In way over his head (Complex) (Ready for grading)

After a long day of first classes and then working, Pablo just wanted to relax. He had less than a year left at Rustboro University before graduating with a bachelor’s degree, and then he would finally be free!

“Such a stupid, stupid idea,” the young man muttered to himself as he walked down the stairs to his basement studio apartment on the outskirts of Rustboro, referring mentally to his decision to continue his education after turning eighteen rather than just wandering out into the world with his two pokemon.

Like all of his friends had done. Like he had promised himself he would do. Like some people even did at age sixteen. At twenty-two, Pablo felt that he was even less of an adult than the younger trainers he encountered who passed through Rustboro in their travels, especially the ones who had more or less lived in the countryside with their pokemon. Not that he wasn’t self-sufficient himself; his parents had forced that to happen as soon as they discovered their son was gay.

Though there were supposedly large benefits later in life to having pursued a post-secondary education, especially in a country like Hoenn where it was uncommon, Pablo couldn’t help but feel like he had been cheated of something, as he sat on the corner of his bed watching Surskit and Magnemite, who stared out of the window out of boredom. at the large machinery moving shipping crates off of large tankers.

It’s hardly fair to them, either, he thought. The pokemon had stuck with him all this time out of the belief that their trainer would some day wake up and decide there was more to life than being trapped in a cycle of classes, work, studying, sleeping, and then waking up to do more of each.

Absentmindedly sifting through the mail as the microwave warmed up the leftovers from the pizza he had made last night, Pablo was surprised to find a letter from his former employer in Petalburg City where his parents lived. He set it on the table to open in a moment and went to feed the pokemon and himself first.

Inside the fridge was a large bowl filled with pond scum that he scraped up every Sunday afternoon outside the Pretty Petals flower shop; he now set the bowl on the floor and Surskit hissed happily, scurrying across the wooden floor and producing a quick tap-tap-tap-tap with his legs as he did so.

Next, the exhausted young man walked over to the window and pulled in the solar charger he had built for Magnemite, so that it could feed off of the electricity generated throughout the day. He, Surskit, and Magnemite all knew that the electric pokemon was perfectly capable of siphoning the charge through the window, but Magnemite invariably waited for Surskit and its trainer just to keep up the pretenses of eating with them.

At last Pablo sat down and opened his letter, almost immediately letting out a loud “Ha!”. The office where he had worked as a bilingual receptionist had been audited, and it turned out that they owed him about half of a paycheck.

If I put this in the bank now and pretend I don’t have it, his mind quickly began to work, I would theoretically be able to leave Rusboro in about 18 and a half months instead of 19 months, and then…

“Wait,” he had to audibly stop himself from continuing down that train of thought. The pokemon glanced at their trainer and his outburst, but quickly turned back to their food when it became apparent he wasn’t going to say anything more.

That type of thinking is exactly what’s wrong with my life, he realized. I’m going to be too old to enjoy all the things I want to if I just keep waiting for some hypothetical future where I have real money. He was never going to be like the trust fund babies that travel from Unova to Hoenn on a whim and stay at nice hotels and eat at restaurants. Granted, he could do that, but only after years of saving for it, and then it wouldn’t be the same. There was nothing really keeping him at the university and his job other than the sunken cost fallacy, the idea that you can’t quit at something because you’ve already invested so much effort into it.

“We’re going to go on a vacation this weekend,” Pablo suddenly announced, causing Surskit and Magnemite to once again direct their attention toward their trainer.

Yes, a vacation. Let’s not pretend like the sunken cost fallacy has absolutely no merit to it and abandon everything. But a little break can’t hurt.

“I was thinking that I could call in sick tomorrow and then take a three day weekend,” the dark-skinned trainer explained to his pokemon. “We can go explore the hills north of Rustboro, camp out, and... maybe... battle some wild pokemon.”

