Stuck as a Pokémon (a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon adventure)

[Pyral Spinneret]

> David: Destroy the environment.


YES.

Take that, stupid trees!


> ==>


Unfortunately, you are not able to do this because you do not possess any LIPSTICK, on account of being MALE.


> David: Throw a Poké Ball.


You do not have any Poké Balls either!


> David: Stand up on your hind legs.


You eye a stick a little ways up on the trunk of the tree you are right next to.


(If I broke that off, there’s probably something I could do with it with my hands…)


> ==>


Ouch.


> ==>



(Well, there is this rock here…)


> David: Take rock.


You pick up the rock. This CAPTCHALOGUES it.


(This seems familiar enough.)

But then you notice the FETCH MODUS you are now using. The POKÉMODUS has no special process for captchaloguing or retrieving items, but it always has only a single card, with no ability to remove it or add more. Additionally, it is exclusive to Pokémon, and Pokémon are not allowed to change their modus.

Apparently you are, indeed, now a Pokémon.


(This sucks.)

[Krakash]

>Casually toss pebble at Samuel.

[Asmodemus]

> Okay, fine you're a pokemon you guess.

[Fuzzlekins]

>Transform into Samuel

[noxious]

>Acrobatic fucking pirouette.

[GoldenMB]

>> The one card sylladex, the sylladex of absolute fuckfaces.

[Taveena]

>> The one card sylladex, the best sylladex for weaponisation EVER.

[wlzrobert]

Captchalogue all the oxygen in the world to kill everyone

[Wessolf27]

> David: Ask "Sammy" for where the next town is
> Samuel: Hate on the name "Sammy"

[hero122]

>David: Take all the luck. ALL OF IT.
>Samuel: Trip over Beartrap as you speculate over what to do.

[baha1219]

>Ask Samuel if he's even seen a human.

[Bamoehn]

>Wonder how a Grass Snake and a Fox can communicate when a Human and ANY pokemon can't.

[Pyral Spinneret]

> David: Find something else to take so you can eject the rock.


Can you weaponize an item by ejecting it from your sylladex when picking something else up? You don’t know. You’ll have to try that out later.
Either way, it seems that the GEO PEBBLE you picked up is a THROWABLE ITEM, and will do 5 DAMAGE to any target it hits. You briefly consider manually throwing it at the Snivy, but it seems like he’s still trying to talk to you.

What are you doing?

…

I don’t know.

But this stuff isn’t set up the way I remembered.

> David: Examine other weaponization options.


Well, other than things like that throwable item you just picked up, you pretty much do not get to use a weapon. You do not even have a Strife Specibus!
Instead, you have a card with a list of MOVES. You currently have three out of four slots filled. What are those things next to the moves? You figure that you can choose what moves to use any time you want, so those don’t seem to do anything.

> David: Complain about crappy sylladex.



This is a total joke, isn’t it.

What?

My sylladex only has one card!

(A sylladex!)

You’ve got to be one of the first Pokémon I’ve met to mention their sylladex.

(Since most of the ones I’ve talked to so far are unobservant dolts.)

But why is that a problem? Did you expect there to be more?

Yeah! When I was a human, I had a real fetch modus and everything!

(A human?)

Oh, come on! Don’t tell me you actually believe in humans, right?

But I—

Uh—

I was about to say that I remember being one, but now I don’t remember much of anything.

(Oh, wow.)

(If he’s suffering from HATCHLING AMNESIA, which is near-omnipresent, then I really can’t hold it against him, can I?)

Sorry.

It seems like you’re young and disoriented, so I’ll cut you some slack.

(And if he’s smart enough to see and talk about sylladices, then he could really be worth joining up with.)

Well, you could consider joining a SURVEY TEAM.

A what?

Survey teams get these special bags that act as sylladices.

Except, instead of normal sylladices, they come with more than one card!

Was that more in line with what you were thinking?

Yeah, that sounds pretty good. Except…

What’s a survey team?

Survey teams go explore all the dungeons of the region to collect information.

