{SWC} Invasive Species

Spoiler

Target: Shroomish (Medium), Morelull (Medium).
Ideal Range: 10-20k characters, 10-20k characters.
Final Character Count: 21,308.
Author's Note: Definitely going more for the Shroomish than the Morelull here. Critique on the story structure (beginning/middle/climax/end etc) would be the most appreciated spot, as I struggled with making this story exciting and I’m not sure I ever actually got there. For what it’s worth, I hope you like it!

It has been one day since he arrived here.

At least, Shroomish thinks that it has been one day. He is not entirely sure, since timekeeping is still slightly foreign to him. Days are the easiest human measurements of time to remember, though - one rise of the sun through one fall of the moon. Even before his first human, he’d payed attention to those. How else would he know when it was time to slip out under the cover of night while the Taillow were asleep and feast upon ripe leaves? It never occurred to him to number them, though; there was no purpose to it, since he could sense the turning of the seasons long before these seasons actually arrived, and what did he need to plan for, besides finding a safe place to nest before the cold grip of winter arrived?

He will probably never understand humans, he reflects, leaning down to take in a mouthful of leaves. These leaves aren’t very good - there’s still far too much green on them, with just a little bit of ripe brown at the edges. There’s not as many leaves here, either. There’s simply too much water and stone for the thick, dense, and most importantly leafy trees that he’s used to to flourish. However, he also has seen no other Shroomish here, so he has no one to compete with for his diet. At least that is one small blessing.

Carbon dioxide and mold huff out with his sigh. All of this is strange to him. He can see the sky above easily; it’s unusual for him, and very disconcerting. The clouds and the stars and the sun - especially the hot, deadly laser that is the sun - should be difficult, barely glimpsed, hidden high above the leafy canopy of thick, old trees. He isn’t used to feeling strong emotions, but he knows that he is sad, and a little bit afraid. There is another feeling, something within and beside and accentuating that sadness, that he doesn’t know how to name, but he know that he misses the place he was born.

The sun is starting to rise, which means that it is time for him to sleep. He takes one last bite from the half-ripe leaves from his nest and settles down. The coming night - or “tomorrow”, as a human would call it - he will have to do some extra work. Hunting for more food than he needs for a meal will be troublesome, but if he becomes injured or tired, he will need to have nutrients within reach. Surviving in this place will be more difficult than anything he has known before, he decides. This is not the first difficulty he has faced; the Pokemon of his birthplace are always hungry, always spoiling for a fight, always on their guard, and he’s had to fight them off before. Then there are the humans he’s had, first the one who caught him and made him fight against all sorts of Pokemon he didn’t even know existed, then the second one, who his previous human gave him to, and who trained him only for a few days before calling him weak and leaving him in this strange new place. But he has no knowledge of this place or its Pokemon, and if he must fight here, he will have no humans to fall back on for food and shelter afterward.

However, all of these problems are for tomorrow; he can already feel the sun’s rays starting to warm the earth. At some point, one of the strange trees here had fallen down, one end on the ground and one end still half-raised by its still-standing stump. The place where it meets the ground makes for a very acceptable nest - cool and shaded, with soft soil to hunker down into - and he lays down, closing his eyes.

He does not see the white figure that wanders too close, spots him, and lights up with surprise before bouncing away, the bulbs atop its head flashing frantically, pink-and-blue.

---

“Let me get this again, from the top.”

The youth sitting opposite her groans, an expression of exasperation written on his face. “Come on, lady -”

“Doctor Keahe, if you please.”

“Doctor.” He says the word like it’s equivalent to having his teeth pulled. “We’ve been over this -”

“We’ve been over it once -”

“- and all I did was release one piddly, low-level Pokemon! It’s not that big a deal!”

She sighs, her irritation transparent. “We have release protocols in place for a reason.” she says, clasping her reddish-tan hands together and placing them on the cheap plastic table between her and Roderick Olsen. “Right now, it sounds to me like you’ve committed a punishable act of negligence by releasing a Pokemon off the record because you didn’t want to pay the fines.” The complete lack of worry in Olsen’s eyes irritates her almost as much as the Trainer’s initial offense. “Because that’s the impression I’m getting, Mister Olsen, you might want to consider explaining the situation to me again.”

