Lilo is a teenage girl who has just been washed away from her homeland of Alola to follow her mother for work in Goldenrod city and now it is time for her first pokemon. Her journey starts in a month and Lilo has no idea if she even wants to go anymore.
Cass is about two years too old to go on a journey by most people's standards, a sharp seventeen compared to everyone else who already got to leave, but she won't stop until she can finally become something more. She had fought tooth and nail through the Goldenrod Pokemon Study Program for a scholarship from Whitney herself.
Easton is a few weeks shy of being twenty-one. He has already had his journey and already failed with flying colors. The marks of failure have stained his ambition, and now he is being blackmailed to accompany two teenagers for their pokemon journey or get kicked out his meager loft he can barely afford anyway.
These three get stuck on a journey together, with Lilo and Cass fighting against the odds stacked against them and Easton as their designated emo babysitter. What is the worst that could happen? Slice-of-Life Journey Fic with a focus on its characters.
Vote One CHOICE Per Character- The decisions you choose will change the character beats and tone for the story. When you make choices for the pokemon, you must keep stats out of mind and choose what you think is the most interesting. These CHOICES will be their invisible voice throughout the whole narrative. Whatever you choose will affect how their journey together goes.
Lilo and Cass are narrative characters, which means the chapters will be told by their POVS unless it is an interlude. Easton is a main supportive character and will have choices for some parts but he is not a narrative character and will have less.
Lilo is an excitable, but cautious girl who still reeling from the move her family had done two months ago. Right now, she is waking up for another day at school where she is still an outsider. Her mother has already left for work at the Goldenrod Research Facility, so her morning is full of silence and her mother's trumbeak watching her carefully. She is a girl who is undecided and conflicted. She will get her starting pokemon today and she does not know what to think about it.
She Is:
Even though Lilo loves her mother, she had prepared to do her first journey in Alola. Lio has studied the routes and pokemon for her home region, not the backwoods of Johto. She misses her friends, family, and even the food she left behind. She is not as self-obsessed to be fully angry, but some part of her blames her mother for how displaced she is. Whatever pokemon she gets will become first have a difficult relationship with her because of this frustration. However, overcoming this will create a stronger bond between her and her pokemon.
Lilo is excited for her first pokemon and has been for weeks. Despite the move dampening her spirits, nothing can upend her getting her first pokemon! However, she is nervous she will not get along with her pokemon or there will be difficulties. This affects how she will battle until she can overcome her own doubts.
Cass is a teenage girl who has been hardened by circumstance and forged by her own determination to push through it. She is from the lower end of Goldenrod and is fighting tooth and nail against her class to get a scholarship from Whitney. Today she has spent the whole night re-reading a textbook she has already read twice. She is in the top of her class, but she knows that it matters little when it comes down to the gritty politics of professional trainers.
She Is:
What if it isn't enough? What if she has spent this whole year working two part time jobs and going to class day after day for nothing? What if she becomes nothing? She might be able to get a starter if she doesn't get the scholarship but what about all her tears and sweat? Cass is scared that all she has suffered will become nothing in the face of reality. Even if her body feels heavy and she has to push through every day, she can make it through. This makes Cass tough and realistic but limited to succumbing to her fear by her own mental constitution. She is only as strong as she can keep up her strong exterior and absolute interior.
Cass knows her chances of being a trainer if she doesn't get the scholarship is low. She can focus her time to catching her own pokemon, which is the backup plan anyway, but her real worry is being funded for a journey at all. People like her don't get to go on journeys and the reality that she is alone is constant in her mind. However, her dreams and motivations drive her. As long as she can see herself accomplishing her goals, no matter how long it takes, she can ignore the jaded part inside of her.
(This vote is different. DO NOT vote for what you think would be the strongest, but instead the most interesting CHOICE to you, instead. Whatever start you pick will decide the theme for his team.)
