Older-than-Time
[Eating My Muse]
- Location
- Somewhere in the Sol System
- Pronouns
- He/Him/ThatIdiot
I have this mental image of cute stickers that you slap on your Pokemon so they can 'dream-learn' the Move overnight.
A Backwards Grin (Pokemon) (Mawile SI)
- Thread starter Flairina
- Start date
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Well, I haven't played Gen 8 yet, so I didn't include them, but I'd posit that Silph (or whoever) have a new and better copy protection method in addition to still holding the requisite patent in Galar (maybe Galar has longer copyright periods than Unova, Alola, and Hoenn for some reason). Actually, just holding the patent is probably enough, since the average person won't bother looking for a way to break the copy protection on something they'll probably only use once anyway, as long as there isn't a cheaper, reusable option available.
- Location
- Wonderland
TMs aren't in the anime? You're joking, right? Guess not.
Sabrina Team Rocket has teleporters.[/i]
That kid that managed to get lost into a desert in Kanto?
Sharpedo-jump? What's a shark?
Bill has a teleporter…huh, doesn't come up in the anime. *quickly checks the other instance*
- Location
- Terra-Luna
There's also at least one instance in the anime of pokemon from one Pokemon Center getting transferred through the Pokemon Storage System over to other Pokemon Centers as overflow for treatment after a big incident, and I believe the system also gets a shout-out in Destiny Deoxys movie. It seems like something that might be a very curious subject for someone able to actually make use of the system; to a pokemon, it's a fast-travel network. Should our chompy heroine here get the idea, then depending on how things progress, she might be able to basically get emailed to where she wants to go should it be a matter of her leaving Paul's "care" for Professor Rowan or something.
- Location
- Earth
One thing that confused me is, if she was trying to find her way out of the forest, why not follow the river instead of heading in random directions?
Jamie Roberts
Hávamál 127
- Location
- N/A
- Pronouns
- she/her
I don't think she was trying to find her way out of the forest, at least prior to getting mauled by a bear. As a Pokemon who did not specifically want to be caught, and having not yet really realized her spot on the food chain, she didn't have any particular reason to think that finding civilization would improve her situation per se. As such, classic Find Civilization tricks like following the river were diagonal to her intentions.
This not mentioning that even though she didn't yet realize how eatable she is, "jump into the river" can still get a bit of a primal "but what if something tries to eat me" reaction. I know I don't want to get into a wrestling match with a Shellder at the bottom of a river, and I'm three times her height.
I was wondering about whether she can be her own trainer, and then I wondered what it even means to be a trainer, and then I think I recalled them needing to go to a pokemon centre to trade one time, which implies that ownership of pokeballs is at least somewhat of a thing, even if only some sort of registry thing, it should still be relevant to other systems like storage, trading, and transmission... . So I am back to wondering if the system will let her own her own ball.
Krazyfan1
Worrying for the future.
- Location
- Australia
They also show up in the manga, which has some interesting information on them...
wiki said:
- Location
- Wonderland
The ability to long-distance transfer pokémon is pretty well-established. I was pointing out that human teleportation technology exists.
Though the point about it being a good "fast-travel" and escape if you don't actually need a password is well-taken. I wonder if one can macro the PCs to release the next pokemon put in (i.e. oneself) without any further input…
Flairina
Least Omnipotent Goddess
- Location
- The next infinity over
True enough. Though, that doesn't change that "it" as the general Pokemon pronoun is still canonical to the English version of the anime, so while I could probably use singular-they as a simple enough replacement, "it" is what it will be staying. Which kind of sucks when you're the "it" in question.
Eheh, sorry about that. ^^; I try to reply to batches of posts before there get to be so many that my responses to them end up going over 1000 words, but sometimes I get behind a little, or just have a lot to say to something in particular, and, well... yeah.
You aren't wrong, I suppose. ^^; Though, this next chapter looks like it's gonna be pretty darn long (it's currently over 6k words), to the point that I'm wondering if I shouldn't split it in two. Either way, I'd been hoping to get it out later today, but I may need some extra time. We'll see.
Even if Mawile!me got this to work, it probably would just look very silly, but I DO have a real soft spot for the concept of prehensile hair (again, I was considering doing a Hatenna SI instead of this at first), so I cannot completely rule out such a thing.
Well, Non-Mawile!me prefers sweet things most of the time, but the nature of taste in Pokemon may be slightly different - I'm not sure if anyone actually likes purely bitter things, and neither "dry" or the Japanese version "astringent" are even flavors. We'll just have to see how the berries of this world agree with Mawile!me.
