#antialiasis

[bluwiikoon]

A scene from chapter 25 of @antialiasis’ The Quest for the Legends, in which Molzapart (the smug bird) heckles Chaletwo (the angry kitty cat). Also Mark is there.

[chibipika]

3, 4, 20! :D

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

Alright, so we all know that I want to write the AU of chapter 19 where Jade gets killed in front of Starr, but I wouldn’t say that that needs much context.  I could pretty much jump right in, the only problem is… it’s just legit really hard to write. ^^;  It’s just such a sheer level of guilt and self-loathing far beyond anything I’ve ever written.  Maybe the experience of roleplaying Starr in Blacklight will help me get to a level where I know how to tackle it, because I really, really want to be able to.

Miscellaneous other scenes that I want to write that do require me to work out some annoying context include:

Sebastian meeting with Giovanni and demanding the position of commander.

Sebastian catching Latios (possibly will be included in a Chapter 65 extra.)

Confrontation between Starr and Ajia prior to the revolt.

Jade/Ajia/Starr pre-story friendshipping. I’m just really bad at slice-of-life and can’t think of how to make the daily lives of ordinary elementary schoolers all that interesting. :T

Chibi/Razors friendshipping.  This is the epitome of “requires annoying context” because in order to write this, I’d have to figure out a lot of details for like, how the experiments were raised and trained, what experiences they had, where they were contained, etc.  Everything I’ve come up with has some manner of logistical issues. ><

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

Right now my favorite sequences in LC are the dream sequences in chapters 46 and 47.  Unfortunately, I can’t talk about why I like them because every sentence has the highest- spoiler-density possible.  I’ll just say that I was really particular with the symbolism there.

Other than that, I’d definitely say that this paragraph from chapter 36 is way up there:

A blindingly bright flash of light shattered my field of view as a wave of psychic energy shot through my entire being.  I was ripped apart, flipped inside-out, put back together, and then shredded once more, over and over into infinity.  What felt like white-hot metal coursed through my veins, dissolving any and all sensations in a spiraling vortex of pain.  And then my brain split open, unleashing a torrent of images from the past year.  All of my panic, all of my uncertainty, every hesitation I’d ever felt from the moment the fight began suddenly bombarded my mind simultaneously, fighting for dominance.

In general, I really enjoy coming up with weird ways of describing inner turmoil, and I think that’s the main place where my descriptions could be considered decent.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

Man, it’s hard to think of something I haven’t already rambled at length about, either here or on Thousand Roads. And by definition, I can’t point out all the clues that I want to...

In particular, I have an annoying tendency to hide clues in would-be errors, which usually manifests as (a) a character conspicuously refraining from doing something they should obviously do, or (b) a character doing or knowing something that shouldn’t be possible.  I sure do love using that as a way to tip off readers, huh.  Only problem is, if I haven’t yet earned a reader’s trust, they’re likely to just be like “ok but why did that happen.”  It also means I have to be really careful to not have accidental inconsistencies.

As for recent hints... it’s probably pretty obvious that I enjoy dropping mentions that the psychic connection the chosen and patrons share is definitely totes psychic everyone.  :V

Hmm, as far as anything else I’ve needed an excuse to ramble about...

So I’ve made the joke a few times that I’ve stumbled my way into writing Jade and Starr as moirails, and I very much want everyone to enjoy this as much as I do.  For everyone who’s not Homestuck trash (I'm not even!  I just absorbed it through osmosis!) that term refers to a close platonic bond between two individuals, one hot-tempered and the other even-tempered, wherein the latter watches over the former and keeps them in line.  This will become more apparent during the checkmate arc of LC (chapters 55-59) and I’m very much looking forward to it.

A preview:

I grabbed her arm.  “Ohhkay, let’s just… let’s just sit over here,” I said, tugging her over toward a couple of office chairs.  Starting a brawl in the middle of an office was not going to look good on us.

“God, it would be easy to break his nose,” Starr muttered under her breath.

“I’m sure it would,” I said dully.  “Which is exactly why we’re not doing that.”

I just really want people to care about these two. ;-;

[Here’s the ask meme if anyone else wants to throw me any!]

[negrek]

4, 17, 18, 20? :D

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

Well, I was going to put something from "accolade" in here because I thought I did a pretty nice job of the atmosphere, with shifting clouds of steam and the flowing river, something clanking and splashing in its midst, obscured and then revealed again by the mist, but actually, no, revisiting it it's even more of a mess than I remembered and I like none of that, lol.

