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Morphic (R, possibly offensive to some)

Dragonfree

Just me
Sike Saner: Haha, thanks! :D I'm glad you enjoyed the extras.

Hopefully, then, you'll be pleased to hear I wrote a couple more. It feels kind of backwards how I've probably written more words-per-day of this fic after finishing it than before, but my mind works in mysterious ways. (Alternatively, I'm just high on Dave and Mia, because I have seriously concluded that I could spend the rest of my life writing about them talking and never get bored.)


Dave and Mia Discuss Horror

“So, Mia,” Dave said as he started the car, “how’d you like the movie?”

She thought for a moment. “I liked the bit where the guy had to cut his eye out.”

He snorted. “You would.”

“Also with the Houndoom killing the woman. That was nice.”

He winced a little. “That was pretty brutal, yeah.” He paused. “How about the Scyther bits? I’ve got to admit that was why I took you.”

“No,” she said. “That was lame. It was all CGI.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well, that’s obviously necessary if you’re going to have a person cut in half.” He paused until it struck him that maybe she didn’t find that obvious at all. “You know, because otherwise they couldn’t get any actors for the part,” he added. “It’s all special effects. Nobody would want to be in the movie if they had to be actually gutted for it.”

She nodded, looking out the passenger side window. “That’s too bad.” After a moment she turned back to him. “But a real person being cut in half wouldn’t look like that. It was stupid.”

“I don’t think a lot of people know or want to know what a real person being cut in half would actually look like, Mia.”

She shrugged. “I could tell it looked wrong.”

“Well, there’s a career for you. Gorn movie special effects. I’m sure you’d be great.”

Mia’s lips curled into a grin as she looked out the windshield. Dave fleetingly wondered if, with time, her social skills and understanding of human ethics might actually improve to the point that she would be able to get and hold a regular job. Probably not very likely. He’d sometimes toyed with the idea of trying to get her into programming – provided she could keep her mind on it, he imagined her bizarre hyperlogical brain would probably be good at it – and seeing if she could earn some money off freelance work online for people who had no idea who or what she was. But that was a question for the future.

“I didn’t like the main character,” Mia said after a while. “He kept doing things that made no sense.”

“Oh?” Well, he supposed experiencing mental anguish over being forced to watch one’s family tortured and slaughtered would probably never make sense to her. “Like what?” he asked anyway.

“Like when he started stabbing himself with his pocket knife. It was painful and he could have died.”

Dave looked at her. It was funny how, after all these years of knowing she had no sense of humour whatsoever, he still always kept checking if she was joking. “I’m, ah, pretty sure that was the idea,” he said eventually.

“Why would he want to be in pain?”

“He didn’t want to be in pain. He wanted to be dead.”

“That doesn’t make sense. You can’t want to be dead.”

“Yes, you can,” he said patiently. “He was living out the most ****ed-up horror scenario the scriptwriter could stuff into one film, and he’d rather die than experience that because he’s a normal human being. Just because you wouldn’t want to be dead doesn’t mean –”

“That makes no sense,” Mia repeated. “You can’t want to be dead. Wanting something means you’d be happy if it happened, but if you’re dead you don’t exist so you can’t be happy about it.”

He thought about it in silence for a few seconds. It occurred to him that he was sitting in his car arguing for the merits of suicide with a ten-year-old girl. That was a little ****ed up.

“Maybe he was religious,” Mia suggested after a while. “Then he could have thought he’d be happy after he died.”

“It’s not that,” Dave replied with a wave of his hand, trying to get his thoughts in order. “If I were him and honestly thought killing myself would just put me into some cheery blissful afterlife while everybody I cared about got tortured to death, I’d…” He trailed off. “Well, point is, that’d be a ****ing nightmare. Meanwhile, not existing means you don’t have to spend an eternity living with the memory of it anymore, and yeah, there’s definitely a sense in which you might want that.”

“But that doesn’t change that it happened,” Mia said.

“No, but because you’d be dead, you wouldn’t care anymore. Dead people are selfish pricks that way.”

“Dead people don’t exist.”

“That was a joke. Jesus.”

There was silence.

“So you’d try to kill yourself if that happened to you?” Mia asked after a while, tilting her head.

He winced. “Uh. Yeah, I guess. Seems less painful than the alternative, in any case.”

She considered it. “But he was just in pain. He didn’t even die.”

“Well,” Dave said, “for my parts, I’d try to stick the knife somewhere fatal. That’s where the guy in the movie went wrong.”

Mia nodded slowly. “So it was because he was bad at anatomy.”

He paused. “In a sense, I guess you could say that.”

She was looking thoughtfully at him now. “What if you didn’t have a knife?”

“Oh, Jesus.” He scratched at his hair. “I don’t know. I mean, what would you do? How the **** are you supposed to know what you’d actually do in some situation like that?”

“I’d kill them,” she said, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

“Well, okay, but what if you had no –” Though it wasn’t like she needed to be armed. “Look, what if they’d just cut off your scythes, or something, and…”

“I could still fight them. I’m strong.”

“There’d be too many of them, okay? Or they’d have, I don’t know, knocked you unconscious and then tied you up with unbreakable rope beforehand. What would you do then?”

She considered it for a moment. “Nothing,” she then said, shrugging. “There wouldn’t be anything to do.”

“Nothing,” he repeated. He took a breath and expelled it in a sigh. “Yeah, I guess I’d be doing nothing too.” He stared at the road ahead. “Well, ****.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

He looked at her in exasperation. “Look, Mia, can we please just talk about something other than being stuck in a bad horror movie?”

She tilted her head. “Why?”

“Well, it’s just…” He gestured vaguely at her. “Imagining that… This stuff could never actually happen and it makes me queasy, okay?”

“It could happen. There are plenty of nutjobs out there.”

“Mia, just…”

“Many of them want the Pokémorphs dead. And you, too.”

“Will you just shut the **** up about that? Christ.”

She looked at him but didn’t say anything; after a moment she turned towards the passenger-side window.

He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay,” said Mia, her tone indifferent as ever. Knowing her, she probably didn’t even know what he was sorry about. He didn’t know why he bothered.

“Maybe we can see another movie sometime,” he offered as he stopped the car to let her out.

“That would be nice,” she replied before she slammed the door.



The next one is a bit less completely silly than the others, as unlike them it takes place post-chapter seven (specifically, the night after the end of chapter nine); there's a lot more general misery involved, and there's actual narration that's not just to provide beats in the conversation. It is still mostly about Dave and Mia talking, but they're not quite talking about any one thing in particular and it's the odd one out in general, so it doesn't adhere to the title pattern.

Chapter 9.5

He didn’t know why they got him to watch Mia and Lucy that night. He wasn’t even sure why they needed watching at all; Cheryl hadn’t really made clear what they were doing. What the **** could they be doing at a time like this that warranted babysitting, even? (Oh, he could think of things, but he liked to think their sex life wasn’t that interesting – though he didn’t like to think of their sex life at all, really – and by all appearances she had used to agree. And there were better times for that than when there was a crazed murderer on the loose, for ****’s sake.)

But he’d agreed to it anyway, because it was Cheryl, and he had to make up for last night somehow, and the girls were probably more of a target than she and Howard were anyway: she was probably safer without them than with. Maybe Mia and Lucy were safer with him, too; he did have cops hanging around his house. Or maybe being with him just made them all a juicier target. It was hard to tell.

It was both disturbing and fascinating, watching the two of them play; Lucy could do the creepiest **** while wearing the happiest, most innocent-looking smile in the known universe, and Mia got a funny, predatory glint in her eye every time she prepared to pounce on her sister, her slightest movements eerily precise and calculated. He wasn’t that often around them playing together. Seeing Mia look something resembling actually happy was a nice change; Lucy usually seemed pretty happy, but with Mia she was positively ecstatic. They were a strange pair, somehow complementing one another despite that the only thing they had in common was being really ****ing creepy in their own different ways.

He made steak for dinner, anticipating Mia would love it rare, and was satisfied to find he was right on that count. He drank a few beers with it, maybe a few more than he meant to. At some point Lucy insisted she was supposed to be going to bed, so he told her to go do that. (Maybe he should’ve had something like that in place for Jean. She always stayed up too late.) Mia remained up, watching the second half of the movie that was on TV with him (some vapid **** about how true love conquers all, vaguely salvaged by the lead actress’s cleavage; he couldn’t imagine why Mia would prefer it over watching paint dry, but she sat there anyway until the end) while he had a few more drinks.

“So, uh,” he said as he muted the sickeningly heartfelt end credits music, “did your parents mention what they were doing tonight?”

She shook her head.

“Nothing about why they wanted me to take you?”

“Mom thought you were lonely and probably needed company.”

He looked at her and blinked. “Well, that’s bullshit,” he said after a moment, taking a sip from the can he was holding. Mia nodded vaguely, still with her eyes on the scrolling text on the screen.

“I mean,” he went on after a second, “I guess that’s nice of her, but… what the ****.” He sipped a little more, thinking. “She didn’t, uh, seem upset or anything, did she?”

Mia shrugged. “Not particularly.”

“Did she talk about last night?”

Mia shook her head. He wasn’t sure if he felt better or worse about that.

“What about your dad? Did he seem more inclined to kill me than usual?” The idea of Howard wanting to kill somebody drew an involuntary chuckle out of him. “Or, I don’t know, give me an annoyed look?”

She shrugged.

“No? Well, that’s good. I don’t know what I’d do if he gave me an annoyed look.”

Mia looked at him with that subtly puzzled expression of hers.

“Yes, that was a joke.”

He sipped his drink. Her gaze flicked disinterestedly around the room, probably looking for insects to murder.

“That’s the thing about your dad,” he said. “He doesn’t know how to be truly angry at somebody. I mean, Jesus. It’s not natural. Sometimes I want to, I don’t know, greet him every day with a punch in the face just to marvel at how not-pissed-off he’d be, except that’d be like kicking a ****ing puppy – I bet he’d like, ask me to please stop and then quietly resign from his job and turn to… ****ing gardening or something.”

Mia didn’t look like she was listening, but he knew she was (she was always listening to everything, even if her attention seemed to be elsewhere), and he didn’t really give a damn anyway.

“I mean, ****,” he continued, “I can’t even tell if he knows, because there wouldn’t be any goddamn difference. It creeps the hell out of me.”

“Knows what?”

“Hm?”

“You can’t tell if he knows what?”

“Never mind.” He rubbed his nose. “****.”

The good thing about Mia was that you could say ‘never mind’ and she actually wouldn’t mind. Her eyes flicked towards the muted commercial on the television, the kind of bullshit ad where there was no Earthly way to tell what they were advertising (a group of men in crudely made Pokémon costumes sitting around a poker table – what the ****). He lifted the can to his lips again.

“Why do you drink so much beer?” Mia asked suddenly without looking at him.

He started to laugh. “You always just ask the best questions, don’t you?”

She turned towards him, apparently expecting an answer; he sighed. “I like it and sometimes it makes me feel less like ****. What’s not to like?”

“I want to try it.”

He blinked. “Uh.” He scratched at his chin for a second, considering it. “Well, who am I to pretend to be a responsible parent. Whatever. Why not.”

He pushed the next can he’d gotten out towards her on the table. She reached for it, not in a hurry, looked at it for a moment, opened it and sniffed at it, expression observant and focused. He watched her with amusement as he emptied his own drink.

After a bit more examination, Mia finally raised the can to her mouth and took a small sip. She seemed to spend a second evaluating it before she wrinkled her nose and put the can back down.

Dave chuckled. “It’s probably for the best. It’s bad for you.”

“Then why do you drink it?”

“Because I’m an adult with fully-developed frontal lobes and that means I’m free to **** up my own life however I ****ing please without it being anybody else’s problem.”

She shrugged.

“By the way, uh, you don’t have to tell your mom and dad that I gave you beer.”

Mia nodded. After a moment she said, “My parents are scared.”

Well, ****.

“You’re not going to drink that, are you?” he asked, reaching for the can Mia had put away. She shook her head and let him take it.

He took a sip. Mia was still looking at him, in that expectant way. “Aren’t we all?” he said, reaching for the remote to turn off the TV. “Psycho murderer on the loose, Brian’s ****ing dead, we could be next. Anybody would be a little unnerved.”

She tilted her head.

“I mean,” he went on, “maybe not you, because you’re pretty ****ing special in more ways than one, but…” He gulped down a bit more of his drink. “See, fear is just a defensive response in the brain. It goes ‘there’s danger, so try not to get killed’. That’s all there is to it.”

Mia looked at him for a moment. “You’re scared too,” she then said.