Heh... on the subject of Pokemon treats, they really seem to have an oscillating scale of weirdness from generation to generation, don't they? On the one hand, we have pastries (poffins) and "poke-puffs", which are basically just fancy little cake things. On the other, we have beans, retrieved from the magic Bean Island (TM), and of course the pounded cubes of flavor that are pokeblocks, which I can only assume are like the berry equivalent of eating pure grape concentrate. Then along comes gen 8, wherein Pokemon finally get actual meals to eat, but they're all curry, which either has a different definition in the Pokemon world or means that every Pokemon in Galar likes, or at least tolerates spicy food. Like, yeah, you can make "Sweet" curry, but curry is by nature a spicy dish; there's not really any way around that. I really have no idea why they went with that as a "base" food instead of something like a sandwich, or just some sort of food that doesn't have a lot of predetermined flavor before other ingredients are added. It's... weird.
A way of getting around which doesn't require walking for ages through potentially hostile territory would definitely be recommended. Where's the Eon Flute when you need it?
Ah, if only things were so simple... if magic like that is intrinsic, dying might actually make things WAY easier on me.
...dang it, will you stop guessing all my major twists ahead of time?! Now I'm gonna have to restructure the entire plot!
I appreciate how much talk there is about this before I've even made it clear whether or not TMs exist in this fic - I don't mean that sarcastically or anything, this is genuinely interesting.
Never really thought about TMs in any real detail before, so this is all potentially quite helpful.I wonder if that would also imply the existence of "bootleg" TMs that don't work quite properly - like a TM that's intended to teach a move, but teaches it wrong. Given that such a thing could theoretically screw up a Pokemon's brain in the process, akin to installing faulty or virus-laden software on an OS, that would be a definite reason to avoid buying TMs from less than trusted sources.
Well, I wouldn't say nothing, but there is significantly more to battle than raw stats, yes, which I'll hopefully be able to convey in coming chapters and fights down the line.
You'll be seeing Mawile!me in the next Dead by Daylight expansion any day now, I'm sure.
...so basically, placing the Pokemon in question in the Matrix for the night for the sake of learning kung fu.
Paul would be more likely to send Mawile!me to Reggie, so this would require getting my own ball away from Paul long enough to send myself somewhere else (and may be kind of difficult if it requires any input from outside the ball to actually start the transfer, since at that point I would need to be IN the ball.) Still, it's likely a faster method of travel than virtually any other available (to humans OR Pokemon), so it's definitely not a thought to be discounted.
The main issue to something like this would be registering as a trainer to begin with, which... may be sort of difficult without being human. Perhaps if there was a way of temporarily looking like a person however...
Mawile!me actually DID try that. There'll be a brief mention of why that may not have worked next chapter.
Oh no, I was, if just because living in a forest wasn't particularly pleasant even before it got life-threatening. It just wasn't working, is all.
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Unseelie
(Verified True Fae)
- Location
- Tír fo Thuinn
It's British curry, so "spicy" is relative.
Probably just in time so that I see it, but have to go to bed before reading it.
(Important exam tomorrow.)
KnownParadox
Not a sphere
- Location
- Canada
I support extra long updates make it as long as you wish.
Farseer Sen'Zabl
Accolyte of 'Common Sense'
- Location
- Dome of Crystal Seers, Ulthwe
Well, at least they didn't figure out that it was actually Cynthia all along who- Oops.
I almost said too much there.
Good luck!
- Location
- Existence
Does it involve having to get through a bunch of Bidoof and Bibarel
- Location
- Here
I had the impression that pokeblocks were like pez – little hard candy bricks, except apparently not always sweet.
And curry varies widely by region – even Indian curries vary depending on which bit of India you're in (and presumably how much the cook was catering to tourists), British curry is often notably milder, Japanese curry is considered to be Western food because they got it from the British and changed it even more... and in America, I'm honestly not sure which one (or more) of those routes the usual stuff could be traced back to. Probably depends a lot on the cook. If nothing else, I've seen a curry recipe online that I've made very often, and its spiciness is basically optional; the core of the sauce is tomato, cumin, ground mustard, garlic, and ginger, plus garam masala (which, at least as available here, is perhaps warming but not really spicy. I mean, I usually add chili powder and a chopped pepper, but it tastes recognizably similar without that.
- Location
- Canada, probably
Yeah, this. Curry just means it's got a mixture of strong spices, but you can make a curry with entirely spices that aren't spicy. Which looks absurd written down? But spicy and spiced are different.
FailLord
2050 lb bombs?
