Since The Wishing Chamber is 99.9% never getting made, here’s some info about the (admittedly PG-13) Pokemon fan-game I plotted out ten years ago. Lots of details and accumulated art by (off the top of my head) Alanahikarichan, Mopomoko, Zaerosz, my younger sibling Vic, TeddyBara, and NightFlowerLuv:
--Centuries ago, a local trainer, the most powerful in the realm, decided to try to capture the most powerful legend the region told of: Rayquaza.
--All this did was piss it off.
--Eventually, unable to stop Rayquaza’s livid rampage through battling, she went with plan B: Underneath the tallest mountain in the region is an ancient chamber. In this chamber, Jirachi makes its home. If you make it through the crumbling ruins and survive the trip, you get one wish--but there can only be one wish at a time, and if you make a new wish, the old one gets undone. Said trainer wishes for Rayquaza to be sealed away, then takes the key to the Wishing Chamber and carves it up into eighteen pieces, which are slowly distributed amongst what would become the region’s Gym Leaders.
--Set in a heavily forested region with a massive lake to the west, rocky mountains to the east, and snowy ruins to the far north from when Rayquaza went on that rampage.
--I’ll talk about the plot another time, since this turned into a character design post.
--There are eighteen Gym Leaders, which can largely be fought in any order; the region is laid out like a web, with the starting city in the center. You have to beat eight gyms to reach the endgame plot, and gym leaders have nine teams depending on whether you have 0-8+ badges.
--Gym Leadership in the region is something of a line of succession; the key fragments are passed on to the person that leader most trusts to take up the mantle.
--The Water leader (and this post was inspired by seeing the Galar Water leader, so we’re starting with her) was a self-made hostess who brought herself up from waitressing all the way to being the most famous, uh...what’s the word for rich party-throwing person? I can’t remember. Anyways, her name was Marina, she owned an underwater ballroom at the bottom of the lake, and she wore a Milotic dress:
--The Rock, Bug, and Grass leaders were a mother and two daughters, scientists all of them; the mother, the Rock leader, ran a preserve where revived fossil pokemon were studied in an environment replicated to the best of their ability. She was the Gym Leader Posse’s team mom, even to the leaders that were significantly older than her:
--The Bug and Grass leaders were sisters and rivals, out studying the biology of the pokemon in the southern jungles. The Grass leader was the older sister, a cheerful earthy type with vine tattoos and a bandana styled after...some Berry or other, I think it was Sitrus?... whose back ties stuck up to look like leaves:
--The Bug leader was the younger of the two, and more grumpy and pretentious. I mean, just look at her:
--That’ the Ice gym leader, who’s a goofy old janitor at a fancy ski resort in the north. He’s on par with the two other strongest trainers in the region. He just likes things quiet.
--The other two top leaders are Dragon and Fire. I don’t have a picture of the Dragon leader that wasn’t drawn by a really horrible former friend, and so I won’t be sharing them here, but she’s a philosopher who wanders the eastern mountain ranges--in fact, you’d have to actually track her down in order to even talk to her, let alone have your battle.
--She and the Fire leader had a bit of a free will/determinism split that twenty-year-old Loreweaver thought was quite clever, as twenty-year-old Loreweaver often did, that would play into a binary choice you had to make at the end of the game that would determine which final boss you faced and which of the pair would die saving the other from Rayquaza. The Fire leader, who’d have been the region’s Champion if the region was structured that way, is a professional explorer who’s the leader of a large adventurer camp in the snowy ruins of the north; they keep Fire pokemon around for warmth and heating and general quality-of-life, and he finances expeditions into the centuries-old ruins to uncover the weird, warped results of the battle and the wish. When you fight the Fire gym, he actually is the door guide, and he wanders with you through the battles, eventually taking you to a stuffy older fellow with a mustache; when you beat the older guy, he turns to the actual Fire leader in exasperation and asks him to quit pretending, and after a short exchange (which, as he was somewhat a response to the crappy Fire rep in Diamond/Pearl, includes the final lines “What were you expecting, fire puns and a red afro? These are the big leagues, kid! Show me what you’ve got!”) you fight the real deal. You may recognize him as the pathological narcissist writing this post:
--He and the Ghost leader are both descendants of that original, powerful trainer, and are based on myself and my sister Jade. The Ghost leader, as opposed to Fire’s outgoing, adventurous, burn-myself-at-both-ends lifestyle, has secluded herself in a small cabin in the mid-east forests, because she has the ability to see and speak with departed Pokemon spirits above and beyond the ones strong enough to manifest as Ghost-types...and she’s got a cult following her because of it, who are clustered around her home and act as her “Gym”. She’s got a ghost Pikachu following her, and she looks like this:
--The Electric and Fairy leaders were a pair of circus performers. The Fairy leader is a classical circus strongman, who likes to make people feel good about partnering with the pokemon they like rather than what they think others will like:
--Meanwhile, the Electric leader was a stage magician who used his pokemon for magic tricks and was visually based on Ray Narvaez Jr, because I’m a huge fan:
--The inside of his cape is a starfield-pattern, and I’m still really proud of that design decision.
--The Fighting gym leader runs a physical therapy center that caters to both humans and pokemon:
--The Poison leader likewise doesn’t have any art of her that wasn’t from that awful ex-friend, but she runs a chemical processing plant in the starting town that doubles as a home for abandoned Poison-types, who help reprocess dangerous chemical waste into stuff that can be recycled and reused rather than left to gunk things up.
--The Flying leader doesn’t have any art of her at all, but she’s a late-fifties gray-haired recluse who lives in a half-mansion-half-eyrie halfway up one of the eastern mountains. She hates people, and will make you do increasingly convoluted and pointless fetch quests for her until you get one of the other leaders you’ve beaten to come give her a talking-to.
--The Steel gym is a three-person family, a band; a twelve-year-old girl as the guitarist, the heavily-tattooed mom as the drummer, and a tall, lanky, nordic-metal dad with long blond hair and a Metagross aesthetic as the lead singer. They also run an orphanage. I don’t have any art of his final design, but here he is back when he was beefier:
--The Ground leader doesn’t have any art of him, either, but he’s a Bill-Nye-esque children’s scientist who works in the swamps in the western side of the region.
--The Dark gym leader in a Chinese man, a self-made entrepreneur who finances small businesses in one of the region’s larger cities. Part of the application process is having a battle with him; you don’t have to win, but he decides if you’re trustworthy based on your bond with your pokemon. His color scheme is specifically based on Umbreon:
--The Psychic leader was a college professor who used his pokemon to help figure out when his students were struggling and what they weren’t getting about the material:
--And the Normal leader was just. Joey. Youngster Joey. He moved here from Johto. He’s a pokemon breeder now.
ANYWAYS IT’S AN OLD IDEA I’LL PROBABLY NEVER GET TO MAKE I HOPE THIS WAS INTERESTING