Aphelli

Random idea: is it possible that, actually, the only reason why Wispy Tower was burnt was that Vitus (under an alias) was inside and working on some shady stuff? After all, it'd be child's play for Crescent or Indriad to strike down Nora without burning an entire tower (where she actually wasn't^^). Also, can we really say that Crescent helped the player? Apart atop Mount Valor (and that was showing off since we know we didn't need her actually), she never helps us, rather helping herself, blasting Team Xen wherever she finds them, and making sure we see her in a good light. A far better help would have been to, well, hint at what was going on and give us the reasons why we shouldn't get involved (and why the Xens had involved us anyway). It actually seems like she's more trying to prevent us from learning anything than anything else. But of course, that could be reverse psychology.

(Nervous chuckle) It wasn't intended. When you try to do what you think is the right thing, you can't consider how it's going to affect everyone tangential to the case. Otherwise you wouldn't do anything. So yes, Cain didn't consider Gabriel's situation. It's not praiseworthy, but I think it's more than understandable, given that Gabriel is not being ECT'ed on a daily basis (now there's an idea...). Or perhaps he didn't think that it would create a political crisis which Ame would (at least partly) blame on Gabriel. Yes, Gabriel is paying for some of Cain's actions. Yes, it's unfair, but very few can say that they alone paid for their own mistakes. That's why Part 2 ("Taking Responsibility") is about, after all. When I thought of that arc, I reasoned as follows: if there aren't immediate political consequences to the breakout, then there's no reason to not involve the League higher-ups in the rescue (hence short-circuiting the plot and missing out on [redacted]). But it's certainly not Cain's style to think of politics before doing the right thing. Something which I didn't elaborate on (and don't know whether I will at some point in the story, because I don't think there'll be an occasion before very long) is that Ame isn't actually that angry at Gabriel (what she told Amaria was mostly a good, long rant at how hard that thing blew up in the city government). She just knows that he's too tempting a scapegoat to associate with in times of political crisis.

I can’t remember any game event that suggested that GDC could do that. What are you thinking of?

The Odd One Out is officially over one year old now. I was stunned when I saw the total word and page counts. How, when did that happen? Anyway, I hope you'll keep reading and enjoying it. Also, there is this one-shot I've written. Take a look if you haven't read it! (or tell me if it's unintelligible) Chapter 37: Plausible Plans Character ratings:

I feel we haven't had enough things being blasted halfway across the map at unreasonable speeds in the plot. Could we have that railgun, please?

We know that red-haired <derogatory term> is pretty OP in Rejuv, but I'm pretty sure devolving Pokemon through time-travel is a new trick. Is Anthony playing Rejuv in Extra-Hard mode? (that's a joke) (Slightly more seriously, if she did this once, what's stopping her from doing it again at not-so-convenient times?) Again, it's a nice chapter. I'm curious to see how you will relate the upcoming events. I never expected to read this from anyone. Thank you.

