As stated last week, this post explains all about why I'm posting these and why half of them will forever remain ficbits instead of becoming finished stories, so rather than repeat myself you can just go look at the beginning of that. (And read the juicy ficbits it contains if you haven't already! Don't forget to look at the rest of the recent ficbit posts while you're at it!)
(24) Defending Evangeline
This didn't start as a 493/649 story but as a general quick challenge to make myself write something by attacking a random pokémon sprite generator until I saw a pair of pokémon that interested me; then I'd write a quick battle scene between those two pokémon. Somehow it turned into some weird pretentious commentary about pokémon battling in general. Also I hardcore failed the challenge because I did this in like 2009 and I still haven't finished it. I really want to, though!
He didn’t love Evangeline but he was fighting for her anyway. His smooth coils slipped awkwardly as he struggled to tighten his grip around the tauros’s mane, trying to strangle two hundred pounds of muscle and madness for a girl he didn’t even know. The tauros probably didn’t know her, either, but he bucked and reared and thrashed and raged around the battlefield as though Arbok himself had injured sweet Evangeline.
“Tighter, Arbok, tighter! He can’t hurt you if you don’t let go!” Rupert’s voice was hard to hear over the tauros’s constant stomping and bellowing, but Arbok didn’t need the direction. He shifted and slid but at last he was able to find some purchase; muscles tensed and coils locked themselves around the brute’s thick neck. The tauros strained and shook his horned head wildly, careering left and right across the battlefield in a bid to dislodge the great serpent knotted around his throat. Arbok squeezed even tighter and hung on grimly. He couldn’t let go. He couldn’t fail Evangeline.
Evangeline was a goddess. She was an angel who flew without wings, gliding through the campus hallways and soaring in circles around the hearts of all the men. Arbok took Rupert’s word for it. He’d never seen her before. No, wait, maybe he had—once or twice, perhaps as she and a tangle of friends giggled and chattered their way across the quad while he and Rupert’s other pokémon relaxed with their trainer. Rupert would point in their direction and start to sigh, and Arbok would stare for a while but couldn’t really pick her out. All the girls in the gaggle looked the same to the snake, but then again he wasn’t hard-wired to find human females attractive. He’d just smile and nod when Rupert called her divine, give a brief twitch of the head when he said she’d stolen his heart, lose interest and space out when he started describing their wedding night. Rupert said he would do anything for her. It was Arbok the tauros wore around his neck like a scarf.
(90) Smarter
Another one that should've been finished forever ago, especially because this one is so simple and short and—for once—I know almost everything that's supposed to happen. (I don't know if you understand how rare an occurrence that is.) I really have no idea why banging out a first draft of this stupid little thing has been so difficult. :( Man I need to get my act together and just get it over with!
There isn't anything all that significant in this excerpt, but it is a very short story and I really do intend to finish it soon so I can't reveal much.
The shellder fought valiantly, struggling against the boy's line for several solid minutes, but in the end rod, reel and angler proved the stronger. One final, mighty tug ripped the shellfish free of the ocean and deposited it in the boat beside its grinning captor.
And they'd all told him that this was a stupid idea.
The boy grinned down at the bivalve pokémon, watching as it clacked its shell halves together irritably. He set a hand firmly on the top of its shell and leaned on it in a bid to keep it still; he didn't want it wriggling its way out of his little dinghy, leaving him shellderless and back at square one. He'd been out here for—he checked his digital watch—three hours already. Three long hours of fighting with the oars and rowing the boat out into deeper water, after which he'd dropped one of the oars and had to watch it slip beneath the waves, well out of his reach. Three hours of trying to situate himself so that he could actually move around without tipping the pitted wooden craft and dumping himself into the water, a less than thrilling prospect given that he couldn't swim. Three hours of fruitless fishing, hours of watching tentacool drift past and sharpedo fins break the surface and magikarp flop pointlessly in and out of the water. Those three hours had been hell, but they were worth it—at last, at long last, he'd finally caught the shellder he'd been looking for.