“What’s your point?” he replied, irritation seeping into his voice. “What the **** do you expect us to do? Not care that somebody ****ing shot Brian? I mean, Christ, he wasn’t even… they weren’t even going for him, they were going for me.” Another quick sip. “That’s the sickest part of all. I mean, ****. You know, maybe there is a god, except he’s a sadistic bastard who saw one of his followers aiming a gun at me and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be ****ing hilarious if it hit the most self-sacrificing nice-guy on the planet instead?’” He laughed mirthlessly at the idea.

“That’s dumb,” Mia said, her tone annoyed. “Coincidences happen both ways. Somewhat unlikely incidents are not evidence for the existence of a supernatural, physics-defying intelligence.”

Dave took a long sip of his drink. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “I know that.”

There was a long silence. Mia looked straight ahead, at the blank television; he imagined she was mulling over whether to forgive him for that grievous lapse in rationality. It was probably too late to tell her it was a joke.

“If they come here,” she said after a while, turning back towards him, “I’ll defend you.”

He blinked. “Uh. That’s…” His imagination saw Mia leaping in front of a bullet, bleeding, dying. “…Thanks.”

“I could beat them,” she insisted as if she knew exactly what he’d been thinking. “I’m fast.”

“No, you couldn’t,” he said. “They have guns. You’re fast but last time I checked you couldn’t break the ****ing sound barrier.”

“They have human reaction times,” she replied. “Imperfect aim. They can be distracted.”

“I don’t give a **** if they can be distracted. You’d die. Maybe you could put up a fight for a few seconds, but they’d ****ing shoot you.”

“It’s a calculated risk.”

“Calculated ****ing nothing.”

“If I didn’t act, they would kill all of us anyway.”

“So defend yourself, for Christ’s sake.” He’d raised his voice a bit more than he intended; he tried to tone it down. “I don’t want anybody else getting shot to death in my place, okay?”

He drank more, quickly; Mia looked at him with something like faint curiosity. “I’d be defending all of us,” she said. “It amounts to the same thing. You’re just arguing with what to call it.”

“Well, then don’t call it defending me.”

“Why?”

Because,” he began exasperatedly, “because can we talk about something else? Christ.”

He finished his drink and walked to the fridge to get another one.

“You’re dodging the question,” said Mia when he returned. Her expression was becoming frustrated. “Is it because of the beer?”

“No, it’s not the ****ing beer,” he said as he sat down and took a sip from the bottle he’d retrieved.

“Alcohol interferes with judgement and reasoning.”

He started to giggle. (Okay, so maybe he was a little drunk.) Mia frowned at him, annoyed.

“If you’re not going to make any sense, I’m going to sleep,” she threatened.

Maybe it’d be nice if she went to bed and left him alone, he thought. And at the same time he really, really didn’t want her to.

“No, stay,” he said, waving his hand vaguely at her as she was preparing to stand up. “You don’t… I’m fine. Don’t go.”

She sat tentatively back down, looking warily at him. “Why not?”

“It’s, uh…” he began before taking a sip from his bottle. “I like talking to you, all right? You’re smart and you’re interesting and let’s face it, it’s a shitload better than talking to myself because I’m kind of a dick.”

She shrugged. “I enjoy talking to you, when you make sense.”

He chuckled a little. “Thanks. I’ll try.”

There was silence. He wondered if she’d return to the same question as before, but she didn’t. Knowing her, she’d probably never actually cared about the answer in the first place.

“Do you think it’s just one killer?” she asked at long last.

He sighed and took a sip of his drink before answering. “I don’t know,” he said. “Could be one guy, could be a global ****ing government conspiracy for all we know.”

She nodded thoughtfully.

“That’s the worst part. We don’t know jack ****, and here we are hiding away from… you know, whatever the ****’s actually going on, completely in the dark, just… waiting for somebody else to die. I mean, what are the odds they’ll catch the guy, just like that, based on the information they have now? It’s basically zero. Somebody else is going to get killed, sooner or later, and I just…” He took a quick swig from his bottle. “****.”

Everything was silent, even the usual noise of traffic absent; Mia gazed at the empty TV screen, expression focused but faraway. (He knew she was listening; she always listened. She was the only person who ever listened.) He looked at the screen with her and didn’t mean to say anything else.

“I don’t know what I’d do if they got Cheryl,” he then heard himself blurting out all of a sudden, in a strained, shaky voice that sounded absolutely nothing like him, and **** he was drunk; he should go to bed already and sleep it off and maybe tomorrow he’d actually want to get up again (maybe) –

“If they killed you,” Mia said, her voice cool but chillingly devoid of her usual indifference, “I’d hunt them down.”

He looked at her and knew he shouldn’t find that weirdly touching and ought to say something about revenge being an archaic, morally obsolete practice and that she’d go to jail – something reasonable that she’d understand – but instead he just put his beer down on the table and said, quietly, “They’ll kill you. Please don’t.”

He expected protests, whys, insistence that she could take on armed murderers and win, but this time, she just didn’t reply. He exhaled slowly, half in relief, half in exhaustion, rubbing his forehead. (He was so ****ing tired.)

“Listen, Mia,” he said after composing himself for a moment, “we should probably go to sleep.”

She nodded absent-mindedly and stood up. He was glad he’d prepared the extra mattress in Jean’s room before dinner; he wasn’t sure he’d have survived trying to arrange that now.

He didn’t know why, but as he collapsed into his bed he felt somewhat better than last night.

-------

When Cheryl came to pick them up the next morning, he dragged himself out of bed through a pounding headache to answer the door. The girls were ready and out in the corridor within minutes; Cheryl lingered for a moment at the door, looking at him.

“How did it go?” she asked quietly, shifting a little; her arms hugged her coat, like she was cold.

“Fine,” he replied and looked at her, trying to get words around something intelligent with whatever parts of his brain were not in the process of being beaten into a pulp. “Was that,” he mumbled eventually, “did you get me to do that… for my sake?”

One corner of her mouth twitched into a faint half-smile, an expression nobody else could have made so weirdly attractive. He looked down and shook his head. “I didn’t deserve that.”

“I did it anyway,” she said simply, without affection, not disagreeing.

He looked into her eyes again for a moment – tired, worried, haunted eyes – and said the only thing he could think of: “Thanks.”

He wanted to add an apology for the day before yesterday, too, but she looked away, sighing, and said, “Goodbye, Dave.”

“Bye,” he said, and then the three of them were gone.
 
Last edited:

elyvorg

somewhat backwards.
Seeing as it's your birthday, I thought this would be the perfect time for me to finally get around to finishing that rambly, fangirly, overanalytical thing for the final chapter that I said I was working on. Happy birthday again! :3

(The paragraph about Dave was written a while before I read his character ramble or indeed any of the silly extras, I believe, so.)

For me, this chapter worked pretty well as a final wrap-up to the story. I think a lot of it was down to some of Dave's speeches - the one he gave to Jean about playing heroes comes to mind, as does him defending why the morphs did what they did in front of the commitee - that were just really well worded and rather worked to sum up the point of the story and why things happened how they did. And then another thing I loved from Dave was his inner monologue about the morphs in that last scene - I don't think I ever really fully appreciated just how much they meant to him until now! 'Cause throughout most of the fic he just seemed like a clever but arrogant guy who does stupid things when he's drunk; yeah, it was mentioned several times that he did a lot for the morphs, but I'm not sure I ever quite latched onto that as much as I should have, and I might just have brushed it off as him trying to make himself look good, or something. But damn it, Dave really cares about those kids. Beyond that, he seems to be the only person open-minded enough to feel that not only are the Pokémorphs perfectly decent people deserving of equal rights, but that they shouldn't even have to try and hide the non-"normal" things about them just because society wants them to; they should be allowed to embrace how different and unique they are without society being assholes about it. And I really can't help but admire Dave for that, no matter how much of an arrogant jerk he seems to be the rest of the time. xP (That and he really was rather adorable when he was breaking down like that at the end.)

Jean, also, surprised me somewhat in this chapter. I imagine it was due to her evolution - either having something that horrific happen directly to her gave her a dose of reality and awakened her to the fact that life sucked sometimes, or maybe she's simply more mature now that she's a half-Ninetales. But a few of the things she did seemed rather grown up for her usual standards, showing that maybe there's something behind that cutesy airheadedness of hers now. The way she suddenly snapped back into cheeriness in the first Dave and Jean scene, for example, where Dave marvels at whether it's genuine or she's just faking it to cope; I like to imagine she's faking it not just to help herself cope but to help him cope too, after vaguely noticing how upset he was about Mia. Then there's the last scene where she just hugs Dave and tells him it's going to be okay; for a child to comfort a parent figure, the ones who are supposed to be strong and invincible and make everything okay for them and not the other way around, takes a lot of maturity and strength.

The whole "house arrest" situation, or whatever you want to call it, doesn't seem like too bad a fate for them in the end, at least when you look at it from most of the morphs' point of view and not Dave's hopeless wishes that the world could just be nicer than this. Because since it isn't, I can see what most of the morphs are getting at in that their lives were going to suck anyway and this isn't all that much worse. The one I feel most sorry for in this regard is Peter - it kinda sucks for him that he can't be a trainer any more and that he's mostly cooped up inside when he loves the outdoors. Especially when you consider that he probably has some of the least "dangerous" powers, he doesn't really deserve to have had that freedom suddenly taken away from him, poor guy.

But meanwhile! Easily my favourite scene in all this - in fact, quite probably my favourite scene in the whole fic now - was that last one between Jack and Gabriel. The fact that you found parts of it challenging doesn't seem to have stopped you from doing it justice at all. Oddly enough, and it may have been me being slow on the uptake, unlike Sike Saner I didn't quite twig that Jack was serious about jumping straight away. I just sort of got it in a slow stream of realisation, first that he's thinking about it, then that he's starting to act on those thoughts and then that, oh god, he might actually do it if something doesn't stop him... I think it was the narration and the way it focused on his fascination with the violence of it rather than anything directly to do with him dying; it really gave the impression that it's less that he actively wants to die and more that his Pokémon side's morbid fascination has brought him here and led him to do this when combined with the fact that he no longer actively wants to live. And so this became one of those times when I'm so into a story that I'm mentally shouting to the characters as I read, in this case desperately urging Jack not to do it because goddammit what about Gabriel? (as a matter of fact, I technically knew he couldn't go through with it, because you'd mentioned something to me about the two of them hugging each other and that hadn't happened yet, but I was clearly so immersed that that just didn't matter as I read.) So I was very much relieved when Gabriel stopped him - and I love that the thing that jolted Jack back into reality was the thought of dragging his best friend to his death, too.

So I find both Jack and Gabriel completely adorable, which I totally haven't already told you enough times. In Jack's case, I love idealistic characters, I love characters who can't resist wanting to help people they care about when they're in trouble, and I love characters who unwittingly bring horrible things upon themselves due to their own actions and decisions. Jack in a nutshell! - thanks at least in part to the mental side-effects of him being a Pokémorph. Although actually, one thing I've noticed about his competetive, violent urges is that they don't just seem like an almost external thing brought on by his separate Pokémon side, like they might if this situation were in the hands of another writer; they feel absolutely like an intrinsic part of Jack, just as much as anything else like his geekiness or his love of videogames is a part of him (although I do kind of wonder now if he got his love of videogames in the first place as an outlet for these competetive urges! but yeah). Which just makes the misery he ended up putting himself through all the more tragic, as it feels like it happened simply because he's Jack and that's what he'd always have done - same with him trying to kill himself! - and d'aww. :<

Gabriel, meanwhile, this chapter managed to make me love even more than I already did, what with him turning out to be incredibly messed-up like this. Another thing I tend to enjoy is when characters I like suddenly show themselves to be dangerous and frightening, so the way part of Gabriel's mind actually revels in his destructive power is all aaaa - meanwhile the rest of him is horrified by himself which is also very fun! I like to think that he's not a monster, at least so long as he remains afraid of being one, because that means that most of him knows full well how terrible his powers could potentially make him and therefore isn't a bad person at all; the feelings of euphoria that his Pokémon side can give him aren't his fault. (Incidentally, I seem to remember Brian's inner monologue way back in something like chapter 6 talking about how Gabriel may be the freakiest physically but unlike a lot of the other morphs he has an entirely human personality; now I realise that this was actually just because his Slugma cells were so undernourished that his Pokémon side wasn't strong enough to be part of his mind - you totally had this planned, didn't you?) But Gabriel still doesn't seem convinced that he isn't a monster what with the rather forced way he responded to Jack's reassurance at the end there, and he's just all confused and adorable and awww. :< Also it was totally Gabriel himself who told the commitee that he didn't stop burning Isaac until he was dead - there was no way Jack would ever have told them that - and the fact that he told them even though it could get him in huge trouble and he could easily have lied about it is so fun and self-loathing. That and I have convinced myself that the throwaway mention of Gabriel losing on purpose at the videogame is his desperate attempt to subdue his competetive Pokémon side by not giving it what it wants and not letting himself feel that dangerous euphoria of victory again. Which I imagine may not have been intentional on your part but is totally my headcanon.

