surfing, similar to those in Gen 3 with your character over a undefined Pokémon. And yes, they're different for both the male and female player characters.

There's also HUGE CHANGES in how information is displayed in several points, with the biggest improvement being the Pokémon's Stats Page. It took me quite some time to get it to look nicer and more organized / easier to read, and I even expanded it by adding a fourth Stat Screen to show some extra "for fun" info.

The font was also changed for a thin yet wider one, to make it less empty between letters, and also more consistent with the different characters, like numbers.

Also, HUGE, HUGE thanks to HyperDriveGuy's amazing work and effort, a way of improving the scrolling and movement on the overworld to make it much more smooth and, to be blunt, less disgustingly choppy if you're used to smooth scrolls.

This change to me is like magic, it makes the game feel so much better! To be fair, finding this improvement refueled my interest in continuing this hack, so thanks again HyperDriveGuy, your work is not just great, it also really did drive this guy forward, pun no intended... Or maybe a bit.

That said, coding this introduced some bugs, some of them harmless, and others being progress-halting or even game-breaking. But fret not, as I managed to fix them all with a bit of work, some trial and error, an a lot of luck, but it was all worth it because the result is a much more fluid experience that translates into a more fun game.

Overall, the game uses much less aggressive colors too, because 99% of the people that may play this (which that would make a total of 4 to 5 individuals, probably) will do it on a lighted screen. Also there's little touches here and there.

Another tiny change that makes a bit of a difference in the long run is battle effects. Most of them on Gen 2 used the same palette: Gray tones! Well, that's not that way anymore.

Most of the effects now have color added to them, and make battles look a bit more fun. A few effects were changed visually, even. For example, Pokémon no longer see "chickens" when confused. Now Pidgeys fly around their poor heads!

The Trainer's card also got a bit prettier, specially the Badges section. Oh, I also added a third page to your Trainer's Card, showing your progress through Kanto's Gyms. You only need to press Right while on Johto's Badge screen when you get at least one Badge from Kanto!

Asymmetrical Badges also spin correctly. Funny enough, the game has coded that function in, but it is only assigned to a medal that was symetrical (Clair's badge). Sounds silly, but once you start seeing Game Freaks coding it's... Actually par for the course, in a way.

o-----------------------o |[13] Tips and Questions| o-----------------------o

Tips: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What type of beginning you want? Each starter is going to change your early hours.

Taking in mind how things work in the Original version of this hack, Cyndaquil would make your first steps more easy than the other two, as his Fire/Rock typing would make him effective against the first two Gyms, while Chikorita's Grass/Ground typing would make it a bit harder than normal. Totodile, with its Water/Ice typing would be a medium difficulty.

But of course, the point of the game is to make more friends and balance your team! You could also ignore the starters and make your team without them. That's how I usually roll.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can get an Exp. Share very early on.

Once you brought the Egg to Prof. Elm, and you're ready to go away on your adventure, go back home and leave 2.000P with your mother. Once you battle once (With Youngster Joey on Route 30), she will call you, telling you she bought something for you. It can come in handy this early!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about saving with your mother, she will buy many useful items, so it's in your best interest to send her money from the beginning!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ During your first few Gyms, look for people in green clothes near the towns and cities' main Sign. These people will sell to you Berries to heal Status Effects!

They will come in handy to prepare against the trainers and leaders there!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't waste your Fruits and Vitamins without having in mind what team you want! This becomes more important the further you go, because NPC trainers will have trained Pokémon either you've raised your own properly or not.

As you get more money, or get more fruits you'll be able to quickly prepare Pokémon, but early on you need to think ahead.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talking about team, while I tried to make all Pokémon good and be on the same Level, that doesn't change the fact that having a balanced team can make things smoother.

Making a team of only slow, defensive Pokémon, or only quick but frail monsters can make things harder for you at certain points. Although, of course, you could just play with your favourites and tough it up. That's what I usually do.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Take advantage of Pokémon such as Meowth or Spearow, capable of learning stealing moves! They will help you to get ahold of many items, that you can either use or sell to make a profit.

Also, be aware of said Pokémon, as they may steal something you have!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Experiment! Because TMs are infinite, HM moves can be forgotten easily, and you have access to the Move Reminder freely, you're given the chance to try all sorts of combinations for a given species. Not to mention, the further you advance through the Battle Tower, the more options you'll have through Move Tutors and the Egg Elder to teach new moves, thus increasing the number of strategies for each species!

You'll only need to watch out for "Event" moves, such as the Odd Egg Pokémon, or the Special Eggs gifted in the Battle Tower, as each have a unique move and you cannot remind it if forgotten.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check the Game Corner on Goldenrod when you arrive!

They've expanded the number of prices you can get. For one, you can get HP restoring Berries there, with Golden Berries being really useful early on, and they're not that expensive.

Even more, new species of Pokémon have been added, and they're Pokémon hard to come by during the early parts of the adventure! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Can you get every single Pokémon in the game? How can I get Mew?

Yes, of course, what would be the point of a Pokémon Hack if you couldn't get every monster available in it by yourself?

There's a lot more variety early on, both so you can get your team-making juices boil sooner, and because different people like different monsters, and having a bigger variety helps with making more people happy.

Although for Mew, you'll have to buy my exclusive and new Park Ball Plus and send it to your game through my exclusive Park Ball Plus-To-GBC Link Cable(tm), or upload it to my exclusive service PokéMaeson Hostage Holdings, previous payment of course, and then you can connect your game magically to it through Infrared connection.

Really, it just works. Wait, are you going to play this on an emulator? Tough luck then, no Mew for you.

...Nah, it's somewhere in the game, you just have to find it, like the rest.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Are you going to do more Pokémon Hacks?

Niet. Nee. Ahneo. Tidak. Nej. Nope.

...What I mean is, don't count on that. The amount of time I put into this is so big that I could have made several other things, the testing has been killing me the most. I have   reached the point of burnout, I've been working on this almost on a daily basis for years. You can't imagine how many times this thing has been reworked and changed over time. Beyond that, my love for the franchise has pretty much being forced to disappear.