He said this last part hesitantly, almost embarrassed to be suggesting that he could be a pokemon trainer rather than a pet owner. Rather than making fun of him, the two pokemon celebrated by sending out a shower of sparks or jumping up and down based on the capacities of each.

A short phone call later, and Pablo and his pokemon were ready to go. They made it a few steps into the street before turning right around and re-entering the apartment to grab more clothes as well as Magnemite’s solar charger. Though it was springtime, there was still a cold breeze coming off the water.

In their second attempt, Pablo and his two pokemon started proudly walking to the bus stop, staring back across the street as they waited. The apartment building was illuminated by the industrial shipyard behind it.

It was a marvel of engineering to anyone who didn’t live next to it to be kept up by the incessant noise and lights. Cargo ships arrived from all over the world, dropping off their standardized containers at Trans-Rusboro, a large port across the narrow strait separating Hoenn from the larger island connected to the Kanto and Johto regions. From there, the containers passed en masse through a large underground tunnel connecting the busy port to the industrial sector of Rustboro itself, from which the containers were retrieved, packed onto trucks, and then sent all over the country. The situation also worked in reverse, mostly for all the fruit exported from Hoenn to some of the colder countries.

Capitalism at work. But unfortunately for the people living in low-income housing like Pablo, capitalism at work all night long. As the sun was just beginning to set, Pablo hopped on a bus marked for one of the northern suburbs.

In stark contrast to the solemn atmosphere of crushed dreams and never-ending stress that he usually lived in, the beginner trainer and his two pokemon were shocked at how lively the people on the bus were. Pablo first spotted one of the archetypal high school dropout trainers, sitting in the back along with his Nuzleaf as well as a Taillow perched on top. He was chatting with a younger girl who seemed especially interested in his bird pokemon, and the swallow was loving the attention.

Across from Pablo, a young woman about his age sat in the same row as one of her friends, with a Poochyena in between them, happily panting as the females gossiped about the father of one of them.

“So where are you headed?” a boy that Pablo estimated to be about eighteen turned around to ask him.

This was one of the people like his friends, or at least the people he used to be able to call his friends. Regardless, the boy, judging by his tracksuit, had come from Kalos or one of the countries close to it, after having graduated from high school there and spending all his money to come to “exotic Hoenn”.

“Um, I was going to go to the hills north of Rustboro,” Pablo explained, with his two pokemon cheering in response. “I’ll probably camp out there, and I don’t know what else.”

“Oh, well I sort of am too,” the younger trainer said offhandedly. “I’ve heard there are some relatively strong pokemon in Meteor Falls that are weak to dark types, so I can train my new Mightyena there.”

Meteor Falls: the huge tourist attraction that Pablo lived right next to but had never actually visited. It wasn’t for sheer laziness or disinterest, because for better or for worse his work as a receptionist at the Devon Corporation had given him a certain minor interest in meteorites. It was more that there were strong pokemon living inside the cave, and those who wanted to see the otherworldly crystal-embedded walls and the waterfalls had to either possess pokemon of their own that were strong enough to repel the wild ones, or pay to go with a tour group, and Pablo had neither strong pokemon or money.

“Your pokemon look pretty pitiful, though,” the foreigner added, also having considered the state of Surskit and Magnemite, “you should probably stay out of Meteor Falls.”

Pablo’s eyes narrowed. It’s not like it wasn’t obvious that his pokemon hadn’t had any training. Anyone on the bus could tell that by the way the two were staring out the window with a mixture of awe and nervousness. It didn’t mean that it was required to actually state that out loud, though.

Look, asshole, in his mind he imagined telling off the younger boy, some of us have different life experiences than others.

Instead he elected to say, “I think if Surskit practices Hydro Pump for a while then we could probably explore it some day!”

Not really interested in continuing a conversation with the other trainer, Pablo redirected his pokemons’ attention to the University of Rustboro campus as they passed it by. Magnemite and Surskit subsequently glued their eyes to the window, never having been beyond that point in the city before.

