Fragmented

Spoiler

This is gonna be a series of stories that tie together as they go on. So if it ends abrubtly, that's kinda why.

Capture: Bounsweet
MCR: 5-10k (Simple)
ACR: 8197

FRAGMENTED: ORIGINS

AETOO

-------​

“Child. Wake up.”

The small purple ball snored loudly amidst the forest floor. Deep under the grass was another world, a place to get lost in. The small purple ball found this place to be the most peaceful place in all of the forest. Surrounding this peaceful place was her sanctuary. Her destiny. Amidst the grass, she could forget everything. That was, until the voice that carried itself through the air tried to awaken her.

“Wake up.”

The wind rustled and pushed its way through the thick grass and into the face of the small ball. The ball snorted and rolled backwards, yellow eyes now wide open. It squeaked and its leaves spread out atop its head.

“I’m up! I’m up!”

The ball bounced upwards, it’s mouth wide open in shock.

“Child. You need to learn to awaken on your own. I cannot keep doing this.”

The disembodied voice began to go on a tangent. The small ball’s attention span couldn’t make it past the first few sentences. The ball found more interest in the flowers blooming in the far corner of the sanctuary. Flowers like this only bloomed here. The place was blessed. Despite the ball’s childish perspective, it appreciated what happened here. Nothing was quite like it. She wandered over to the flowers and stared with delight. The wind rushed through the leaves atop the balls head, and the flowers seemed to disintegrate before her eyes.

“The gods desire a new protector of this forest. I will take away every flower if it means you will get the job done.”

The small ball sighed and plopped herself onto the ground where she stood. Her small shape squished outwards as she pressed herself against the ground. In the sun, she almost shined like a perfect apple.

“Please, Aetoo. I don’t want to be here as much as you.”

The ball puffed her cheeks out and finally spoke.

“Then why do we have to be here!?”

“Because, it is our duty to Arceus.”

“Arceus, shmarceus! If he wants this forest protected so badly, he can do it himself!”

As the words left her mouth, the trees seemed to cast larger shadows. The grass around her began to grow upwards. The sun began to glow brightly. In front of the small pokemon now stood a four legged beast. Atop its stemmed out large horns on either side. It’s entire body was green, except for the tan face and a small strip of black above the face.

“I, Virizion, have been blessed with this duty.”

The creature stomped a foot forward.

“To do Arceus justice to this world and make sure that this sacred land stays sacred!”

The creature stomped forward until in front of the creature.

“You, Aetoo, may be just be a Bounsweet, but you were born of sacred blood, so you better start acting as such.”

The creature leaned down to meet her eye level.

“It is your duty as well, to keep this world sacred.”

The Bounsweet’s eyes glistened.

“Um… why?”

“Because, your bloodline for generations has kept this forest at peace.”

“I mean, it’s super pretty! And super wonderful! But what if I want to do more than this.”

“Your fate is to live here, your fate is to die here.”

Virizion growled slightly.

“Child. I’m sorry to say… that you don’t have a choice.”

The Bounsweet gave a large frown.

“Well… fine!”

She jumped up and down a couple times angrily.

Virizion sighed.

“I don’t mean to be so rude… this is important, far more important than you realize.”

The Bounsweet hastily nodded. She didn’t agree, but she didn’t stand a chance in an argument. The grass lowered itself and the tree’s shadows went back to normal.

“Now.”

Virizon stretched its legs out.

“We begin today’s lesson.”

---

Two autumns later, Aetoo went from a Bounsweet with attitude to an obedient one. With this new mindset, she was finally able to take full responsibility to the forest she called home. Whether she wanted to or not.

Standing over the forest from a hilltop, Virizion stood behind her. The forest rustled with dying leaves, awaiting the next spring.

“It’s almost time to hibernate, child.”

“Yeah…”

The Bounsweet kept a straight face as she looked across the forest.

“Hey Virizion?”

“Yes, child?”

“Is this view… pretty?”

“Technically it is, but to us, it is extremely tragic. Some of these trees will never see a summer again.”

“Oh.”

Aetoo looked down sadly, her tone had really mellowed out since that day. She always had an exhausted tone to her voice. Virizion tried their hardest to hide their worry, but it was hard.