So Jack and Gabriel both hate themselves and each cares way more for the other than he does for himself and the only thing that's keeping both of them going is each other, and this is why they are absolutely one of the most adorable platonic friendships ever! The end. :3


Now that I've rambled as much as I can without being completely incoherent and disjointed, I guess I'll vaguely attempt at giving some help for the rewrite. The thing that most struck me as off with the first half of the fic was the endless morph introductions. It wasn't the introductions themselves as such, since obviously you had to introduce the morphs, and a lot of them did result in me growing very fond of the morph in question in a short space of time - it was more the way they were done, as if you obligatorily had to do them rather than them being an organic part of the story. For example, one of the introductions that felt the least problematic in this way was Peter's, because it involved him reacting to Brian's death and was therefore part of the events that had begun in the chapter before. Mia's also doesn't feel particularly off because the whole of chapter 5 was pretty much her own little plot arc with her expulsion, so it seemed to have a purpose and a story to tell other than just "Hey guys, meet Mia". So if you can somehow restructure the morph introductions so that they feel like they're part of the plot rather than just "oh, and here's another morph" - although admittedly I don't know how you could do this as there isn't really much plot going on prior to Brian's death, but I imagine you'd be able to figure something out - then it should help the first half of the fic feel like a much more coherent whole.


But yes. You have written an incredibly fun, interesting, moving story (that last Jack and Gabriel scene made me cry, remember!) filled with adorable, fascinating and likeable characters, and you should be very proud. :3
 

Sike Saner

Peace to the Mountain
Heh. I think that I will never tire of Mia's ability to technically make sense in a way that breaks my brain in a way that people usually have to make no sense at all to do. If that makes any sense. X3;

Other highlights:

Lucy could do the creepiest **** while wearing the happiest, most innocent-looking smile in the known universe, and Mia got a funny, predatory glint in her eye every time she prepared to pounce on her sister, her slightest movements eerily precise and calculated.

And that's pretty much why I like their interactions so darned much. :D

“What about your dad? Did he seem more inclined to kill me than usual?” The idea of Howard wanting to kill somebody drew an involuntary chuckle out of him. “Or, I don’t know, give me an annoyed look?”

She shrugged.

“No? Well, that’s good. I don’t know what I’d
do if he gave me an annoyed look.”

Heh. X3

“That’s the thing about your dad,” he said. “He doesn’t know how to be truly angry at somebody. I mean, Jesus. It’s not natural. Sometimes I want to, I don’t know, greet him every day with a punch in the face just to marvel at how not-pissed-off he’d be, except that’d be like kicking a ****ing puppy – I bet he’d like, ask me to please stop and then quietly resign from his job and turn to… ****ing gardening or something.”

That struck me as amusing, too. Especially the "just to marvel at how not-pissed-off he'd be" part and the bit about gardening.

Her eyes flicked towards the muted commercial on the television, the kind of ******** ad where there was no Earthly way to tell what they were advertising (a group of men in crudely made Pokémon costumes sitting around a poker table – what the ****).

That's... certainly an interesting image. XD Also, I find crappy costumes hilarious. I just do.

“I want to try it.”

He blinked. “Uh.” He scratched at his chin for a second, considering it. “Well, who am I to pretend to be a responsible parent. Whatever. Why not.”


Well, at least he's honest about it. X3


Seeing more Dave-and-Mia-related extras made me smile. :3 Thanks for posting them!
 
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Dragonfree

Just me
elyvorg: Eeeee! <3 Thanks for the awesome rambly review! I love awesome rambly reviews. :D Seriously, best birthday present.

And then another thing I loved from Dave was his inner monologue about the morphs in that last scene - I don't think I ever really fully appreciated just how much they meant to him until now! 'Cause throughout most of the fic he just seemed like a clever but arrogant guy who does stupid things when he's drunk; yeah, it was mentioned several times that he did a lot for the morphs, but I'm not sure I ever quite latched onto that as much as I should have, and I might just have brushed it off as him trying to make himself look good, or something. But damn it, Dave really cares about those kids. Beyond that, he seems to be the only person open-minded enough to feel that not only are the Pokémorphs perfectly decent people deserving of equal rights, but that they shouldn't even have to try and hide the non-"normal" things about them just because society wants them to; they should be allowed to embrace how different and unique they are without society being assholes about it. And I really can't help but admire Dave for that, no matter how much of an arrogant jerk he seems to be the rest of the time. xP (That and he really was rather adorable when he was breaking down like that at the end.)
As the character ramble must have made abundantly clear, yessss. He cares so much and is such a complete idealist at heart underneath all those layers of bitterness and despair and depression! And it's so hard to communicate any of that efficiently to the reader when he is being himself but it worked and yay. :D

The way she suddenly snapped back into cheeriness in the first Dave and Jean scene, for example, where Dave marvels at whether it's genuine or she's just faking it to cope; I like to imagine she's faking it not just to help herself cope but to help him cope too, after vaguely noticing how upset he was about Mia.
:D

I think it was the narration and the way it focused on his fascination with the violence of it rather than anything directly to do with him dying; it really gave the impression that it's less that he actively wants to die and more that his Pokémon side's morbid fascination has brought him here and led him to do this when combined with the fact that he no longer actively wants to live.
Very, very nice observation! Jack's not really the type of person to actually, intellectually consider suicide, but on some deeper level he does want to die; it just doesn't properly surface because that's a very, very frightening thought for him. The morbid what-if is a sort of lead-in that's letting him coax himself into getting consciously comfortable with the idea, and throughout most of the scene, as you note, he never actually admits to himself that he wants to die. When Gabriel gets there, though, the part of him that's telling him It's the only way. You have to. Jump! is definitely bona fide suicidal - you wouldn't get that sort of thought there otherwise.

(as a matter of fact, I technically knew he couldn't go through with it, because you'd mentioned something to me about the two of them hugging each other and that hadn't happened yet, but I was clearly so immersed that that just didn't matter as I read.)
D: Sorry for almost spoiling it for you! And glad it worked out anyhow.

and I love that the thing that jolted Jack back into reality was the thought of dragging his best friend to his death, too.
:D I love how you notice things.

(although I do kind of wonder now if he got his love of videogames in the first place as an outlet for these competetive urges! but yeah)
He liked video games before the competitive urges began to manifest in a real, conscious way - that sort of came with puberty - but on a subtler, subconscious level, who knows?

(Incidentally, I seem to remember Brian's inner monologue way back in something like chapter 6 talking about how Gabriel may be the freakiest physically but unlike a lot of the other morphs he has an entirely human personality; now I realise that this was actually just because his Slugma cells were so undernourished that his Pokémon side wasn't strong enough to be part of his mind - you totally had this planned, didn't you?)
Yup! The scene where Gabriel discovers his powers in the church was actually written waaaay in advance, long before I'd properly figured out how the hell he'd even get there. I had so much fun with foreshadowing that.

But Gabriel still doesn't seem convinced that he isn't a monster what with the rather forced way he responded to Jack's reassurance at the end there, and he's just all confused and adorable and awww. :< Also it was totally Gabriel himself who told the commitee that he didn't stop burning Isaac until he was dead - there was no way Jack would ever have told them that - and the fact that he told them even though it could get him in huge trouble and he could easily have lied about it is so fun and self-loathing.
:D :D

That and I have convinced myself that the throwaway mention of Gabriel losing on purpose at the videogame is his desperate attempt to subdue his competetive Pokémon side by not giving it what it wants and not letting himself feel that dangerous euphoria of victory again. Which I imagine may not have been intentional on your part but is totally my headcanon.
In my mind he was doing it for Jack's sake, in a desperate attempt to make him feel that victorious euphoria so that he wouldn't want to kill himself anymore. But that works too! Alternative interpretations are good.

Yeah, I'd try to structure the introductions better. I already have some ideas - I hadn't actually nailed down their relationships with one another properly when I started, for instance, so I could make much better use of that in the rewrite. (I should introduce Jack and Gabriel's friendship much earlier, considering how important it then suddenly becomes - I think the first time they interact on-screen or are even vaguely hinted to know one another is chapter eight.) And there will be more plot. I'm hoping to include a little more of the Church of Holy Truth, and make them a little less flat in the process.

Thanks again for the awesome review! Best birthday present. :3


Sike Saner: Glad you enjoyed it! :3 And that you're entertained by the extras, in general; I love writing them but they're way pointless as far as the actual fic goes and I never really expect anyone else to give a damn.

Heh. I think that I will never tire of Mia's ability to technically make sense in a way that breaks my brain in a way that people usually have to make no sense at all to do. If that makes any sense. X3;
She's remarkably consistent and reasonable in her own completely loony way. It's very entertaining to write her, just for the sake of thinking up how she'd actually view various things. x3

That's... certainly an interesting image. XD Also, I find crappy costumes hilarious. I just do.
Believe it or not, that part was actually based on some actual Icelandic ads. I think they're for a phone company? Not Pokémon costumes, but yeah. Though the one with the costumes might have been a different one from the one with the poker. I'm not sure.

Thanks awesomely for reviewing! :3
 

Draco Malfoy

-REaction
This is an example of how you might reply to an Open Participant as a Closed Participant. Dragonfree is now going to play the part of a sample open participant to my closed participant.

This is a review exchange review.
Fics: "Under the Same Sky", a PG-15 Chaptered Story (Currently at Three Chapters, and 20,000-ish words).

Summary: A nameless teenager is heralded as the Champion of the Unova League. However, he's not ready to bear that cross. In order to deal with his inner demons, he absconds to Undella Town - and meets a certain blonde Sinnoh Champion.

Review Wanted: A review similar to mine. I provided quote-by-quote analysis for four chapters, which should be similar to my three chapters in length. Generally, I want some nitpicks as provided: grammar mistakes and syntactical errors are both areas of focus. Other elements I'd like you to perhaps concentrate on are plotline, premise, and description.

And my review begins. Hang on to your seat-belts, because this is going to be a bumpy but exciting ride. =O

Chapter One:

It was a rhetorical question, of course. Dave and his girlfriend were now at some fancy restaurant, celebrating their anniversary. He had been practically begged to go; Dave had given him a long speech about what his relationship meant to him. And in some moment of pity, Mr. Edwards had agreed to it, figuring it would perhaps, maybe, if he looked optimistically at it, not be [You forgot a ‘Space’ here] quite as bad as it sounded. Damn it all. It was even worse.

-Comma required, since it is the couple, not the restaurant, which is celebrating the anniversary.
-Both ‘Dave’ and ‘Brian Edwards’ are ‘he’s. It makes it a little confusing to use the pronoun all the time.
-Self-explanatory.

“Good evening, and welcome to Friday Night with James Sullivan!” the host said suddenly, indicating that they were on air. “As most of you will already know, there has been much recent controversy around a team of scientists working for Heywood Labs! According to their spokesman and leader, David Ambrose, the group actually managed to create ‘Pokémorphs’, fetuses with spliced human and Pokémon DNA, which appear to be growing normally. In particular, the controversy is about this statement you will see here!”

Good things and bad. I liked the ‘Corny Collins’ vibe from Sullivan; it imbues the story with a nice atmospheric beginning. However, I did feel that it was an Info Dump, Exposition conversation. Couldn’t you have split it a little, so the information isn’t too daunting to process in one go? Perhaps include a description about the camera crew, before proceeding with the rest of the information.

“It… it seemed like a much better idea at the time,” he said stupidly. “We’d had a little to drink that night since it was Dave’s birthday – he always gets weird ideas when he’s drunk – and it was just so obvious, I mean, look at all those book series – and after getting the idea and figuring out how it was possible in the party, we just figured the next day, hey, why not…” What the hell was he saying?

Hannah gave him a disgusted frown and looked at the camera. “Drunk scientists who want to imitate bestseller book series in some sad attempt to get attention make genetic experiments with unborn human children, and now, to top it all, they’re going to be murdering them. Clearly this is only another example of the godlessness of some of the men we call intellectuals today. We cannot let them do this.”

Nice bit of conversation here. I chuckled a little. Edwards is a little zany, isn’t he?

Damn it.

Damn it all.

****ing hell.

Stars can be avoided through the use of Size tags. Unmodulated swears don’t break immersion. =)

“You’ve really ****ed us up, Brian.”