And even if I wanted to do more, I wouldn't be able to use any other disassembly project thanks to current DevkitPro versions being incompatible with 32 Bit systems; I'm not going to get a new computer only to do more of this, and going back to the older "Hacking Tools" is not a very welcoming idea, mostly because they're so much more limited and risky to use.  

So, sorry but no, I have no intention, I have no energy, I have no passion for it anymore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

o------------o |[13] Credits| o------------o This wouldn't exist without a lot of people involved with the Pokémon Rom hacking community.  

Thanks and Credits to every single person on PRET, a community dealing with disassembly for many Pokémon games. These projects look like THE WAY going forward, how awesome they are.

Check it Here: https://github.com/pret -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to Rangi42, and all people on places like the Skeetendo and Pokecommunity forums, and many others that shared their findings and information about ASM, going so far to make great tutorials to teach stupid people like me how to do do a whole lot of things, fix several of the bugs in the game, and many other things.

Check it here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal   https://hax.iimarckus.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Oh, and of course, credits and thanks to Rangi42 again for Polished Map, an amazing utility for map editing, very complete and absolutely essential.

Check it here: https://github.com/Rangi42/polished-map -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to the TPP Anniversary Crystal 251 Project to create the code for the Move Reminder, which I adapted to my hack. I couldn't even have known where to start with it, and my hack is only better thanks to it. Also for giving me an idea of how to make Caught Data be shown in the Stats Page. My approach to how the information is displayed is different, but again, without TPP I couldn't have know where to start.

Check it Here: https://github.com/TwitchPlaysPokemon/tppcrystal251pub -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks and Credits to HyperDriveGuy for its example and implementation of "60 Frames per second" project, which created a new way of programming a Run Button, but even more incredible, it made the scrolling of the game as you walk, run, and ride so, so much more smooth. It's amazing.

Check it here: https://github.com/hyperdriveguy/pokecrystal-60fps-example -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Chamber, Soloo993, Blue Emerald, Lake, Neslug and Pikachu25 for their Pokemon Icons. While I did a number of them myself, I also used a good amount made by them, and also remade some of them from their initial work, so they deserve the credits!

You can see their work here: https://github.com/pret/pokecrystal/wiki/screenshots/minidex.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/pret/pokecrystal/screenshots/minidex.png

Also, if you play my hack and find any of the icons or tweaked sprites I made good enough to use it yourself, go right ahead. Just give credit and you're good to go, don't even ask. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits and Special thanks to Vice04 for helping me test my hack over the years. May you never be assaulted by Level 168 Slowbros ever again.  

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Music Credits:

Credits to FroggestSpirit for "Hoenn Wild Battle" and  "Hoenn Trainer Battle" themes.

You can find FroggestSpirit music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/froggestspirit -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm for "Hoenn Rival Battle", "Route 101", "Cipher Peon Battle", "X/Y Rival", "Hoenn Champion Battle" and "Shoal Cave" themes.

You can find Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm music in this Soundcloud link, check it out: https://soundcloud.com/mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Credits to TriteHexagon for his Night Theme music for cities and his tutorial on how to implement them in the game. His ASM files and his Soundcloud can be found here:

https://pastebin.com/u/TriteHexagon https://soundcloud.com/user-930339535 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I hope I'm not forgetting anyone, it's way too much people hacking around the world!

[nelvana]

In which the dreams are nightmares

First [ARC 1]: In which the human is transformed First [ARC 2]: In which a present is prepared Next: In which the god of space is fought Previous: In which there is one last break

Warning! This chapter has descriptions of body horror! Reader discretion is advised.

    The way forward was quiet as the group walked together through the dark corridors of Palkia’s home. The long stretch of cavern that only went one way almost felt as though it went on forever. They all knew that Palkia themself, Primal Palkia, awaited them at the end of all this. That eventually they would make it to the end of this all, for one final fight. And that could only add to the feeling of going too fast and yet too slow.

    Finally though, Ceebee told them that they were nearly there.

    “In fact…” Ceebee went on, “Dialga is close too. They still aren’t in the same place, but the path must diverge slightly soon.”

    “What about the Lake Guardians?” Alex asked, quickening his pace, which had been uncharacteristically slow before, to stand beside the celebi.

    “…They’re with Dialga. As is the ditto. I suspect they’re guarding them,” Ceebee answered, antennae flicking slightly as she spoke.

    “So, should we fight them and get Dialga first, or go straight to Palkia?” Tsuki asked next, shaking her head afterwards as if ridding it of more dirt, despite no more of the specks falling out of her mane anymore.

    “Dialga is still weakened, but we could try to get them if we wanted. We have not yet actually fought Palkia with the help of Dialga,” Ceebee said, slowly slightly without realizing as she thought. “I wonder if what orans we have left would be enough for them…”

    “We would have to fight the Lake Guardians to get through to Dialga. We might be able to avoid that extra fight and save our own energy if we go straight to Palkia,” Nelvana pointed out.

    “…We might not get that choice,” Ceebee suddenly murmured, slowing down even more to the point she was practically just fluttering in place.

    Everyone else slowing to the celebi’s pace, they looked ahead to see what she could possibly be referring to here. Right away, there wasn’t anyone else in the cave nearby them. However, one could see that they were close to the dividing pathways that Ceebee had spoken of. The way they were heading continued onwards ahead before turning to the right slightly, but to the left there was the large mouth of another tunnel, the darkness and the distance preventing anyone from seeing what was actually within either pathway past a glance.

    Then, from the shadows of the last path, the Lake Guardians floated out, Ditto trailing behind. They stared out at the others across from them in the corridor, neither saying nor doing anything. For a couple moments, the two groups merely stared down at each other, each tensely awaiting the other to act first. Eventually though, it was Ceebee that spoke, calling out to them.

    “Do you wish to fight us again, or shall we pass peacefully?” Ceebee asked them, despite being certain of the answer that would be given.

    Despite that, there was a pause before any of the trio spoke, Ditto only laying on the floor, passively ignoring any dialogue going on. Uxie continued making eye contact with Ceebee, their eyes as glassy and emotionless as ever, though Mesprit and Azelf exchanged a momentary glance to each other.

    “If you leave now, you will not be hunted,” Uxie responded, gesturing vaguely with one arm, holding it out in front of them.

    “Another mercy chance?” Nelvana whispered to no one in particular.