“Oh, a Hydro Pump Surskit, so you’re a pokemon breeder!” the eighteen year old seemed to have a moment of revelation, as if that excused Pablo’s untrained pokemon.

Pablo, for his part, didn’t correct the boy, because it was true that Surskits normally learned the move Hydro Pump as a result of pokemon breeding. It just happened that said breeding occurred in the wild before he even met his bug pokemon, and he felt defensive on top of that about the whole idea that someone younger than him was more experienced.

Though they could have traveled together, as was customary for pokemon trainers, Pablo and the foreigner immediately went their separate ways after getting off the bus at the most northern stop in the city, with the Kalos native instead heading over to chat up the teenager with the Nuzleaf and Taillow as Pablo ducked into a small family-run shop to buy an ice cream with some of his unexpected windfall money.

 

The Vanillite inside making the ice cream was so cute and happy that he even left a tip somewhere for the first time in months. On the edge of town, he sat on the hillside staring out at the open ocean, a view uncrowded by cranes and container ships for essentially the first time since he had moved to Rustboro for the university three years prior. As the sun set slowly, casting beams of light in reddish hues across the water, Surskit begged to head down to the beach, and Pablo obliged.

He resettled down by the beach, and watched as his water pokemon gleefully skated across the open water, playing a game of trying to avoid the waves. Magnemite soon joined in by levitating at a very low height above the water. Watching his pokemon play, Pablo knew that the life he had been giving them up until now hadn’t been fair at all. Surskits shouldn’t have to learn how to walk across a wood floor. But the pokemon had resoundingly refused to abandon him last year when he had suggested it, even through such neglect. Both of them were simply too innocent.

After the sun went down, Magnemite sparked a little from either end of its body in order to produce enough light for the trio to find a place to sleep for the night. Pablo made his way off the beach and up into a relatively secluded area where he laid down on top of some tall grass, using his backpack as a pillow and leaving his jacket on for warmth.

Surskit, the climate being his natural habitat, found his own place without any real regard for the cold breeze, and Magnemite appeared to not experience cold at all. Pablo did think it was a little strange that they hadn’t encountered any wild pokemon on the beach or now, but supposed that wild pokemon were not actually as common as he had assumed. The three fell asleep in relative peace that night…

...only to be awoken in the very early morning by a complete downpour. Pablo jumped to his feet, but when he looked around in the dim light of the rising sun, he discovered that the hillside was hilariously devoid of shelter from the rain.

“We have to go farther inland!” he shouted, and thus the two pokemon and their trainer began trudging uphill in the rain and the mud toward shelter in the rocky areas.

At one moment, he slipped in the mud and tried to grab on to Magnemite in order to hold himself up, only to receive a small accidental shock due to the rain. Despite the brief shooting pain, the pokemon’s strong magnetic field that kept it in the air was also strong enough to hold Pablo up, and the young man recovered his stance and kept moving.

Within twenty minutes, he left the hilly grasslands behind in favor of more rocky terrain, and it appeared that there were several large boulders he could hide underneath in order to avoid being totally soaked. Upon approaching more closely, some of the boulders set up against the mountainous hillside appeared to be a small cave, so Pablo wandered on inside, setting his bag on the ground.

It was a harsh hissing noise from the entrance to the cave that alerted him that he had perhaps not made the best decision in his eagerness to escape the rain. An angry-looking Seviper blocked his exit, Pablo’s first real encounter with a wild pokemon since capturing Surskit almost a year ago, and his first encounter with one that wasn’t friendly.

As the snake pokemon coiled up to strike, he realized that he needed to try to fight it off using his own pokemon. “Magnemite, use Spark to try and repel it!” he commanded, hoping that his pokemon would actually listen to its first battle command ever.

Fortunately, the electric type got the message and positioned itself in between Pablo and the Seviper, crackling with electricity. Seviper struck outward with its long scythe-like tail, but recoiled the second it touched Magnemite from the sudden shock. Cautiously, Magnemite moved forward, and Seviper lunched at it, fangs bared, only to experience the same fate once again.