Hi! I have a lot of stuff to do (it's incredible how much time doing serious math takes and how much time I'm somehow managing to not do it), but I wanted to write out an idea I had had a few days ago. It might eventually serve as a prologue for a hypothetical story, but don't expect anything about that before a while though. The title is weird, but don't worry. I think it's still understandable. My usual "spoiler policy" applies: you may be spoiled stuff, but if you can identify the work it's taken from, then you probably already knew it. Enjoy! Code Review Imagine a room. As much as one can tell from present-day standards, it’s an impersonal meeting room. The decoration is so sober as to be insignificant. People in this room don’t look at their surroundings – they look at the people they're speaking with. Its main, almost only, feature is a large rectangular table made up of a light, artificial material – think of it as plastic. And currently, twelve people are sitting around it and doing a code review. Well, more like twelve, minus one, plus another. Of course, they’re not actually doing what we would call today a code review. And the table isn’t plastic. Who knows what they actually are doing? Who knows what unearthly procedures they are really enacting? Who knows how they communicate? What language they speak? How they view the world, one another and themselves? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Neither you, nor me, can truly understand, in full detail, what went on this fateful day. So this tale can be but an approximation, fit to our own frames of mind. We will thus pretend that these beings are people, that they are speaking, that their language isn’t so alien to us as to be untranslatable, that they’re coding for a living (in some manner of speaking) and that they’re currently doing a code review for a Project. The Project being the important part there. It was a breath-takingly ambitious endeavor, which had gone on for decades at least. Our modern minds, especially thinking of technology, struggle with the idea that critical components can be as old as thirty or forty years old. But apparently, these people didn’t care. No advance in technology could help the Project as much as stability in the tools and methods they used. It was because a vague scope of the Project’s scale and complexity could be loosely envisioned by imagining a group of a few hundred people trying to make our entire current software and firmware structure, without blueprints, and, using as building blocks mechanical steam-powered parts (as in, say, a 19th-century Babbage Analytical Engine) rather than electronics. It wasn’t that their technology was primitive. It was just that the ambition had been consistently described as “insane”. It was a secret known only to the people working on the Project, and the person who had initiated it and kept the money going, why the Project was so important. Some of them hadn’t believed at first, but it was too compelling to disbelieve for long. To be short, one prophet had seen the future, and they had feared it so much that they had spent enormous effort trying to prevent it. They were aware of the concept of paradox, of self-fulfilling prophecies, but they had decided that they didn’t care. Hence the Project. They had used their knowledge to get a lot of money, and attract the best workers they could find, towards a single goal: realize the Project, and make it work. They knew they probably wouldn’t be alive to see it to completion, but it didn’t matter. The Project was crucially important – time wasn’t. Most of the workers this prophet had found were organized people with extensive technical skills, and decent communication skills. The rest was those, far fewer, tasked with managing the organization, using bureaucracy to fight the inevitably (although low enough) emerging entropy. Their work was simplified, as their group didn’t have any customers to reach, nor sales to make. It answered only to the prophet. The recruitment had gone on after the initial wave, but more slowly, more quietly, as the stability of the organization and the quality of its production were valued more than its speed. They didn’t have all the time in the world, but most of it; however, they had to get it right the first time. Let’s come back to our table. One of the people there was older by at least twenty years than the others, we could call her Matilda. She had been working on the Project almost since its start, after only a couple of years. Once upon a time, she had been a brilliant young woman, extremely learned, with deep and blinkingly fast understanding, driven and methodical, the one person at her workplace you could have relied on to always go above and beyond what most employees could manage to do, or want to. Then she had fallen in love, and involved herself less. But tragedy had struck – even in so remote a situation, such clichés could still hold – and the love of her life, and their baby child, had died in a freak accident. Six months later, searching for a way to stop thinking about her lost dreams and wasted life plans, she joined the Project. Everyone else on the table was accomplished and highly skilled, but Matilda was listened to as an oracle, not simply as a team lead. She understood their code nearly as well as they did, and its relevance inside the Project far better than them. She could still regularly suggest, with little to no apparent time of thought, major improvements to her coworkers’ code. The review was ending. Apart from one team member who had called in sick (let’s name her Agatha), and another person (that we could call, say, Magnus), everyone had explained what they had done, how they had done it, commented on their peers’ code and noted Matilda’s own suggestions. Everyone was growing restless, eager to finally leave for what we’ll call their week-end, even if they perhaps had no such concept. But when Matilda called for silence to let Magnus, the newest member of their team – had it been two years already? – show his work, all the others obeyed her. But Magnus was clearly flunking it. Unlike his usual assured, knowledgeable, well-documented self, he sounded distant, not always consistent, almost