Star Fox [WaR 2017]

Floating among the stars in the depths of space was an asteroid. The rocky asteroid slowly moved through space enveloped by a translucent blue barrier. Whenever space debris made contact the orb-like barrier, it disintegrated, keeping the asteroid and its inhabitants safe. The barrier was supported by six large towers positioned across the asteroid. Each tower extended beyond the barrier with doors that would open for travelers to enter the tower's hollow tunnels and reach the asteroid's surface. At the bottom of one of the towers laid a two floor building made up of a series of hallways, and outside of the building a young boy stood waiting.

Showakusei was a short, skinny ten year old boy. He wore a single, smooth, blue, seamless outfit that covered most of his body. All that were exposed were his matching white sneakers, pasty white hands, and his head. Showakusei had a weary, exhausted look on his face. With his back to his school, he patiently stood still while gazing out at the asteroid's nearest support tower. He squinted to make sure, then smiled when he saw his mother's scully approaching. Scullies were state of the art vehicles used my civilians for transportation. They had circular tops and bottoms, sides that curved outwards, and generally resembled the shape of a creme filled doughnut. Scully owners could customize the displays that lined the outside of their vehicles with animations of whatever they wanted, and Showakusei could recognize his mother's floral designs of roses, tulips, and daffodils from miles away.

It took mere moments for the scully to arrive at his school. The scully flew across the gray, desolate, barren landscape as it approached the black, paved entryway to the school. The scully hovered in front of Showakusei, and half of the curved walls retracted into the base of the scully. Showakusei climbed into one of the gaps they left and sat down in one of the chairs that lined the rim of the scully. Other than the cushioned chairs that lined the border of the scully and a circular table in the middle, the vehicle was unadorned on the inside.

"Alright, let's go home," Showakusei's mother said.

The scully's openings were resealed with the walls that retracted for Showakusei to step in through, and the unoccupied seats retracted into the floor, leaving Showakusei and his mother sitting on the two remaining seats next to each other. Where the seats had previously been were the newly revealed walls. The screens that made up the walls turned on to reveal the asteroid outside captured by cameras in real time, acting as windows. The scully whirred to life, and darted off towards the tower it arrived from.

"So, how was your day, kiddo?" asked Showakusei's mother.

"It was alright, I had an English quiz. I think I did well on it," Showakusei replied.

A hexagonal door at the base of the tower opened as the scully flew into it. The scully rose up into the air as it passed by countless rows of yellow lights that illuminated the vertical tunnel within the tower. Once the scully reached the top of the tower, it exited out of the opening and flew away from Showakusei's school's asteroid. As the scully started flying to Showakusei's home planet, Showakusei pressed a button on the metal band that wrapped around his wrist. The band projected a display in front of his head, and Showakusei began to swipe at the air with his hands to browse it. Showakusei lost track of time as he navigated his device, so he was startled when the scully came to a sudden halt.

"Oh, that's odd, our scully broke down. Luckily there's a repair shop nearby. I'll head over and see what they can do, you sit tight in the meantime," said Showakusei's mom as she left the vehicle.

Showakusei's mother floated away, not needing air as scientific advancements allowed humans to be genetically modified to no longer require oxygen several generations ago. Showakusei returned his attention to his device to pass the time. He played games, browsed the news, and chatted with friends, patiently waiting for his mother and the scully repairman to arrive. Eventually, he heard a knock on the side of the scully. Was it so broken that it wouldn't open automatically for his mother?

"Open doors," Showakusei ordered the vehicle.

The doors opened. Showakusei did not see his mother floating in front of the vehicle.

Floating outside the vehicle was an adult sized monster glad in gray and white armor. It was a Pokemon, a form humans had evolved to transform into. More specifically, it was an Aggron. The Aggron had a teardrop shaped head with three long spears sticking out of it; one straight forwards and two diagonally forwards and upwards. Below the forward facing spike was the Aggron's face, which consisted of two blue, piercing eyes, a singular oval nose hole, a jagged mouth with a minor under bite, and an angular chin. Below the beast's white head lied gray rectangular plates of various sizes. These plates wrapped around the Aggron's middle body on all sides. Each of the Pokemon's two arms and two legs were coated in similar gray and white armor. Both of the creature's hand and both of its feet were adorned with glistening white claws. Each of the claws were accentuated by a white glow that surrounded the Aggron.