“Ok good, now Surskit, try to use Hydro Pump!”

The water strider focused intensely, forming a sphere of water on top of his head, before firing it as a thick column of water toward Seviper, not dealing a large amount of damage, but pushing it out of the cave at the very least.

Both pokemon charged out toward the snake pokemon, and Seviper hissed its intention to continue the fight. Fortunately for Surskit, there were small puddles all over the ground, and he hopped around and slid between them effortlessly, firing Bubble attacks to explode all over Seviper whenever an opportunity presented itself. Magnemite, meanwhile, circled overhead and charged up Thundershocks to periodically shoot out.

Seviper lashed out in various directions trying to land a hit on Surskit, but when it became clear that this was not going to happen, the poison type changed its mind and made a hasty retreat back down into the hillside grasses.

Pablo, once he was sure it was safe, congratulated his pokemon on their first real victory, even though it had been two against one, and they re-entered the cave for some breakfast. This consisted of a few granola bars for Pablo himself, some red algae for Surskit from a plastic bag, and Magnemite drained what was left of the electricity from the solar charger.

After eating, the two newly reinvigorated pokemon went back out in the rain to play. Pablo sat at the entrance for a moment, watching them.

There is no one here at all, he thought. It’s totally silent here other than the rain. This is what freedom feels like!

Excited by this last thought, the dark-skinned boy took the opportunity to have a shower in the rain while his clothes dried in the cave. He even began singing, which he hadn’t done in years out of the embarrassment of other residents in his apartment being able to hear him through the walls.

When he opened his eyes, Pablo realized with horror that his singing had attracted the attention of several Zangoose, who were now peering at him curiously from behind some rocks. He instinctively froze, before remembering that was exactly what not to do in this situation.

God damn it, he thought. I’m behaving like a prey animal right now. I should have shouted to try to scare them off, or even pretended to ignore them, or…

The mongoose pokemon, rain running down their white and red striped fur, did seem to pick up on the human’s body language, and deftly jumped out into the open, claws bared. The young man took one hesitant step backwards, and then the Zangoose’s predatory instincts seemed to kick in. One lunged at him, and Pablo barely managed to avoid the pokemon’s claws slashing into his chest by a stroke of luck as he tripped backwards over a rock. The pokemon stood over him menacingly, and just as it was about to attack, Magnemite came zooming back over and unleashing a stream of electricity that distracted the Zangoose.

Pablo took advantage of the opportunity to get up and run toward the cave entrance where his bags lay, but the other two Zangoose leaped in front of the entrance to block it. Surskit quickly skidded over to spray bubbles in the faces of the two pokemon, and at that same moment the Seviper from earlier reappeared.

The poison type had a split second staredown with Pablo, and the rookie trainer prayed to some god he had suddenly decided to believe in that it wouldn’t end him right then and there. Fortunately, the snake pokemon seemed more interested in reclaiming its cave, and attacked one of the Zangoose instead.

There was a loud metallic clunk as the first Zangoose’s Slash attack threw Magnemite into the rocky mountainside, and then Pablo began to run desperately away from the situation once more, toward another cave entrance to the north, his two pokemon close behind him.

At this new cave entrance, Pablo hesitated for a moment and looked back to where his bag and all of his clothes lay. He also saw, however, the three Zangoose ripping apart the Seviper and starting to eat it. One of them looked up and made eye contact with Pablo, and that was enough to scare the young man and his pokemon inside the cave.

Please don’t let there be any more wild pokemon, he silently prayed, stepping inside cautiously, careful to not cut his bare feet on any rocks at the same time.

After a solid five minutes of standing in the same spot in silence and listening, the young man concluded that he was safe, at least for the moment. He sat down against a wall uncomfortably and looked to the dim silhouettes of Surskit and Magnemite.

“We can just wait here for a little while,” he reassured his pokemon, “until those Zangoose go away. Then we can go back for our stuff, but we have to do it quickly!”