rambling, certainly unfocused and perhaps preoccupied. It did not take long for his peers to lose interest in spite of all their professionalism, with only Matilda listening to him as intently as ever, still trying to understand his convoluted explanations for phenomena, which, she thought, she could have summarized in five sentences for anyone there. “Magnus,” she finally cut him off. Everyone fell silent at once, recognizing an unusual event. “Is something the matter?” Magnus looked around the table. Everyone was staring at him, and the combined weight of their expectant gazes was unsettling him. His train of thoughts had been especially unclear and certainly very preoccupied today, and he knew the reason well. It was just that he couldn’t spit it out in front of everyone, not the newest member of the team. And unless he revealed his terrifying thought, he couldn’t be sufficiently at peace with himself to finish explaining his code. “Yes,” he sighed. “I’ve got an issue. Can I have a word with you now?” Matilda glanced at the rest of the team. They were ready to leave. She sighed back. “Okay, everyone, next time we’ll start with Magnus’s code. Have a nice week-end.” she sent them away. “Come into my office,” she added for Magnus. Again, what Matilda’s office looked like wasn’t something you’d easily picture, given that neither you nor me have the proper frames of reference to understand what we would be seeing – or we even see it? We can at least say that it was impersonal in the extreme, completely functional-minded and very tidy. “So,” Matilda asked Magnus, sitting and motioning him to sit, “what’s it about?” “Well,” Magnus answered, “it’s about Agatha’s code from last time.” “Yes, what of it?” She was annoyed now, if he had noticed something without raising it in code review, what was the point of it all? Hadn’t he been a member of the team for two years? “Something, I don’t know what, something struck me as odd when she showed it last time. I didn’t have time to investigate right after…” “I know, it’s a pretty tricky piece of code she’s been working on.” Matilda approved. “Even I don’t understand it too well.” “So I rushed my tasks to make some…” “How many times,” Matilda sighed, “do we have to tell you that rushing is a waste of time? So is overtime. Time isn’t important and you know it.” “I know,” Magnus answered, looking down. “But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right, so in the time I created I took a look at Agatha’s code.” “And?” Matilda pressed him further, interested. At least that youth was interested in the work of his elders, she thought. She had been working with Agatha for over fifteen years and she had always been highly skilled, although both knew that she couldn’t hold a candle to Matilda. It had better be a good reason why he couldn’t carry out the code review as usual. “It’s very good code, very clear despite its complexity, …” he started. “Get to the point.” “I’m probably just not understanding it well enough, but …” “The. Point.” “Look at this place,” he answered after a deep breath, as if having to deliver very painful news. “This piece, just here,” he showed her, “I don’t understand what it’s doing. It looks like, apart from simply calling the core functions, the code’s doing, some, er, strange stuff.” “Hm.” Matilda made a noncommittal noise as her eyes read the passage Magnus was speaking about. “Yes, there’s a mistake there. That’s why code reviews exist.” “But code reviews where we all missed it? Even you?” “I’m not omniscient, you know. Remember how last time Agatha spoke last? We’re all tired, and there’ll be a thorough test session shortly. Why did that disturb you so much?” “I don’t know…” Magnus admitted. “But it was in a crucial part, and, I mean, it’s Agatha… I didn’t believe it was just a mistake.” “You’re young.” Matilda observed. “You’re composing fantasy stories within your mind. You let yourself get carried over instead of focusing on your task. Yes, there’s a mistake and we’ll have to be extra careful and I’ll slip Agatha a word. Next time you spot a mistake, just do it in review and don’t look so distraught. You look like you expected someone to sabotage the Project.” “It’s not a joke!” Magnus protested. “Here you are,” Matilda pointed out. “You’re just living in a fantasy. If people wanted to mess with the Project, they certainly wouldn’t manage to do it through Agatha when so many other people,” she glanced at him, her eyes earnest, “would be much easier targets. Is that all?” “Yes.” Magnus answered, somewhat sheepishly. “At least I’m relieved the mistake will be corrected. And next time I promise I won’t rush my own duties, ask for explanations in code review, and not short-circuit the usual process.” “Then you may go. You look like your imagination overheated your brain. You need some rest.” Matilda observed. She watched him leave. Then she looked at Agatha’s code again. She hadn’t expected anyone else to look at this part of the code, much less spot the mistake that had been obvious to her. She felt she had to do something about Magnus to make sure he learnt his lesson. Yes, she thought, I’ll slip in his code a few supplementary bugs. It had taken decades to admit it to herself, but she wasn’t really working for the Project. It was all fake, she knew, and all a delusion of her own old imagination. The Project – the Universe, in fact – she couldn’t care less about. She worked there because she liked it and was good at it, and because it was unbearable to her that her own work, or the code she supervised, could be less than top-notch, according to her own standards, perhaps some of the most demanding in the world. She glanced at the code again for a few minutes, thoughtful. She noticed there was an unlikely, quite far-fetched, edge case that wasn’t handled properly. Her memory supplied her with all sorts of interesting behaviors the code might exhibit given this unexpected input. Behind layers and layers of little mind-gears and emotional walls of impassibility, built over decades of grief and professionalism and perhaps a little touch of aesthetics, a mind-reading observer might have spotted the tiniest hint of a smile. Let’s see you deal with that, Interceptor, she thought.