    “That is strange, why now?” Alex replied in an equally quiet voice, though he kept his eyes trained on the group’s foes rather than glancing to his partner when he spoke to her.

    “Perhaps Primal Palkia’s motives are different from Palkia’s,” Tsuki pointed out, lowering her head slightly, tilting it just barely to the side as well.

    “We are not going to leave,” Ceebee called back, speaking above the whisper the others were using to just speak amongst themselves and projecting her voice to ensure she would be heard. “Our quarrel is not with you, if you leave, we will not bother you four,” she continued.

    Mesprit glanced down at Ditto, furrowing their brows at them. Ditto didn’t react.

    “We cannot do that,” Azelf told Ceebee tersely.

    Ceebee paused, letting out a sigh and then narrowing her eyes, “then we are at a standstill. And for us to achieve our goal, we cannot just stand still here, so it would seem that we will fight.”

    “So be it,” Uxie replied.

    The Lake Guardians moved backwards, forcing Ditto to lay in front of them. This time they barely spared the poor creature a glance before it began to shake and writhe, the tell-tale sign that Ditto was being forced to transform, which were signs that were already becoming scarily familiar to the group. Not wishing to allow time for the four foes to merely stand around and prepare themselves for battle, the others moved forward, some lingering momentarily to use a status move before jumping ahead to join the others.

    As they advanced, the ditto’s shape grew and morphed into something… unfamiliar. Pink turned to a black darkness not unlike shadows, and they shakily rose to two silt-like legs that appeared far too weak to hold up any creature. Clawed arms stretched to lay by the sides of an almost hourglass-like figure, shoulders which had long black tatters that floated in the air limply like a flag on a calm day. Red spikes grew to cover their neck, protecting a small head with ice blue eyes and long, flowing white hair. As with other transformations from this ditto, some places were incomplete, the red collar bleeding into the pink sludge that Ditto was originally made off, and bones jutting out where the body hadn’t been formed properly.

    There was a pause from the group, as the vast majority looked at such a pokemon and didn’t have the slightest clue what it was supposed to be. A couple, however, recognized this from one source or another, though it was Keahi that was the first to speak up about it.

    “That’s Darkrai!” Keahi exclaimed, “The nightmare mythical!”

    Though zie seemed as though zie was about to go on, no more words came out as the newly transformed pokemon lifted their arms over their head, forming a purple and black sphere between their palms. Nelvana threw her club at them, but the attack was deflected by Azelf, the weapon clattering on the wall next to them; out of reach of the marowak from where she currently stood.

    Following this up, Uxie raised their arm in front of them again, extending a finger and using it to draw an ‘X’ in the air, which showed up in a scratchy red. This would be the start of the move imprison, an attack known to have a couple uses. Uxie quickly demonstrated which use this was, when psychic bars appeared, blocking everyone together in this space of the hallway. No one could retreat until the effects wore off.

    Seeing this, and then being able to piece together what Darkrai’s attack might be based on what Keahi told them, despite no one of the group ever seeing it before, they began to spread out. Though they could not pull off a full retreat anymore, staying clumped together would make them more vulnerable.

    During this, and as the imposter Darkrai continued to power up the move, Uxie clapped their hands, a golden glow pulsing over their hands and passing over to their ally, the Dark Void instantly increasing in size. Azelf and Mesprit followed suit, each using helping hand to strength the attack as the group could only watch now in increasing horror as this humongous orb towered over them all.

    Before anyone could say or do anything to possibly prevent the attack from going off, the sphere began to split into dozens and dozens of tiny orbs, each being shot out at the group members. A couple missed, the aim going wide and hitting a wall, but there were far too many to dodge forever.

    Keahi felt something hit zim in the back, a crimson bubble forming around zim and shifting the world around them to a red tint. The bubble popped, and zie felt zirself hit the ground before succumbing to the darkness of sleep.

    It’s calm. A cool breeze brushes over the land, brushing over the young torchic’s feathers as she walks across the forest floor.

    Her steps were quick, but careful. She had just been out around Tiny Woods for a walk when an earthquake happened. A lot of those had been happening recently, but this one felt like the worst yet. Perhaps it would have been wiser for her to return right home afterwards, but she couldn’t help by want to check to see if everyone out here was okay, since she was out here anyway. In previous earthquakes, some trees had fallen down, and she would hate to find that someone was stuck under one. Plus, she had already started hearing that there was a new dungeon here, so at the very least it would be good to locate it to avoid for any possible Tiny Woods picnics with family in the future.

    For some reason though, despite wanting to check around the forest quickly, Keahi found herself slowing down towards a small clearing in Tiny Woods. She wasn’t even tired, and yet she naturally slowed to a stop here. There was nothing special about this spot. It was a space in the forest that had less trees, providing a small circle of space to freely walk around in. However, as she looked up, the foliage from other trees still blocked out most of the sky. This was normal.

    And yet, she found herself standing there, staring up at the leaves, almost as if waiting for something. As she didn’t even know what this was, she quickly snapped herself out of this distraction, turning to glance down at the grass around her. A few leaves were scattered on the forest floor, naturally falling from strong gusts of wind, but not much else. She didn’t know what she had been expecting; this was normal.

    Suddenly, Keahi was torn out of all zir thoughts about her own strange pause here at the sound of fluttering wings and someone crying. Turning towards the source of the sound, she saw Butterfree hurriedly flying about, happening to head towards the direction of the torchic.

    “Oh, my baby! My poor baby!” Butterfree cried, “somebody! Please! Help me!”

    “What happened?” Keahi asked, quickly stepping over to the distressed mother.

    “It's horrible! My Caterpie fell into a cavern! My poor baby!” Butterfree explained.

    “A cavern? I heard there was a new mystery dungeon after that earthquake earlier, did it make a cavern?” Keahi questioned.

    “A huge fissure opened in the ground, and my Caterpie fell in! He's too young to crawl out by himself! When I went to get my baby, pokemon suddenly attacked me!” Butterfree continued, pausing afterwards to gasp for breath between all her sobs and previous rushing about.

    “Don’t worry, I’ll help him get back out!” Keahi assured her.