(149?) Invincible
Those of you who have visited 649 may know that I actually already have a "149" story posted, Outrage. My original intent was to make this the project's dragonite story, but it stalled and instead I jumped on Outrage when that idea came to me. I still think this one could be interesting, though, so if I do finish it I'll decide whether to leave this out of 649 or to put it in and change Outrage's protagonist to a garchomp or something (it's vague enough that it could be about any of a few dragon-types if you wanted it to be)
I suppose I should give some credit to Dragonfree and her guestbook for this guy—the idea came to me when she responded to a comment on one of her one-shots, Curse, and I sort of ran with it just because. I guess I could also change the subject of this story, since nothing about its plot requires the protag to be a dragonite, but both Butterfree's story and the commenter's remark were about dragonite and it feels wrong to have it star something else. Eh.
Dragonite tracked the glaceon's movements with his eyes, following her as she darted this way and that across the battlefield with five identical glaceon in her wake. The mawile at the other end of the arena simply stared at her and her clones with both jaws hanging slack, clearly baffled by the double team. He held his hands out at chest level, trying to prepare a flash cannon, but the brilliant silver light that marked the first stages of the attack quickly flickered out as he faltered. Six glaceon now strode toward him with their ears pulled back and their teeth bared in a snarl, and for the life of him he couldn't tell them apart.
“So she likes double team,” said Jacob, mumbling around a mouthful of salted cashews. “A widespread heat wave would take care of that in short order, of course.” Dragonite ignored the inadvertent shower of nuts that accompanied his trainer's sentence, just nodding and keeping his focus on the second semifinal.
“Could go with aerial ace, too, if we wanted, maybe swift. Both are a bit less energy-intensive. But we don't want to just pick at an ice-type, do we? Better to incapacitate it by hitting hard and fast at the same time we destroy the clones. We might even get lucky and set the turf on fire; a glaceon definitely wouldn't like that.”
The mawile's trainer was floundering now, every bit as lost as his pokémon as he looked from one little blue creature to the next. “Uh, uh...” Dragonite could see him digging his teeth into his bottom lip on the big monitor. “Use flash cannon on the... on the... the third from the right?”
Jacob shook his head and swallowed the last of his snack before continuing. “Why doesn't he just have it use faint attack? I suppose he's hoping he'll guess right and finish Glaceon off with a lucky power shot. The glaceon is certainly battered enough for it to work... but I wouldn't gamble with five to one odds. Not during a semifinal. It would make more sense to clear the clones with faint attack, using it to dodge whatever Glaceon's about to do in the process, and then come back with the flash cannon later.”
Jacob's running commentary, unlike the rush of other noises that usually accompanied a big battle, was something that Dragonite did make an effort to pay attention to. His trainer's detailed observations played a huge role in maintaining their lengthy win record. Every blast he dodged, every attack he countered, every finishing blow he landed he owed to Jacob's careful planning and strategizing, as Jacob himself was quick to remind him.
The hesitant silver glow engulfed Mawile's hands again, this time throbbing and twisting until it had swollen into an orb almost the size of the pokémon himself. He thrust both arms out and sent the flash cannon rocketing toward—and then straight through—the third glaceon on the right.
“Oops!” Glaceon's trainer laughed and smirked across the field at her opponent. “You guessed wrong, and now you're finished. Glaceon! Hidden power!” The five remaining glaceon, each wearing a smile just as broad and mocking as the girl's, were suddenly surrounded by a multitude of tiny white orbs. The little balls swirled around the glaceon in a swarm, darkening into a ruddy brown as they zoomed between legs, tails and bodies. Then they banked and shot forward as one, peppering the mawile with a salvo of brown spheres. The vast majority of them passed harmlessly through his body, simple illusions conjured by the double team clones, but those that came from the real Glaceon struck true and sat him down hard.
“A fighting-type hidden power, huh.” Jacob rolled the empty cashew package into a ball between his fingers and spoke up a little so Dragonite could hear him over the renewed screams of the audience. “Useful trick for a glaceon to have. Won't matter to you in the slightest, but a commendable choice.”
Next week on "Ficbits": ...nothing, probably! All out of old 649/493 fanfics to share, at least those that are worth sharing (The Fire of Castle Esperanza can go... die in a fire). Unless I come up with something super interesting in the next few days, we'll be returning to your regularly scheduled mostly inactive blog. Wasn't this fun while it lasted, though?
And, of course, you can ask questions about these and whatnot and I'll do my best to answer without getting too spoilery. Alternatively you can try and kick me into actually finishing Defending Evangeline and Smarter (and The Almighty and Most Glorious God of Thunder from the first 649 ficbit post), since those are the ones I'm still really, really interested in trying to get through. Help me get rid of all the frustration and laziness, you guys. :( Haaaalp.