Given your view count and who liked your post (I realized only a few weeks ago that you got to see that after a while), you have more than one reader. But a significant fraction of readers won't systematically (or at all) post comments about it (compare the number of comments and the number of views for most fiction, at least on this website). That was a fine chapter (just, if I may, try to proof-read your future chapters -- there are a few mistakes, not too bad but still). I wonder why they all call Anthony overconfident? It wasn't like he had any other choice with Iris but to go for Shadow Sneak, given that the Haxorus was faster anyway... Then again, we didn't see the rest of the battle. (also, please, Anthony, don't leave your Pokemon to Prof. Juniper, you are so going to need them... why do I even bother. There's a plot in motion, isn't there? )

Whoa. You got dark much faster than I expected. Granted, it's a Desolation story, and you made it clear right at the beginning (when you mentioned Brendan) that there was a huge potential for darkness, but, again, I didn't think you'd start tapping into it so soon. Poor Felicia... will she ever truly recover from her first encounter with evil for evil's sake (or at the very least, cruelty for cruelty's sake)? I can't help but wonder if the same kind of thing happened to the other Rangers at some point... And I wonder how some of them (or even Felicia, had it been after her adventures in Ayrith) might have reacted. I find it interesting that you made the Joltik (now Galvantula... wait, so it's Spider-Man with Batman/Wolwerine's origin story?) able to understand some morality at (almost) birth... I have no idea how relevant that remark can actually be to the plot though. PS: I've been trying to find the original "Awesome Adventure" and I can't find it. Did you delete it or am I just searching it wrong?

@TheHellHamster: Thanks a lot for your comment, it really pleased me. I think I probably wrote it somewhere, but I was worried about these two Shade chapters -- I couldn't bring myself to write them as just another Gym battle. So I tried to do something different, thinking it'd be hit or miss. If you had the time and inclination to think about what, in this chapter, made you like it this much, I'd be very interested to hear it.

For a while I thought Felicia would go for the Styler kind of Rangers, and I wondered how you would make that fit in. But she captures her own Pokemon, so it’s fine. I think Kevin needs to explain me how Alolan Rattata fit Felicia. That’s an interesting choice from you. I had hoped that Felicia wouldn’t be hopelessly reckless (that she might have kept the best part of her mother’s sense), but given her eagerness to raise to the Elite rank... I think it’s not going to happen.

I don’t remember Desolation well – Is Kevin an OC or a canon character? Anyway, nice chapter. I was a bit shocked that Felicia might see “the nasty plot” at the Daycare but actually, the inverse statement would have been more surprising. And I can’t blame her for leaving after seeing a Wailord and a Skitty. But I’m glad she found her calling.