- Location
- very high up
Or they might be going back to the original definition of curry in english cookbooks, which usually just meant heavily spiced
- Location
- Terra-Luna
I imagine that practically everything is tied to a user account registered through the Pokemon League, which, given the setting, could very well be a person's official, government-issue ID. It probably has some serious protections around it, either way. For being such a common thing, though, it might none the less actually be pretty vulnerable on the user end even if there is some kind of impressive cybersecurity; there's a fair possibility that a trainer won't at all be inclined to think to need to make sure that their pokemon aren't watching them a password entry with a goal in mind, or whatever, and I wouldn't be surprised if a trainer's Pokedex is used to make an awful lot of things more convenient. A trainer's Pokedex probably has considerable parallels to a real-world person's cell phone with all kinds of linked accounts and passwords set to auto-fill or stay logged in, so there's a fair possibility that a trainer who happens to have an unusually aware and insightful pokemon might basically wind up the victim of identity theft.
Ah, but are they speaking English? "Shinx Shinx Shin-Shinx" isn't English, but a listener who happens to be a pokemon can understand Shinx-speak just fine because "because pokemon". Who's to say that pokemon might in fact understand human-speak much the same way? Perhaps it's a matter of the language being thought to be English for simply assuming such to be the case and never noticing otherwise. Maybe a native speaker of Japan who ended up a pokemon might automatically denote a difference in the pronoun usage that simply doesn't have the same nuance in English without getting archaic. Y'know, just in case there wasn't enough of an existential identity crisis and confusion already.
I suppose part of it might just be a matter of pokemon simply having different tastes; they aren't human, after all, and some of them are downright weird in any case. "Dry" and "astringent" sounds like something of a linguistic discrepancy, though; those... aren't remotely equivalent, or even local analogues, as far as I know. Still, I suppose "dry" could be as much about texture and composition as actual taste as far as the palate is concerned, and some tastes might perhaps be described as astringent, but probably not things that are generally actually good or even safe to taste; I think of astringent flavour being a chemically taste-smell that is kind of bitter and... and astringent? Describing senses is never easy.
Sweet curry... Okay, so you can make sweet curry, but that does not mean that you should make sweet curry. Sweet curry? Ugh... Moving on!
I think a lot of it could be explained in-universe as people just having a lot of ideas about foodstuffs. Pastries, cakes, and other bakery goods make sense as a treat thing, especially with the prevalence of the particular berries of Pokemon. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if everyone has all kinds of treats like that for humans and pokemon alike. The beans, however, seem like a product of Japan being Japan and having a particular type of bean hold a prominent place in dessert-type foods, perhaps coupled with the influence of things like jellybeans, and Pokemon being Pokemon; who knows what those things are really like in-universe.
I agree with that earlier post about the Pokeblocks, though; they seem like they might well be just some sort of candy treat thing simply based on berries, with the game mechanics being something of a simplification. I think Pokeblocks in-universe might come in different styles, with some Pokeblocks basically being like fruit gummies made of dried berries pureed and pressed into molds, or others made by outright dehydrated berries ground up and given similar treatment, or additionally or alternatively have a hard candy shell derived from the berry juice, assuming that the whole thing isn't a hard candy in entirety. Overall, I think Pokeblocks are basically sweets for pokemon, with as much variation as we have in real candies and sweets.
More broadly in terms of food, Galar curry prevalence also brings into question the prevalence of other types of pokemon food, because I'm pretty sure most meals are basically cereal/pet food available at your neighbourhood Poke Mart. That would, however, easily have plenty of room for the market to be expanded to include more "luxury" food. Now the only question is how many great big bags of food Paul brought with him, because I think that might be about as many days as he has before something really awkward happens. Or maybe just hours. Arceus help him if she ever makes friends with a Wailord.
No one has definitively proven that Mawile can't learn Teleport with the right help! New discoveries are made every day. Maybe the future holds evolution, maybe it's the dream of all lazy people!
The real twist is that she is Paul's uncle! No really, that's... that's pretty twisty....dang it, will you stop guessing all my major twists ahead of time?! Now I'm gonna have to restructure the entire plot!
Well, like said, Paul at least got the same end results as TM usage, one way or another, so it becomes an interesting question of just what exactly that means; it does definitely have some intriguing implications for the world-building.I appreciate how much talk there is about this before I've even made it clear whether or not TMs exist in this fic - I don't mean that sarcastically or anything, this is genuinely interesting.
There's also the topic of held items to consider, too. It functions quite neatly as a game mechanic, but how does it apply in-universe? We do see some instances of pokemon indeed featuring possessions of one sort or another, but this is also a matter of rules and customs, too, so official matches might differ from actual feasibility.
Should totally get a sword. That'll improve battle performance. Hey, Steel-type pokemon, here! It counts! ...besides, if anyone argues, well you've got a sword.
