I was reading through stuff on someone's LJ when I came across this: the first-ever Pokémon Big Bang. To summarize for those who don't know what a big bang is (which more or less includes me, lol), it's basically a call out to creative people in a fandom to create "multimedia works" over a period of a few months, multimedia here defined as "a fanfic of at least 10,000 words and some drawings/music/fanvids/bluh/art to go along with it". Interested people work in teams consisting of a writer, a few artists and a beta reader and collaborate to put out the fic and its accompanying pretty stuff before the big bang is over. I'd never heard of these things before seeing that little mention, but it seems like a fun idea.
...a fun idea that I was going to let pass me by this time, or at least only join as a beta reader, until I realized that 10,000 words is equivalent to six days of writing at a NaNoWriMo pace, and that if I could come up with a completed outline and think of the writing that way then it's actually feasible for me do. Pretty up the outline, spend a week typing until my keyboard catches fire, have the better part of two months and three weeks to edit it/show it to a potential beta/let the artists get started on their respective artings. Realistically it'll probably take me a bit longer than that due to crippling self-esteem issues, but as long as I keep telling myself I can have it done in ~1 week I think I might be okay. Sure would be nice to get some actual writing completed, at least. Point is, I'm almost 100% sure I'm going to join as a writer, and the next step is figuring out what to write about.
Even with the very generous subject range (anything Pokémon from any canon, be it games, Pokémon Adventures or something else, any characters, any genre, any pairing, alternate universes are permitted, etc.) I had trouble thinking about what to write—most of my fic ideas are either really, really lengthy or else far too simple to stretch out to 10,000 or so words—but after letting my mind wander for a while I realized that I had an older idea for a lengthy one-shot that could fit the bill if I tweaked it a little.
Whirlwind summary: A few years ago Negrek wrote some fanfics as birthday gifts for me and Butterfree, set in a future where pokémon were "freed" from their trainers; most were too domesticated to return to to the wild and basically spent the rest of their lives languishing in abandoned cities the humans had given to them. I really liked the idea and asked whether I could write some of my own fics in the same setting. And I did, or at least I started to—my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel, At Liberty, was supposed to be this sprawling, crazy murder mystery/dystopian future thing, and while I still haven't finished it (and what's there is in dire need of rewriting and plothole-filling) I did enjoy it, and I got a few ideas for additional stories that would expand on subplots I didn't have room to really explore in the main ‘fic. One of those "spin0ffs" is essentially a much sillier story about some pokémon "cops" dealing with "drug" (read: those exorbitantly-priced vitamins that raise EVs) trafficking and gang wars, hunting down the vicious drug lords of huge vitamin cartels and other assorted awesomeness/ridiculousness like that.
There's a catch, though: one of the big bang's rules is that the story's central characters must be canon rather than original (original characters can still be pretty important, but not the primary focus of the fic). Considering this story's setting and focus on pokémon over humans it's understandable that it's not exactly brimming with canon characters, and while it's possible to work a few in there it would be hard to make them really important; more generally, that just wasn't something I was planning on doing. It turns out that that's not as big a death sentence for the idea as I first thought, though. The people running the big bang just want a canon character; they don't particularly care if it's not an important canon character, or if it's a character that gets very little screentime. Based on that and what I've gleaned from a few other questions and answers, I believe it should be acceptable to write about pokémon that belong(ed) to a canon trainer: Red's pikachu, Morty's gengar, Iris's druddigon, Looker's croagunk, so on and so forth. Most of the fic's "main characters" were really just nebulous ideas anyway, so I'm pretty 0kay with replacing them with something a little more canon.
So! Help me out here, you guys. Throw some ideas for "canon" pokémon at me, since right now I don't have much preference and am curious as to what/who you might like to see. Gym leaders'/elites' pokémon would probably be the best places to look first, but if you can think of some obscure or unusual person's pokémon then that'd be pretty cool, too. Keep in mind that this is happening in Johto (not to say that pokémon from other regions/generations/games/gym leaders/etc. can't appear at all, but Johto-based pokémon/people make the most sense to start with), and that I pay absolutely no attention to the animé or any of the manga so I'm more or less confined to gameverse characters here.
I also have interesting plans for a legendary pokémon or two, so a few ideas for that wouldn't go amiss. I can't really say what for, unfortunately (spoilers), but pretty much anything that isn't Mewtwo or one of the cosmic JesusBuddhaVishnu legendaries from Sinnoh would work, again with a preference for Johtomon. (Maybe even one of those would be fine if I can swing it, heh.)
PICK MY CHARACTERS, YOU GUYS
HELP ME MAKE FALKNER'S PIDGEY A HARDBOILED, EDGY COP
OR SOMETHING