Olsen finally, finally, takes his dirt-caked shoes off the table - it’s a cheap table, but he should act civilized; Dr. Keahe has standards - and clasps his own hands in a mimicry of Dr. Keahe’s own posture. “Look, Doctor,” he says, voice wheedling, “all I did was release a little mushroom. And I let it go because it’s weak and pathetic and I got tricked on a bum trade. Tapus’ sakes, I’m the real victim here! I gave up a Jangmo-o because the idiot I traded with said that fungus was rare and powerful! And it turned out that I could barely train it because even when it listened to me instead of sitting around looking stupid, all it could do was smack its head into things and shoot spore clouds that missed half the time. There’s no way a Pokemon like that Shroomish is gonna cause your precious little hill any trouble.”

“This sort of behavior damages ecosystems and demonstrates a tremendous dearth of responsibility,” Dr. Keahe says matter-of-factly. “The Shroomish is either going to die of starvation and poison anything that eats from it and can’t handle its unfamiliar toxins, or breed with local Pokemon in its egg group and potentially cause a population boom of a foreign species.” She stands, her folding chair scraping across the floor. “League officials will be meeting with you shortly. Maybe you’ll listen to them about League protocols a bit better than you’ve listened to me. In the meantime, I need to clean up the mess you’ve made.”

She stands up and walks out of the impromptu interrogation room and back into the main lobby of the Paniola Conservation Center. Or at least, the place that Dr. Keahe is trying to turn into a conservation center. Right now, it is really just a rented building in the middle of Paniola Town with cheap furnishings, minimal staff, and far too much work to get done. A halfway decent conservation center would have had dedicated Trainers and-or Rangers at the ready to deal with a situation like this. Instead, Doctor Paloma Keahe has to deal with this situation herself.

She doesn’t bother paging a Charizard; it takes Ride Pokemon hours to service Paniola Town, and she doesn’t have that kind of time. Instead, she pulls out a Pokeball and lets out her Toucannon.

In a flash of light, Dr. Keahe’s favorite Pokemon is right there. The great bird churrs happily and rubs its bright red-and-orange beak under Dr. Keahe’s chin, its blue eyes bright with excitement at the sight of its Trainer. She can’t help but smile despite herself as she pets the white feathers on her Pokemon’s downy chest. “We need to go to Brooklet Hill. Can you do that, girl?” she asks, and Toucannon turns around, lowering herself down so that Dr. Keahe can climb onto her back. Dr. Keahe mounts up, then braces herself as Toucannon lunges into the air and opens her sable wings in flight. Dr. Keahe holds on tight and watches Akala Island go by, hoping that she can find this Shroomish before it does any real damage.

---

Cool air wakens him, beckoning him into consciousness. He opens his eyes and for a moment, his mind is still back in the place where he was born, and he is confused. Then he remembers the human that caught him and took him out of his first home, then gave him to the second human, who left him in this new, watery place. He feels that same strange sadness as before, but he pushes it aside. Night has come, and night is the time to gather food so he can survive.

He rises, shaking soil off of his gills and feet. The earth in this place has a sort of crunchy, shifting texture that gets much worse when he gets near to the many waters here. He doesn’t like walking in the strange, pale grit, but fortunately, he doesn’t have to; nothing grows by the water that he can eat.

He does, however, need to go walking in order to find his food. Slowly and steadily, he trundles out from under his nest and up a gentle slope, seeking a path through this new environment. Every few steps, he stops and inhales, hoping to get the smell of ripe leaves, but the vegetation close to him is immature and will put an ache in his stomach if he eats too much of it.

Fortunately, it doesn’t take him long to pick up a more tempting aroma. This far up and in, he can hear the faraway rumble of falling water, though he doesn’t see its source. It’s irrelevant, especially when compared to the smell of ripened fronds.