“I know,” Brian said miserably. “She was just making so much sense and being so calm that I just…”

“Making sense?” the phone shouted at him. “She was making exactly no sense at all! You didn’t even say half of the stuff we talked about! And for Christ’s sake – well, not his, specifically, but you know what I mean – babbling on about how I have weird ideas when I’m drunk? What the ****?”

I know that this is more of a personal quibble, but why would Jesus exist in the Pokemon Universe? It seems a bit weird. I recognize that the proclamation is a rhetorical device and that most readers wouldn’t be fazed, but it’s a minor problem with me.

You seriously ****ed us up, man. Remind me never to make you represent us again.”

Refer to above.

Overall, a decent start to an interesting premise. I had to trudge through some of the prose, mainly because I didn’t find Brian Edwards a palatable or interesting character. He felt bland and boring to me. Yes, I know you intended that, but the Chapter was through his POV, which did weigh more the narrative. However, your concept is fascinating. PokeMorphs and the political (and humorous) implications? Bumbling, drunk scientists without scruples?

Hell yes.

Chapter Two:

He pressed a key on his laptop. On the smooth, white wall behind him appeared the cover illustration of ‘Sarah Hooter and the Rocket Experiment’: a sexy teenage girl with Vulpix ears, a tuft of red hair that organized itself into unnaturally orderly curls on the top of her head, and six curly, reddish-brown tails fanning out behind her as she struck a pose. A couple of people snickered.

“Ridiculous, isn’t it? Well, it’s possible. We proved that here at Heywood Labs – of course the whole thing with Team Rocket suddenly turning an ordinary girl into half a Vulpix is ******** and the real method is a lot different, but the end result is the same. We even specifically created a Vulpix morph who is likely to look very similar to Sarah Hooter here when she grows up.”
[SPACE]
“Of course,” Dave added with emphasis, “we never intended for her ever to grow up. She’ll be made fun of like all hell at school. But outside pressure and… some inside goofs have forced us to raise the Pokémorphs, and that’s why we’re here. We are all responsible, and thus we need to fairly distribute the morphs between us for rearing. Any questions?”

-Self-explanatory.
-I added the Space because the paragraph of just talking was becoming very long. Readers with short-attention spans tune out, so please make it bite-sizes for us peons.
-Sarah Hooter summons very funny images.

It was Cheryl Jones, a woman in her thirties that Howard, a research assistant for Heywood Labs, had been seeing recently. She had also, according to Howard, always been passionately interested in the Pokémorph project. She was one of those intelligent blondes who wore glasses, liked to protest and did volunteer jobs.

-Too many dependent clauses in one short sentence. It reads a little awkwardly, because of the information overload. Separate it into two sentences, or two independent clauses.
-I like the name “Cheryl”, by the way. It evokes fond memories of the Eterna Forest from D/P/Pt.

Jane leant at him. “Maybe we should take her, honey.”

He turned around. “Why?”

-You lean “towards” somebody, not “at” them.

“Well,” he said. “The last one. The Slugma boy. The bad part is that he’s pretty much a total failure; it’s lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you look at it – that he’s survived at all to this point. For one thing, his skin is looking to be liquid – as in some kind of thick ooze. This ooze appears to slowly harden at room temperature, which would make him immobile unless his skin is rubbed or heated or something. In addition to that, his blood is far too hot, so he’s really just begging for some sort of organ failure at some point. The organs do seem to be developing some resistance to it, and we’ll have to hope that’s enough. Oh, and we had to take him out of the artificial uterus and put him in a heated glass cage. Somehow he’s already self-sustaining, although if something attacked him at this stage he’d obviously be completely helpless. We don’t even know if we should consider him already born or what, and we have no idea how his physical age is going to change. Basically we’ve got some sort of a human blob and we have no idea what is going to happen to it next.”

The spouses stared at him in horror.

“Yeah, his life is going to suck,” he agreed. “If for any reason you are ever going to try to mix a human being with a blob of lava in the future, don’t. But regardless, we can’t kill him, so somebody needs to take care of him if he survives.”

-“Ouch” for the Slugma boy, and the highlighted statement was pure win. It sounds like a Desperate Housewives or Stepford Wives moment. Gotta love the juxtaposition between absurdist events and middle-class behavior.

And poor Brian. Holistically, this was a stronger chapter than the one before. The interplay between the scientists and their spouses creates an interesting friction which gives traction to absurdist comedy such as the one that your premise proposes. The Morph Children are ridiculous in their descriptions, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Let’s see where we go.

Chapter Three:

“I can’t stand this, Dave!” Jane said desperately. Her smooth face was tearstruck and her beautiful blue eyes were red and puffy. “I hate that freak!”

“Please, Jane, be reasonable…” Dave began in the most soothing voice he could manage, but was cut off.

“Reasonable! It’s all you think about, isn’t it?” She sniffed. “Your precious science and career! Keeping a journal of every little thing that little ***** does! You write happily about how she’s teething, and meanwhile I’m getting hormone injections every day and her fangs are digging into my nipples, just because you still insist on her being fed ‘naturally’ for your stupid research! Everything was so much better before the freak came along and we could spend our time together without the stupid howls waking us up at night!”

-“Tearstruck” isn’t a word, while “tear-struck” is a compound word.
- Self-explanatory.
-The breastfeeding reference made me wince. It really did.

“No, it won’t,” she sobbed. “You said that last time, too, and it just stayed the same.”

“No, it didn’t, until you started complaining about nothing again! Why do you keep having these ridiculous hysteria fits about everything?” slipped out of Dave in frustration. He regretted it immediately; Jane pushed his hand off her shoulder and turned away.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean that…”

Jane threw the baby into his hands and stormed back into the apartment.

“Wait, Jane!” Dave called desperately, running in after her with the morph squirming in his hands. “I really didn’t mean it! I haven’t slept for days! I was just…”

“Goodbye, Dave,” she called over her shoulder.

“No, please, don’t leave…”

The door slammed. Dave stared at it.

He bit his lip and blinked a few times to clear his eyes out. “****,” he muttered.

-Self-explanatory
-Jane is becoming unhinged. We are starting to see the effects of raising PokeMorphs. Also, single male + baby = disaster awaiting.

****!” he screamed at the clothing rack. Then, at the bawling Vulpix morph in his hands, “I hope you’re happy, you little freak!”

She continued to howl for food. He looked at her for a few seconds and didn’t have the energy to be angry anymore. He quickly splashed some infant formula milk from the refrigerator into a baby bottle and fed her absent-mindedly; after a moment, he opened the refrigerator again and got out a few cans of beer that he put onto the table, before closing the fridge with his foot.

He suddenly realized that the little Vulpix girl was already asleep. Everything seemed so unreal that he hadn’t noticed.

****,” he muttered again, carried her into the bedroom and put her down on the bed before taking out his cellphone and entering Jane’s number. He slumped down on one of the couches in the living room, still staring at the number on the screen.

“Later,” he muttered to himself. “When she’s gotten over it.” Then he added, as if to reassure himself, “She always does.”

Admittedly, she had never before gone quite as far as to walk out of the apartment on him. She had locked herself in the bathroom and refused to come out, and she had verbally told him she was going to leave, but she had never actually left.

-Self-explanatory swears and some missing commas.
-The highlighted statement sounded strange to me. I would have done it this way:

“Fuck.”

Muttering under his breath, Dave carried the girl into the bedroom and put her down on the bed, before taking out his cellphone and entering Jane’s number.

Or

“Fuck,” muttered Dave, as he carried the girl into the bedroom. After putting her down on the bed, he pulled out his cellphone and entered Jane’s number.

Either way, it’s an awkward sentence. It’d be best if you fixed it, rather than me. I’m not as familiar with your writing style as you are, so you are the best person to make the final call.

“What is it you want this time?” he said disdainfully. “Need your diaper changed? More food, you greedy little *****? Or are you just screaming for your mommy because your daddy isn’t good enough for you?”

-Self-explanatory

The *****.

He closed the cellphone and threw it at the couch. “****ing *****!” he shouted at the phone.

He hurried over to the refrigerator and opened it, but didn’t find any alcohol. He closed it again and wasn’t sure what he’d do. Finally he went into the bedroom to the still-crying Pokémorph baby and collapsed onto the bed next to her.

“Jane…” he moaned. He was silent for a long while, listening obliviously to the cries of the little Vulpix girl.

“It’s just you and me now, isn’t it, little Jane?” he muttered, turning to the child. “Jane…”

He winced. “No, I really can’t call you Jane. Not quite that, anyway. Too much painful association.”

Dave looked at his adoptive daughter. Her tiny fangs were visible in her open mouth and whitish hair was already growing on her head and organizing itself into unnatural curls. He sat up and stroked her face carefully, scratching behind her triangular ear; her mouth latched on to his finger and instinctively started to suck on it. He smiled briefly and stroked her one soft, white tail that would one day split into six and gain color.

“How about something more like… Jean?”

Okay, I’m going to stop with noting all the swearwords. I’ve mentioned the problem already, so just assume what my stance is for the rest of them.

And a redhead girl called “Jean”? I shotgun calling the X-Men reference. =)

A strong chapter. Switching to Dave as a central character was a smart move; he is considerably more interesting than Brian, I’m afraid. The conversation between Dave and the Principal was intense, drawing interesting parallels with real life. The moment with the film studio also made me chuckle, because of the absurdity of it all.

Although I can see bucket-loads of drama, I can’t see some of the humor that your premise promises. Jane’s dramatic departure, the fracturing of a relationship, discrimination at the school… These are all heavy topics. If this was a drama fic, I’d be fine; however, since the chosen genre is (black) comedy, I was expecting some more humor.

It’s not a problem for now, but if it isn’t rectified soon, you may face troubles further down the line.

Chapter Four:

“The Pokémorphs,” he repeated. “Humans, though created in His image, should not play God, but those propagators of science and evolution of course disregard this as fantasy. I need only cite the very fourteenth Commandment: ‘The creatures shall be the humble servants and the men shall be their kind masters: they are distinct by their nature.’ It tells us that the Pokémonly and the humanly are to be separate. And we are again warned in the Book of Visions, 21.5: ‘And there will be no more distinction between the men and the monsters: the Machoke shall pose as man and lie with the woman as the man.’ By creating the Pokémorphs, they have blurred the natural border between humans and Pokémon, and thus brought us one step closer to the looming apocalypse prophesized in the Book of Visions.”

‘Book of Visions’? Sounds a lot like the Book of Revelations. Deliberate or incidental reference?

David Ambrose had to die.

Dun-Dun-duh! *Cue dramatic music* To be serious, it was a good sentence. Pithy and dramatic; doesn't it extol the virtues of shorter sentences, ay?

The rustling gave it away altogether too loudly, but the teacher had gotten so used to it that she only glanced briefly at Katherine, rolled her eyes quickly and continued talking.

Some of your sentences seem a bit too long. You can do with shortening some of them, at least so that they read awkwardly. So much had happened in that quote alone. I had to read it twice to gage what Katherine was doing – and that’s not good. It breaks immersion. It’s only my personal opinion, but think about it.

“Yes, I’m the Slugma Pokémorph,” Gabriel replied with a sigh. “Please try not to make me angry at any point in the future, because if my body temperature gets any higher than it is, I happen to have a very uncomfortably high risk of major organ failure.”

The kid ran for it. Gabriel smiled grimly after him.

“My life sucks,” he sighed as he headed towards his home.

Can you “sigh” words? You can sigh and then say something, or say something in a weary voice. But physically sighing words? It must belong to the school of “smiling” or “glaring” words.

I would remove that comma for something else.

Overall, I really felt for Gabriel in this chapter. The writing was stronger, but dragged a little in some portions. Those long, awkwardly-worded sentences are part of the problem; I had to read twice in Katherine’s section, and that really breaks immersion. You don’t want the reader to double-guess even basic actions, like moving a pencil. Please consider what I’m saying, at least for the future.

There were some great positives, though. The Slugma Morph only appeared for one scene, yet I already feel a greater emotional connection than I have for the other characters. The dialogue from him seems natural, which leads me to my point: you have a gift for dialogue. Your character say things that make sense and sound unforced. The exchanges between Dave and Jane exemplify my point; Jane was more than a paper cut-out, and Dave sounded like the harried significant other. Good dialogue leads to a greater suspension of disbelief, so well done.

The storyline itself is solid, and at this point, I like the direction this story is travelling. The religious subplot and the sociopolitical implications were skillfully woven in, so well done again. As a whole, I enjoyed Morphic at this point. Sure, there were some problems, but which story doesn’t?

