OOC: Thanks to your ask, I realized that I never went back to work on Arkaion's map!
I have a general idea of where I want towns, gyms and other locations placed, but I don't have in mind the overall shape of the region and I absolutely need to fix this.
Probably (as I scribbled on this shitty attempt at sketching something I made in the early afternoon) I could start drawing the parts I'm sure about and then piece them together to get the full map...
This is my first attempt at making a Pokémon region so I'm pretty much winging it as I go.
Transcription of my awful handwriting under the cut
Ignore that I felt fancy and I decided to use one of my dip pens to sketch a part of the map (the sticky note didn't like the ink lmao) and scribbled all of the notes in shitty English forgetting that my handwriting is a bit whack and not easy to read.
What's there's written on the partial "map":
Arrow pointing to the side, between stylized mountains, with the word "KALOS" next to it
A dot with a thin line mimicking a river with over it the name "Creekdale"
Under the "dots" for tiny islands there's written "Wailmer Sanctuary"
Not too far from "Creekdale" there are two squares: the first has "Stoneburgh" written under it while the second has "Stone-on-Sea" under it.
"Wildemons Route" is written next to a dashed line going from "Stone-on-Sea" towards the upper border of the sticky note, where there's written "WILD AREA"
Another dashed line named "Oceanus Route" goes towards a bigger square called "Brassport"
An island next to the coast is called "Torterra Isle"
On the bigger island in the bottom right there's written "MINERALIS ISLE" and has a dot with "Ferrumwick" next to it
Notes around the pages:
Connected on land to Kalos
Peninsular region? IDK =(
Vague idea for some places but I'm missing the overall Region shape =/
I picture it as a mix of routes and wild areas like a mix between Galar & Paldea
I keep changing my ideas lately...
Maybe I should make the little separate maps & then connect them together? IDK I never made a pokémon region before =(
Okay, so this morning I woke up from an interesting dream that really seemed like it’d make a neat one-shot or something. I’m calling it “Black Arrow” bc of reasons later shown in the half-awake dream dozes I had after.
So it started in modern day with me and my family living in this house and apparently living there for years.
Over that time, we became really good friends with the husband of this couple next door, and one day it was discovered that he'd contracted a life-threatening illness that if he survived, would leave him in worse shape than my step-dad. So me and my mom's cousin, Ruth, got him on her motorcycle (apparently a thing in the dream??) to go to the hospital bc the quickest way was too narrow for normal cars. Well, she ended up taking me and my neighbor through this back way, across cobblestone streets and through side bushes toward the hospital.
However, while we were on our way, the path went along the edge of a cliff and I ended up falling off the motorcycle and falling into an icy ocean. My family & neighbor's wife found out and went in to rescue me, and we all ended up washed up against this big black cliff. We tried to find a way out of the freezing water but the only thing we found was a large circular drain grate just under the water's surface.
By this time, I was actually in a kind of lagoon trapped behind the grate trying to get out (bc I'd somehow been pulled under into a natural tunnel by an under current). My mom and the neighbor's wife ( who was super strong despite being a really skinny Asian looking gal) managed to break the bars and peel them back. However it was too cold for us to swim back to the mainland. So we opted to follow the lagoon and explore the inner cave I was in. (This is where it starts feeling like we walked into the Golden Compas movie).
As it happened there was a kind of natural doc made of the same craggy black stone as the cliff side, so we climbed onto that and discovered bars forming a ladder to a big drain pipe above. We climbed our way in in hopes of finding a way out, and found ourselves climbing through this big building that doubled as both a factory and a kind of weird cult-like base. It had some serious Magisterium vibes, and apparently, they were doing brainwashing hocus pocus on these kids who'd been sent to as apprentices to learn from these guys since they were presumably "powerful" and "well-learned". Everyone there had to undergo an initiation before being allowed to work in the factory (presumably to "earn" their education??).
Well, we managed to make it to the ground floor and find an exit. however, that exit was stuck behind another grate (which the neighbor lady bent just like the first one) that led to a "sewage" pipe. No one was happy about this, especially my mom, but they all went through the pipe to get out of the building. But while my mom was getting into the pipe, I got impatient with how slowly everyone was crawling and, not wanting to be caught, went to go find a quicker way outside. I found one, but it was connected to a set of conveyor belts and when I tried to get through it, the conveyor belts would switch and the exit would be on the opposite side of the room.
