Patience is Rewarding

Title: Patience is Rewarding
By: OmegaBlazer
Target: Magikarp (5k)
Count: 7,956 Characters

“Paaaaaaw-paaaaaaw!” a young boy cried out while releasing a large yawn. He stretched out his pudgy body and tugged down his navy blue shirt. The shirt rose up and showed his white stomach as he fiddled with the ends of his denim shorts. He then stared down the fishing pole that was wedged into some rocks on the ground in front of him. The line sat out in the middle of the lake as the bobber floated just at the surface, barely moving. The boy turned to an elderly gentleman seated next to him. “We’ve been here forever and still hadn’t caught anything!”

As he heard that, the gentleman, most likely his granddad, just chuckled to himself before turning to the boy, a smile on his wrinkled, tanned face. “Luis, you need to be patient and quiet when fishing,” he said in a quiet and hushed voice, “Just listen to the sounds around us and watch as the lake shows you the potential it has.” As he said that, the boy’s grandfather slowly started to stand up and extend his body as well, but in slow, measured movements. Eventually, he ended his slow stretching as he bent his body backwards. Then, he dusted off his dark brown, long sleeve shirt and his black denim pants, “Now, just listen to and watch everything around us.”

Slowly but surely, Mother Nature seemed to have responded to the gestures, along with his words, of the boy’s grandfather as she allowed the wind to gust, which started a rainbow of red, orange, and yellow leaves to fall from their branches and onto the lake. Suddenly, a yellow crown-shaped object peeked out from under one of the leaves in the lake Luis’s eyes widen a bit.

“Wow…” he breathed out as he looked at the leaves before he spotted the crown, “Is that a Magikarp?”

The granddad nodded as he started to watch more crowns starting to peek at the surface of the water before taking a deep breath, “Brings me back to where I was your age…”

“Huh?”

“When I was your age, I was just like you: jumpy, excited, easily bored, and didn’t want anything to do with sitting still.”

Just then, Luis started to chuckle, “Paw-Paw, you’ve always been Paw-Paw!”

To this granddad shook his head with chuckle as he sat back down, motioning to Luis to do the same thing, “Oh, another thing I remember from my childhood, naivety. Tell me, Lewy, what words come to mind when you think of Magikarp and strength.”

Luis tilted his head, raising an eyebrow for a while as he shook his head, “The only word that comes to mind is ‘weak’, but everyone knows that!”

“I know otherwise, my dear Lewy. Just the ones who call them weak haven’t had the patience, and the perseverance, I had when my friends and I challenged each other to raise Magikarp to try to get them to match the skills in the Pokedex.” Seeing Luis’s still confused face, he pulled out an old book from a backpack that was next to him, flipping a few pages in it and showing it to Luis.

The page featured two different creatures, both of them completely different from each other but there was also an arrow that went from one creature that was at the top of the page to the other. The top creature on the page was a small red fish with a huge, open mouth, a yellow crown on the top of its back and under its belly, a long, yellow whisker on either side of its face, and white fins. The other, however, was a long, dark blue serpent-like creature that had lighter blue crowns for fins on its face, and at various points along its back. Naturally, Luis found himself looking at the huge beast at the bottom of the page before finally looking up and seeing a line of text circled next to the Magikarp: “A Magikarp living for many years can leap a mountain using Splash.”

Luis’s eyes moved over that sentence once, twice, thrice before looking up at his granddad, “Paw-Paw? Isn’t that just a load of Tauros?” only to cover his mouth as he looked down at the ground, clearly a bit flustered about what he said.

The granddad, however, didn’t respond to what Luis said that made him seem worried. Instead, he started to breathe deeply before finally speaking, “Luis, remember what your parents and I have always told you: Nothing is impossible unless you don’t try. Well, the story I’m about to tell you is one of many stories that prove that saying correct.

“It happened before your father was born, heck it happened before I even knew about your Nanna. As a matter of fact, it happened when I was around your age; we had just watched the news about 3 new 10-year old Trainers that left their hometown to start exploring. When this happened my friends and I decided that we were going to get Pokedexes ourselves and see what could learn about Pokemon. However, being too young to get the electronic version we had to settle for the newest copy of the information in print.