Perhaps I’ll finishing reviewing the rest of the chapters at a later date. But for now, I shall close my book.

Cheers.
 
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Dragonfree

Just me
Thanks for your review, Draco Malfoy! I'll get my review of Under the Same Sky up as soon as possible.

Heh, you reviewed just the chapters I don't like. Oh, well. It's only fair.

On the swearing: yeah, I should probably go ahead and add in some tags to evade the censoring. It was laziness combined with the fact this isn't the main or only place I'm posting it so the uncensored version is on my site anyway, but it is distracting and over time has been bothering me more and more. Size tags actually aren't ideal, though, because not all the styles have the same default font size; in the Dark-type style (which I use), the ones you 'uncensored' show up with one larger letter, which is also distracting. I'm pretty sure it used to be possible to just insert something like an empty [noparse][/noparse] tag in the middle of the word, but last time I tried it that didn't work anymore, and I still haven't found a completely seamless replacement.

Draco Malfoy said:
Switching to Dave as a central character was a smart move; he is considerably more interesting than Brian, I’m afraid.
This is very much an ensemble story with POVs switching between most scenes, as you may have started to guess towards the end of what you read; Brian was only the POV character in the first chapter because he went to the talk show and the talk show was what I wanted to show. Since you appear to like Dave, you'll be happy to learn that he has more POV scenes than any other character in the fic overall.

Overlong sentences are a problem of mine. I like to think I've gotten a bit better with that in the four years since I wrote the early chapters, but yeah.

Draco Malfoy said:
Although I can see bucket-loads of drama, I can’t see some of the humor that your premise promises. Jane’s dramatic departure, the fracturing of a relationship, discrimination at the school… These are all heavy topics. If this was a drama fic, I’d be fine; however, since the chosen genre is (black) comedy, I was expecting some more humor.

It’s not a problem for now, but if it isn’t rectified soon, you may face troubles further down the line.
Yeeeah, the thing is this pretty much is a drama fic, believe it or not. When I started it I thought it was going to be mostly black comedy, but it ended up being more of a dark deconstructionist drama taking silly premises and making them into serious business, because I appear to be incapable of writing anything longer than a one-shot that my mind doesn't eventually decide to make depressing. I am planning a rewrite which would make the genre shift less jarring, but if you continue, just... be prepared, because it's only going to get less funny from here. Except for the Dave and Mia extras.

Draco Malfoy said:
‘Book of Visions’? Sounds a lot like the Book of Revelations. Deliberate or incidental reference?
Deliberate. This fictional religion is pretty much a Christianity Expy with Pokémon sprinkled on, and the Book of Visions is its equivalent of Revelations.

Draco Malfoy said:
Can you “sigh” words? You can sigh and then say something, or say something in a weary voice. But physically sighing words? It must belong to the school of “smiling” or “glaring” words.
Mm, it's not quite in the same category as using "smiling" or "glaring" as a dialogue tag, because when sighing you are expelling a breath and if you move your tongue and lips while doing so, words are going to come out. I do agree with your criticism in that that's hardly going to be sufficient for three syllables, however.

(Gabriel is also one of the most major characters, incidentally. If you like Jack too when he appears, I am going to be amused.)

Anyway, thanks again. These chapters are quite old and going to be very heavily changed in the rewrite anyway, but your comments are appreciated.
 
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Dragonfree

Just me
Hello, everyone! I just wrote a new extra. And then I realized I actually never posted the last extra I wrote. So here are both of them, if anybody still cares.

They also both use the new high-tech discovery of evading the censoring with font tags. So if it has been vitally important to your enjoyment of the fic so far that half of Dave's dialogue consists of asterisks, you have been warned!


The first one is, unusually, from Mia's point of view. Contains talk of sex, bloodlust and a complete veer off the initial subject.

Dave and Mia Discuss Relationships

There were a lot of things that puzzled Mia about people. She had learned to accept it long ago, of course, and she didn’t lose any sleep over it, but it frustrated her because she liked understanding things, and there were a lot of things that involved people behaving in puzzling ways that she didn’t entirely understand.

Today, for instance, she had noticed two girls in her class discreetly holding hands under the table and sitting a little closer to one another than they normally did and kissing behind the school building during recess, and that made her ask Dave, “What are relationships for?”

“It’s a sexual exclusivity thing,” he answered after a moment. “In our ancestors, because human kids are helpless as all **** for several years after being born, it was advantageous for fathers to help raise their children to make sure they survived to adulthood, only they don’t know it’s their kid unless the mother was only sleeping with them. Because it’s the mother’s kid too and she wants it to reach adulthood just as much, she also wants the father to stick around instead of just running off to **** somebody else. Pairing off into couples who mostly have sex with one another turns out to be a win-win, genes for latching onto one person of the opposite sex and being jealous start to dominate the gene pool, and here we are.”

“But there are two girls in my class who are in a relationship together.”

Dave raised his eyebrows, his lips curling into an amused smile for some reason. “Well, the beauty of evolution is that once you get past how brilliant it is, you realize it’s really pretty terrible at its job. That applies doubly to evolved behavior of any kind. The falling-in-love mechanism doesn’t know it’s supposed to be ensuring you have kids; it just makes you fall in love, and as a society we’ve advanced to the point where we don’t really give a damn what it was actually supposed to do anymore.”

Mia considered this. “So humans are still sexually exclusive even when they’re both girls or not having kids or can just have paternity tests and it doesn’t make sense.”

He tilted his head a little. “Well, it still makes sense, in a different way. People want to be happy, and evolution works on behavior by programming us to feel good and be happy when we do something it thinks is correlated with having more offspring, like being in monogamous relationships. What they feel doesn’t change just because we know why.”

Mia nodded, satisfied. People wanting to be happy made sense. A lot of bizarre things really boiled down to people trying to be happy.

Then she furrowed her brow, because on second thought this didn’t quite make sense either. “My mom slept with you even though she was with my dad, though.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dave said, suddenly defensive. “When are you going to shut the **** up about that?”

Mia frowned, looking out the window. Dave usually made sense to her, but whenever she brought this up he seemed to clam up in the stupidest way and act as if it wasn’t true when it obviously was. “Are you jealous because she’s also having sex with my dad?” she guessed after a pause.

“No!” he replied exasperatedly. The curious strain in his voice told her that was somewhat closer to the truth than he let on.

“I don’t think my dad’s jealous. He doesn’t act weird around her the way you do.”

“He has no reason to be jealous because he doesn’t – as far as I know – just, for ****’s sake, stop thinking about this.”

It irritated her when he got upset over stupid things, because she liked him and he was usually better at making sense than most people. Of all the times when people were puzzling it bothered her most when it was him. He was supposed to know better.

“Why would she sleep with you when she already had my dad and people are jealous and happier in monogamous relationships?”

Dave made a strange face somewhere midway between pained and amused that then turned into a stiff wince. “You tell me.”

Mia watched him with interest, starting to catch on. Dave was just confused because her mom didn’t make sense. That explained a lot. “Is it like a love triangle?” she asked after a pause, and suddenly Dave burst out laughing, in a bitter, hollow way.

“No. The only guy she loves is your dad, love triangles are a horrible plot device in bad movies, and I’d be very grateful if I never, ever had to hear that phrase out of the mouth of a half-Scyther again.”

She frowned again. “But then why bother having sex with someone else?”

Dave chuckled spitefully. “Maybe your dad has a small dick.”

She looked blankly at him and couldn’t imagine why that would be relevant.

“That was a joke,” he said, waving a hand at her. “Maybe. I don’t even know. ****.”

“Love seems very impractical,” she said after a moment. “There’s no point in it if it’s one-sided. There should be a mechanism to make you fall in love with the next best choice if the first one is unavailable, instead of being hung up on the same one.”

“Well, people generally do just that after some time,” Dave said, a little reluctantly.

“Why haven’t you, then?”

There was silence. She cocked her head, waiting for an answer, watching his reactions: his fingers clutching the steering wheel just a little tighter, the muscles and tendons in his neck tensing a little. Her eyes locked onto the throbbing pulse near his throat, and she felt her senses automatically tuning themselves and reaching out and noticing the smell of the blood rushing through his body and the fact he was not looking in her direction right now and was really very vulnerable.

He sighed, glancing at her. “Uh, hotdogs?”

She nodded. That would be nice. She was kind of hungry.

She noticed his brow furrowing ever so slightly, warily, before he looked away from her again. “Mia, uh,” he said after a moment, hesitantly, “what are you thinking right now?”

“I’m hungry,” she replied, shrugging.

“Right,” he said, still wary. He gave her a couple more concerned glances out of the corner of his eye before he opened his mouth again. “Just so we’re clear here, when you say ‘hungry’ you mean ‘let’s get hotdogs’, not ‘I want to tear Dave’s throat out and eat him’, right?”

“Both,” she said.

She watched him raise his eyebrows slowly and take a very deep breath. “Okay,” he said, in the slightly slower, carefully leveled voice that he used when he was pretending not to be nervous, “you remember when we talked about self-control?”

“I won’t eat you,” she said, mildly irritated; she had told him this many times before. “I like talking to you more than I’d like eating you.”

“That’s great,” he said, still in the same voice, “but you can’t eat people you don’t like, either.”

“I know,” she said.

“Tell me why.”

“Because it would be found out, I’d go to jail and it wouldn’t pay in the long term.”

He nodded, slowly, without looking at her. “Never forget, all right?”

It was a stupid question. She didn’t forget.

Dave parked the car outside the hotdog stand, but didn’t open the door immediately, which usually meant he wanted to say something. She waited and watched him swallow before he turned to her, but even then he didn’t actually speak; he just sat there for a while, looking at her in silence, his eyes very open and concerned. She stared back at the wild blue patterns of his irises and her reflection in his pupils and the shadows of the people on the street moving indistinctly behind her.

“Mia…” he said finally, leaning slowly back and relaxing a little in the driver’s seat as he squeezed his eyes shut. He took a breath, again like he was going to say something, but then changed his mind. Mia, getting impatient, reached for the handle on the passenger-side door.

“Please don’t let me down,” he said, turning towards her again, and she wondered why he would keep repeating that when she had gotten it the first time.

After a moment he turned away, and they exited the car. He stopped by the front to wait for her and offer her his hand, like he always did. In his eyes and his posture and the barely noticeable tremble to his fingers, she could see the subconscious fear that wanted him to stay a safe distance from her and the pure suicidal willpower that refused to back away, and she smiled.

He didn’t always make sense, and he didn’t always answer her questions, and he didn’t always buy her hotdogs. But he was always willing to make these small gestures to show that he believed she wouldn’t hurt him, and though she didn’t know entirely why she found that so satisfying, she did.

She took his hand and together they walked towards the hotdog stand.



The second one happens four years after the creation of the Pokémorphs (so six years before the main body of the fic and the other extras) and is written in present tense, so if that makes your eyes bleed, you have been warned. It's also longer than usual, at seven pages. Also they don't actually get to the hotdogs until near the end.

Dave and Mia Discuss Hotdogs

Scyther are ****ed-up Pokémon.

Not only are they surprisingly smart and ruthless predators, but they also have a unique social structure where they group together in swarms only to subsequently make every effort to leave one another alone. They hunt alone, sleep alone and generally mind their own business. They are social, in the sense that other Scyther are an important part of their day-to-day environment and they must have a keen ability to predict and model other individuals. But because their primary direct interactions with one another are battling and mating, they never needed to evolve any sense of compassion or empathy, the way humans understand empathy. It would only have gotten in the way. They understand each other’s point of view, but they don’t care.

There is a lot of scientific literature on the evolution – Darwinian evolution, not flashy metamorphosis-evolution – of different Pokémon species, and Dave has read a lot of it. And because he likes to know what the **** he’s doing when he works on something new and interesting, he’s probably read close to all of it when it comes to the species they picked out for the Pokémorph project.

So to make a long story short, what he’s read about Scyther has given Dave some suspicions about Mia Kerrigan. She was late to start talking, shows little interest in people, only intermittently makes eye contact, and speaks with slightly off inflections. Cheryl is worried she’s autistic. Dave is worried she isn’t.

He’s no psychologist, but it obviously wouldn’t help to take her to some professional child psychologist who doesn’t know jack **** about Scyther and would have nothing but some autistic spectrum disorder diagnosis to label her with anyway. (Plus he doesn’t trust strangers with anything relating to the Pokémorphs, really. The only way to make sure things get done right is to do them yourself.) So he’s going to attempt to use what he does know to find out what’s going on in her brain.

It sounds simple and straightforward. From experience over the past four years, he knows never to trust things that sound simple and straightforward to actually be that way.