"This hunka junk's supposed to be abandoned! Ah well, guess I can take care of a kid," the Aggron exclaimed as its gaze turned toward Showakusei.

The Aggron's eyes tightened and the beast lowered its head, ready to ram into Showakusei. The young boy used his psychic powers to levitate out of the scully and hide beneath it. There was no chance of outrunning the Aggron. Showakusei knew that he had to defend himself until his mother came back. He closed his eyes and focused his mind. A thin, light blue aura began to permeate around Showakusei, not dissimilar to the Aggron's white aura. While the boy was already short, he began to shrink even further. He compressed himself into less than half of his previous size, and he positioned his limbs out in front of himself. He merged with his clothes, and his body turned into an amorphous, white blob. It reformed into a triangular head, a round body, tube-like limbs with no joints, and a fan of nine fluffy, connected tails. The ends of the boy's limbs morphed into paws the same shade of blue as the aura that surrounded him, as did the ends of his tails. On the surface of his head emerged two large, bulbous, light blue eyes, two large, triangular, dark blue ears that faced his sides, a puny black nose between his eyes, and a white, fluffy tuft of fur on the top of his head.

Showakusei had transformed into his Pokemon form: a Vulpix.

By this point, the Aggron had charged at his previous position and had now turned around to pursue Showakusei under the scully. The Aggron pressed its arms to its body and its legs together, resembling a torpedo. As the Aggron propelled itself at Showakusei, the boy made use of his new form to levitate himself out of his pursuer's trajectory. Now that Showakusei had assumed the form of a small fox, he could traverse outer space much faster. The Aggron darted past where Showakusei had floated mere moments ago, but was unable to stop itself quickly. As the clumsy monster of a Pokemon continued barreling onward, Showakusei took advantage of the moment to counterattack the Aggron. Showakusei closed his eyes to once again tap into his mental powers and conjured a gust of icy wind. The burst of chilling wind blew right at the boy's pursuer and wrapped around it in a vortex.

The Aggron struggled against the winds and slowly turned to face Showakusei. The hulking Pokemon winced as he put forth all his might to charge once more. Thanks to the vortex, Showakusei significantly slowed his pursuer. As the Aggron slowly trudged towards him, Showakusei opened his small snout and floated backwards while propelling small balls of ice out of his mouth. The balls of ice pelted the Aggron one by one, and the Aggron cried out in pain. The beast stopped in its tracks and changed its tactics. Rather than attacking the Vulpix head-on, it hunched its head and shoulders down, raised its tail above its head, and shot out white, pulsing ring projectiles. The circles made their way to Showakusei, phased through him, and left him dizzy and confused.

"Hruh hruh hruh hruh," roared the exhausted Aggron triumphantly as it slowly floated towards Showakusei.

Showakusei was unable to move. His eyes were shut in pain. He was unable to fight back. Was this the end for him? His previous retaliation had slowed the Aggron, but his attacker was growing ever closer. Showakusei opened one of his eyes, expecting to see the Aggron right in front of him. Instead, he saw a light blue glow very similar to his own.

Between himself and the Aggron was his mother, who had transformed into her Pokemon form to defend Showakusei. Her Pokemon form, a Ninetales, strongly resembled Showakusei, with some minor differences. She was slightly larger, the ends of her tails weren't as close together and flowed freely behind her, her neck was longer and adorned with a cuff of fur. She growled ferociously and glared at the Aggron with her ice blue eyes. The Aggron raised its tail once more to assault the Ninetales. Instead of the Aggron using its tail to send out sonic waves again, the Pokemon rotated its whole body to swing its tail directly at Ninetales. Showakusei's mother let out a shrill howl and erected a psychic barrier in front of her before the Aggron could land its attack. When the tail hit the barrier, it came to a complete halt. With the Aggron vulnerable, Ninetales prepared a counter attack. She opened her mouth for a few seconds, focused her energy, and shot out a pure white beam of ice. The impact of the ice beam sent the Aggron tumbling backwards in space.

