See? I told you there'd be more updates soon! See the previous post for disclaimers on why these poor old bits may or may not ever be finished, etc..
(359) This Is A Disaster
Small and simple one here; not much to see out of context, but it's still kind of nice. If I do continue this (I am still marginally interested in this one) then this snippet may not appear in the final product—it's from the very beginning and I'm probably going to change the story's starting point. We'll see.
I haven't yet named the main character, hence the placeholder.
[Absol] woke up, stretched, flexed his heavy black claws and decided that, no, he really didn't feel like hunting today. Oh, sure, he was hungry, and he needed to eat something, but chasing after zigzagoon and spoink and the like was just so much work—work that was rendered entirely unnecessary when the townsfolk would practically throw him a side of tauros meat.
Mmm, yes… tauros did sound nice, he thought as he scratched absently at the tip of his scythe. It had been itching ever since he'd settled down to sleep the night before, and it was beginning to annoy him. Which was, of course, all the more reason not to go out hunting today. How on earth was he supposed to concentrate on being stealthy while trying to resist the urge to break cover and scrape the offending appendage against the roughest tree in the vicinity? It was just too risky a distraction to contend with. No, he really was better off heading into town.
(482) The Cave in the Middle of the Lake
This one, on the other hand, will probably never be finished. What little story I had was sort of cute, sort of sad, but there isn't enough and I can't think of anything to do with it that I'm particularly satisfied with. There's not much to see here, either; I'm just sort of proud of the way I started it, I suppose.
Something was happening in the cave at the center of Lake Valor, which was surprising enough on its own considering that there wasn't supposed to be a cave there in the first place. Edouard had been to the lake on more than one occasion, and each time everything had been the same: the palisade of evergreen trees surrounding it, the grass rustling with bibarel and staravia, the calm water reflecting the blue of the sky. But Edouard and his gyarados had surfed across that water dozens of times and there had never been a cave in the middle of it all.
There it was all the same, though, a small island not even 100 yards square with a rocky hill sitting smack on top of it and the mouth of a cave gaping southward across Lake Valor. The overall effect was something like the skull of a giant cyclops almost entirely submerged beneath the lake, its lone eye socket and the top of its cranium the only parts of it that were visible. And, as far as Edouard was concerned, it might as well have been a cyclops. Cyclopes were just something you didn't see every day; neither were caves magically appearing out of nowhere in the middle of a lake.
Gyarados, by contrast, was unimpressed when he was released from his poké ball and turned around to see a strange island cave where none had been before. That, or he was simply very good at masking his surprise. He was also very good at masking how much it intrigued him—if it intrigued him at all, honestly—for when Edouard asked "Where did that come from?" he responded with a non-committal grunt.
(493) Mystery Gift
Oh, man. This one. Back when the project was still called "493" I had wanted the arceus story to be some mysterious, fantastical epic involving the creation of the universe and all that. This was less because I'm interested in the legendary "cosmogony" (although I am pretty interested in that) and more because I was going to call it "Beginning" and that sounded nice along with the title of the bulbasaur story (#1), "End", even though the two stories themselves were entirely unrelated. Then Black and White happened and arceus wasn't at the end of the pokédex anymore, and I felt less guilty about my plans to change from the grandiose cosmogony story to this piece of... something I came up with when soft-resetting for an event arceus on Pearl. I haven't gotten into the really fun part yet, and I'm not sure I ever will (nor can I guarantee that I won't still choose to go with a cosmogony-related thing for 649 in the end), but you can have the beginning, anyway. Maybe that's just enough to figure out where I was ultimately going with this. ;)
The man smiled from his spot by the cashier's counter and waved Melanie over with a slender, white-gloved hand. Melanie frowned; she had no idea who he was or what he wanted with her. She didn't recognize his face, and she was certain that she'd remember a uniform like that if she'd seen it before. It was just so green.
Green, green, green everywhere from head to toe, a veritable sea of bright, leafy green from the crisp slacks to the snug jacket to the short hat hugging the top of his head. The satchel slung over his shoulder was green, the pens poking out of his breast pocket were green. Even his shoes, sleek and shining in the pokémart's fluorescent lights, were a deep, rich emerald. Only a bit of gold trim, golden epaulets and hat brim and the white gloves he kept waving at her broke the monotony.
"Ex... excuse me?" Melanie asked, risking a few steps in the man's direction. She gave the rest of the store and the customers in it a cursory glance. The shoppers were all busy with their potential purchases, pulling potions and ethers and lengths of escape rope down from the crowded shelves. No one seemed to be paying the green man any attention. "Can I... help you with something, sir?"
"Good day," the man said, giving her a warm smile. His voice was soft but quite clear, every syllable enunciated with careful precision. "You must be Melanie."
Melanie bit her lip. How did he know her name? "Er... well..." She wasn't sure whether she should confirm or deny it; he was a complete stranger, after all.
"Ah, yes, Melanie," he continued, not waiting for a response. "I've received a gift for you."
A gift? Melanie didn't know anything about any gifts. All she'd wanted to do was buy some ultra balls. She'd heard that wild chansey had been spotted up on Route 210, and so she'd dropped into the Solaceon Town pokémart to grab a few extra ultra balls before heading right back out again. "I'm sorry, sir, but... I'm afraid you're mistaken. I'm not expecting any gifts. I just wanted to buy some stuff and—"
But the man smiled and shook his head. He reached into his green bag and retrieved a green notebook, which he opened and flipped through one page at a time. After a few seconds he stopped, scrutinized the contents of the current pages with eyes narrowed in concentration, and then turned the book around so that Melanie could read it for herself. "Oh, there's no mistake, miss," he said jovially, tapping a line of green ink somewhere in the middle of the page. "See? Right there." The text he indicated with his thin white finger read, in clean, cursive script, Melanie Fisher, Arceus, Solaceon Town.
The man seemed to think that the notebook cleared everything up, but it still made absolutely no sense to Melanie. "I'm... I'm... sorry, but... sir, I don't understand. What is an... and how did you know that I'd be—"
He cut her off again. "I've received a gift for you," he repeated, bobbing his head and upper body in a hint of a bow. His hand went into the satchel again, this time coming up with a small, metallic sphere. Melanie was surprised to see that it was a uniform shade of vivid scarlet instead of his normal ubiquitous green. He held the red ball out to her. "Here you go!"
Melanie didn't take it, instead eying it as though she thought it might bite her or explode. "Look, sir... I don't know what that is or why you're giving it to me."
"It's a gift!" said the man.
"A gift from whom?"
The green man reached out and took Melanie's hand. She flinched and tried to pull away, but he pressed the ball into her palm and closed her fingers over it with his own before she could wrench her hand free. She tried to push it back to him, but he didn't take it or give her an answer; he simply continued to smile as he closed his satchel and straightened up.
Next week on "Ficbits": Psychotic mightyena! Adorable hellmouths! The postal service! As before, feel free to ask for more info on these, and I'll tell you what I can without spoiling those that I still want to write.