But he doesn’t make it there. Lights flash in front of his face, a bright pink and blue luminescence that pulses with a soft, slow rhythm. The pattern is most unusual, captivating even. It reminds Shroomish of the glow of Dustox antennae when the moths use their strange mind attacks. This is no Dustox, though. For one thing, the Dustox make lights that are purple and purple only; for another, the Dustox appear in the air and travel alone, whereas these lights have started in front of Shroomish and have spread out, flashing all around until Shroomish is completely surrounded by this strange pattern of blinking.

He is unconcerned by this. Below these lights, he sees Pokemon, and they are quite small - willowy white creatures with pink and blue caps suspended above their orb-shaped bodies and beady black eyes. Pokemon smaller than himself do not threaten him in any way. However, he is confused, and they are in his way, so he questions them. “What are you?” he asks.

For a moment, he thinks that he is not going to get an answer as the Pokemon all turn to look at each other - though, annoyingly, they do not get out of his way and let him pass by to find the meal he’s sniffed out. The lights change their pattern, blinking more rapidly, and the Pokemon are no longer flashing in unison. Eventually, this comes to a halt, and the strange Pokemon turn back toward Shroomish. “You are a stranger,” says the one directly in front of him, its voice matter-of-fact and unemotional. “We are Morelull. You are not Morelull. You should not be here.”

He shuffles his feet, trying to figure out how to respond. He does not know Morelull; he has never seen Pokemon like these. They are smaller than anything he knows, and much too bright, so bright that the soft glow of their caps is starting to sting his eyes. “A human brought me here and went away without me,” he says. He takes a step forward, but the Morelull in front of him does not budge. “I am looking for food. Please stand aside.”

“What do you eat?” The main Morelull’s flat tone hasn’t changed since it’s started speaking, but Shroomish swears that the strange Pokemon looks tense.

“Ripe plants - the ones browned and dampened by age.” He takes another step forward, and he is almost on top of the Morelull. He wonders if he can step on it, but the idea of hurting it makes him uncomfortable. After all, the other Pokemon has not attacked him, and an unprovoked attack would be extremely rude.

There is another burst of lights from the Morelull circle, but this time it is a much shorter affair. When the Morelull speaks again, for the first time, it sounds emotional. There is anger apparent in its voice. “You are a stranger,” it repeats adamantly, “and you are here to eat our food. This is unacceptable.”

Anger is something that Shroomish knows very well. He has heard it many times, in the voice of the humans who tried to train him and called him weak, and in the voices of Poochyena and Wurmple and Slakoth when they fought each other, so that they could kill the others and go on living. There is a warning in anger, and he knows to heed it. He takes a step forward, hoping to step over the Morelull and run away, but it flashes brighter than ever and there is a curious sound, an almost gentle shuffling and rattling noise. He feels a weakness rolling through his body and he staggers back, his one foot suddenly not enough to sustain him.

Shroomish has not felt much fear in his life, but he feels it now as he rises up onto both feet. He does not know what these Morelull can do, but he knows that their caps are lighting up again, and as he watches them shoot out brightly colored spores towards him he knows that he is in very real danger.

---

Dr. Keahe is not happy.

This whole thing is an honest-to-Tapus mess. She had gotten a call that morning from Captain Lana - the girl is a bit of a ditz, but her skill and her trial draws plenty of people to Akala Island, preventing Paniola from becoming entirely obsolete, so Dr. Keahe provides her leeway - who claimed that she had seen a strange Pokemon on Brooklet Hill. A bit of poking around and a whole lot of dumb luck had allowed Dr. Keahe to find Olsen, the idiot Trainer who’d just let his Shroomish go because it was a ‘bum trade’ and he didn’t feel like he should have to pay release and rehabilitation fines because the ‘rare and powerful Hoenn Pokemon’ he’d trade for didn’t live up to his expectations. The poor thing. Technically, Dr. Keahe probably should wait up for certified conservation officials before meddling like this, but she hasn’t gotten a doctorate in Pokemon biology to so that she can sit back and watch idiotic Trainers ruin Akala’s ecosystem while the higher-ups took their sweet time dealing with the problem.

