Negrek _Admin

Website: Thousand Roads

Posted September 22 2017

Chapter 26 Reply

After checking out every single post in that Serebii thread, I gotta say I really enjoyed the story of how Nate met his Mightyena. She is adorable, and I wish she was my friend. I loved all the little worldbuilding details, too. Team Rocket seems oddly plausible as an organization in this universe, and I finally understand why Nate might have joined them and why he might be in trouble with them as well.

Thank you! I'm particularly fond of the Nate and Poochyena extra myself; I wrote it a long time before it got posted, and it was something I really looked forward to being able to publish once I got to the right place. It's been a while since I've done any kind of extra, but I'm hoping to get some more out in the near future; they're fun to do, and I think it's nice to be able to give people some more background info that doesn't really fit anywhere within the frame of the story itself. I'm glad that you liked reading over the Serebii thread in general, too... it's always nice to be able to see the reviews other people give to stories I'm following, just because they so often catch things I didn't, or have interesting theories, or just remind me of some of my favorite bits. One of the disadvantages of posting across multiple sites (and FFN not being set up for public replies, grr!) is that it's easy for readers to miss out on that kind of thing, which I think is part of the fun!

My favourite thing, though, was the little extra where Nate tried to get the child to turn into what it was like when it was human. I really wish that had been in the mew backstory chapter [...] In any case, I would have liked to have a little more of Nate and the child's more lighthearted interactions to bookend the grimness of its origins. The contrast would have been nice, and "absurdly dark plot development mixed with the hilariously oblivious child's perspective" is something that I just find incredibly charming about this story.

Interesting! I do like that little exchange, and I'm planning to remove one of the flashback scenes when I revise this chapter, so that will free up a little space for something extra. (Your comments about a chapter "feeling" long versus "being" long are duly noted, though!) It's true that the chapter's unusually grim overall, so a little more humor wouldn't go amiss.

And while I'm on the subject of that chapter, it reminded me a lot of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, particularly the bits about Mew's perspective and her life in the jungle. It's my favourite chapter to date, and I really appreciate the work you put into the contradictory task of making her sensory information both alien and understandable at the same time. I eat that stuff like candy.

Wow, that's some high praise! Thanks so much! I'll admit that the backstory chapter is my favorite thus far, too. It was a very difficult one to write, so I'm glad it turned out well. And I'm glad you enjoyed how I handled Mew's POV... it definitely is difficult to make psychic perception seem alien but also comprehensible to the reader. I certainly don't always get the balance right, but I'm glad that it worked well for you in that chapter!

The details about how the child got through Leonard's shielding were also really cool. I love reading about how people work around restrictions and safeguards, because it makes the world feel real. It's like stuff has been made by actual people with actual technology that has actual rules, and isn't so much just a bunch of cool things that are slapped together because why the hell not.

Awesome! I've had to think a lot about the kinds of technology that would develop to kind of curb/contain pokémon abilities in this story, and I'm glad you enjoy some of the stuff I've come up with.

I want more information about that Deepwilds thing.

I do hope to do an extra that will talk about the deepwilds more, but basically territory in most pokémon-world regions is split into three categories: human-controlled land, routes (both pokémon and humans have jurisdiction here), and pokémon-controlled land. Pokémon-controlled areas are commonly referred to the "deepwilds." While it's perfectly legal to catch whatever you want in a city (human-controlled) or on a route (joint jurisdiction), it generally isn't in the deepwilds. That's where you'll find many all- or predominantly-pokémon socieities, and that's typically where pokémon go if they don't want to interact with humans. Of course, a lot of the pokémon out there are quite powerful, so certain unscrupulous people do go looking out there for things to catch...