Ice is another thing I enjoyed playing with, though, and there are a couple lines I still like there. One is, "Lunete shook her head and watched Glace wander the courtyard, blowing idle puffs of ice that turned bushes to miniature sculpture." Nice and simple, but I think it does a good job of conjuring up the kind of glittering ice-rimed... things... plants turn into after an ice storm. I think it's an unexpected moment that's fun to visualize. Should definitely be "puffs of *frost*" rather than "puffs of *ice*," though.

I also like, "The glalie's displeasure shed from him in a litter of snowflakes." Again, I think this is just a fun mental image, and a way of making the glalie feel different than a human. When glalie get disgruntled, the temperature around them drops, so you get a little shower of snow... again, a nice little image, and something that people might not ordinarily think of when they think of ice-types. Shoutout to myself for picking this out of the doc and going, "Hey, I like this sentence!" and not realizing until I pasted it in here that it was in the wrong fucking tense.

17. Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

Ahaha, well, I think many people perceive my writing, and probably me in general, as a lot more serious than it actually is? Most of my writing is just me having fun, and what it contains is unabashedly driven by rule of cool/rule of funny a lot of the time. Which, honestly, considering a lot of the nonsense that goes on in the chapterfics especially, shoudn't be too much of a surprise. There are certain themes that show up throughout, but generally speaking they emerge organically as a result of what I find interesting or because plot naturally accretes around certain aspects of the story or characters. But generally speaking my stories aren't really *about* anything except me having a good time.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Salvage has so many of these. So many! Which is kind of weird, because my previous stories haven't, despite Clouded Sky taking nearly as long to produce. It might be that I haven't been working on any big long chapterfics, and not even many one-shots, while writing it as I have with my previous fics, so maybe effort/ideas that would ordinarily go into those stories have ended up spawning all these spinoffs/mutations of the main fic instead.

As far as abandoned plotlines, this story has been pretty extensively and publicly restructured, so yeah, stuff's gotten lost in the shuffle... I used to joke to myself that the story had an unreasonable amount of hanging out on the beach given its overall tone, but thennnnn Mewtwo went and burned down the child's house and it won't be going back to its island again, so in fact the story now contains almost 0% beach from this time on, oops. (There is one scene in Orre that will take place on a beach, assuming it makes it all the way through to publication. It's not a plot-crtical one.) We also missed out on Nate going to prison, the child being Red (although that one could still happen), and one scene that I really liked where Nate got to lament the fact that his pokémon were all gone and it was all his fault. Now you'll just have to imagine it, since we won't be seeing him until he gets them back, if ever.

And AU's, so many AU's. Even way back in 2012 or something I was talking about one I was rather fond of, where the child demands that Nate read it a children's book, and he isn't about to put in the effort to actually do that and makes up something ridiculous solely based on the pictures. Assuming I still have the file around somewhere, that one will end up getting published as an extra at some point near the end of the fic. Other than that, I've got everything from alternate endings to a weird time travel AU that happens in a scene that isn't even in the main fic (because the child isn't there for it). There's also a rather extensive PMD AU that may or may not end up seeing the light of day at some point and which is gently referenced within the fic itself. It's perhaps not technically an AU, since it's not in any way incompatible with the main canon; you could choose to pretend that it happened or not without it changing the story as written at all.

20. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

Uhhh this one seems hard to do without spoilers. But I hope you've all been paying attention to the stuff about how psychic abilities work and their ability to warp the thinking of people around the psychic, especially over time. I'm quite proud of this worldbuilding thing, but people haven't commented on it much. The concept is central to the plot and drives basically all of the final arcs in Orre, so it's definitely worth thinking about if you haven't! Relatedly, there was a scene in one of the now-deleted Orre chapters (but it will 100% return largely unchanged in the new version) that dropped some info that I thought made it pretty screamingly obvious what's up with Mew and where she might be, buuuut nobody ever commented on that, either, so perhaps it wasn't quite as big of a giveaway as I thought, haha. If you're interested in trying to figure out the plot before the characters, all the psychic bullshit is what you should be paying attention to.

Also, Absol is very precise in her wording, and what I understand as the "twist" of this story (it's not much of a twist, way more important for the characters than anyone reading) relates to something the child's misunderstood for the entire story so far about something she told it.