The rain outside continued relentlessly, and even seemed to increase in intensity. Due to the downward slope of the small cave entrance he was in, Pablo found himself sitting in a stream of rushing water. Without any clothes to protect him, he was starting to feel cold, and knew he had to make his move soon.

After a few more minutes of watching Surskit hop around in the stream and trying to make the rain stop through sheer willpower, the pokemon trainer finally stood up and started to trudge upward through the water toward the cave entrance. There was a deep rumbling noise from above, and his eyes grew wide as he recognized the sound of a mudslide coming down the outside of the mountain. He started desperately scrambling to climb the wet rocks, only to fall and slide backwards several feet, the sharp stones cutting into his bare skin.

Surskit nudged him back up, and Pablo began ascending to the daylight once more as the rumbling noises grew steadily louder and louder. One up on flat ground he made a mad dash toward the entrance, only to see the daylight abruptly vanish. Though the water stopped, stones began falling from the ceiling, and a large chunk hit him in his shoulder, causing him to fall over and slide back down painfully to where he had fallen the previous time.

Magnemite sparked intermittently to provide a light source in the pitch black cave, and Pablo looked over to Surskit just in time to see the bug type get crushed by a falling boulder from the ceiling. In horror he recalled the pokemon into its pokeball, and along with Magnemite began descending further into the tunnel with the hope that they would be safer there.

Pablo walked slowly, with his hands moving along the wall to feel ahead of him, and also so that he could help to hold himself up with the friction of his hands when he unexpectedly stepped onto wet rocks. His feet were bleeding and in pain, and his left shoulder and entire back were scratched up from having fallen twice.

Magnemite chirped nervously as his sparks illuminated some standing water, which Pablo stepped into as the tunnel forced him in that direction. He couldn’t figure out why it bothered Magnemite at first, but then realized the situation.

What if all this water just sitting here means there’s no exit? he suddenly thought, and began to take deep breaths in an attempt to remain calm.

He waded into increasingly deep water that now came up to his waist and was beginning to grow concerned about the cold and hypothermia that could result from being trapped like this. Shivering, he slowly stepped through the water, only to run into a wall in front of him. Magnemite sparked up again to illuminate the area, and to Pablo’s sheer horror it appeared that they were at a dead end.

 

This had always been a possibility. He knew that given all the seismic activity in the area that the composition of the mountain was ever-changing, and some caverns were created while others were divided up into pieces or destroyed altogether. He also knew that it was a stupid idea to go deeper into an unknown cave system after a rockslide.

I’ve seen fucking scary movies with this exact plot, Pablo cursed at himself. Some naive young explorers get trapped into a cave and then die because they make terrible decisions while panicking.

After a depressing walk around the perimeter of the lake to confirm that he was indeed trapped, Pablo waded back up out of the water to warm up. He recalled Magnemite to its pokeball, not wanting to waste the remaining energy of his pokemon given that there was no way for it to recharge down there, and then proceeded to sit on a rock and cry.

Less than two days ago he had been sitting in his apartment, bored but with a very safe life. Now he was sitting cold, naked, bleeding, hungry, and afraid inside of a cave that he was probably going to die in.

In an attempt to relax for a moment, Pablo decided to lay down and close his eyes, not that it made a difference with the total lack of ambient light, but he needed to feel like he was in control of something.

I wonder whether I would die from sepsis, hypothermia, or starvation first, he morbidly wondered, ears ringing in the complete silence.

He soon realized that he wasn’t actually in complete silence, and as his ears adjusted Pablo was able to hear a dripping noise that sounded far away. In his state of panic he was unable to think clearly and determine the source, so the sound became an annoyance to him. The steady dripping reminded him of a horrible news report he had seen of the enhanced interrogation techniques the Kanto military was known to use in times of war, and he now understood how it could be maddening over time.

Maybe there is a small crack that all this standing water is slowly leaking out from, the thought eventually came to him after about five minutes staring into the dark void.