    Butterfree blinked down at the torchic, “you will? Oh, thank you! Thank you!” she responded, tearing up again at the overwhelming emotion from everything. “The dungeon, it’s… it’s right off where I just came from,” she directed, pointing out behind where she had come from, “please be careful!”

    “I will, don’t worry!” Keahi chirped, nodding to Butterfree before beginning to hurry off to where she had been directed to; she had had an idea of where the dungeon was, but it was good to get some confirmation too.

    Before they got far, however, they found themself slowing to a stop again. Their mind spaced again, the feeling of something being off settling into their gut. Something was… missing?

    “Before I go…” Keahi murmured, slowly turning back around to face Butterfree. “Have you seen… anyone else here? Around this area?”

    “No, you’re the first one I’ve run into!” Butterfree answered.

    “Okay…” That made sense, why wouldn’t it make sense? “If you do see someone else though, could you… maybe direct them to me? I’m…” Keahi paused again, finding it a challenge to place their thoughts here and find the right words. “…I’m missing a, uh, friend. Yeah, I’m not sure where th- she is.”

    “Okay, I will, but please, rescue my son!” Butterfree responded, panic beginning to enter her voice again.

    “I will!” Keahi reassured her, but found their feet stuck in the grass. “But… are you really sure? My friend, I… I need her. I don’t know… if I can do this without her. She’s supposed to be here.”

    Butterfree paused momentarily, merely continuing to flutter about anxiously. She just continued staring at Keahi expectantly, as if Keahi stopping to ask about this here was something the mother simply could not comprehend.

    “Please, just go rescue my son!” Butterfree finally snapped, “I-I’ll keep a lookout here, just… please, go,” she added, pleading.

    “I…”

    Now it was Keahi’s turn to pause, as they found their mouth dry and mind dazed yet buzzing. Technically, there really was nothing stopping them from going to rescuing Caterpie. There really wasn’t. They had managed to identify that what they felt was missing was a friend, and Butterfree promised to look out for her, and yet…

    And yet, they couldn’t let go of that. Their mind felt fuzzy, almost sleepy. This friend felt so important, and yet they couldn’t even place a name or species in this moment. What was wrong with them? And why was it so important that they couldn’t rescue Caterpie without her? Keahi knew that they could fight in mystery dungeons, they had been training for that exact thing! So why…?

    They idly reached a wing up towards their neck, a wing claw scratching at the feathers around their neck. Something was missing. But they rarely wore anything around their neck. They wanted to wear a sash whenever they formed their rescue team, but that was a long way from now, they still hadn’t found the right… partner…

    “Why are you still just standing there?” Butterfree questioned, “go rescue my son!” her voice strangely turned harsh and demanding, something Keahi had never heard from the mother before.

    “…No.” The word came tumbling out of Keahi’s mouth before zie could think about it, but somehow zie didn’t want to correct zirself. “This… This already happened. I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”

    “What are you talking about?” Butterfree shrieked, her panicked worry very quickly turning to enragement.

    “This is the dead timeline!” Keahi exclaimed, the pieces finally putting themselves together as zir mind reminded zirself of what was going on. “Nel’s supposed to be here, but she isn’t! This is the dead timeline!” zie continued, “and this… this isn’t even real. I’m dreaming! I’m really in the Spacial Rift! I’m with my team, and we got attacked by a ditto transformed into Darkrai! This is just a nightmare!”

    “Go rescue my son!” Butterfree screamed, now purposely ignoring Keahi’s words.

    “No! I already did! And you aren’t the real Butterfree! None of this is real!” Keahi snapped back, “and I want to wake up!”

    Butterfree stopped. She stared blankly at the torchic, saying nothing, wings now slowly beating behind her just enough to continue keeping her in place. Keahi stared back, awaiting some sort of response from her. For the longest time, neither of them said anything. Eventually though, Keahi sighed and looked away, glancing deeper into the forest.

    “Fine then, I’ll just find a way to wake myself up.”

    “No, you can’t!” As Keahi turned to look at Butterfree, zie found that her words almost seemed to come out at an eerie delay. “You cannot wake up! You weren’t supposed to even know! How did you know? How? How?”

    Repeated phrases from this unreal version of Butterfree turned into an incoherent garbled mess as their form began falling apart, the image of being someone Keahi knew literally melting away into shrieks. Keahi zirself found that zie could only watch, stuck in place, petrified like a statue as zie watched how what almost could have just been a dream quickly showed its true colors as a nightmare. This broken illusion of Butterfree continued to scream as their mouth stretched impossibly open, wings wide and unmoving, yet somehow still being suspended in the air.

    Then, Butterfree vanished altogether, voice still echoing in the trees even after her form had completely melted away into the air.

    Keahi still didn’t move, didn’t even test if zie was capable of running off now, zir gaze still glued to where the warped dream version of someone zie knew once was. Zir chest heaved as zie gasped in ragged breaths, each one feeling worse than the last.

    “I want to wake up,” zie whispered into the breeze.

    Just as the illusion of Butterfree had fallen apart, soon that of Tiny Woods was no far behind. The world seemed to shake around zim, colors flickering in front of zir eyes. The breeze picked up into a violent wind that tore at Keahi’s feathers and made zir eyes water, but now zie dug zir talons into the grass, well aware that zie would likely have to see whatever this nightmare had planned for zim through.

    Right where Keahi had checked before, the form of a cubone appeared. Despite knowing this was just a part of this dream, and was likely a trap that would turn against zim, Keahi couldn’t help but pull free of the grass to run over to the sight of zir partner.

    This image vanished though before zie had barely taken a few steps, and was replaced by the body of something larger, more unfamiliar; a human. The body of a human which no longer moved, from a timeline that never came, one where Gardevoir never stepped in and the fall combined with previous injuries was fatal.

    Frozen in place, Keahi watched at the world seemed to flicker again, the image vanishing again as the world was swept into a darkened land with only greyscale colors. Another flicker, more shaking. Then, still all black and white, Tiny Woods was also a barren landscape, the trees of the forest all knocked over each other and leaving just the open fields of dead plants.

    The world continued to shake and flicker, continuing to cycle between illusions and images, each of other times and possibilities. Displaying a timeline that no longer existed, the timeline that newly existed, and timelines that never existed at all, but could have had things gone differently. Each time Keahi remained in place, remained in Tiny Woods, being forced to see these glimpses of alternate worlds.