Unfortunately, it had taken til about noon for Captain Lana to get word to Dr. Keahe, and it had taken much longer to track down Olsen and find out what sort of Pokemon had been released. She’s lucky that she’s gotten as much done as she has in less than twenty-four hours, but…

Beneath Dr. Keahe, Toucannon lets out a worried croak, and Dr. Keahe pats her head to calm the Flying-type as best she can. What both the doctor and her Pokemon are worried about is the fact that night is falling.

Brooklet Hill is normally quite a safe place for Trainers, even amateurs, but any Pokemon-populated place has its risks. Stepping off the beaten path at night is a good way to anger the local population of Morelull - and while the little fungi are usually fairly peaceful, they’re active at night, and they get very irritable when they’re disturbed. Dr. Keahe knows that her Toucannon can handle the pests, for the most part, but swarms of them have been known to overwhelm Trainers with their sleep-inducing spores, and they’re not above supplementing their diet of leaf mold with nutrients from Pokemon or even human bodies. She’ll have to be careful, she supposes. Hopefully she can just find the Shroomish quickly and -

Several urgent, rapid-fire croaks fire out from Toucannon’s throat as pink-and-blue lights, bright as daylight, flare up from the woods surrounding Brooklet Hill. Dr. Keahe can’t stifle a scream of surprise as she sees it and feels Toucannon stopping her forward momentum, then start wheeling in worried circles. Such a flash isn’t too out of the ordinary, here, but the lights just keep going, flaring up out of the trees like some sort of demented disco display.

There is a questioning, almost hopeful, chirrup from Toucannon, as if the bird is trying to get permission to turn back. However, Dr. Keahe can’t do that. Even if this isn’t where the Shroomish has been left, something is clearly going on down there.

“Come on, girl,” she says, steering Toucannon down a bit, “let’s go see what we can see.”

---

Shroomish is half-blind now; the spores that afflict him have hindered his movements the way his Stun Spore attack does, but they also exhaust him, making him so tired that it is hard to keep standing. The Morelull are still shooting off spores, their caps flipped upward so that veritable streams of glowing spores drift out of their gills. He knows that he cannot just stand here and endure all of this; he has to do something to protect himself.

His own cap lets out a noise like an explosion as he shoots spores of his own through the clearing. Bright golden powder flies everywhere, and sure enough, some of the Morelull are affected by the Stun Spore. Before Shroomish’s eyes, they seem to wilt, their legs unable to support them as they bow with their caps low to the ground. Heartened by this small victory, he tries a new tactic - his cap opens up again, but this time, he tilts his body forward and points himself at one of the other Morelull. A pellet of green light shoots out of the top of his head and smacks into the Morelull. In seconds, the pellet becomes a seed, and the seed takes root. The Morelull all but collapses; the seed is not only half the other Pokemon’s size, it’s sapping away at its very life energy. The Absorb attack isn’t giving much back, but it’s enough to keep Shroomish on his feet, and he needs any boost that he can get.

But it’s still a desperate fight, one that he doesn’t think he can win. “We don’t have to fight,” he says to the Morelull that are still standing on their trios of spindly legs, but there’s no answer except for more aggressive flashing and a scattering of fresh spores. Gathering what strength he has left, Shroomish lowers himself even further for a Headbutt attack, then throws his body forward as hard as he can, hoping to break free of the Morelull’s circle -

Whumph, whumph, thud, CRASH. He plows two of the Morelull aside, only to smack into something that he didn’t even know was there. He feels himself running headfirst into a heavy, feathery body, and the last thing he sees before he loses consciousness altogether is a brightly-colored beak hovering over him.

---

“KIRRR!” screams Toucannon as she touches down, Dr. Keahe still on her back. Toucannon rocks slightly as something - sure enough, it’s the Shroomish, Dr. Keahe realizes with some relief - crashes into it. However, this is not the most pressing concern at the moment; there’s a veritable fairy circle of Morelull in front of Toucannon and Dr. Keahe. Easily a dozen of the things have gathered. What’s more, the air is cloudy with spores; pink, white, blue, and gold flecks of mold are falling down and drifting about like snow.