Suddenly inspired, Pablo jumped to his feet and called out Magnemite. The pokemon clearly was starting to run a little low on energy, especially after being thrown around by the Zangoose earlier and having put off sparks for light for the past few hours.

“Magnemite,” the electric type’s trainer said, looking to where he assumed it was levitating, “I think there might be a way for us to get out. I want you to go to the cave wall around that pond, and wherever you think that dripping noise is loudest, use Sonicboom on the wall to try to break apart the rock. If that doesn’t help, then I’ll climb back up to the top and maybe you can try to use whatever energy you have left to break us out of the original cave-in. Sound good?”

Magnemite beeped in affirmation before setting out across the water, lighting up the area with quick brief flashes of electricity in order to find its way around. It floated around silently, listening for the sound of the water, and stared at one section of the rock wall for a moment as it mustered the power for a Sonicboom attack.

Though Pablo could not see what was going on, he had preemptively covered his ears and jumped slightly as a loud pressure wave crushed part of the cave wall. He briefly wondered if it was going to cause another collapse of the ceiling and kill them, but suddenly light flooded in, burning his unprepared eyes.

The water all rushed out of the new hole in the wall, and Pablo scrambled over to the edge where Magnemite was floating and looking out. They hadn’t reached the outside, but rather a large interior cavern illuminated by floating rock pokemon, their light reflecting off the variety of colored minerals lining the walls. Although slightly discouraged, the trainer and pokemon had hope that they had just found their way into an area frequented by tourists.

As Pablo looked down and contemplated how they were going to get down from where they were standing to the cave floor, the wild pokemon of the cave suddenly took notice of not only the big splash of water but also the origin of it and the human and his Magnemite.

Before they could react, Pablo and Magnemite were swarmed by what appeared to be angry Lunatone. He had seen pictures of the pokemon in advertisements, but the very real pokemon he was now staring at were not made of smooth rock and benign-looking; they were made up of a variety of jagged rocks smashed together with some kind of consciousness about them centered on the eyes.

The five vaguely crescent-shaped pokemon charged up blue spheres of energy in preparation to attack cooperatively with Ice Beam, and Pablo’s eyes grew wide. He ran backwards, scrambling to get up the wet rocks farther into the tunnel for safety, while Magnemite unleashed one last Sonicboom, knocking the central Lunatone backwards before collapsing due to a lack of energy. Pablo turned back and recalled his pokemon for its own safety as the four remaining Lunatone entered the damp tunnel and surrounded him.

“No, please don’t!” he sobbed futilely as they charged up for successive Ice Beam attacks once again.

This is it, he found his thoughts coming extremely quickly due to adrenaline, as if time was slowed. This is all my fault, I should have known better than to go anywhere near Meteor Falls. I should try to throw Surskit and Magnemite’s pokeballs down below before I die so that someone has a chance of finding them…

Though resolved to try to save his pokemon from an eternity of being injured and trapped in their pokeballs, he didn’t have the chance to react as the four rock pokemon unleashed their attacks. Pablo screamed and closed his eyes, but the pain never came. Instead he felt an intense heat directly in front of him.

Cautiously opening an eye, he saw that a second type of flying rock pokemon had inserted itself in between him and the Lunatone, and the ball of fire it had conjured vaporized the ice attacks. The spoked pokemon he recognized as Solrock proceeded to unleash its fire attack on the Lunatone, singing them slightly and scaring them away.

When the Solrock turned around to stare at the human it had just saved, it saw a sobbing, shivering, bleeding mess. The sun-shaped pokemon floated over to the edge of the tunnel where it opened up into the main cavern and grunted slightly.

Not even daring to hope yet, Pablo walked over carefully and looked out at the fifty meter drop to the ground. He suddenly felt himself being lifted off the ground and floated into the air; meanwhile the rock pokemon’s eyes glowed with a harsh lavender light as they descended slowly to the ground.