[the-wandering-whumper]

Another TAT: I'm a huge sucker for anything where a character is shot painfully in the stomach or the like and left to die, and they use their remaining strength to crawl and stumble their way to complete some task, collapsing as soon as they have. (Extra points if the task involves saving their friends.)

... maybe crawling to the phone so they can call for help :)

[elyvorg]

I would love to hear if there's a particular fic bit that you've been dying to talk about! :D

Well, at first my answer to this was, “nothing off the top of my head?”, since I reblogged that post less because I’d been thinking of anything specific recently and more because it’d been on my dash three times. But I’d definitely felt that way about certain parts at some point in the past, so I went and reread the fic (this is the Shadow Kaito fic I’m talking about, of course, being the most recent lengthy fic of mine and me being still mostly in V3-mode) to refresh my memory. And now the response is, “not one particular part. Several particular parts”. 

I’d say I’m sorry, but I’m emphatically not, and I know you’re not going to complain about this either. =P

“But still… they were always gonna find out sooner or later, y’know? Hell, knowing Shuichi, he probably already figured it out a while back, right?”

Kaito’s gaze darted to Shuichi, his eyes flashing with alarm and… something else, something that made Shuichi reach for the brim of a hat that wasn’t there.

In the early conception of this moment, my mental simulation of Shuichi simply kind of flinched when Kaito looked at him here. As I tried to figure out why, I remembered that oh yeah, Shuichi has some issues with eye contact, particularly of an intense nature - and then it occurred to me that the way Kaito was looking at him here was actually directly connected to those issues. It’s not “hatred” - Kaito would never hate Shuichi - but it’s that same kind of hurt, accusatory “how dare you uncover my secrets, they weren’t yours to know” from the part of Kaito that’s terrified he knows everything, and it feels all too uncomfortably like the culprit from that one case. Since that was a very fun notion, I wanted to get it across, but only very subtly because Shuichi would never consciously acknowledge that Kaito had had that effect on him. So I was really pleased when I came up with the reference to his hat and his instinctive reflex to hide his eyes behind it when something like this happens.

“It’s so obvious who I am. Shuichi can see the truth, but all I can do is run away from it like a coward.”

Originally when I wrote this line that leads to Kaito fully denying his Shadow, I wanted to get across the idea that, since everyone can already see that the Shadow is obviously him, Kaito is only making himself look even weaker by not being able to face it (which just pushes him even further into desperate irrational denial instead of cutting his losses and accepting it). At first I couldn’t word that right and the Shadow was basically directly saying as such, until I managed to streamline it here into a line which implies it better.

But here’s the fun thing - I wrote this part before properly getting through the trial 4 section of my Kaito ramble and figuring out exactly what’s going on in Kaito’s head during that trial and what the root of the problem is. So when I did figure that out, it was pretty great to look back at this bit and realise that I’d already written Kaito doing pretty much the same thing without actually having known at the time that something like this essentially happens in canon, too. “Shuichi can see the truth, but all I can do is run away from it like a coward” is a perfect description of what Kaito is doing in trial 4, but I didn’t know that when I first wrote that line!

A bunch of other bits in this fic were deliberately drawing off things I talk about in the Kaito ramble - “Heroes aren’t supposed to be this way!” comes to mind - but I think this was the only bit where the parallel happened backwards by complete chance.

Shuichi doesn’t see the Shadow’s true form until quite late in the game and Maki sees it pretty immediately and more or less gets it straight away, but Kaito? Kaito also notices the Shadow’s true form quite early on - and then his mind just does a big NOPE on acknowledging it or thinking about it, because he’s totally got better things to be doing, like rescuing Shuichi, right. (But what he gets from it is not, like Shuichi and Maki do, that he’s hurting himself by taking on their burdens without worrying about his own problems - he just sees it as meaning he’s too weak to support them.)

There was in fact a far better way Kaito could have “saved” Shuichi - by believing in his ability to save himself and simply encouraging him to do that. Shuichi was too nervous to climb down on his own until he felt like he absolutely needed to, but Kaito could have talked him through it, giving him the confidence to do so and reassuring him that he’d be there to catch him if he messed up. Exactly like Kaito always should be doing for his sidekick! But not here, because this is chapter 4, and because everything Kaito’s just heard has made him desperate to prove it all wrong and show that he’s “strong” enough to very directly save Shuichi and be the hero.