“Toucannon, flap your wings as hard as you can!” Dr. Keahe instructs before the Morelull have time to flash their communications at each other. Toucannon obeys readily, black-and-white wings shooting out and flapping at maximum speed. While it’s no Gust attack, Toucannon’s wings are strong enough to carry both herself and an adult human, and Toucannon blows the spores away like they’re nothing but harmless dust.

This display of strength, as well as the presence of a powerful Flying-type, seems to quell the Morelull’s will to fight. They exchange a few rapid-fire blinks, then all hop away as one. If they weren’t so dangerous in large groups, the way they jump around on their twiggy legs might be comical, but right now Dr. Keahe is just glad to see them leaving.

Dr. Keahe dismounts Toucannon and lets out a sigh of relief. “Thank the Tapus,” she mutters; that could have gone exceedingly badly had Toucannon not been quicker on the draw. She then looks down at Toucannon’s claws and sees the Shroomish collapsed on top of them. It’s so still that for a moment she’s concerned that it’s dead, but when she slips on a glove and gives it a gentle nudge with one hand, it twitches in response.

Toucannon lets out a questioning croak and slips her head under Dr. Keahe’s arm to get a look at the Shroomish. It really is a strange Pokemon, at least from Dr. Keahe’s perspective. Its body is so squat that it’s hard to imagine how it runs. Furthermore, its main defense mechanism being the hole at the top of its head, which she can only imagine is extremely difficult to aim.

Then again, Shroomish flourish in Hoenn, and many of them live long enough and grow strong enough to evolve into the powerful Breloom, so clearly their adaptations do them some good. Dr. Keahe might be able to study them more in the days ahead; while she’ll do her best to work with the Shroomish to figure out whether it would want to stay with her or be returned to its natural habitat, she hopes that it will consent to stay with her for at least a little while so that she can collect some data firsthand.

However, all of these are matters for tomorrow. For now, she needs to take care of this little one. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a Pokeball, then clicks the button on the front and unleashes a red beam of light on the Shroomish. The Pokeball barely wiggles in her hand before it lets out a loud ping to let her know that the catch has been successful.

Dr. Keahe smiles, and she can’t help but let out a tired laugh which Toucannon accompanies with a few amused croaks. “Well, the Paniola conservation efforts have saved this little guy, at least,” she says, waving the Pokeball a couple of times before stashing it back in her bag. “Come on, miss,” she says, slinging the bag over her shoulder again and climbing back onto Toucannon, “let’s get back to the lab and get this ‘bum trade’ bandaged up, yeah?”

 

Claiming

 

@VeloJello Really sorry but I have to unclaim. Trying to find an appartment is consuming my soul irl so I wouldn't have time to give you the level of feedback you deserve. Good luck!

 

It's all good, thanks for letting me know! :3

 

HEY IT'S ME SORRY FOR NOT SEEING THIS EARLIER GOTCHU FAM

 

PLOT/CHARACTER STUFF

This story is quieter and doesn’t rely on explosions or tense action to propel its inner drama, and I was incredibly okay with this. This reads like a cute entry in a larger slice-of-life series, and I think this worked out so well because you were able to introduce your characters quite vividly in the short amount of space that you had.
quote]At least, Shroomish thinks that it has been one day. He is not entirely sure, since timekeeping is still slightly foreign to him. Days are the easiest human measurements of time to remember, though - one rise of the sun through one fall of the moon. Even before his first human, he’d payed attention to those. How else would he know when it was time to slip out under the cover of night while the Taillow were asleep and feast upon ripe leaves?[/quote]

These are some of the earliest paragraphs we have for our two main characters, and they do a lot for introducing them into the story. For quieter works like this, your characters basically are the plot, so the fact that you give them so much attention so early is really, really critical to how well the story panned out later. And you do a great job of setting them up efficiently: we learn that Shroomish is observant (“days are the easiest human measurements of time to remember”), has had several home swaps before (“his first human”), and is prepared to venture out into dangerous territory (“while the Taillow were asleep”). These elements of his character later become critical to his interaction to the story. Similarly, we learn early on that Dr. Keahe is a hands-on worker (“reddish-tan hands”), ready to defend Pokémon, and also highly observant (“the complete lack of worry”).