“But yes, it is quite a gorgeous sight, no?”

Aetoo nodded with closed eyes. She hid the single tear that fell. There was an air around the forest these days. Virizion, the deity of all the forests could sense it too, but neither wanted to speak of it. This was the last autumn they would experience together.

Aetoo looked out to the forest once again. The wind soared quietly between each tree. Then, suddenly, the autumn orange around them seemed to almost… flicker. It was indescribable, but both Virizion and Aetoo shifted into a more defensive state. Then, it happened again. The wind stopped.

“Child… stay back.”

Aetoo hopped back and watched Virizion scan the forest around them. An odd continuous electric sound filled the air. Another flicker. Aetoo swore she saw faces within every flickering color. She was too distracted to notice the odd blue and pink thing floating in front of Virizion.

A blast of light caught her attention though. Virizion and the creature began to dash back and forth, sending attacks at one another. Aetoo saw the blasts from the odd creature. They were nothing like anything in the forest. The beam came out in perfect solid extending squares, leaving burn marks on whatever made contact with them. Virizion easily dodged every single one. They circled the creature, but attempted to get closer with every step. The swung their legs out in hopes to knock the creature out, but no luck.

The weird block shaped creature twitched and moved with no rhythm. The two legs and its head each had their own mind. Yet somehow, they worked in perfect sync. It was a living contradiction. Whatever it was, living or not, it did not belong in their forest.

It happened fast. The winning blow happened before anyone could react. The graceful moves of Virizion were sure to win, it was just a matter of time. The foot landed perfectly onto the head of the creature. It didn’t go flying, it cracked open. Large cubes burst out and began to rain down. They burned whatever they touched until they burnt themselves up.

Virizion panted.

“Aetoo, are you alright?”

She nodded and hopped toward Virizon.

“Yeah! Are you?”

“Of course, just out of breath from fight-”

The ground shook and the cubes gathered above the two of them. Within seconds they descended upon the two of them at rapid speed. Virizion, without much thought, threw their body over Aetoo.
Heat was burning through their body and onto Aetoo. Then, nothing. Everything was still once more. Aetoo crawled her way out from underneath Virizion. Looking over the guardian, she saw that their skin was starting to shift. In a flash of light, Virizion now stood, but floated about an inch off of the ground. Their skin began to melt into purple and blue, their eyes hollow. Aetoo took a step back.

“AsSiMiLaTeD.”

The voice of Virizion shook with every breath.

“V-Virizion?”

Virizion stared at Aetoo with no emotion. Their eyes were now pure white. Their entire body shook and stuttered like the odd creature from moments before.

“R-r-R-r-R-R”

“Viriz-”

“RuN.”

The shell of Virizon began to charge towards Aetoo. Panicked, she rolled under Virizion and down the hill into the woods. Virizion let out an inconsistent roar of many noises. Aetoo made it into the heart of the woods and hid inside the crevice of a tree.

Virizion’s voice echoed inside her head.

“It is your duty.”

She nodded to herself. A part of her finally understood. Threats like these were the reason she was here. Her resolve began to take form. Her body began to glow in response to the acceptance of her role. Her legs grew out and her body gained new arms. Aetoo’s head pulled itself into the leaves atop her head. The purple of her skin was now complimented by white.
Her eyes gained a sharpness to them.

She grasped the side of the tree. Maybe not now. But she would find a way to defeat this threat. No matter what, the forest would remain hers. It was sacred, after all.

 

hi yuh it's me coming 2 grade stories for a really cool grader tbh

 

INTRO STUFF

I thought that starting with this bit of dialogue was really apt. This story is about Aetoo answering the call to adventure, so to speak, so having it start with her being called to wake up is really fitting. It’s a little vague, sure, but the rest of the plot moves so quickly after this that it doesn’t feel particularly out of place. We wake up and hit the ground running, and this pretty much fit in tone with how Aetoo gets bombarded with a greater destiny/a bunch of other things she wasn’t expecting, so that fit pretty well too.