    Even as the world finally stopped flickering between these windows of other timelines, leaving Keahi back in the original Tiny Woods, everything continued to shake. It shook worse than an earthquake and almost seemed to spin at the same time with the incredulous roar of the nightmares own frustration of being defied.

    Then, the ground began to cave into itself. Grass and dirt and rocks pulling into a growing pit of nothing but darkness which only grew bigger and bigger. A massive hole which only slowly grew larger, swallowing everything like the most vicious whirlpool.

    Keahi stared at the pit as the edges of it grew closer and closer to zir own feet, talons curled tightly into the grass again. Zie knew, zie knew, that though this was far more vivid than any dream or nightmare zie had ever had, that that didn’t mean that this would play by the rules of reality. Trying to run would likely force zim into running on the spot helplessly, or make the pit open up faster to swallow zim whole. No, there was really nothing zie could do to stop what had already begun here.

    So, as a final act of defiance, Keahi narrowed zir eyes and puffed up zir feathers, steeling zir courage before rushing forwards, not backwards, and throwing zirself into the growing void of the hole.

    Falling. Zie fell through the nothing of the nightmare, and even if zie turned to look back up where zie had come from, zie would see nothing but more of the same darkness. Keahi stared wide eyed as zie fell, but even though it almost felt as if zie was falling faster and faster, there wasn’t even any ground in sight to hit at the bottom.

    “I WANT TO WAKE UP!!!”

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 snd\IfjkBNou\ddh8RJ\iQ13r\djikiog\nfjowke\tnai023qu59\wqkoNF\aMgj;Q[TI9\nJUqpeg\tmkal;ms\hmkldfgk\iwangdgh\setjetetj

    WakE Up

    Keahi’s eyes shot open, followed by zir body lurching as zie attempted to stand up before fully awakening. It took a few moments to focus again, heavy breathing and darting gaze from zir own panic making it a challenge to properly adjust to being back in reality again. But as zir eyes focused in on the darkened cave walls of Spacial Rift, relief flooded in at the realization that zie was finally awake.

    Taking a proper look at zir surroundings again, panic stabbed back in zir heart at the sight of being the only one standing. Momentarily, in zir still awaking mind, zir feared that everyone else had died, but zie managed to focus enough to see the movement of breathing and was able to relax again. Slightly.

    The effects of imprison had long since worn off, and the Lake Guardians, along with Ditto, were also long gone. This confused Keahi slightly, but zie didn’t feel like questioning why zie and the others had been left alive despite being all defeated, and settled for being thankful that they had been spared instead. Whatever reason it was, they hadn’t been attacked in their vulnerable states, and right now, it didn’t matter what that reason was, and just that it happened.

    What still did confuse Keahi, was why zie had been capable of waking up at all. Zie had read that the only thing capable of waking up someone who had been struck down to eternal nightmares by Darkrai was a lunar wing from Cresselia, but… there was certainly no Cresselia here, and it would be even more confusing if Ditto had transformed into Cresselia themself. If Ditto had…

    “Oh,” Keahi murmured aloud as the thought hit zim. “That wasn’t really Darkrai, just a ditto; the effects are weaker!”

    Now grounded again and confirming the possibility that these nightmare effects were only temporary, Keahi decided to set zirself to helping everyone else wake up. Even those with teleport or capable of vanishing into the shadows had been caught by the dark void attack, likely from imprison being set up, so if zie were to get everyone up to fight Primal Palkia, zie would have to be quick. Hurrying over to the unconscious form of zir partner, zie went to nudge Nelvana. When she didn’t awake, gentle pokes turned to more forceful shoves as Keahi grew more desperate at the thought that zie would be incapable getting anyone else to wake up.

    “Please… wake up, Nel!” Keahi pleaded, pushing with all zir weight against the marowak, only succeeding to roll her over from her side onto her back. “Please…”

    Letting out a sigh of defeat, Keahi stood back up again, staring down at Nelvana silently for a few moments, as if merely willing her to wake up would make any difference. In the end though, zie had to turn away. Zie had seen zir partner having nightmares before, but that certainly didn’t make it any less painful to watch, especially now as it was becoming evident that as a marowak, Nelvana was capable of showing more expression than when the skull just covered her face as a cubone.

    Looking around again, Keahi sought out another solution. Would there be someone that was easier to wake up, or were all these efforts pointless? The idea that Keahi was the only one capable of waking up from this at all wasn’t something zie wanted to consider, but the thought settled itself like a rock in zir gut anyway.

    Eyes landing on Alex, at first zie wondered if he, as a lighter sleeper, would be any easier to wake up. Then, zie noticed the bag again, and hope reinstated itself within zim as zie recalled that he and Damien had mentioned that they still had other status berries. Including chesto berries, which woke someone from sleeping. Those had to work!

    Dashing over to the unconscious grovyle, Keahi crouched down beside him, tugging the bag to sit beside zim so zie could rummage through it. As zie moved the bag a bit, Alex stirred, making Keahi pause with held breath and the hope that maybe zir first thought was correct after all. It wasn’t long until this excitement deflated within zim, the realization clicking that he wasn’t actually waking up forcing zim to go back to zir second plan and open up the bag.

    With the bag on its side, some of the rounder items at the top rolled out a bit as Keahi opened it, which zie carefully set aside so that zie could search deeper into the bag. As zie gently moved aside the reviver seeds and some of the oran berries that hadn’t rolled out, zir eyes landed on Giratina’s stone, which had also been placed near the top of the bag for easier access. Temporarily forgoing zir plan in favor of some company and advice, Keahi hooked a claw around the rock and pulled it out of the bag, cradling it carefully in zir wings.

    “Giratina? Are you there?” Keahi called to the item, desperately hoping that the connection hadn’t been severed when Ceebee had been knocked unconscious like the others.

    “Yes, I am,” Giratina replied, “what is it? I had just been… Oh. What… What happened here?” they questioned, their voice growing quieter as they sensed the scene around them.

    “Ditto transformed into Darkrai and used dark void,” Keahi told them, “and Uxie used imprison to make sure we couldn’t escape. I just woke up a couple minutes ago. Everyone is still asleep and I haven’t been able to get anyone up.”