Thus, the Deceiver Pokemon gets a-deceiving! The good Nurse Joy is just doing her job if she happens to push a few convenient buttons after obviously being supposed to do so.
Come to think of it, though, that also raises the idea of just how useful simple, straightforward truth might be, actually. There's a fair chance that any given Pokemon Center has a helpful Chansey or the like who could offer some advice on how to deal with abusive trainers, and there might even be some legitimate legal recourse for that sort of thing, and I should think any Nurse Joy to be inclined to be helpful to some degree or another if actually aware of the situation.
That again seems like the sort of thing that would be a lot easier with a Pokemon Professor smoothing things over. On the other hand, though, just what is involved with registering? If it could maybe just be done as some paperwork or online process featured standard at a Pokemon Center, who knows, maybe registering as a trainer could be completed before anyone actually gets a chance to say anything about it. It would certainly be convenient if she could get released and capture herself with a pokeball tied to her own account to make her a trainer pokemon owned by herself. Or maybe she turns to a life of crime and joins Team Snagem to jailbreak herself. A Mawile can dream.
Even if Mawile!me got this to work, it probably would just look very silly, but I DO have a real soft spot for the concept of prehensile hair (again, I was considering doing a Hatenna SI instead of this at first), so I cannot completely rule out such a thing.
Have you read Ascensions and Transgressions? It's a transcription of an Exalted game run by @EarthScorpion for @Aleph where Aleph's character has hair that's not only prehensile, but admorsile.
- Location
- Wonderland
Pounded sweets? Pokéblocks are perhaps (remotely) calling on the idea of mochi, then…?
So yes, we're definitely guessing and he didn't tell us at all.
I hear Paul's Uncle works at GameFreak in Celadon....dang it, will you stop guessing all my major twists ahead of time?! Now I'm gonna have to restructure the entire plot!
So yes, we're definitely guessing and he didn't tell us at all.
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Maybe Pokemon Language doesn't have a concept of personhood? I mean, when rocks, trees, accumulations of spiritual energy, universal concepts... can all be people, are you really going to risk talking about some random puddle you walk around on the road as though it isn't? That is just begging to get into a fight with an enraged Muk.
You would bring a mundane sword to a pokemon battle?
Opposing Trainer: What... what is that!
Flairile: My held item, silly.
Opposing Trainer: B-b-but... that's The Space Battleship Yamato!
Flairile: And I am Holding The Wave Motion Gun's trigger...
Arceus: Meh, I'll allow it.
Flairile: Imma chargin' mah lazor!!!
*Sinnoh has fainted*
- Location
- Canada, probably
I like this. A sort of extreme animism is only logical, when many of the speakers of the language are animistic spirits.
- Location
- Here
Modus_Tollens
SCREAMING.
- Location
- ALSO SCREAMING.
Her reach is rather subpar, but honestly a little something for when something tries to bypass the toothy tentacles and go for the biped behind them. Those jaws are godlike at mid range but some things will get through.
The issue there is that, again, this is the deciever pokemon. Being cute, helpless, and innocent... or looking like you are, even to people who should know better... is a tactical asset. Being kitted up for war nullifies some of that.
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- Location
- Terra-Luna
That is why she learns sword-swallowing and stores the sword in a "back scabbard" to dramatically pull out a naked blade from her gaping maw for maximum horror when she actually does need to reveal her nature. Use those Intimidate and Astonish features, little mon! Perfect it until it becomes Glare. Oh, and pick up Fake Tears, too, just to throw people off all the more at the switch. After all, Mawile is totally innocent. Obviously.
Nah, that'd never work; she'd end up eating the sword. Delicious high-carbon steel...
On a more serious note, though, it does bring up the question of just what moves she might go for; there are matters of actual practicality, time, and other people to perhaps consider, but we can reasonably assume that she has a pretty good idea both as to what a Mawile could learn and what would be useful to have, quite possibly more than anyone else. Time, though, might be the single greatest factor; if she prioritises her development like a typical trainer pokemon, she's going to be beset by constantly shifting possibilities, but also a need to actually use her moves well with finesse and technical skill, practicing just as any other professional athlete, which might be a serious problem for new moves that may seem more powerful on paper but are not necessarily actually better for all that they may have greater base returns. Her basic Bite, for instance, might well seem like a good candidate for replacement as a non-STAB-applicable move with uninspiring damage and a generic damage-dealing role were this the game and a fancy new TM move became available, but here? Bite might play in pretty well for the idealised fighting style of a Mawile, and serve as a good basis for both learning the actual move Crunch and how to use Crunch to best effect. On the other hand, though, some moves really are quite good in their own right or have potential that could indeed be tempting as simply worth it, and she'll never progress in anything if she never starts it in the first place.