So when Dave sits down opposite Mia at the Kerrigans’ kitchen table, he fully expects her to be difficult. For the moment, though, she’s just looking him up and down and still hasn’t said anything, which he knows her well enough to not find surprising. He places his suitcase on the table before he looks at her and says, “Hi, Mia.”

“Hi,” she responds, her expression the same neutral as ever.

“Your mom might have told you, but if she didn’t, we’re going to do some experiments. All you have to do is answer my questions.”

Her eyes flicker vaguely between him and the suitcase. “Why?” she says, just as he’s concluding she isn’t going to answer.

Dave sighs. “For science,” he says. “It’s not like you have anything better to do.”

Mia considers it for a moment and then nods. “Okay.”

Well. That part was surprisingly easy.

He decides to start with basic empathy. He pulls two pencil cases out of the suitcase and puts them on the table in front of Mia. “They’re empty,” he says as he shows her. “But now I’m going to take this pencil and put it in this one.”

He does so and closes the pencil cases. Mia looks very unimpressed.

“Pretend your mom is in here with us and saw that, all right? And now, suppose I ask her to go somewhere else and she leaves the room. Got all that?”

She nods warily.

“Okay,” he says. “Now, Mia, where is the pencil?”

She looks at him like he’s retarded. “You know where the pencil is,” she says. “You put it there yourself.”

“Yeah, I did,” he answers patiently, “but I want to know if you know.”

“You showed me where you put it.”

“Maybe you forgot.”

“This is stupid.”

Mia is beginning to turn away, so Dave gives up. “Okay, the pencil is in this one, right?” he says, indicating the pencil case on his left, the one that really has the pencil in it. She doesn’t dignify that with an answer, but he never thought she’d have any problem remembering where the pencil is anyway, so he lets it slide and moves on to the next part.

He opens the pencil case, takes the pencil out, and moves it to the other pencil case.

“Where’s the pencil now?” he asks.

She gives him that this-is-retarded look again, and on reflection he’s starting to agree with her. “Okay, never mind,” he says. “That’s not the point anyway. The point is, if your mom came back in now and I asked her which case the pencil is in, what would she say?”

Mia looks at him for a moment and then points at the one on the right.

These kinds of things have always amused Dave. The idea that certain seemingly obvious concepts just aren’t there in the minds of kids for some time is one of those delightfully counterintuitive little nuggets that every so often make you consciously aware of the brain being a machine. He leans a little back in his chair and can’t help grinning. “But how would she know that when she wasn’t in here when I switched them?”

“Because you wouldn’t make her leave the room like that and then ask her about it unless it was a trick,” she says immediately.

This is the precise moment where it hits him, for the first time, that she is ****ing brilliant.

He lets out a chuckle of disbelief. “Good point,” he concedes. “Okay, you’re smarter than whoever thought up this test.”

He puts away the pencil cases, watching Mia. She is looking disinterestedly around, unaware of having done anything impressive or unusual. If it were Jean thinking she’d figured something out, she’d he wearing a triumphant grin and looking expectantly at him, waiting for recognition of her achievement. Mia clearly doesn’t give a **** about impressing him, and that’s exactly what makes it so impressive. She wasn’t expecting a trick question and looking for the answer he wanted; she just told the truth as she saw it.

A really stupid idea strikes him, and he flips through his brain for the dumbest riddle he’s ever heard. “Where do Magikarp keep their money?”

She gives him that look again. “Magikarp don’t have any money.”

“But where would they keep it if they did?”

He waits. She clearly thinks the question is ridiculous and shows no inclination to answer it.

“Give up?” He pauses again for dramatic effect. “They keep it… in the river bank.”

She looks at him for a long second without changing her expression. “They don’t have any money,” she repeats. “They can’t keep it anywhere because they don’t have any. And they can’t even dig in the river bank, so they couldn’t put it there.”

“It’s a river bank. Banks keep your money. See?”

“It’s not a bank. It’s a river bank.”

Dave grins helplessly at her sheer lack of amusement. She doesn’t even think the joke is unfunny; she doesn’t see the joke at all. Some part of him hopes she never will. The world would be a smarter place if everyone made enough of a distinction between words and concepts for bad puns to be this completely lost on them.

“But that’s enough of that,” he says and reaches into his suitcase again. “I have another test for you.”

Mia looks marginally less annoyed at that. She watches his hands as he pulls out a stack of photographs of eyes, then looks back up at his face. She isn’t quite making eye contact, more just looking at him.

“Okay. Just look at the pictures one at a time and tell me how you think the people in them are feeling.”

She nods. He shows her the first picture, and she peers at it. “He’s pretending to be angry,” she concludes after a moment.

Dave blinks and turns the photo around to look at it. “Why do you think he’s just pretending?”

“The eyebrows are too scrunched. People only look like that when they’re pretending.”

In retrospect he supposes it’s a little exaggerated, but it doesn’t exactly make him think ‘pretending’. He switches photos, warily.

“Sad,” she says.

It only takes a few more photos to completely convince him that she is not autistic because she can read these emotions better than he can. Then, as he continues because he brought thirty photos and he might as well get through them all, another pattern starts emerging. Slowly he starts to get the feeling that she’s processing the pictures in a wholly different way than he is. She notices things like two sets of eyes belonging to the same guy (who, she says, is probably really sad, because he’s better at acting sad than happy). She impassively notes that unusually many of the eyes in the pictures are blue. At that point he doesn’t think he’s noticed any of the eye colors, and for all he knows they could all have been purple. She notices particular wrinkles around the eyes and comments on them (or the lack thereof), the differences between the environments reflected in the subjects’ irises (he doesn’t even know how to respond to that), the wideness of the pupils, and even more ridiculous details that seem to indicate she is actually looking at the pictures and carefully analyzing them, not just instinctively picking up the emotion being conveyed.

Is this what she does every time she looks at someone’s face? Does it even count, for the purposes of a test like this? He doesn’t know, because he isn’t a ****ing psychologist.

As he puts the stack of photos away, he looks at her and scratches the back of his neck, thinking. He knows there are autistic savants with extraordinary observational skills. He also knows Scyther can pinpoint their prey’s weak points in a split second, before it can react. Maybe this is how they look at everything. So far nothing has been very conclusive. She does seem to have a theory of mind going, with recognition of the idea of others having different knowledge than she does, but that alone hardly disproves some kind of autism.

The most obvious way to test the theory that her oddities stem from her Scyther genes is now to try to establish whether or not she experiences sympathy or concern for others’ suffering, provided she’s aware of it. Autistics don’t have any problems with that, generally. It’s the becoming aware of the suffering that they can have difficulty with, and Mia doesn’t seem to have any problems with that, even if her way of finding out is a little unconventional. It’s psychopaths that lack compassion. Unfortunately for Mia’s chances of having something approaching a normal mind, research seems to suggest that Scyther are psychopaths by nature, but the point is that though she could coincidentally happen to be an autistic psychopath, that’s unlikely enough to make any signs of psychopathy at this point pretty damning evidence that her Scyther genes had a hell of a lot more to do with behavior than they assumed when they were putting her together. The problem is just figuring out how to test that.

Part of him feels like he could actually just ask her, because he decidedly can’t picture her lying about it. But he knows that psychopaths are supposedly often good at manipulating people while appearing trustworthy, and no matter how much it breaks his brain to try to imagine this four-year-old girl is a master manipulator, he also knows he can’t make any assumptions when it comes to the Pokémorphs.

He thinks it over, trying to come up with something that eliminates as many other variables as possible, and then what he actually ends up saying for some reason is, “My dad died last week.”

Her expression doesn’t change. She looks at him and waits, like she’s expecting him to get to the point. He already knows in his gut that she doesn’t care, doesn’t even realize she should care. And for some reason he’s kind of relieved.

“Cancer,” he finds himself saying. “I hadn’t talked to him in years. Never even knew he had it. Funny how that works out.”

Why the **** he’s dumping this on an empathyless little girl of all people is a mystery to him, but she sits there and considers it, with no apparent perception that this is at all inappropriate. “Then it doesn’t matter,” she says. “If you didn’t talk to him anyway, it doesn’t change anything.”

She says it like it’s about as obvious as the river bank not storing money. He could be imagining it, but it seems like there’s an accusatory vibe to it, like she wants to tell him he’s being a pussy thinking this is any kind of a big deal. (Did he sound upset? He didn’t think he did.)

“Well,” he starts to explain himself, because for some dumb reason he feels like he needs to explain himself to the empathyless little girl, “even if you don’t talk to somebody there’s always this part of you that thinks someday you’re going to, until one day you realize that now it’s just too ****ing late.”

He remembers he’s talking to a four-year-old the moment the word is out of him, but Mia at least seems unperturbed. “That would have happened anyway,” she counters. “He would just have died sometime later.”

“Yeah,” he says, because from an objective perspective she’s absolutely right. He can’t say that knowledge makes him feel better, exactly, but it’s sobering to realize even a ****ing four-year-old can see that. “You’re right. Never mind.”

She looks around for a moment, apparently content to change the subject. Then she asks, “What does ‘****ing’ mean?”

Goddamn it. “Uh. Not really anything, in that sentence.”

She tilts her head. “Why would you use a word that doesn’t mean anything?”

“Grownups do that sometimes.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Yeah, isn’t it? I’m sure you’d never do that.”

“Why do you?”

He looks helplessly at her. “It’s a swear word. Do you know what swear words are?”

“Swear words mean something.”

“Only when you’re really talking about what they mean. I wasn’t talking about what that word means. People say ‘what the hell’ and they’re not really talking about fictional underground torture chambers; they just mean ‘what’. What I said just meant ‘it’s too late’, but I used a swear word because that’s just what people do sometimes for emphasis. You’re not supposed to know that word, so don’t tell your parents I said it. Okay?”

Mia nods slowly. “So what does it mean?”

Dave will never, ever, ****ing ever forget to watch his language around kids again.

“You don’t need to know that,” he says in exasperation. “Nobody’s going to talk to you about that for the next ten years.”

Mia considers that and then shrugs, apparently taking his word for it.

That was also surprisingly easy. The easy parts with her, oddly, are exactly the parts that would be hardest with Jean.

He lets out a breath and leans back in his chair. “Speaking of hell,” he says. “Your parents haven’t been teaching you that stuff, have they?”

“What stuff?”

“Religion. Big almighty guy in the sky who created the world and forgives your sins, et cetera.”

She shakes her head.

“Oh, thank God.” He has never understood how otherwise intelligent people can hold on to their childhood religion well into adulthood, but he supposes he can give them some credit for having the decency to not force it on their own kids. “Well, in case they try, it’s all something gullible people thought up thousands of years ago to explain natural phenomena before they had science. There is no evidence for any of it. But don’t take my word for it; ask them. Then ask them why they believe it anyway because I’d sure like to know.”

Mia frowns for a moment. “Are my parents stupid?” she then says.

“Eh,” he says, scratching the back of his neck. “Well, your mom’s great. I don’t think she really believes any of it, deep down. She’s just into the community stuff. And your dad… well, he knows his science just fine. I guess he’s just going for first prize in the Compartmentalization Olympics.”

He expects her to ask what that means, but for whatever reason, she doesn’t.

There is silence. Mia is glancing disinterestedly around; he gets the feeling she doesn’t quite grasp the idea of conversation so much as individual strings of questions and answers.

“Mia,” he says after a moment, leaning a bit forward over the table, “do you ever want to hurt people?”

She seems to spend a second evaluating whether to answer the question before she says, “Sometimes.”

Dave nods slowly. It’s already becoming increasingly apparent that all the morphs, except maybe Gabriel, have some violent tendencies, so that’s not unexpected. The others don’t really act on them, because they don’t have any problem with the idea that hurting people is wrong. He’s just not sure how well that’s going to work if Mia really lacks empathy.

“One day,” he says, “you’re going to grow scythes on your arms. They’re going to be sharp and dangerous. When that happens, it’s going to be very, very important that you don’t hurt anyone. Do you understand why?”

Mia looks at him, probably analyzing the size of his pupils or trying to gauge his motivations in asking that question, and finally shakes her head.

Dave exhales. This seems to be the best confirmation to date that he’s really created a monster. And yet he doesn’t feel like a mad scientist with an unstable creation that must be kept at bay. She’s just a little girl equipped with a slightly different brain than the rest of us – a really brilliant brain, too, even if she’s also missing a circuit or two. Who knows how much potential there could be in that brain?

She’s not dangerous, not necessarily. There are psychopaths who lead normal, nonviolent lives. All she really needs is persuasion that she ought to, in terms that make sense to her.

“Do you like hotdogs?” he asks after a moment of thought.