And this was all fantastic and really subtle, and I know I’ve been saying it a lot, but I feel like this was hands-down one of the strongest slice-of-life intros I’ve seen in a while, so I figured I could say it a few more times.

Your story was definitely just long enough to cover the stuff you needed, but as you venture into longer works with a similar, slice-of-lifey theme, I would suggest metering your character interactions a little more carefully. You set up Shroomish and Dr. Keahe fantastically as separate entities, but their interactions are limited to less-developed characters (the Morelull and Roderick, respectively), which gives them less time to shine properly. To me, it felt like the meeting of Shroomish and Dr. Keahe was where you could effectively use both of the characters you’d built up over the course of the story, but it doesn’t really pan out since the story ends Shroomish still unconscious.

And I think that was okay for a story this short, honestly! We’ll talk more about structure/stuff in a sec, but I think this was all pretty clean and well-paced for the length you were going for. For a longer installment, never having your two most-interesting characters interact at all would look a little stranger, but I think the stuff you had here was really strong.

WORLDBUILDING STUFF

I love that you chose to focus on a bunch of topics that most people would choose to shy away from because they’re topically less exciting. And, honestly, a lot of worldbuilding work doesn’t get shown in the story: no one cares if the coffeeshop in Hogsmeade has a really killer vanilla latte if Harry Potter never goes there, but maybe it’s still a detail that got written down somewhere. The secret to making good worldbuilding obvious is having the setting interact with the characters in a meaningful way. So paragraphs like this:

might not mean a lot in some cases, but you do a great deal of interspersing details about the setting with explanations for why they’re important at this time. The impromptu interrogation room in which she talks to Roderick is important because Paniola Conversation Center is a little shambly, which is important because that means Dr. Keahe has to go look for the Shroomish herself, which is important because that in turn drives the plot.

And subtle details like this are really, really hard to pull off because people don’t often think about why certain locations are the way they are. But having these details makes your work feel that much more lush, so fantastic work here!

STRUCTURE STUFF

You requested this in your author’s notes, so I wanted to address it separately from the plot/characters thing. A good story doesn’t have to have shit hitting the fan every single minute to be exciting (but, arguably, a love of shit hitting the fan is something that tends to appeal to a larger population).

I would argue that your structure gives away the ending of the story a little: Dr. Keahe is introduced a competent individual going on a quest to look for a Shroomish; Shroomish is introduced as an exploratory individual foraying into uncharted territory. You even give a hint about how encounters with native Pokémon would go fairly early on:

And while this isn’t quite how the scenario plays out chronologically—Shroomish would’ve probably been eaten before starving to death lol—the dire hints of Shroomish being in peril are laid pretty early.

And, as mentioned earlier, your character motivations are set up pretty early as well, and we know exactly where the main characters are headed. Furthermore, because we know more than either character does, we know that Shroomish is going to get screwed, but help is on the way. So it’s not really a surprise when the midpoint/climax of your story is Shroomish getting jumped by Morelull, and it’s not really a shock when Dr. Keahe manages to get there in the nick of time.

AND THAT’S OKAY. HONESTLY. Not every story needs to keep readers on the edge of their seats or in awe of the flashy fights or crying at the cancer drama. And each of these types of stories can accomplish what it’s trying to make you feel in different ways, so it’s hard to give blanket advice here, but I think that your characters and worldbuilding were more than enough to keep the story lively for the amount of time you were writing for.

OVERALL STUFF

Trying 2 keep this grade a little lean since you’ve been waiting a while, but I wanted to throw in somewhere that you have a good knack for description + I love the way that you used the flashy lights to make the Morelull really creepy.

Morelull and Shroomish captured, if I haven’t made it apparent that I was really impressed by the level of nuance in this story yet! This is all great stuff, and I dunno if you’re new to writing or if I just missed you when you were writing before, but I’d love to see more from you in the future!