I just can't let that one pass, sorry in advance for the source. Same here. The feelings I had with Reborn were... complicated, when I first watched a playthrough. I mean, it was so... so obviously not right! So much was wrong, so many characters were screwed up beyond belief. So I googled the name and found the forums and wanted to rant I felt it all was. But I read a bit instead, I eventually calmed down, and... well, I certainly didn't think I'd end up doing a fanfiction of it at the time. I'll let Caz's Desolation answer for me: 'Poor, poor Trainer.' (at least I think that's how the quote goes). (BTW, this is exactly one of the reasons why Gabriel thought Heather better in the orphanage, for a while at least -- on her own, there was no way she could be safe). I wonder too. That's inexplicable! They're children, they were stuck in an orphanage, they have nothing to do with all of this! Doesn't "Pirate Guy" have nefarious schemes of grander scale to attend to?

I really shold wait for a better time to do this, because there's a lot I have to do, but I'm also seriously mismanaging my time and my sleep schedule so I don't think I'm good for anything until next morning. So, let's do something overdue. Chapter 36: Worse Worries Character ratings: Death count:

I'm speaking about the very first sentences of the game (which are also pretty much the first sentences of your prologue):

So the caring parents can turn dictatorial, but they can be reasoned with. And the Nurse Joys are a dynasty.. I guess one has to take the good with the bad. Desolation question: Do you know when this start-of-game conversation is occurring in the Desolation timeline? Have we even reached that point? Because it sounds a little like (early e5 spoiler) yet some of it doesn't really fit (especially the part about consequences).

Nice. I appreciate that Felicia’s parents show actual concern as to a Pokemon adventure – this is like first-class care for the Pokemon world – but it’s funny how Felicia “doesn’t get it” (although, she’s 10, it’s normal). And yet the Desolation plot wants her to become a heroine... I’m looking forward to reading what’s going to happen!

I'd never have thought that Candy would try and deliver Lin the Queen's message. That's more than reckless! Shouldn't she, like, know better? Then again, of course she's a Pokemon Champion so recklessness is literally part of the job. Why does Vanilla believe the training isn't going to be pleasant? You sort of asked for it by not waiting for E19, but I feel that's the better choice. It would lessen the fun to read (or, I guess, write) if we knew you already had the answer, instead of us knowing you have to try and accomodate an incomplete canon and tell events you don't fully understand.

Honestly, I didn't want the Doctor to not care at all after the children. After all, he's canonically been in the Orphanage for quite a while, so I thought it was unlikely for him not to care at all. But that's not the only reason why he acts -- like many people, he has stated motivations, motivations he knows but won't claim out loud, and motivations he's barely (if at all) aware of. So I wouldn't dare assign him an alignment -- a 'lawful' guy does not call up Meteor muscle to do something for him, when he has the law on his side. But as the head of the Orphanage (and attached to law and procedure), you can't exactly call him 'neutral' or 'chaotic' on that score. The same kind of considerations work for 'good' and 'evil'. I'm not too sure if there's going to be significant revelations when the Belrose sisters meet again their demon, or if it's just going to be a battle to the death and Saphira is just going to fry him. I suppose I'll be glad either way. Just a side note (and an invitation to speculate, maybe?): the Doctor still has some screen time here, though, and there are still surprises to come... And yes, we know who's the next Meteor on screen. Regarding who gets abducted: the reasons may get spoiler-y, and I don't want to spell it out before it's on screen, perhaps you can grasp what I'm hinting at.

@Evi Crystal: Yes... it's a lot of the point of this entire section. And the nastier bits are still to come, obviously. Also, the thread has now over 5000 views and 35 chapters. I wasn't confident I'd keep going on when I started (slightly less than a year ago), but well, here it is. Thank you to all of you who read! So... new chapter. If you've followed the status posts (or discord maybe? I don't remember), you've read that the Shade chapters were a bit of a headache during summer break, and that I had to, er, rework them quite a bit. It might be somewhat weirder than you expected it to be. Also, I'm really unsure about how the dialog is handled, so don't hesitate to comment on that. And I'll stop delaying now, enjoy! Chapter 35: Nigh Nightmares Character rates:

I googled it and I found it was a (slightly modded) Dr. Seuss quote. I have no idea whether it's really a random post emanating from too long a Discord chat or there's a puzzle to unravel here...