It’s needed work for all the Pokémon trying to renovate the region to make technology available to all Pokémon of Crosscro.

There are engineers in Ebony City making all sorts of cool devices to make Pokémons’ lives more convenient, and also to share information region-wide!

But not all Pokémon have the same physical features, so the engineers need pretty thorough data on the Pokémon that live in the CROSSCRO REGION so they know what to develop for.

And that’s where survey teams come in!

OK…

They also do other jobs like rescue Pokémon in trouble and capture outlaws, as well as other things that teams are trained to handle.

It’s an active job, and it pays fairly well if you join a good guild.

Hm…

In fact…

I always wanted to form a survey team, but you can’t apply to become one without at least one team member. It’s considered too dangerous to do alone.

So, how about it?

Will you form a survey team with me?

[Stinkosar]

>Agree.

Eeh...sure.
Maybe we'll trip over the plot some hints to my past.
And plus fame and fortune would be awesome.

[Asmodemus]

> Well, it's not like you've got any better plans right now.

[Pyral Spinneret]

> Agree, and pose as a team.

OK, so this guy is kind of a jerk, but you don’t know where else to go and you can’t think of anything better to do with your time. You agree to this whole survey team thing.


Excellent!

Snivy (Samuel, Lv. 5, Male, Adamant, Overgrowth) joined your team!

You learn your team member’s GIVEN NAME, and Samuel presumably learns yours. Most of the time, Pokémon refer to strangers and acquaintances by their species name, because this is convenient enough for most purposes. It’s only between close friends, and between Pokémon of the same species, that they use given names instead. Of course, survey team members always tell each other their names to ease the process of FRIENDLY TEAMWORK.


> Engage ability.


Now that you have a TEAMMATE, your ILLUSION ABILITY activates. You temporarily transform into a SNIVY!


> ==>



**(Alright, bipedal again!)

**(Let’s see what kind of acrobatics I’m capable of like this!)


> ==>


But the ILLUSION ABILITY doesn’t change anything except your appearance.

**(Wait, I’m still a fox, aren’t I? Damn it!)


> Examine team stats.



**So, when do we get the bag sylladex?

Well, I heard that in the SHRASIA REGION, they used to mail them out to every team that formed.

They’d somehow automatically know who just formed a team, and send the starter kits there.

**Creepy.

But then they ran into problems.

Some teams formed under a shallow pretense just so they’d have an easy way to steal things.

**You could do that?

…

**…just kidding, of course.

Anyway, that’s not the case anymore, so you have to go formally register with a guild first.

Partly to keep track of you, and partly to ensure that you receive proper training until they know you’re qualified.

In the early days, they had problems with rookie rescue teams taking up missions and getting so in over their heads that they had to be rescued themselves.

And Shrasia had such a bad outlaw problem for a while that pretty much every legitimate team was tied up capturing them.

Last I hear, they still haven’t finished getting all of that straightened out, but here in Crosscro teams have been generally kept productive thanks to the guild system.

**Alright then, so we have to join a guild.

**How do we do that?

First we have to pick a guild to join.


> Samuel: Explain guild choices.



As far as I know, there are four guilds in the Crosscro region, but we can forget about two of them because they’re too far away.

The Slate Suburbs, which are close by, has a guild lead by Stunfisk, and Cobalion has a guild a little further away in the heavily urbanized Ebony City.

Stunfisk himself has a reputation for being a little bit strange, but his guild is well known, close-knit, and fairly good at getting new teams started.

Don’t let that fool you, because the training and tasks you’re given are still really tough.

Cobalion’s guild is supposed to have higher paying jobs, and it’s probably the most prestigious guilds in the region.

They have very little patience for weaklings and slackers, though.

We can sign up as trainees at Stunfisk’s guild, but we’d have to get training elsewhere if we failed the entrance exam with Cobalion.

Anyway, those are our choices. We should pick one of those two.

[Krakash]

>Ask about the various reasons.

[Stinkosar]

Guild of Stunfisk excellence.

FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC YOU KNOW.