“While my friends and I were looking at it, we circled different facts and manually updated information as they were announced on the TV or Radio. However, after I looked through it on my own, there was always something that bugged me: if Magikarp was so weak, how could any jump so high as 7 feet seemed like a stretch to our minds. Therefore, we did chores, yard work, sold Lemonade, sold Soda Pop, and anything else we could do to get the money so that we could fish. As we started to fish, a few of my friends got tired and stopped fishing, like you, but I still wanted to try to get a Magikarp to perform that mountain-high splash. I knew that there had to be some way to perform that in front of everyone, I didn’t about having the strongest or best anything.

“It took nearly the entire summer vacation but on a day like today where the older folks, like I am today, were donning warmer clothes and the kiddos, like you or like I was, could still run around in shirts and shorts, I finally caught a Magikarp,” he paused and chuckled a little bit, as if remembering something funny, “Or I suppose it caught me…”

Luis looked at his grandfather as he laughed a little bit, “What do you mean by that, Paw-Paw?”

“Well, it was the last day of summer break and I wanted to get at least one Magikarp to take home to put in the pond I used to have in our backyard so I remember speaking to this very lake, ‘Please, Magikarp,’ I begged it, ‘I want to prove you aren’t just weak fish. I want to show that you have the strength it says in the PokeDex.’

“Then, about a minute or two later, I started to get sleepy until water had splashed on my face, and something had fallen onto my lap, flopping around in it. Startled, I jumped up, backed away, looking at where I was at. Sure enough, it was a bright red Magikarp just flopping around, staring at me. "Karp karp ma magikarp," I remember it saying as I approached it carefully before smiling and hugging it.

“‘Hey, Magi,’ I told him through tears as he wiggle and squirmed in my hands, but then he seemed have been to slipped right through and landed back in the lake. However, he never swam away; instead he stayed right there, wiggling side to side as I started to get my net. Slowly and carefully, I started to scoop him up and took him home, just a proud as I could be. Once home, I got him in the pond and showed _my_ mommy and daddy, they were proud I finally caught one and even said I could keep it while I was in school.

“Every day, after school, I wouldn’t even go into the house until I spent at least an hour talking to Magi, watching it splash and leap about, almost in tune to me telling him about my day, even placing a blue band that I found on the street around its tail. The more I spoke, the closer he and I seemed to be getting and I had completely forgotten about what I originally planned on doing with him until one day…”

Suddenly the lake started to sound out of something moving around in it, splashing about noisily and the grandfather’s eyes seemed to be lighting as the splashing got louder but he started to keep telling his story to his grandson.

“…I was late heading home from school because I was helping my teacher out with cleaning the classroom on the last day of school. Though, as I was riding my bike home from school I saw something going up and down in the sky from about the quarter mile it took to get home. At first I didn’t know what it was, but, as I got closer, I began to make out shapes and colors of the object. Although, it wasn’t until I was home and saw a crowd at my house that I finally realized what it was.”

Just then, a massive splashing sound could be heard, causing a shower to fall on the boy and his grandfather. Pointing up, his Grandfather pointed out a Magikarp that had a blue band on its tail and almost started to tear up as it landed once again, causing an even larger spray of water to land on the pair.

“It was Magi, just like it is him right now that did that. He had missed me, coming home and talking to him and was trying to get my attention, but, when I got home the wind or something must have caused him to start to head toward the ground at an angle. When I noticed that, unless somebody caught him, Magi was going to hit the ground, I pushed my way through the crowd. However, as I started to run towards him faster than I knew I could, I tripped over a rock causing me to stumble as I tried to get under him. Eventually, I closed my eyes and prayed for the best. Thankfully, I felt the cold scales of the Magikarp inside of my arms and I knew that I had saved him.”

“Wow! Paw-Paw! That’s amazing, and was that re…” Luis started to ask, excitedly only to suddenly turn his attention to his line and bobber, which was being pulled. With a renewed vigor from his granddad’s story, the boy started to reel in his line as best as he could while pulling.

Eventually, Luis’s granddad started to get behind him to help reel in whatever was on the line and once they finally pulled back the rod enough to get whatever was on the line out of the water, they saw…

 

Going on a road trip for the weekend so I'll go ahead and snag this too!

 

HELLO I AM THE WORST.
um i mean this grade took so long because… patience is rewarding?
Yes okay I am the worst.


THE BEGINNING STUFF

I quite enjoyed the first few paragraphs of your story, and I think they did a great job of introducing the story itself. There are a few hallmarks of a rock-solid introduction, but nothing is really set in stone: your introduction really should just make me 1) make me know a little about your characters/world/plot (any/all) and 2) make me care about what happens next.