“I always say that,” the Shadow said. “I tell everyone, ‘I’ll do something about this’, but I never have a clue what to actually do.”

“Shut up!” yelled Kaito. He flailed one of his arms at the lights as if trying to swat them away, to no avail. “Get outta my face!”

“I’m hurt. I’m scared.” The stars’ brightness intensified, and Shuichi hated how powerless he was to stop what was coming. “Heroes aren’t supposed to be this way!”

“Sh-Shut up!” Kaito tried to turn his head away from the stars, but they were all around him. He screwed his eyes shut instead. “Y-You don’t know a damn thing about me!”

In earlier drafts, Kaito’s protests and denial at his Shadow before it attacks him both times were pretty nondescript and interchangeable, but in editing I tried to tighten that up a bit. Now the idea is that each time Kaito’s reaction essentially reflects what the Shadow is saying about him and proves it right even as he’s denying it.

Despite all the pain relating to his own issues he goes through in this, the absolute worst and most terrifying moment of it for Kaito was when he thought his Shadow was about to kill Shuichi while he was powerless to stop it.

(The Shadow threatening to do that and Shuichi figuring out that it was a just bluff to hurt Kaito was actually one of the earliest ideas I had for how part of the “fight” might go, before I’d even remotely pinned down the Shadow’s berserk form. As a placeholder, I was picturing some vague giant shadowy creature picking Shuichi up in its hands and threatening to crush him or something.)

While Kaito was immensely relieved that Shuichi wasn’t going to die, he otherwise hated it when Shuichi figured out his Shadow’s intentions. That was Shuichi saving himself by using his intellect and realising that Kaito was the vulnerable one who needed protecting (and also that this Shadow definitely was him), none of which are things Kaito wanted to be true. The stubborn desperation to prove that all wrong was what gave him the strength to stand up again, even though he couldn’t a moment ago when Shuichi’s life was apparently in danger (because all that moment made him feel was utter terror at his helplessness).

It’s also not a coincidence that the moment at which Kaito clams up and stops saying anything for a while is just after Shuichi starts very directly protecting him. At that point, it seems indisputable to him that Shuichi knows who the real hero is and who’s really in need of protecting, such that there’s nothing Kaito can say to try to deny it any more, while he also still can’t bring himself to admit the truth. At first when I wrote this bit I wasn’t completely sure if my simulation of Kaito retreating into himself and being unresponsive for a long time was truly in character for him - it doesn’t seem very Kaito-like on the surface - but then it occurred to me that actually this is basically also what Kaito does in the first half of chapter 5 in response to a not-entirely-dissimilar set of circumstances, so yes, it definitely is in character.

“What you just said is that you don’t trust us,” Maki snapped. “You think we’d turn our backs on you if we knew about this.” Her mace crashed into the Shadow, harder than before. “How stupid can you be?” Fuelled by her frustration, she grew relentless, striking him over and over again. “How could you possibly think – after you accepted me for who I am – that I would ever not do the same for you?”

Part of the reason Maki gets so furious and relentless here is that as she’s saying all this, she’s realising that, oh, wait, her own offhand comments about Kaito being an idiot or a coward prooooobably did not help any with him trusting her not to turn her back on him, and she’s starting to feel rather guilty about that.

Maki first hits Shadow Kaito in the torso, which is the least weak part of him since he’s a statue, but later when Kaito’s accepted him and the berserk form just needs to be destroyed, Maki simply shatters his limbs to end it immediately. She could have done that the whole time - but what she was trying to do in the beginning wasn’t to force the Shadow to drop the pedestal, but rather to persuade him to choose to drop it of his own volition by making carrying it even more difficult. It occurred to me that the amount of time between Maki leaving and returning was probably a little too long for her to have spent just running all the way to her lab and back at full pelt. So then I decided that she paused for a while in her lab as she picked up the mace and pictured herself destroying something that looked like Kaito with it, which made her shudder and reconsider exactly what the Shadow was and whether attacking it would really help. She came to the conclusion that it’s essentially Kaito’s “enemy” and therefore she needed to help him fight it rather than just easily winning the fight herself.

Despite everything, Kaito was smiling. Not a huge, dazzling grin for the sake of others, but a quiet smile that was just for himself.