    “That is quite the situation. You are fortunate they do not have actual Darkrai on their side,” Giratina murmured.

    “Yeah, I know,” Keahi sighed, “I was going to try chesto berries. Do you think that will work?”

    “I… I have my doubts. However, it would be worth it to try regardless,” Giratina answered.

    Nodding, Keahi set back down the rock to continue rummaging through the bag. Managing to locate one of the purple berries, zie carefully rolled it out of the bag to pick up properly. As Alex was the closest, zie decided this plan would be best to test with him. Placing down the chesto berry for a moment, Keahi gingerly pried the grovyle’s mouth open, placing the berry in his mouth and then closing it for him. Silently, they waited to see if anything would happen. Eventually, his body seemed to recognize the food in his mouth and managed to eat it, but despite all that, he still didn’t wake up.

    “It didn’t work…” Keahi moaned in defeat, going back to pick up the stone again. “Will… Will they wake up on their own?” zie asked, zir worry and concern pouring out of zir voice.

    “I believe so, yes,” Giratina assured zim, “if you were capable of waking up on your own, they should as well. Unfortunately, it seems that they cannot be awoken by an outside force; excluding the lunar wing, which we lack. You will have to wait for them to wake up on their own.”

    “What if they don’t? What do I do?” Keahi continued.

    “Calm yourself; they will wake up,” Giratina responded, “it’s just a matter of time. They are all strong-minded, they should be able to wake themselves up.”

    Reluctantly accepting this answer, Keahi nodded weakly again. Deciding to put the items back in Alex’s bag to give zirself something to do in the meantime, zie set the rock back down again and began placing all the items that zie had moved or taken out back into the bag like they once were. When done, zie closed the bag and picked up the stone again, the only item zie hadn’t put back into the bag, and began pacing around, searching for any signs that someone could be waking up.

    Nelvana suddenly jumped up, merely a couple minutes after Keahi had begun pacing. Seeing zir partner wake up, Keahi darted over to her, barely stopping zirself from just throwing zirself at her for a hug, and instead gingerly reaching out a wing to pat her arm as she readjusted to waking up after her own nightmare.

    “Keahi…?” Nelvana whispered.

    “Yeah, it’s me, you’re awake now,” Keahi assured her, “you’re finally awake… I was so worried.”

    “How are you feeling?” Giratina, rock still being cradled in Keahi’s other wing, spoke up.

    “I…” Nelvana rubbed the right side of her head with one hand, reaching out to hold Keahi’s wing that was touching her shoulder with her other hand. “I have a bit of a headache, but it’s already fading away. That was… Gah, that was horrible,” she said, “how’s everyone else?”

    Frowning, Keahi had to explain what had happened since zie had woken up zirself. Nelvana listened patiently, her eyes drifting slightly to the others as Keahi told her how none of them could wake up with any outside help, and how they’d have to wait for everyone to get up on their own.

    “That’s…”

    “A problem,” Keahi finished Nelvana’s sentence as she trailed off. “I think… aside from these being really freaky and vivid nightmares, I think they’re fine, at least. It’s just a matter of us… being a bit tight for time.”

    Nelvana nodded slowly, “yeah…” she agreed, “Giratina, can you tell how… how bad the world’s balance is, now that Palkia is primal? Do you know how much time has passed?”

    “I am not certain how much time has passed. However, I can tell you that the imbalance has only slowly gotten worse. While I was gone before, I had been focusing around Murky Cave and some of my other locations to check on the status of the rest of the world. We are only fortunate there have not been any instant and larger damages so far, like when Dialga was primal,” Giratina explained, “some mystery dungeons have been altering, and so has a lot of landmass. I have heard that some portals have been opening up too, though I have not heard if anyone has been unfortunate enough to fall in one, or where any of the portals lead to.”

    “And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t do anything,” Nelvana concluded.

    “What should we do then?” Keahi asked earnestly, “do you have any plans, Nel?”

    “I’m thinking…” Nelvana furrowed her brows. “Giratina, do you think if we fight Primal Palkia, we could at least stall any further damages, even if we don’t defeat them right away?”

    “Yes, I believe that would work! While much of what is happening is not purposeful or conscious on Palkia’s part, by distracting them with battle, you would be able to force their energy to focus on you, which should buy some time. Not much, but I believe that it should still help,” Giratina answered.

    “Do you think we should fight them, just the two of us?” Keahi questioned.

    “I know we can’t win, with just us. But it wouldn’t be good to just sit around here and do nothing, if at least being present in a fight could help,” Nelvana told zim, “we would have to be extremely careful, but if the others should be waking up soon, they’ll be able to come over and help us in the battle too, until eventually everyone is there and we can defeat Palkia.”

    Keahi paused, mulling over this idea for a couple moments. Then, zie smiled, nodding back to Nelvana with a determined gaze.

    “Alright, let’s do it,” zie decided.

    Nelvana smiled back, “okay! I’ll get my club then… You still have your fire gem too, right? That might help too. We’ll have to start off without any other items though, so we’ll have to be extra careful,” she said, getting up to search for where her club had been dropped after being deflected before, finding it right by the wall where she remembered.

    “I can stay here, if you two would like,” Giratina offered, “your friends may be confused when they wake up, so I can inform them of what has happened and where you have gone, so they can be directed to you.”

    “That sounds great! Thank you Giratina, that will help a ton,” Keahi replied, “and yeah, Nel, I’ve got the fire gem right here.”

    “Yeah, that sounds good, Giratina,” Nelvana agreed, returning to the other two from fetching her weapon. “Are you ready then, Keahi?”

    Keahi nodded, placing back down the stone close to the center of everyone else, “yeah, I’m ready.”

    “Best of luck to you both,” Giratina told them, “be careful out there.”

    “Thanks, we will,” Nelvana replied, smiling slightly. “Let’s go then.”

    The pair headed back down the path they had been travelling through before, they spared a glance towards the other path, glimpsing the Lake Guardians there. If that trio had noticed anything going on outside of the room they were in, they didn’t say or do anything about it, instead keeping their backs turned completely from the entrance to their area. Silently, Nelvana and Keahi decided to just pass that path by, continuing on with their plan to fight Primal Palkia. Though they knew Dialga could still be helpful if they got them freed and back to health, the two of them weren’t certain that they could take on the four foes guarding the legendary on their own at the moment.