[Bamoehn]

>Join the Stunfisk Guild.

Mainly because it seems like it would be like Wigglytuff's Guild.

[Copygoo]

>Stunfisk Guild!

[noxious]

No, join the hardwork guild. It can't be as bad as all that.

[Asmodemus]

> Maybe you should try building up your fighting skills before committing to any guild, see how well you take to it.

[Pyral Spinneret]

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OK, here's the deal with updates. I'm really sorry to leave you guys over two entire days with no new updates. What's happening is that I'm trying to seriously clean up my writing and art styles because I made a whole bunch of mistakes.

I hate past me. Past me is a shitty artist who doesn't use references and doesn't bother to get details right on characters. Past me got so many things wrong with Snivy (like the color of the arms), and forgot that it was Servine, not Snivy, that had an additional leaf on the back. Plus the proportions were really wrong.

So slightly-less-past-me went and filled a download folder with a bunch of Snivy and Zorua images (official or really decent fan art), and then went and practiced drawing them for a while (on paper):

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I think future me can start drawing them much more on-model in the future. Crappy art doesn't kill an adventure, but it sure doesn't help it, and I hope future me will know better than to keep drawing such crappy things.

Past me is also a shitty writer. Part of it was not knowing the characters well enough that I missed opportunities for characterization moments, and part of it was my being too gung-ho to show off the world building I did, but past me made some amateurish mistakes in the past update, and present me is wishing that going back and making writing edits (as well as art edits) didn't somewhat go against the spirit of the format. I think I can roll with it, but the second update of the two I'm preparing might have a somewhat-messy retcon that I'd like to otherwise avoid. So present me isn't sure what to do about this.

Present me also thinks that slightly-past me is probably making too big a deal of this, because it is basically Pokémon fanfiction, so she should chill out and stop trying to make it perfect. But, present me also wants future me to be a better writer, and present me knows that the best way to achieve that is by practicing, so why shouldn't present me do the best job she possibly can.

Anyway, I'm almost done with the writing for the very next update, and though I'll use multiple images, the art part shouldn't take more than two hours. It should be up later in the afternoon (US Mountain Daylight afternoon, that is).

>Join the Stunfisk Guild.

Mainly because it seems like it would be like Wigglytuff's Guild.

Heh, you know, I was kind of intending to make a 5th-gen equivalent to Wigglytuff's Guild, for the sake of familiarity! I don't think I want to make an exact clone of it, though, so no lifting character personalities straight off. In fact...
TAKING SUGGESTIONS FOR QUIRKY GUILDMATES.

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Limit the species to 5th-gen only, not fully evolved or not particularly powerful Pokémon.

If you want to make suggestions about Stunfisk himself, now's the time to do it.

[Stinkosar]

Here's one.

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Species: Dwebble
Nickname (If applicable): Crust
Gender: Male
Quirk: Very easily frightened. Very physically weak, but can take a beating.
Little self confidence. Quite Clumsy. Surprisingly determined and trys to see everything through to the end. Can't say no, leading to wacky misadventures he isn't ready for/didn't bargain for/doesn't want to do/.

Basically the "Bidoof" of the guild.
Except not

[Copygoo]

I never noticed anything wrong with past you's art, personally.

Solgon the Stunfisk: Be Wigglytuff's best friend in elementary school and have a personality that matches his when Wigglytuff is in Serious Mode.

Mordecai the Litwick: Be the weakest and youngest member of the guild that is basically babysat by the others even though you constantly try your hardest to train. Have everyone be very caring and nurturing and protective towards you, even the stoic and stern members.

Team Insect led by Jonathan the Shelmet who adventures with Micheal the Whirlipede and David the Joltik: Be the stoic and stern members.

Team Yulalis led by Isaac the Rufflet who adventures with Elizabeth the Tirtouga and Alexandria the Swadloon: Be the serious yet kind and welcoming members.

Team Eclectic led by Victoria the Audino who adventures with Yunan the Cottonee and Serenade the Duosion: Be the wacky and hilarious and upbeat yet powerful members.

That's all I got.