I wrote this line perfectly innocently, and then it occurred to me that there is in fact one time in canon in which Kaito smiles like this, and it’s when he is in SPACE. Then I had a lot of emotions.

“I’m alright now.”

This is just after Shuichi and Maki have encouraged Kaito to accept his Shadow; this is also exactly what Kaito says in the correct route of his Harmonious Heart when Shuichi convinces him to be okay about showing his weakness. Probably nobody was ever going to notice that, but I wanted to put it there anyway.

The lunar lander had landed, standing quite stably on the three legs that it had always had, as if those two statues on top had never really needed Shadow Kaito’s support at all.

That’s not true, Shuichi thought fervently as the implications of this sank in. How could even a part of Kaito have ever thought that?

There have been many points during my V3 commentary at which I have wanted to say “and that’s why the pedestal has legs.” But I couldn’t, because readers of the commentary may not have read this fic and would be very confused.

“I shouldn’t have blamed everything on you, when you’re no different from anybody else.”

At some point after I wrote this line, it brought to mind a line from the game Celeste, during Shadow Madeline’s explosion of rage, where she says, “You think you can blame everything on me!?” I thought that was a neat unintentional similarity. Don’t blame everything on your Shadow. It will just make them sad. They are weaker than you and need to be your sidekick.

(Reminder: if you are here for my Shadow-related content, please play Celeste.)

Kaito’s gaze rose to meet his. “Time for what?” There was a quiet urgency in his voice. “What are you going to do, Shuichi?”

The narration here was me doing my best to subtly get across the sense that Kaito’s really just desperately thinking, “Please tell me you can save me, Shuichi.” Shuichi really is his hero.

Kaito’s grip tightened just a little on Shuichi’s shoulder as he looked between them both imploringly. It might have been because Shuichi knew the truth now, or just because Kaito wasn’t trying so hard to hide it anymore, but Shuichi could sense something almost anxious behind Kaito’s usual confident gaze.

“I believe in you guys,” Kaito said. “Isn’t that enough?”

And similarly, this was me trying to get across that Kaito is really, really desperate for this to be enough. Shuichi and Maki are going to be figuring out a plan to escape and save his life with their awesome talents of deductions and fighting, but Kaito’s mind isn’t wired to deduce things like Shuichi can or come up with plans, and he’s not strong enough right now to fight. He so badly wants to be able to help somehow with them forming this plan and not be useless, to prove that he really can still support them after all despite everything, but all he can do is be his usual optimistic self and believe in them, and if that isn’t enough to help then he’s just got nothing else to offer and he can’t bear that thought.

[qwertyfinger]

Dave and Katherine Discuss Real Life

Author’s Note: this is just a little thing i threw together after reading @antialiasis’ Morphic because the sad ending left me wondering about the future. i originally had plans for it to go further, but i’m not really interested in making this a long-term project, at least for the time being, haha. anyway, i hope you enjoy it!

Calm down now. Be cool.

Katherine took a deep breath and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked damn good. She didn’t think such things very often, but right now, she had no shame in admitting it. She was a little off base in some places, sure— her eyes were rather squinty, for example, and her nose was much too small and high— but you didn’t have to be perfect to look your best, and she certainly did.

Oh, there was also the trio of green horns sticking out of her head, and the fact that her hands were in fact giant roses. But those were minor details, really, hardly worthy of address. At least, that’s what she had to tell herself if she had any hope of making her case.

“Ms. Harrison, five minutes.”

Katherine nodded. “I’m just about ready,” she replied, glaring at her hair in the mirror. She wished she could do something with it. Its utter plainness was all the more obvious when contrasted with her rather fetching pantsuit. Oh, and don’t even get her fucking started on the pantsuit. No one would ever appreciate it for what it was, that being nothing short of a miracle. Just try putting on a tight shirt when your hands are roses and your head is covered in thorns.

Christ, what was she doing? Ruminating on her clothes? In less than five minutes, she would leave her house and step into a car, which would bring her all the way to the town courthouse. How long had it been since she’d been to town? In a car? Outside of her neigborhood, even?

She took a final look at herself in the mirror. Flawed. Perfect. Plain. Beautiful. Human. Pokémon. It was hard to describe someone like her concisely, but that’s just who she was. A mix-up. And today, she was going to change things for all the other mix-ups. Today, years of hard work would finally come to fruition. After hours and hours spent poring over books and articles and wiki pages and proceeding transcripts and histories and everything else imaginable, teaching herself the inner workings of this particular corner of law, Katherine had finally reached the day she’d been long preparing for.