Easton has already done everything he could and has given up doing more. His days pass in frozen meals and mechanically going through the motions of life. He works part-time job after part-time job to just fill his time and mind up. He hasn't spoken to his parents for years, ever since he lost against the seventh gym leader he went against two years ago. It doesn't really matter to him that much anymore. Yeah, he spent the majority of his teenage years chasing some fallacy that he just... wasn't good enough for. All that really says about him is that he is a failure and foolish. Easton has disappointed everyone at this point: Himself, his pokemon, and everyone who has ever believed in him. However, he has accepted that even though other people have not. That was until his landlord threatened to evict him from his trash apartment unless he accompanied his neighbor, a teenage girl on her journey, after missing a couple of payments. Just when he was going to tell the landlord to evict him and fuck off: he was offered a generous sum of money to do it.
So, Easton decided that walking some stupid kids on their journey would be better than sitting around and rotting. There is also a part of him that feels fathomless guilt for letting his pokemon, who he trained to be battlers settle for nothing. They are what encouraged him to accept the money his landlord provided and the decision to go babysit some kids more than the money itself.
Speaking of his pokemon, his starter was a:
She is furious and fierce, and she is the reason that Easton became a fire-type specialist. Easton met her when he was a young boy who was fireless. When they first went on their journey, she is what had kept him warm and his mind spirited. He is beaten down, but he is ferocious when he is needed to be. The forest may be burnt down to the ground, but life can grow from it. With this CHOICE: Easton is a man whose fire has been blown out. His ambition crushed under the cold ice of deficiency. She is what keeps him going most days.
When Easton started his journey, he had no intentions of evolving his shroomish and she had agreed with him. After something terrible, she evolved to keep him safe from the horrors of the pokewilds. That event scarred him and with his pokemon he decided to become a fighting-type specialist. Easton had fought and fought until he couldn't no more, and now he has admitted defeat. There is no reason to fight against an unmovable force. With this CHOICE: Easton is a man who has stopped fighting and accepted all his losses. He has rolled with the punches and will continue to do so.
Easton had wanted to fly before he had wanted to become a grand trainer who everyone wanted him to be. Who he wanted to be. That is why he became a flying-type specialist. He had wanted to fly away, far away and above everyone else. Then, he failed. Skamory never left him, they never left each other, but now they were both chained down because Easton gave up his dreams. Sometimes he thinks about it, how Skamory can't fly ahead above him until he goes to the bird pokemon sanctuary or gets the energy to the routes around Goldenrod. With this CHOICE: Easton is a man who was knocked out of the sky too soon and young. He is a man who has wind under his wings, however short-winded he is nowadays. He is untethered and boundless to most things.
I seek to give him more wind for his wings, please. It's never too late to push spread your wings, and nothing puts that more in perspective than helping someone spread theirs. Even if things are looking down right now, we still have the freedom to do what we want and seek something better.
I think this could be the most interesting choices
For the simple fact that lilo hard work was for nothing and cass hard work in going to pay off, lilo is going to have to watch someone have the journey she wished but was denied, and Easton is in a similar but different situation from the girls that he got the journey he wished for but couldn't do anything after it, he fears that all his hard work was for nothing and he considers himself a failure and hopes that he can or save the girls from his mistakes or help them Give up so as not to be disappointed as him but in the way he may succeed in Putting out their fires or they may accidentally light up his own again
So I think "Bitter but Kind" is far more interesting personally - an immediate personal hangup to get over and provides opportunity for good, interesting character growth + development.
The last few sentences for Skarmory are evocative, I dig it! The "roll with the punches" energy for Breloom is cool but maybe overlaps with other choices more than I'd like. Might be a moot point depending on the other choices, though.
As for Cass, both options sound good to me and I could be swayed either way. It probably would be good to choose the higher energy option to contrast the other two, though.
I really like the imagery of a flying-type trainer who's tied down and can't actually go anywhere due to his own choices. And his pokemon being all tied down with him.