The young man’s jaw dropped when he discovered a man-made path and hand railing on the ground below, and despite his injuries and hunger took off running along it, at the same time scared that the wild Solrock would change its mind and attack him. Without looking back, he exited the cavern into a relatively dark tunnel, but soon made a U-turn and saw daylight ahead of him.

Laughing maniacally at the thought that he was actually going to live, Pablo ran outside and fell down in the grass staring up at the sun. He closed his eyes for a brief moment in relaxation, and when he opened them he saw Solrock above him, staring up at the sun and basking in its warmth as well.

“Thank you so much!” Pablo exclaimed, now somewhat confident that this wild pokemon was at the very least not trying to kill him. “How can I repay you?”

The rock pokemon looked back up at the sun, and then stared out at a cargo ship slowly passing by on the horizon, before looking back to Pablo expectantly.

“You… want to see the world?” he asked, and in response the sun-shaped pokemon laid down next to him in the grass.

Revisiting the entire series of events in his head, Pablo realized that even though he had never been in so much danger before, he had also never felt so alive. It was at that moment that he knew he could never return to the life he had before, especially when the world was such a big place.

“...so do I,” he finally added. “Let’s go.”

---

Character count: 30.003
Pokemon captured: Solrock

 

Hey Karpi,

This was a pretty good first URPG story! There’s plenty of stuff to talk about, so let’s dive in. I’m going to talk about character development, plot, and description in this grade. I think that overall, you performed well in each of these categories, but there is always room for improvement.

The first major aspect of the story I’d like to discuss is point-of-view and how you used it for character development. The story is told by a third-person narrator, but the narrator spends a lot of time inside Pablo’s head. Telling a story from that sort of perspective, like any other narrative strategy, has its upsides and its downsides. On one hand, it gives your audience a window into your character’s thoughts, which can help them to better understand what they’re going through and why they’re acting a certain way. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of doing all your characterization through thoughts, which can make it seem like there’s not much happening in the story.

I think that happened in your story, to a degree. It becomes stagnant not because Pablo’s thoughts are necessarily uninteresting, but because every second we spend in Pablo’s head is another second we’re not watching something happen in the “real world.” I’d like to talk about one scene and how you could have brought in some action to liven it up a little. Note that when I say “action,” I don’t mean a high-speed car chase, I just mean that when you’re revealing character and plot points, it becomes more enticing for the reader if you mix it up between telling them details directly and showing characters doing something or talking.

So, here goes. Towards the beginning of the story, Pablo gets a check for some back pay and thinks “If I put this in the bank now and pretend I don’t have it, I would theoretically be able to leave Rusboro in about 18 and a half months instead of 19 months, and then…” You used this line to help show that Pablo is rather poor, and it does that job just fine. But I would like you to consider other ways you could have shown this information besides doing it through Pablo’s internal monologue. For example, you could have shown him depositing his measly paycheck into a near-empty jar on the shelf labeled the “Get Out of Rustboro Fund”. That one action shows that Pablo hates where he lives, that he wants to get out, and that he’s obviously not making much progress. More importantly, it gives you a chance to add some more detail to the setting and story without having to rely on Pablo’s thoughts as much.

All in all, the plot feels like a set-up for a bigger story, but there isn’t a whole lot that happens in the story itself. At the end, I’m left wondering where it’s going, but not necessarily in a suspenseful way. You’ve left it very open, and shown that Pablo has decided not to return to his old life, but that doesn’t give much clue where he’s going. This is the part of the TV show where we get a montage of all the zany things that are going to happen in the upcoming season (but obviously that doesn’t work in this sort of media). Having a sort of origin story is fine, but I’d really like to have more clues about the sorts of things that are going to be important later on. For example, Pablo meets a few interesting characters on the bus, but we don’t get any indication that they’re going to have any significance beyond a few short lines of dialogue.