Today, Katherine would testify before the city court to free the Pokémorphs from their perpetual house arrest. And, with any luck, today would be the day she was finally freed.

Unfortunately, David Ambrose woke up.

“Agh, fuck.” His head pounded as he rolled to the side, his eyes scrambling desperately into focus before resting on the alarm clock on his nightstand. 12:17. “Shit.”

Didn’t he have something today? The, uh… The thing. Fuck. What the fuck was it?

Dave flopped onto his back again and was just about to shut his eyes and fall back into the sweet embrace of sleep when he saw something taped to the ceiling. What the fuck? He squinted at it, rubbing his forehead as though it would actually do something for the pain.

It was an index card, and he could just make out the text. It read: “Court case. Katherine. 11:30, don’t forget.”

Ah, fuck. Well, he hadn’t forgotten, at least. He’d overslept, which was at the very least outside of his control… Though, if the taint of beer on his breath was to be trusted, it probably _was _in his control after all. But whatever. He’d probably have slept in until noon anyway. Right?

Groaning, he sat up and fumbled for the remote on his nightstand, nearly knocking over his alarm clock and table lamp in the process. When at last he found it, he switched on the television and turned it to channel one.

There she was, in all her morphic glory. Dave had never seen her so dressed up— she wore it wonderfully, though he found the buttons that ran along the back seam of the sleeves amusing. So that’s how she’d fit it on despite her hands…

A marquee rolled across the bottom of the screen. Dave wasn’t yet conscious enough to read it all, but he got the gist. Katherine was still making her case for the humanity of the Pokémorphs, and arguing that the Dangerous Nonhuman Act was unconstitutional— or, at least, it was unconstitutional in its application to the Pokémorphs. Dave had heard the argument a million times. He’d even helped write it. He could only hope she delivered it well, though he’d never resort to fucking praying, thank you very much. If anyone knew how important delivery was, it was him. It was definitely, fucking definitely him.

“—aware that the media paints us as half-human, half-Pokémon hybrids,” Katherine said, her voice cool but just shaky enough for it to be perceptible. Well, Dave sure as hell didn’t blame her. At least she was talking fucking sense. He’d seen way more severe television blunders on similar topics in his days, to say the least. But it didn’t take much to outperform fucking Brian, of all people. Dave didn’t realise he was shaking his head until he felt it pounding in protest.

“However, this is simply not the case. You will notice by the upright posture and intelligent behaviour of not only myself but my peers that we are much more human than anything else. As per the lab report, in fact, we are almost entirely human, with some Pokémonic genes spliced in. So, modified as we may be, Pokémorphs cannot be described as ‘nonhuman’ any more than, say, a black person, or a disabled person might be. There are simply different genes at play, but we look and behave and think the same way as anyone else. The line between human and non is blurred, to be sure, but i think that given my substantial evidence, even the most resistant will see that we are just like everyone else.”

Dave shook his head. Fuck. It was too early in the morning for this shit, and he had very important things to do today. He always did. Such as reflecting on what little he’d seen as he made his way to the kitchen.

Katherine was a fairly good public speaker, you had to give her that. But that was only true on some accounts. She presented herself confidently, true, and she vocalised without timidity. She was a proud and strong speaker. And yet, what on God’s green fucking Earth was she talking about? While he could agree that the Pokémorphs were primarily human, why he hell did she think to compare that to race and, fuck it all, disability? Well, whatever. It wasn’t Dave’s case. If he’d wanted it done better, he’d have just done it himself. This wasn’t about him. It was about the Pokémorphs, and it was also (purely by chance) about everything Dave had worked toward for the past ten yeaoh goddamn it who was he kidding.

Katherine couldn’t fuck this up. She just couldn’t. To her credit, she had a sound argument when she wasn’t botching her attempts at injecting political buzzwords. If the judge had any reason at all, he’d see her point and rule in her favor. But in truth, Dave had come to distrust the public sector a long time ago.

He’d come to distrust a lot of things, actually. Sometimes he wondered whether his drinking habits should be one of them. Even still, he produced a fresh beer from the refrigerator and cracked it open, taking a good sip. Christ, why the fuck was alcohol in the morning looked down on? There was nothing in the world like a cool splash of beer on a dry, scratchy morning throat. Absolute fucking ecstasy.