Suddenly, a scully came flying from the repair shop. It opened up, and the Aggron quickly floated inside. The scully closed and zoomed off into the distance. The Ninetales morphed back into her human form, and Showakusei quickly followed suit.

"This whole place was a scam," Showakusei was explained to by his mother, "they're the ones who damaged our scully remotely. They planned on stealing our scully while we went into the supposed repair shop. I think we scared them off for now, I'll call an actual repairman to come and fix our vehicle."

Showakusei let out a sigh of relief. He was glad that the ordeal was finally over.

Character count: 10475
Target: Alolan Vulpix (Medium: 10,000 - 20,000)
WaR details: Young Fantasy/Space or AH/Hybrids or Pokesouls

 

Claiming.

 

Before I get to the grade, due to this being under the terms of Write-A-Roll, take in mind that I will be treating this differently than I would approach a normal story due to it being juvenile fantasy. So if you have any questions, I will most likely answer in relation to that topic. Thanks!

Introduction:
The introduction starts off with leading us into a short description about what I assume is a school built on an asteroid. This is pretty creative, and despite the issues I have with it (like how does the mom find it consistently), it doesn't hinder on your introduction too much and gives some creativity that works well with your theme. For the school though, I would have liked to known what it looked like outside of a "two-floor building with a lot of hallways". I like generally having a picture in my mind of the surroundings for the character, but there's not too much to build up on here.

This also applies to our main character, Showakusei. Now, I'm not going to ask for like eye color and stuff, that's too much. But having a basic idea of his outfit instead of only being told he's a short, skinny boy would have been more interesting in my opinion. The description you give us of the Scully is nice and allows the reader to go over it once or twice to comprehend the design, and figure out a clear enough image in their head on it. However, why did the mom have flowers and the such on her vehicle? I know this is the typical 'girly' preferences, but having a nice snowflake based design would have been more in connection to the story and overall fit the the story better than random floral designs that are about as basic as you can get.

Besides all of this, Showakusei gets in with his mom, and they head out to home and we learn that he's just pretty much a normal kid. Or at least you'd think he is, but let's leave that to the next part.

Plot:
The plot is fairly simple which fits the theme well: our protagonist's mom leaves to figure out an issue, and a practical...ship thief (who knows) comes to break into it and possibly leave with it. This is fine, understandable, and honestly not a bad idea in regards. It applies to modern possibilities and why you should always be careful as a kid. This isn't my issue in particular though, but rather what happens while this is going on.

Right away, there are two statements brought up that would make me question it no matter my age:

But how?

But why?

These two statements feel like they're thrown in randomly to give the story a reason to carry on, but when I'm reading through I'm constantly getting stuck on these two quotes. How were humans changed so that they required oxygen no longer (I'll ignore any other space related questions because nobody at the typical age range of juvenile fantasy is really gonna give a damn about space logic)? Why can people just randomly turn into Pokemon too? Did a giant asteroid strike earth that embedded these people with this power, or did Pokemon always exist and we started cross-fusing DNA from Pokemon with every human? There's no clear basis given to either of these, and it feels so random that I just wish there was a small explanation as to why. These form huge holes in the plot that I just feel like I can't ignore purely for the fact that "its written for a younger audience."

Now, with the fight scene, I have some minor issues, but they aren't things I would exactly force someone to fix, but just seemed pretty random. We see that the protagonist, Showakusei, and the antagonist, Aggron, are fighting in space. Showa has a legitimate reason for why he can move there; he has psychic abilities due to his Pokemon (which is kind of bs but A-Vulpix learns psychic moves so I'll let it pass) and is able to control his momentum via that and his moves. But Aggron just kind of....moves. He's able to propel himself through space just because he can, which seems odd but I can get over it. But why would the attacks from Showa even hurt him enough to make him shout in pain? Slowing him down makes perfect sense, but not putting him in pain, and this is even shown in the latter half when Aggron confuses him and Showa says it himself. Showa is a small child and this is a fully grown adult, and if we toss in Pokemon logic , its an Aggron taking ice attacks. When the mother comes and takes care of the situation, I can see that happening. But I feel like Showa does not have the ability to stop a monstrous Pokemon like Aggron with how young he is.