    Just before passing through the small corner down the corridor they were heading down to get to Primal Palkia, Nelvana paused, turning around and glancing back to the rest of the group. Keahi stopped and looked back as well, and the duo remained quiet as they stared at their friends for a few moments before they had to move on, continuing onwards.

First [ARC 1]: In which the human is transformed First [ARC 2]: In which a present is prepared Next: In which the god of space is fought Previous: In which there is one last break

Special thanks to @team-ion​ for helping me with some tips for the garbled messages! There are thirteen hidden messages in that mess, some much easier than others, feel very welcome to try figuring them all out!

[depressedkakashihatake]

Pokemon Au Masterlist-Headcannons

This is going to be very long so i’ll put it under the cut :)

Kakashi is the son of Sakumo Hatake, the current Champion of Kanto when Kakashi starts his pokemon Journey. He is also the grandson of Tobirama Senju, the Pokemon Professor of the Kanto region. As such, Kakashi is put under a lot of pressure to meet a lot of expectations and even before his pokemon journey begins he is followed by reporters and others who want to know all about him.

When Kakashi arrives at Tobirama’s lab to be given his first official pokemon and start his journey, he meets Maito Gai. The others who start their journey at the same time are Obito and Rin. (Genma, Ebisu, Asuma and Kurenai all start a few years before them since they are older. Iruka, Tenzo, shisui and Itachi all start a few years after them)

When it comes to choosing pokemon, Rin took squirtle, Kakashi took Venasaur and both Obito and Gai took Charmander. Obito is the only one who still has/uses his charizard for battles. 

Gai notices that Kakashi is uncomfortable with the reporters that seem to be already following him, so he attaches himself to the other kids side and make sure to get between him and the camera’s whenever they try to focus on him, taking all the focus onto himself. Kakashi appreciates this and they decide to head to the first gym together. 

Kakashi almost always does his gym battle after Gai so that he can get a feel for how the gym leader fights. Because of this, Kakashi is able to come up with a plan of attack by the time that he fights and is usually able to obtain the badge in one try. The only exceptions are Minato and Danzo. Minato he had to fight 3 times before he gets his badge, Danzo he gets it on the second try. Gry sometimes has to try gyms multiple times, but Kakashi is in no rush and thinks it’s fun to watch Gai train with his pokemon so he always waits for him. 

In Lavander town, Kakashi and Gai meet a young kid still waiting a few years before he can start his own pokemon journey. Tenzo lives in a home with his adopted father, who is often away because he is also a gym leader, leaving Tenzo under the care of baby sitters. While they’re visiting, Kakahsi’s ivysor bonds with Tenzo so much that when they’re getting ready to leave Kakashi notices that Ivysor is sad to be saying goodbye to Tenzo. Because Tenzo doesn’t really have anyone else stable around with him, Kakashi decides to leave Ivysaur with him so that he has a friend.

Kakashi is one of very few trainers who is able to beat Fugaku in one try, and he is absolutely ruthless in the battle after hearing Fugaku bad mouth Gai’s training technique and bond with his pokemon, telling him he should focus on getting strong pokemon rather than working with weak pokemon. This is the first battle which Gai see’s Kakashi aim to absolutely destroy his competition, and the only battle in which Fugaku’s pokemon fail to faint even one of the challengers pokemon. 

After his battle with Fugaku, Kakashi is presented his badge by a young Itachi. When Kakashi see’s Itachi looking at his Jolteon, he tells him he is welcome to pet Jolteon and that his pokemon won’t bite. Itachi has a lot of questions for Kakashi, but Fugaku rushes him and Gai out of the gym before storming into the back utterly annoyed that Kakashi defeats him completely. 

The day after Kakashi’s gym victory and Gai’s lose, Itachi goes to the local pokemon center to see if Nurse Tsunade needs any help with the pokemon. There, he see’s Kakashi and Gai with their pokemon. Gai is in the back field training with his pokemon for his rematch while Kakashi is sitting on the sidelines with a small growleth in his lap and his Jolteon by his side. Itachi remembers the team that Kakashi brought with him, even though he only used Jolteon. Kakashi had released all 3 of the pokemon he planned to use so Fugaku could see them. They had all been Electric pokemon, leading Itachi to believe that Kakashi was an electric trainer, only to see him with a fire pokemon in his lap.

The next day, Gai and Kakashi show up so that Gai can redo his gym challenge. While Gai is doing his battle against Fugaku, Itachi slides up beside Kakashi in the bleachers and watches as he brushes Growlithes  fur. While sitting there, he finds himself blurting out a question. ‘I thought you only used Electric pokemon?’ Kakashi laughs and explains that while he does only use electric pokemon, he has a certain fondness for dogs and likes to collect dog pokemon. He doesn’t use those pokemon in battle though, even though he does train them, because he wants to show people how amazing Electric pokemon are. He more likes to have Dog pokemon as companions that often play with and train with all of his electric pokemon. This is the first time Itachi has heard of anyone besides his mother keeping a pokemon as a companion and not a battling pokemon.

After Gai win’s his gym badge from Fugaku, Kakashi and Gai get ready to set off onto the next part of the journey. Before leaving though, Gai goes up to Itachi and lays a pokeball in his hand, telling him it’s from Kakashi before he runs off to join his friend. When Itachi releases the pokemon to see what it is, he finds himself faced with a beautiful Eeevee that Kakashi had caught on the way to Fugaku’s gym because he found it stealing food from his bag and decided someone had to take care of it.

Kakashi and Gai go on to face the Elite four together after getting all 8 badges and doing a lot of training. On victory road Shizune joins them until they run into Tsunade at the end. Tsunade challenges them to make sure they’re ready to take on the elite four, and when they prove themselves she gladly sends them on their way. Shizun chooses to stick around with Tsunade and learn from her, since she’s not only an amazing pokemon trainer but also a Pokemon Doctor. 