Dave took the can to his recliner and fell into it, leaning forward and taking healthy sips as he stared off into the distance, into his regrets, surrounded by a rather impressive castle of beer cans and the persistent drone of the courtcase on the television in front of him. His throne. It was another day in the life of the once-great David Ambrose.

If he had been watching the television, of course, he might have seen something very important. Game-changing, even. But, of course, it was absolutely nothing like Dave to see important things until it was entirely too late. Who did he have to blame but himself?

Literally everyone, obviously.

Sighing, he turned his gaze to the portraits that sat on his shelf. He wasn’t the sentimental type, but, well… He wasn’t the sentimental type. Having a bunch of your kids die tended to change some things about you.

He regarded the images somberly.

Will was such a sweet kid. He’s the last one you’d expect to get shot. But that also made him the likeliest. That’s what happened to sweet kids. It happened to Brian, too. When you’re in peril and you can’t stand up for yourself, you get a bullet in the fucking head. No golden charm was going to deflect that. Dave sniffed a little, and took a long drink of his beer.

Mia. Christ. What a character. And yet, Dave found himself thinking that her loss was perhaps one of the most profound ones the world would ever know. He knew he was wrong for allowing himself to choose favorites and value one life over another, but… Mia was something else. She was unstable. She was terrifying. She was a psychopath. But there was something beautiful about that. She was all of those things because she was supposed to be. They had always been here. They were not defects. They were woven into her DNA as solidly as the colour of her hair or the shape of her face. It was who she was. And now it was all gone.

Nothing personal, of course. Purely scientific. She was a marvel, biologically. Well, they all were, to be fair. But she was something else. Sometimes it seemed like she was more Scyther than anything. There was real scientific potential there. He should’ve tested her more. Should’ve prodded her. Picked her mind apart and figured out what she really was on the inside.

Well, there was nothing on the inside now, and there was no sense moping over it. Dave finished his beer, then crushed the can in his hand and threw it backward haphazardly. It fell amid a pile of similarly crushed cans, at least three dozen in number.

It was going to be a long-ass fucking day.

“Your honor, if i may.” Daniels’ voice was so damn smug that Katherine could hardly resist leaping over the bench and socking him in his face. There were two reasons she couldn’t do that, however. Firstly, the public already erred on the side of Pokémorphs being extra dangerous and violent, so her case would certainly not be helped by flagrant aggression. Secondly, her hands were roses, and she suspected they may not be very good for punching anyway.

“The plaintiff raises valid points, of course,” he continued snidely. Grr. “Points worth considering. However, it seems to me, with all due respect, like she’s gracefully failing to address the Mamoswine in the room, as it were.”

The judge raised an eyebrow. “That being?”

“Mia Kerrigan, your honor.”

The audience burst into quiet but energetic chatter.

Mia. Of course.

“Order!” the judge cried. “Continue, Mr. Daniels.”

Daniels happily obliged.“Mia Kerrigan was a proven psychopath. All witness accounts corroborate claims of her violence and dispassion. She attacked with little provocation, and herself provoked others, seemingly searching for reasons to fight or even creating them. Such behavior is consistent with the observed behavior of Scyther, and in human beings is antisocial to the point of justifying asylum. If the animal genes could have affected the mind of Mia Kerrigan in such a way as to make her unfit for human interaction, your honor, why should we assume her fellow Pokémorphs are any better off, when they are purportedly equally human? After all, we do know that several of the surviving Morphs were personally responsible for the tragic deaths of several men of the Church of Holy Truth.”

Katherine stood abruptly, heat rising to her face, heart leaping in her chest. How could he say something like that? “I object, your honor,” she said through clenched teeth with all the tact she could muster. “The kills made by the Pokémorphs are shown by the court of law to be in self-defence, and are not valid evidence against the humanity of our kind.” Even as she said it, she could feel Daniels’ smug grin. It doesn’t matter, he’d be thinking. The seeds of fear have been sown. “Mia Kerrigan was a psychopath, it’s true. There’s simply no denying it. However, her mental state is not indicative of any of the rest— there is no evidence to suggest that any of the other Pokémorphs are psychopathic in the least, and none of us have committed violent acts apart from the Church of Holy Truth incident, which as i stated previously was self-defensive. And, for what it’s worth, you don’t put psychopaths in asylums. They walk free just like everyone else, until they commit a crime. Which Mia didn’t.”