Unfazed by the sudden change in topic, Mia nods.

“So if there was a hotdog on the table that you could have, you’d eat it?”

She nods again, warily.

“What if I told you I’d poisoned the hotdog, and eating it would make you very sick for a whole week?”

She gives him a suspicious glare. “Why would you poison it?”

He pauses, realizing this probably wasn’t the right way to begin this approach. “Let’s try this again,” he says. “Say there was a hotdog and you were going to eat it, and then I came in and told you actually that hotdog was part of an experiment I was doing and I’d injected it with some nasty bacteria that were going to make you sick. Would you still eat it?”

“No,” she says, in that obvious, I-question-your-motives-in-even-asking-me-this-question way.

He nods and leans towards her over the table again. “It’s important that you don’t hurt people,” he says, “because if you do, there are going to be people who think you’re dangerous and need to be locked away, and they’re going to have things their way no matter what we try. You’ll have to eat what they tell you to eat and do what they tell you to do. You won’t be allowed to go anywhere you want or see people you want to see. And they might never let you out. Do you understand now?”

She blinks at him. She seems a bit caught off guard; he doesn’t imagine anyone has really tried using this kind of pure rhetoric of self-interest on her before. Reward and punishment as people normally think about them are dependent on a system of morality: they rely on the idea that people deserve something-or-other for doing certain things. When people really think punishment is unjust, they want to change the rules; they aren’t content with just not breaking them. Dave doubts Mia would really buy the idea of punishment at all, when she couldn’t properly comprehend why she was being punished. But this is a matter of simple consequences: if you do this, that will happen, grouping the two together so that they must be evaluated as a combination. Mia understood the poisoned hotdog. She has to understand this, too.

After a long second of evaluation, she nods. He leans back and releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding, feeling oddly like he’s just passed some kind of a test.

Maybe a conventional moral upbringing would completely go over her head, but if she can just be reasoned with on a basis she accepts towards the right conclusion, her rational mind should provide a substitute for everything she’s missing. All she needs is the right line of reasoning, the right argument, the right logic to turn the gears in her head the right way, and then…

(Challenge accepted.)

And then everything should be fine.

“So you said you like hotdogs,” he says. “How about we go out and get some hotdogs right now and talk more on the way?”

“That would be nice,” she says with evident satisfaction.

Well, this will be interesting, he thinks and reaches for his car keys.
 
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Dragonfree

Just me
Ever looked at these silly extras and wondered, "Wow, Dragonfree would write about Dave and Mia watching paint dry, wouldn't she?"

...

Dave and Mia Watch Paint Dry

Mia cocks her head at the wall. “Can you actually see it dry?”

“No, you can’t,” Dave says impatiently. “You can’t actually watch paint dry. It’s an expression, that’s all.”

She continues to squint at the paint, unconvinced. “It’s reflecting more light now than it was earlier.”

He looks at the wall (it looks exactly the same as before), then at her. “No, really, Mia. We’re not going to watch the paint dry. I was joking.”

She doesn’t look up, already disturbingly into the whole paint-watching thing.

(Dave wonders dejectedly why he hasn’t yet learned not to joke around her.)



For what it's worth, that's a drabble (i.e. exactly 100 words). People started talking about drabbles and this stupid, stupid idea popped into my head and I just couldn't resist.
 

chanseychansey77

Elite Trainer
Sniff...

WAAAAA!

Will the kitty GONE... Mia, the incomparable no-nonsense girl, GONE...

Stupid reality... Blasted fact that kids, even Pokemorphs, have about no chance against people with guns who wish to kill them... Accursed fact, that while they die people continue to laugh... Stupid religious extremism...

...I didn't read any of the stuff concerning sex, and I'm glad most of the language was bleeped out, but what I did read, was, well, phenomenal. The way you introduced each character, set their personality in stone, managed to make them react perfectly believably, and in ways that almost make me cry about them, even though I read my way through it in like two hours...

Incredible, I must say...

Where did you learn to write?
 
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Dragonfree

Just me
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the story. (And sorry for the sex talk/profanity. According to your profile you're thirteen, and I'd have thought exactly the same thing when I was thirteen, so I don't blame you. But you chose to read an R-rated fic, and that's what you get.)

I didn't exactly learn to write anywhere; I've just been writing, posting my work online for feedback and giving reviews of my own for many years, and that's always a learning process even though it's slow. The first half of this fic already makes me cringe. :p Hence the rewriting plans.
 

Sike Saner

Peace to the Mountain
Then she furrowed her brow, because on second thought this didn’t quite make sense either. “My mom slept with you even though she was with my dad, though.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dave said, suddenly defensive. “When are you going to shut the **** up about that?”

My initial mental response to this was, She will NEVER! 8B Then I remembered what ultimately becomes of her and made a sadly for a moment. And then I remembered that people in general can't truly be said to never stop doing anything (except for having a limited lifespan) because, you know, mortality.

Then I managed to let that little train of thought go and resume reading.

There was silence. She cocked her head, waiting for an answer, watching his reactions: his fingers clutching the steering wheel just a little tighter, the muscles and tendons in his neck tensing a little. Her eyes locked onto the throbbing pulse near his throat, and she felt her senses automatically tuning themselves and reaching out and noticing the smell of the blood rushing through his body and the fact he was not looking in her direction right now and was really very vulnerable.

I will never stop enjoying her beautiful, creepy-*** mind.

Well, not while I'm alive, I mean. Unless I lose my memory for whatever reason.

...Annnnd so much for me having completely let go of the whole tangent about what a person may "never" do. XD;

And your dad… well, he knows his science just fine. I guess he’s just going for first prize in the Compartmentalization Olympics.

Heh. X3

“No,” she says, in that obvious, I-question-your-motives-in-even-asking-me-this-question way.

Really liked that bit of description there.


I think the second of the latest extras was my favorite of them. Again, I really enjoy reading about Mia's mind, and that extra felt like it dug particularly deep into it. Plus the part about swear words was gold.

Oh, and I feel like I should mention that even just seeing the title of the third one amused me. XD Although I think the lead-in to it in that post that was at least partially to credit for the title making me laugh as much as it did.
 

Dragonfree

Just me
Thanks for reviewing as always!

Sike Saner said:
My initial mental response to this was, She will NEVER! 8B Then I remembered what ultimately becomes of her and made a sadly for a moment.
D: I know. Sometimes I forget I killed her off, what with being so conveniently able to write more and more extras that are squeezed somewhere into the timeline before that actually happened. And then I remember and it makes me sadface.


Anyway, the reason I'm posting right now is that I was bored and happened to remember that I'd never actually made a chapter index for Morphic, so I decided to stick one in the first post, and that made me realize that I never posted the April Fools' Day joke I made last April.

Basically, I'd hinted vaguely at the possibility of a sequel when I posted chapter fourteen; then, on April the first, I first announced the sequel would be written by a new author and presented a mock first chapter (the new author was my friend lunar_espeon, who has not read Morphic and was just given one-liner descriptions of the characters); then, later that day I retracted that chapter, admitting it was a joke, and instead posted the supposedly real first chapter of the sequel, which was written by me and which I love unreasonably. That was of course also a joke, but I imagine it might amuse some people anyway. (I'm not posting lunar_espeon's fake chapter because it is not my writing and doesn't exactly have anything to do with the actual fic, but you can look on my website if you're interested. I found it hilarious, but that could largely be because, being the author, I am unreasonably amused by all the various OOCness involved. He made Mia have the hots for Dave. Without even having read Dave and Mia Discuss Sex.)


EDIT: Because apparently I was just that bored, I replaced every chapter except four and six with censor-evading versions, so you can now read Dave's dialogue in its full, non-asterisked glory (chapters four and six don't contain any swearing, probably because they don't have any Dave-POV scenes or parts where Dave is vaguely nervous/irritated/feeling any kind of human emotion). Since the censor-evading versions were created by running a bunch of find-and-replace functions on the versions on my site, this may also have resulted in the correction of typos or other mistakes in said chapters. Yay?

Now that that's done, I also figured I might as well copy the thread over to Completed Fics now. This thread will stay here in case anyone still wants to review or I happen to write more extras in the future; the copy will be archived for posterity.


Morphic II: Chapter 1 (April Fools' Day joke, not canon)

Dave’s doorbell rang at some unholy hour of the morning and continued insistently until he’d stumbled to the door in his underwear.

“What?” he said, staring at the man who was facing him, looking weirdly shifty. “Who are you?”

“Graham Williams,” the man replied, glancing from side to side. “One of your interns at the lab a few years ago.”

Dave blinked. He supposed maybe the guy did look familiar. “Okay,” he said after a moment. “Is that it?”

Graham took a deep breath. “I… have a confession to make.”

There was a pregnant pause. Dave said nothing.

“I created two additional Pokémorphs,” Graham then went on, in a hushed tone.

Dave stared. “You what?”

“I made a couple of extras. I thought it’d be interesting.”

“That makes no ****ing sense,” Dave said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “That was my secret project and I sure as hell don’t remember letting you in on it.”

“You told me in detail how it worked. I think you were pretty drunk at the time.”

Dave rubbed his forehead. “Oh, Christ. So what sorts of abominations came out of it? I hope you aborted them.”

“No, actually.” Graham smiled nervously. “They came out perfect. A Mew and Mewtwo morph. I raised them myself.”

Dave stared at the man again, trying to discern whether he was joking. “Mew… and Mewtwo,” he repeated after a while.

“Yes.”

“As in… the mythical pink transforming psychic cat, and the superweapon conspiracy nuts think the government engineered in the eighties.”

The man nodded.

Dave waited for a punchline. There wasn’t one. He was way too ****ing tired to deal with this (whatever this was) right now.

Before he’d properly decided how to respond, he’d simply closed the door. That was rude and eccentric as hell, but it was probably preferable to confronting the fact he’d apparently been employing a lunatic (had he? Maybe that was why Dave hadn’t thought he recognized the guy at first). He started to walk back into his bedroom, but before he’d made more than a couple of steps, there came another enthusiastic knock on the door.

“Look –” he began when he opened it again, but stopped when he realized that Graham was gone. In his place were standing two girls, one short blonde with rounded conical ears and huge blue eyes, and the other tall, pale and disturbingly skinny with long, jet-black hair and stubby ears sticking out of the top of her head.

“Hi!” said the short one, waving happily at him. “I’m Bubbles! Can I call you Daddy-two?”

“What the ****,” Dave said.

“That’s a bad word,” Bubbles said, frowning. “You can’t say bad words ‘cause then the angels all start to cry and are very sad.”

“What the ****.” His brain desperately reached out for the relative sanity of before he’d reopened the door. “Where’s Graham?”

“Daddy had to go,” Bubbles explained, “because he’s afraid the bad people will find out about him and come with guns and kill us.”

“And he left you with me?”

“Yeah!” Bubbles grinned. “You’ll take really good care of us, won’t you, Daddy-two?”

He stared. The two girls suddenly disappeared into thin air, and then he heard Bubbles’ voice go on behind him (oh, Christ, they could teleport): “Your place is really small. You should buy a bigger house. Oh, and it should totally have a swimming pool! Swimming pools are awesome. I bet God has lots of swimming pools in Heaven.”

“This sucks,” said a deeper, monotone voice. “I hate my life.”

Dave leaned desperately out into the corridor, but there was no sign of the man who had brought them here.

He needed a drink.

-------

To his horror, Bubbles and Jean hit it off immediately.

“…and then Jesus died on the cross, and that’s why you can get into Heaven, but only if you really really believe in him,” he heard the Mew girl explain from inside Jean’s room.

“Really?” asked Jean, somewhat unsurely.

“Yeah,” Bubbles went on. “’Cause if you don’t, he’s going to come and judge you. And then he casts everybody who didn’t believe in him into the lake of fire, with the Houndoom and everything, and then there are Slugma crawling all over you – ewww!” She grimaced. “Also there’s eternal torture, and no matter how much you regret it you can’t get into Heaven because you were too late.”

There was a pause. Then Jean said, hesitantly, “I don’t think Dad believes in Jesus.”

Bubbles gasped. “Oh! Then we have to convert him quick, before the bad people come for him.”

“Please kill me now,” Dave said and found it oddly relieving as he downed the rest of his beer to realize that there was in fact now a real upside to the prospect of being murdered.

“Life sucks, doesn’t it?” commented Raven the Mewtwo morph, who was sitting beside him on the sofa, arms folded.

“Yeah.”

“Totally.”

He looked at her. “So where the **** does your dad think he got his hands on DNA from the government’s weaponized unicorn project, anyway?”

“Dude, I’m not a unicorn,” she said, annoyed. “Unicorns are gay. I mean, they’re all rainbows and happiness. I hate that ****.”