Kakashi and Gai beat the elite four, but both of them lost to Sakumo. Of course, as soon as Gai see’s who the champion is he understands Kakashi’s aversion to reporters and cameras. He always knew Kakashi was the son of the champion since day one, but he never realized that Kakashi was the spitting image of his father. 

After facing Sakumo, the pair decide to continue exploring Kanto to train up their pokemon and become stronger, going over to Johto about a year later to find new pokemon and try the league there. This is where they meet Professor Shikaku, who is more interested in getting the pair to help him with research projects than he is with helping them with their gym challenge. Of course, Kakashi gets a cute Chikoreta out of the deal (that he later also gives to Tenzo) so he’s not complaining too much. 

A few years later, Shisui and Tenzo start off on their journey. Unlike Kakashi and Gai they decide to do their journey alone like most kids, though they do run into each other a lot on the way and have battles to see where they’re standing in terms of skill. Shisui chooses Charmander as his starter, and finds that he likes to collect a variety of pokemon. Tenzo, on the other hand, has a real love for grass type pokemon and has the Ivysaur that Kakashi gave him to start off his journey with. 

Shisui first meets Kakashi and Gai in Celadon city. The pair is there to relax after getting back from the Johto region, and there’s a bit huff around the city about two top trainers being there. Shisui decides to check it out and ends up challenging Gai to a one on one battle thinking neither of these two look all that great. He is...pleasantly surprised. 

Gai absolutely destroys him in battle with his Hitmonlee, and Shisui decides then and there that he’s going to train until he can beat this weird pair of ass kicking trainers. 

When he has 8 badges, Tenzo heads to victory road where he finds Kakashi and Gai chilling outside. Kakashi smiles when he see’s him, having gotten word that Tenzo had finally gotten his last badge. As a reward, Kakashi lays a pokeball in Tenzo’s hand. It’s the Chikareta that Shikaku had given him a few years ago, and thankfully this time Tenzo has a pokemon to give Kakashi in return. The only electric pokemon that Kakashi had been unable to catch as of yet, because it’s a stubborn shit that keeps eluding him. Electobuzz. 

Shisui and Tenzo both end up losing to Sakumo as well, though Sakumo is impressed by how many pokemon they manage to get through. Only Kakashi and Gai have managed to actually get close to beating him before. 

When Itachi begins his pokemon journey, It’s Kakashi and Gai’s first year as Gym Leaders. Gai is the 7th Gym leader and a fighting type leader, while Kakashi is the 8th gym leader and the Electric type leader. 

Kakashi quickly gets a reputation for being a ruthless gym leader. Not in the same way as Fugaku, who is known to insult challengers' training methods and skills. But rather because he doesn’t go easy on his gym challengers. If they want to win a badge from him, they have to earn it in every way possible.

The only person who gets a gym badge from Kakashi ever, Is Itachi. It gets Kakashi into quiet a lot of trouble with the league for not letting others have a chance at facing the elite four, but Sakumo is damn proud of his son and knows that Itachi facing him means this kid is damn strong.

Itachi doesn’t beat Sakumo the first time, but he does get Sakumo down to one pokemon which is terrifying. 

Ultimately, both Kakashi and Itachi beat Sakumo. The difference is Kakashi beats his dad in a silly battle at his gym that’s not legal in any way and he’s happy with that. He never wanted his victory publicized. Itachi beats Sakumo on live TV for everyone to see and becomes the new official champion. 

This happens 3 years after Itachi started his journey, and it’s huge because for years Sakumo was undefeated.

As the new Champion, Itachi gets to choose the elite four that will be working with him. He chooses Kakashi, Gai, Shisui and Rin. All absolute power houses in their own way will test a trainer's skill in brute strength, intelligence, quick reactions and adjustments and training style before they even get to Itachi. 

To get past all four of them is damn impressive, but because it’s so hard it’s actually rare to see Itachi out as the champion, and thus not many people know what the champion actually looks like.

Couples

Kakashi and Gai started dating when they were about 18. They have always been side by side and the pair gets genuinely annoyed when they’re not together because it feels like something is missing. The Gym leader years are the worst because they have to spend so much time apart and neither of them really enjoy it at all (so Kakashi ends up spending a lot of time at Gai’s gym, meaning people have to go back to find him so that he can go to his gym for challenges)

Itachi and Sakura start dating when Sakura is 19. Sakura always enjoyed hanging around Itachi and helping him take care of his pokemon. She got a lot of training as a doctor being around the elite four and the champion, because one way or another there was going to be pokemon who ended up needing healing. Sakura asked Itachi out to dinner one day while she was taking care of a small burn on his amphroses hand from a battle with Shisui, and Itachi can’t say no to those adorable eyes.

Tenzo and Iruka met during their first year of their pokemon journey and have been friends since, but they didn’t start dating until they were about 16. Tenzo loves to go to Iruka’s gym all the time and hang out with him and his pokemon, and Iruka loves letting Tenzo lay down with his head on his lap napping while he runs his fingers through his hair. 

Students

    While he’s at the gym, Gai ends up with Neji, Lee and Tenten as students of fighting type pokemon. Although they do not all stay strictly as fighting type trainers, they do learn the same determination and training style that Gai uses and they always go to find him at the elite four headquarters for a challenge every once in a while.

Itachi only trains two people, and it’s in vastly different things. Sasuke he trains as a pokemon trainer, though him and Sasuke (at first) have vastly different ideas of how to train and work with their pokemon. He also trains Hinata, but not as a trainer. He shows her pokemon breeding. Brushing pokemon’s fur, taking care of them, making pokemon food (he also has her learn that from Gai as well because he makes some of the best pokemon food) and everything that needs to be known about Pokemon breeding.

Kakashi only trains Temari and Sasuke. Sasuke comes to him for some special training because they are both electric type users, while Temari genuinely enjoys Kakashi’s fighting style and approach to battles and decides to learn from him.

Baki trains Temari, Gaara and Kankuro, and he absolutely hates that he has to share Temari with Kakashi.

Kurenai trains Kiba and Shino, both of which have different types of pokemon that they use but enjoy her training style over others.

Asuma trains Ino and Choji, helping Choji find a love for pokemon battling where he used to just think about being a breeder. He’s a bit of both now while Ino is an absolute force to be feared with Psychic pokemon.