Regarding the first: you introduce your characters quite nicely here! There’s the impatient little kid who’s clearly going to learn something, and the grandfather who’s probably going to be the teacher. Little details like how his stomach sticks out of his shirt make Lewis a lot more vivid early on and are great at setting the scene without getting overwhelming.

Regarding the second: this one is, naturally, much harder to quantify. On one hand, there’s a little bit of the mystery lost—it became clear to me from the title/first few paragraphs of the story that this impatient kid was going to learn that patience is rewarding. On the other hand, I think that you were able to tease the greater question of why/how Lewis is going to figure this out, and that was what kept me reading.

One thing to consider: introductions are a hugely important. Those first few sentences are your chance at selling your entire story to your readers. Think carefully about what you’re saying, and even more carefully about why you’re saying it.

THE PLOTTY STUFF

On the surface, this was a cute story about a kid going fishing with his grandfather, and then they both learn what it means to wait. Although the plot is simplistic, you’ve got some lovely bits that delve into more complex themes—young vs old, the past and the future—that make the story feel much deeper. And for a beginning story, having well-integrated sideplots like this is just awesome.

I think the way you communicated the story did feel a little awkward, though. The first half or so was really well done, especially the bit where grandpa pulls out his paper pokédex, but the dialogue that follows feels a little incomplete. You tell the bare bones of the story through the grandfather speaking it directly, and this results in paragraphs of text with a few disjointed visuals scattered in: it read a bit like videogame exposition (some offhand examples would be describing the giant war in the X/Y games, or really most intro games that have a pre-tutorial introduction). This kind of storytelling works really well for videogames, where you can incorporate visuals directly with the text (and notice how they usually save this for telling some sort of backstory, but not the plot itself), but it doesn’t quite have the same punch in straight-up writing.

Having the second half of your story as mostly dialogue has a few strange results: it makes a lot of the action feel very removed from the story. The grandfather has a nice stylistic voice that carries across in the words he’s saying, but the actual actions he’s describing feel very filtered and removed. The elation he might’ve felt when he finally found a Magikarp, the panic when he saw Magi in peril, and the sheer relief when he saved Magi—these are all things that the readers don’t get from his dialogue, but it’s a little strange because we can halfway feel like it’s all there.

That being said, this is a relatively minor stylistic thing that didn’t derail the plot you were communicating, so it’s more of a thing to keep in mind for the future. Your basic plot here was great!

THE MECHANICAL STUFF

You had a couple of typos here and there, but nothing too major. Just a reminder to proofread things! Editing is good, yo.

I think ‘my’ was supposed to have a different format? Underscore for _italics_ works on Discord but not on the forums. Markup text vs bb code. If you’re writing in a word processor (ie MS Word or Google Docs), you can actually directly copy/paste italics into BMG (but not PWN or PXR because of forum differences). If you want to be safe across all forums, you can just write [*i]italics[*/i] without the asterisks, and it’ll parse in directly.

THE PRETTY STUFF

I’m trying to keep things shorter than the story itself, heh, and there’s already a lot of information crammed into this grade, so this section will be brief. Your descriptions were good! I already mentioned those early details, like Luis’s stomach peeking out beneath his shirt and such, but the level of description throughout the story (barring some of the grandfather’s dialogue) was excellent. My personal favorite was when the grandfather pulled out his old-fashioned pokédex: such a lovely, tiny detail that highlights just how different his world is from Luis’s! Awesome!

OVERALL STUFF

Length checks out! I also felt like this story was well-paced and was just the right length from a qualitative rather than character count standpoint, so great work here!

Overall, this is a great first magikarp story. I don’t know what else to say here—you set up a cute plot, incorporate some nice themes, and created a couple of characters that I genuinely enjoyed. There are some storytelling semantics that you’ll want to keep in mind as you strive for higher-ranked captures, but as we stand here, this had everything you needed and then some! I have no qualms saying Magikarp is captured! Or Magi swims back to them and it’s a cute happy reunion and everything <333333*

*just a heads up regarding endings, because I wasn’t sure if yours was intentional—there was once an old rule in URPG that stories had to end with a “wiggling Pokéball” or some sort of equivalent, AKA you weren’t allowed to say that a Pokémon was captured/end your story properly. That’s no longer the case! If this was a stylistic choice on your part, that’s fine too, but you no longer have to end your story with that level of uncertainty.

Thank you again for your patience in little old me for writing this late grade, and I’m sorry that this is so meta/late, lol. Now go out and write more good things!