Ending was perfectly fine and believable, so good on that.

Grammar:
Overall, I didn't notice too much grammar issues except for forgetting words and misspelling certain ones, so I'll just go over those quickly to save time. I noticed that this mostly happened in the introduction and progressively happened less as you got further on in the story, so that might be something to note.

You should have left out the 'was' here, as this sentence is completely in present tense, so it would just be "it disintegrated".

We're still in present tense here, so you would want to use the word 'laid' over 'lied', as it would have implied there was a building there in the past, not in the present.

After those two main ones, it seemed pretty good in grammar. There were a couple of mishaps where words were different ones on accident, such as by being my in the introduction, or clad being glad when describing Aggron's armor.

However, I did notice that you ended up putting commas at the end of nearly every bit of dialogue for your characters. This would make sense if they were going to say something after, like for example:

But you generally put it at the end of every dialogue, which should be using periods instead of commas if they aren't planning on saying anything after. There's a great guide here if you would like to look at it that could explain the simple rules to dialogue much better and quicker than I can.

Description:
I felt very fifty-fifty on this bit. When you were describing the Pokemon forms and the battle, it was very descriptive and I could picture practically everything going on. This made it very easy to get a sense of what's going on in the story here and made that part of it interesting to read, and I found it very easy to understand. This was great writing, especially for a juvenile fantasy as this is what I was practically looking for.

However, before that, I have some issues with the space school scene and a bit of the scully as I've brought up before. We lack a lot of information in this scene except for the small description about the asteroid and its towers, the school that is barely given any much, and what the scully looks like. This makes the scene very difficult to picture, and it was hard for me to imagine the place until Showakusei entered the scully. And even with that, it kind of screwed up my original idea of what the scully looked like from your normal description, but after a few reads over it I was kind of able to understand.

But my biggest complaint in terms of description is that despite our main character and his mom being humans, we never hear anything about what they look like, except for the small snippet on Showakusei about being short and skinny. This is an issue, as they are like this for almost half of the story, and yet we hear nothing about their appearance. We're not told anything about what clothes they were in this time, if they have anything unique about them like hair color or eye color, and its hard to exactly get a clue of what they look like until we shift to Pokemon. If there was anything I'd want to be resolved right away with the story, it would be adding descriptions, even if they're just simple like "he wears jeans and a gray sweater, and his hair is black." This would make it easier to not only connect with our main character, but give us an idea of what could make him or his mother unique to the story instead of just being there to be there until you get to the conflict.

Summary:
Overall, this story didn't have too bad of a premise and I enjoyed reading the fight despite some of my thoughts around it. The story was simple and you described the setting just enough to where there wasn't too much but I didn't need to know much more than what was given while they were flying through space. However, my problems with the lack of description for two important areas (character and introduction setting), along with the holes in the plot are huge problems that I believe if you just go back through and fix would make this a great story. But until then, I'm going to have to say Alolan-Vulpix does not pass. Along with this, I'm going to say the roll requirements has not been met either.

I do encourage you to fix this story and let me know when you're done so I can re-evaluate. You're almost there, so don't pressure yourself too much. Once you've done that and this story has passed, you'll be able to claim your prize then as well for Write-A-Roll.

 

Well first off, apologies for this taking so long.

We already discussed mostly everything in PM, so I won't really cover much here. You went over and changed one of the big issues I had with the character having no description, and the two main sentences that gave me issues have already been talked about privately and the reasoning on why is fair. Since everything else was pretty much fine, Alolan Vulpix now passes. You may also claim your prize for WaR.

 

Claiming Exeggcute.