That being said, I want to point out some aspects of the plot that were really good, too. I like that Pablo is not the typical Pokémon trainer, because it affects the story in ways that you wouldn’t expect. For example, it opens up some cool interactions with people like the trainers on the bus who he feels worlds away from. If you do continue this story with the “I’m gonna go see the world” plotline, I’d like to see you expand upon the gulf Pablo feels between himself and the average Pokémon trainer, like his friends who you mentioned in the beginning. Though the pace the of the story was kind of slow because you spent so much time on Pablo’s thoughts, you did a good job of setting him up as a unique character who sees the world differently than most of the people around them because his past experiences differ vastly from theirs.

In the scenes where you weren’t telling the story through Pablo’s thoughts, you had some really great action. I particularly enjoyed his battle against the Zangoose and Seviper. One cool detail I liked was the way you used the puddles that the rain had created to provide a fitting surface for Surskit to fight on. What really helped the scene was the way the narration switched from thoughtful to frantic. It reminds me of the way it feels to play a fast-paced game like DDR or Guitar Hero or something like that, where you get so caught up in the moment you forget to think. You take the narration out of Pablo’s head and show him just reacting, and it reveals a lot about his character and that of his Pokémon. His desperation in this scene shows a lot more about his inexperience as a trainer than you could show just by telling us he’s a novice. When he trips and accidentally saves his own life, it shows how utterly unprepared he is for the outdoorsman’s life because he lacks any situational awareness whatsoever. I cared about what happened in this scene more than any other because this is where you really revealed the stakes in the story—win or die.

You did something similar later on when Pablo was trapped by the landslide. You described a lot of the setting and the things happening around Pablo without relying too much on his internal thoughts. I felt his desperation not because he told me he was desperate but because you, the narrator, described the bleak situation he was stuck in. This makes it all the more relieving when Solrock finally shows up and saves the day.

On that note, however: Generally we expect the target Pokémon (in this case, Solrock) to have a greater role in the story, especially at the harder ranks. It takes a fair bit of suspension of disbelief to accept that a Solrock will up and give itself over to a trainer without that trainer having to prove themselves first. That being said, I’m willing to be a little lenient since this is, after all, you’re first story. I’ve got a few other things I want to mention before I get to the final grade, however.

These last few details I want to touch on are really just small blips that I think you could have caught with a little more proofreading. Somewhere towards the very beginning I noticed you used a period instead of a comma, though I can’t find it at the moment. I also noticed you said “Rusboro” instead of “Rustboro” at least twice. These aren’t deal-breakers, but I really recommend you re-read your work to find these sorts of errors so that they don’t negatively impact your grades later on, especially if you keep shooting for harder Pokémon. The last thing I want to mention is the way you used the term “high-school dropout” at one point. You meant to describe someone who had left school to become a Pokémon trainer, which is a good thing in the Pokémon world, but “high-school dropout” has a generally bad connotation to us, so I was confused for a second. I definitely envisioned a different kind of person than you meant to portray until I realized what you meant.

Overall:

Since this is your first story, and you did an overall good job, I’m going to grade this a pass. You get Solrock! In the future, I might not be willing to give you a Complex Pokémon so easily, however. For your next story, work on the following:

1. Describe actions and settings, and try not to do too much character development through the character’s own thoughts. It may seem odd, but the best way to get a reader to empathize with what your protagonist is feeling is by providing them the vivid description that makes them feel like they’re in the same situation, rather than having your character tell the reader how they feel.
2. Give more unity to the story. The general idea of a “vacation” doesn’t tell me what’s going to happen or make me excited to read about it. You recovered later on through the desperate and action-filled scenes later in the story, but I think you can do more plot-wise to entice your audience.
3. Proofread! There were only a few mistakes in your story, but I feel they’re solid evidence that you didn’t go back and re-read it after you finished. Had you done so, you might have not only fixed those typos, but also found lots of places to improve your story in other ways.

Overall, this was a good first story, and I’m sure I’ll be seeing more. Enjoy your Pokémon!