He stared at her for a moment. “I don’t know if you noticed that Mew is a pink kitten that flies around in a ****ing bubble, makes cute mewling sounds and plays with people who are pure-hearted.”

“Yeah, but I’m Mewtwo,” she said, rolling her eyes. “It’s gray and it’s all badass and **** and can destroy everything. Didn’t you see the leaked CIA video of them trying to talk to it?”

“The guy who made that came forth and admitted it was a ****ing hoax made to promote Battle for the Earth.”

“Whatever.” She tossed her hair. “They made him say that in exchange for sparing his life. Why do you think he’s still alive?”

“That’s an affirming the consequent fallacy. You’re saying that –”

“Dude, don’t get all Latin on me. You aren’t right just because you’re smart.”

Dave looked at her for a moment and then reached for his beer again, sighing. “Okay. Brick wall. Got it. Never mind.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m just a big fan of bricklaying.”

She stared at him. “Dude,” she said after a moment, “you’re weird.”

Unfortunately, unlike the legendary sisters, Jean was the very opposite of a brick wall, and Bubbles’ particular brick wall seemed to be getting to her. By now, he discovered to his dismay as he returned to listening to them, Bubbles was trying to convince her that homosexuality was against God.

“But I think if they love each other…” Jean protested.

“They don’t love each other!” Bubbles gasped. “The devil made them think they did, but really they love women like everybody else. You just need to show them.”

“Really?”

“No,” he called in response, leaning in the direction of the door. “Don’t listen to her. She may be brainwashed beyond help, but you’re smarter than that.”

In the blink of an eye, Bubbles was standing in front of him with her arms crossed. “You’re brainwashed!” she said, her big blue eyes staring accusingly at him. “Deep down you know I’m right, but you’re just lying to yourself.”

He gave her a hopeless glance. “Jean, she’s a nut. Please tell me you’re not taking any of this seriously.”

The Ninetales morph had opened the door to her room and was looking at him; she still looked a little hesitant, but she nodded, seeming somewhat reassured. Bubbles whirled around, disappeared and then pulled Jean back into her room, making a point of slamming the door shut so he couldn’t hear them anymore.

Dave sighed, ruffling his hair. He needed to talk to somebody with sense before his brain exploded. He reached for his cellphone in his pocket and entered Howard and Cheryl’s number.

Lucy picked up after a few beeps. “Hi, Dave!” she said cheerfully.

“Hey, Lucy.” He smiled a little in relief at hearing her voice; she hadn’t talked much lately. “Can I talk to your mom?”

“No,” Lucy replied. “My parents aren’t at home right now.”

****. “Oh.” He paused. “Well, it was nice talking to you, anyway.”

“You too. Oh!” she added suddenly, like she’d just remembered something. “Mia’s back.”

Dave was silent for a long moment. “What do you mean?”

“I brought her back. I just imagined she was here hard enough and then she came and – oh, she wants to talk to you.”

“What the –” he began and then froze as an all-too-familiar voice said, “Hi.”

It would probably have taken him longer to recover on any other day. As it was, it was oddly easy to accept this on some basic temporary level just while he figured out what the hell was going on. “Mia?” he said after a short pause. “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” she replied as if nothing were more natural. “You haven’t been around in a while.”

This didn’t make any sense. Nothing made any sense.

“You should come over now. That would be nice.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be right there.”

Mia hung up. He sat there frozenly for a moment, trying to get his brain to form coherent thought. Eventually he stood up, walked to Jean’s room and opened the door.

“…but I think my dad’s right,” Jean was saying, and some part of him was grounded enough to feel a twinge of pride. Bubbles looked up at him and then appeared in front of him, arms crossed, like she was trying to prevent him from entering the room.

“Jean, we’re going to the Kerrigans’ place,” he said over Bubbles’ shoulder. “Something’s come up.”

“Ooh,” Bubbles said, suddenly not cross anymore. “Can we come?”

“No.”

Bubbles pouted. “Well, I’m coming anyway.”

Dave sighed. There was probably no way to stop them coming if they wanted to – if they could teleport, it wasn’t as if he could just refuse to let them into his car.

“I’ll bet you an ice cream you can’t stay completely quiet while we’re there,” he said instead.

Bubbles grinned hugely, mimed zipping her mouth shut, and followed them out.

-------

It was Mia who opened the door. He spent a long moment just standing there on the doorstep, looking at her, before he reached forward and touched her shoulder. Solid. Real.

This just wasn’t ****ing possible.

He wanted to say something to her, but what the hell were you supposed to say to somebody who’d inexplicably turned up back from the dead, months after being shot three times in the back of the head? Instead, he just continued to look at her, waiting for that weird suffocating feeling to go away. It didn’t.

“Where’s Lucy?” he said finally.

Mia stepped wordlessly out of the way, and he followed her inside with Jean. He had managed, with further bribes of ice cream, to convince Bubbles and Raven to stay in the car, and there was no way he was leaving Jean completely alone with the two of them.

The Misdreavus morph was sitting on the living room couch in front of the television. She looked around as he approached.

“Hi, Dave,” she said nonchalantly, like she hadn’t just somehow raised the dead. He stopped near her and squeezed his eyes shut, thinking.

“Okay, Lucy,” he began after clearing his throat, trying to keep his voice calm. “How did you do this?”

She shrugged unsurely. “It just happened.”

“This sort of thing does not just happen.”

Lucy contemplated it for a few seconds. “I was just here,” she then said, “thinking about what Mia would be doing if she were here. And then I thought about it really hard, and then she came.”

Some crazy part of him, despite knowing perfectly well that the name was just a historical artifact of less enlightened times, couldn’t help latching on to one stupid, irrational thought: Ghost-type.

Goddamn it. He was a ****ing scientist. He could do this sensibly.

“Uh,” he began, rubbing at his eyes. “Could you do it again?”

Lucy looked a little confused.

“Try doing the same thing but for Will, right here.”

“I didn’t know him as well,” Lucy said hesitantly. “But I can try.”

“It’s okay if it doesn’t work,” he said, his voice wavering slightly with a weird rush of impatient anger. “Just do the same thing you did then, all right?”

Lucy closed her eyes, concentrating. At first nothing happened at all, and he fleetingly thought this was without a doubt the stupidest experiment he had ever done; then, without warning, the air beside the sofa began to shimmer with a strange, purple haze, and suddenly Will was standing there, blinking sleepily.

Jean ran up and hugged him; he responded in turn, looking a little confused. “Um, hi, Jean,” he said as she started to sob into his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

Dave stared at the boy who had just appeared out of thin air. This couldn’t be happening.

“Lucy,” he began hesitantly, “are you manipulating them somehow?”

She looked vaguely confused by the question; she shook her head unsurely. Will gave him a puzzled look.

“I mean, are you deciding what they’re going to say or do?”

“No,” she replied, shaking her head again, looking a little anxious.

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think. “Mia,” he said abruptly, turning towards the Scyther morph. “What’s the age of consent?”

She gave him a blank look. “What is that?”

He exhaled slowly. Okay. She had Lucy’s knowledge, not Mia’s. Some sort of a physical projection of her mental image of her sister, then. Of course it had to be something like that – the alternative was ridiculous – but still he couldn’t shake off some irrational disappointment, the remnants of an absurd hope that somehow this was actually her.

He looked at Lucy; she was tilting her head at him. Should he explain it to her? He thought about what she’d been like ever since Mia’s death – not speaking, always that same haunted stare, spending her days sitting around gazing into space. She seemed perfectly content now that her sister seemed to have simply returned. He didn’t have the heart to just crush her hopes again.

Though actually, he realized suddenly, last time she’d discovered her sister was dead, she hadn’t been crushed – she’d gone into a frenzied rage and knocked out everyone in the vicinity with a Perish Song. Her reaction to finding out again could be even worse, and he wasn’t sure she entirely subscribed to the “don’t kill the messenger” philosophy.

He shuddered and looked away from her. Jean had just released the Will projection; she sniffled as he smiled awkwardly. “Anybody want to tell me what’s going on?” the boy said hesitantly.

“You… you died,” Jean said quietly.

“Oh,” Will said, furrowing his brow. “Oh. I guess I did.”

Jean pulled him into a hug again, and Will’s frown deepened. “Wait,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense. I’m confused.”

“Yeah, uh,” Dave began, “Lucy brought you back.” It felt exceptionally odd to speak to him (it?); his head was all hypotheses on what would happen if Lucy left the room or covered her ears or went to sleep, and he wasn’t sure whether he should be looking at Will or at Lucy when he spoke, and if he didn’t act normal Lucy would probably start asking questions and realize something was up. It was starting to dawn upon him that this couldn’t possibly last. Sooner or later she’d have to get suspicious, and who could guess what might happen then?

“Who are they?” Mia (not Mia) asked suddenly, snapping him out of his thoughts; he turned towards her, only to see Bubbles and Raven standing behind him, having presumably just teleported inside. The Mew morph immediately frowned and started to gesture wildly at him in a way that, as far as he could understand it, appeared to imply they’d gotten bored waiting.

“Yeah,” he began. “They’re, uh…” Why was he even talking to her? It wasn’t Mia. It was some ****ed-up figment of Lucy’s imagination that looked and acted like her. He avoided its gaze. “Apparently ten years ago some intern went and made two legendary Pokémon morphs without our knowledge, and…” He trailed off. He sounded ridiculous.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Not-Mia said.

She was right. It just didn’t make any ****ing sense.

He stood there for a moment. He looked around for a light switch, hurried to it and turned the lights off, then on again. Lucy looked at him curiously.

“What the **** is going on?” he said. He meant for it to sound annoyed, but it came out more just desperate.

“We are,” said Raven in a bored-sounding voice. He looked blankly at her; Bubbles sighed.

“Oh, you just have to ruin all the fun, don’t you?” she said, and suddenly her face began to melt; Dave watched in horror as her skin peeled away from her skull, only there wasn’t a skull; there was a small, pink head with blue eyes and similar conical ears to the ones she’d had before, and then the rest of her body crumpled to the floor where it shrunk away and vanished, leaving a small, pink creature in her place, hovering in a translucent pink bubble. It narrowed its huge eyes at Dave as Raven’s shape shimmered white and turned into a small purple blob.

“What,” Dave said weakly, backing away without ever really deciding to. “Who the **** are you?”

“Mew,” said the creature that had once been Bubbles, disdainfully. “Really, don’t you read?”

The Ditto by her side morphed into the shape of a man with dark hair and cold, icy blue eyes. A cold shiver trickled down Dave’s spine as Isaac Daniels looked at him and grinned widely, then pulled out a handgun and raised it.

A shot rang out. Dave instinctively threw himself to the side only to crash into the wall. As his head spun from the impact, he realized that the shot hadn’t been aimed at him: Lucy collapsed, her body disappearing from view behind the back of the sofa, and he could see the Will and Mia projections’ eyes widening simultaneously before they vanished into thin air. He heard Jean scream as he struggled to get to his feet; then the gun roared again, and she was silent.

“You sick ****,” he said, his voice shaking, his mind numb as he dragged himself up by the wall, fixing his gaze towards the man with the gun so that he wouldn’t have to see Jean’s body (maybe she was okay, or just pretending). “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“He is dead,” Mew said coolly. “That’s why it’s up to us to finish our trainer’s job.”

He stared at the legendary Pokémon in incomprehension as the Ditto pointed the gun towards him, grinning widely. “Don’t worry. You’ll see them again in Hell.”

This time he had no time to attempt to dodge before it pulled the trigger.
 
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jireh the provider

Video Game Designer
Chapter 1 review. Wait a minute! I read your story at fanfiction.net! I know your story. But ... I guess I only stoppedreading it 2 years ago after that slugma kid died out of hardening and lack of heat

Anyways, this is the most interesting topic I've read from you.

Plot: A masterpiece as how you can include religion and science (OF ALL DIFFICULT THINGS) in pokemon. Know about human experiments transporting young humans to the digital pokemon world?! That's a decent thought but to see someone struggle speaking the research is a great execution. I mean it fits the scenario. You know ... chromosome genetics, unobtained human traits, sudden bursts of evolution. Very good questions to ask the theologians and the scientists. a great start as what it means ... "to create your children and raise them as your children". Something from "I Robot"

Conflicts and Dialogue: A grand way to tell that if you make a risk you are not prepared, you pay the price. The reporter is a good example as to why these scientists did not rationalize their risks and debates. So in the end, they may have to deal with the unwated consequences. "Should we call Scientist Colress about this?"

Writing: A good balance of deep science and average ordinary spoken words.
 
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