Daniels’ grin had faded. She was right, and he knew it. Or he knew she was technically right, at least. If he was anything like his cousins, Katherine knew he was fare more malicious than he was letting on. But you simply couldn’t in court. Katherine almost wished he would. Then everyone could see what a sham he was once and for all, and the support of the judge would be hers for certain.

No one else spoke, so Katherine continued. “Besides, that’s a matter of mental stability, which, while admittedly influenced by our Pokémorph genes, has nothing to do with our status as human. Your honor, i believe the truth is evident here. Despite our appearances and minor differences, we Pokémorphs are no less human than any other person in this courtroom. Our segregation is unjust and should be repealed immediately. I see no reason to believe otherwise, and none has been presented.”

And that was true. Daniels had sure said lots of things about Pokémorphs over the last few hours, most of them bad and some of them true. But none of them had anything to do with their status as human. And that’s what the case was about.

The judge’s softening impression implied that she agreed. “A fine point, Ms. Harrison.” Daniels tried rather poorly to keep his fear from spreading to his face as she spoke. “The court rules in favor of the Pokémorphs. They are hereby excluded from the provisions of the Dangerous Nonhuman Act, and otherwise protected against further discrimination by the full power of this land’s constitution.” She slammed her gavel with a resounding and unbelievable satisfying, crack. And it was all over. “Case dismissed.”

Katherine fell into her seat, lightheaded. And for the first time in a decade, free.

“Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck?” Dave sounded more angry than excited, as he often did. But in truth, his heart was leaping in exuberance. “She did it. She really fucking did it. Holy shit.” Still muttering to himself, he looked around for his daughter before remembering they no longer lived together. Fuck, how long had it been? Three years? And he still expected her to be around. Christ.

He grabbed for his phone and began punching in Jean’s number before anxiously holding it to his ear, leaning forward in his chair with anticipation.

“Hello? Dad?”

“Jean,” Dave said, more of an energetic breath than a true utterance. “You… You’re… Fuck.”

“So you heard?”

“Yes, of course i fucking heard. Wait, are we talking about the same thing? Did you watch the fucking—”

“Yes, of course i watched it. We all watched it.”

“So you know that—”

“Yes, Dad. I know. I’m in town right now, actually. God, i forgot how awesome it is here! And did you know you can pay for things with your phone now? You don’t even need credit cards! I mean, people are staring at me weird still, especially now that i’m yelling into a phone, and they probably don’t know that i’m allowed to be here yet so it’s all really weird, but still! Wow! It’s so great to be back out here, i can’t even hardly believe it! And i know i can’t really be Sarah Hooter anymore, and that sucks but i’m over it so whatever, but maybe i can be an actress in something else now? And i think Katherine should be a lawyer forever now, she was so super good. And Gabriel could toootally go into construction or mining or something, i mean he totally jives with rocks and stuff, and Jack… Well, i don’t know! But we can all have jobs now, that’s the point, and we can finally be with people, and even if they look at us weird that’s fine because we’re free, and—”

She continued for a good little while, but Dave stopped listening to the words. That wasn’t the important part. Instead he clung to her voice. The energy, the enthusiasm. It had been gone for years now. Ever since she’d evolved, there had been something off about her. This was it. The cheer. And here it was back.

His daughter was happy again.

Dave revelled in it as she spoke. And when she finally finished, drawing for air to replace all of it she’d just displaced while talking, Dave found himself at a loss for words. For once.

It was a good thing Jean couldn’t hear him cry through the phone.

[memedocumentation]

Shouldn't the explanation post for the McDonald's chat meme include the common format where the final character also shouts "McDonald's! McDonald's! McDonald's!"

Good point! The explanation post has been edited to reflect this information!

[chibi-pika-artwork]

The Quest for the Legends by @antialiasis​ turns fifteen years old today!!!  Holy crap!!  I’ve been reading it for about thirteen of those years, and it’s honestly hard to imagine my life without this fic being a part of it.  It’s had such a tremendous influence on me as a writer, growing up with this fic and watching it grow and evolve.  I can’t believe it’s finally going to be over very soon.

So here’s Chalenor the time-traveling murdercat life guardian, looking way more badass than I’ve ever drawn him before.  Perhaps we’ll finally get to know what his deal is.