By the time I realized I couldn't get out that way, the boys I'd seen in the initiation room were coming and I knew I'd be found out. So I tried to blend in and get back to the backroom and escape. But the warden lady was there and was watching everyone - including me, and somehow I knew that if I stayed in the room too long, she'd get suspicious and send in people after me, thus exposing my escape tunnel and possibly getting me captured along with my fam if they didn't get clear. So I tried to get to the room without her noticing - only to find that each time I went into the room, it changed and a machine was now blocking the grate.
To make matters worse, the cult leaders were coming down to inspect the work. So I do the most logical thing. I hide behind a big steel door. brilliant right? Well I end up being found by one of their acolytes who turns out to be an old friend of mine that I thought had moved to private school. Turns out she and the boys I saw didn't want be being initiated bc they knew these guys weren't good guys and tried to help me by pretending I was this lore figure the cult leaders all feared, the "White".
My friend sounded the alarm, I stepped forward and pulled my white hood forward (bc I apparently was wearing a white hooded robe now) and played along. The boys pretended to be mind controlled and tried to be a distraction so I could get away, but it didn't work. The head cult-leader literally just pushed them off like they were nothing. When I saw the ploy wasn't working, I tried to bolt toward the back room, only to be grabbed and restrained from behind by one of the dark-robed cult members.
That was when the main dream ended but it continued in little mini dreams I had as I tried to get back to sleep (bc it ended at like 4 in the morning).
In the mini dreams, the cult leader unhooded me to find that I was just a girl and not the great "White" as he thought. (The dream kept switching between me as a redhead in a blue and white dress, and this pale skinny girl with long black hair and big black-brown eyes so idk what i really looked like.) But in the mini dreams, they caught me and brought me to this room with a table and a candle in the middle of it, and began asking why I was there and why I pretended to be the "White".
I tried to answer honestly without diminishing my chances of escape. So, I told them how I'd been on my way to the hospital to say goodbye to a dying friend when I fell into the winter ocean and got swept away to the lagoon under their tower and worked to find my way out and I pretended to be the "White" to spook anyone away so I could find and use the exit to get out.
Each time I misspoke or lied, the candle flame would turn blue and one of the cult members (who looked like professor Quirrell from the Harry Potter movies) would shout at me to tell the truth. Finally, I decided that since I couldn't lie, I just wouldn't answer the questions that would've led me to exposing my friends, family, or neighbor’s wife.
When they can't get the whole truth out of me, the Magister (head of the cult) mentioned how unfortunate it was and said that since I wasn't willing to tell them the full truth, that they'd have to keep me there until I did. It kind of did a weird fuzzy thing where it glimpsed over me getting this symbol ➵ tattooed on my right forearm, marking me as the new property of the cult and assigning me servant duties to one of the cult heads (a tall, pale man who was mostly shaved except for a patch of hair on the back of his head that was tied back with a pony tale) as punishment for my intruding. (The only method I can think of them using on the dream!me is one a friend of mine brought up called “stick-and-poke” so that’s gonna be the method I assume they went with.)
To add to this though, the tattoo was apparently magical and if I displeased or disobeyed the cult leader in charge of me, he could cause it to burn excruciatingly as a punishment. Punishments included speaking out of turn, not doing my new duties as their servant, or straying too far from the spellcaster. At this point, I’m firmly of the opinion that they did it not only to see if they could pry more information out of me later, but also to keep me quiet without killing me because I’d “seen too much.”
Also, for the cult leaders, they all wore similar hooded robes that were black velvet that shimmered either blue, mauve, prune, or maroon, and were accented with gold patterns/embroidery. Below are some of the closest fcs I could find to the cult leaders in the dream.
((For those wondering about the ear comment on the tags of another post, have a comparison between N’s ears and his parents’. Note that all of these use the same base head circle to compare ears alone, and not facial structure (that’s another picture for another day).
N gets a lot of his looks from his dad. Ears included))
Still hoping to get feedback on this. I know I have no regular update schedule but I recently started work and I often have other things to do and before I know it, my fix has slid to the back burner again. But if really like to improve my writing. I know a crossover between Dangan Ronpa, a well known niche Japanese visual novel, and Wolfblood, an equally niche pre teen British show, is kind off the wall but I hope I've kept the spirit of both alive and blended them well enough so that the fact that they exist in the same universe is believable. I can see that people are looking at my work but I'd really like to hear back from people. I want to improve my vocabulary, my descriptions, my world building, my dialogue. What are you enjoying? What aren't you enjoying? What are you hoping will happen?