Intros for stories this short are kind of hard to judge, since the first few paragraphs are already a significant chunk of the story, but one thing I would advise you on is to be a little judicious with what details go where. For example, in the next paragraph, we meet our main character:

And we also get some nice bits about the setting, and the pretty grass, and the peaceful forest. All of this is great for setting the stage (which promptly gets ruined by the end of the story, so bonus points there), but there’s some weird drops here that feel a little confusing—“her sanctuary. Her destiny.” Reading it for the first time, it feels like a lot to introduce your protagonist’s destiny in the first substantial paragraph of the story so casually. Words like “destiny” are like big, neon flags. If you put them early in a story, the reader is gonna stop and wonder why it’s there, and if there’s not a particular reason, it looks really out of place.

BUT THIS INTRO WAS P DOPE SO THAT’S COOL.

PLOT STUFF

wOwOw. This was a pretty short intro, but it was action-packed and tightly paced. It reads like the prologue to some huge, epic destiny—which, judging from your author’s note, is definitely on the way. I liked that you added a little more characterization to Aetoo early on, and emphasized her personal reasons for wanting to avoid her guardian-roles. This part of the hero’s journey (where the young hero is like “nah dude I don’t want this destiny” and then gets inevitably dragged in when the greater evil attacks something personal to them) appears frequently enough in mass media (Luke from Star Wars, Tony Stark from Iron Man, even Odysseus) that we kind of know that song and dance already, so even a slight variation/personalization makes it feel more vivid. Good stuff!*

*I’m not gonna go this deep into it for a Simple grade, but there's an interesting intro here on storytelling re: the hero’s journey/the monomyth, which I think is pretty apt since this story has some strong parallels to the “Refusal of the Call” part of the cycle.

The rest of the pacing here is really solid: there’s just enough time to see the happy forest and Virizion and all of the tranquility before you rip it to shreds, which makes the weight of that loss much more heavy. The ends are tied off, and the motivation for Aetoo’s rise to the call in spite of her previous reluctance makes a lot of sense. Good stuff for such a smol piece!

PRETTY STUFF

So you have this sort of montage thing midway, where Aetoo learns to be content with her place in the forest, which I think it well-done. Trying to convey the feeling of time passing/people growing up is really hard in writing, and this was solid. However, I think your transition paragraph between this “years passed” and “this is where we are now” sections was a little choppy:

(ignore the bold words for now)
LIKE WOAH. We were just so happy! When did this dark air come about! When did they both realize that this was their last autumn together? What does that even mean? This is super ominous stuff, but it loses a lot of impact without any proper description trying to back it up.

There’s that old adage you’ll hear until the end of time: show, don’t tell. And it’s applicable to everything you’ll ever write, but it’s almost more applicable to these big statements of doom/fear. Imagine if, instead of what you normally had, you wrote something like:

We get the statements that two things are happening, but it doesn’t feel very weighty. I don’t understand why Aetoo is scared, or what even happened in this assimilation, and this statement doesn’t really convey how these events took place.

(okay, now we can revisit the bolded words)
Note the use of the verb “was” in all of these cases. It’s a statement of “being”, and it kind of just states that things are, but doesn’t give anything else. Compare this with how you actually wrote this paragraph, which is filled with tons of juicy action verbs:

BUT WOW. When this story gets creepy, it gets really creepy. And this is much more of an effective way of conveying that emotion rather than just saying that it was scary.

Side note: I love that you depersonalize the dialogue here—it isn’t Virizion saying these things, but their voice is technically making vibrations of sound to convey meaning. SUPER TERRIFYING STUFF. I like it!

One exercise I might recommend: take out as many “to be” verbs from your writing. You’re still going to need them in the long run, no matter what people say—but taking them out entirely makes you understand a lot better where you really want to use them, and where you could actually use a stronger, more specific verb in its place.

TECHNICAL STUFF

Quick note on your dialogue:

Even if it isn’t something like:

You should still group dialogue with things that the speaker is doing while/near saying that dialogue. This makes the string of dialogue much easier to follow, since we can anchor the speaker to the spoken.

Now it becomes much more obvious that Virizion and Aetoo are having a back-and-forth conversation, since each paragraph is alternating speakers.

Otherwise, your grammar looks squeaky clean here!

OVERALL STUFF

Dis story was super clean. Most of my commentary is way beyond the Simple rank, but then again, your writing is too! This is a super strong start, and I really look forward to seeing where you take this. Bounsweet captured!