My first oneshot: Toxogod

My first one-shot. Comments please!

It was dark, cold and wet. But I didn't care. It's not like I could get out of it. I had nothing but the clothes on my back and the knife in my hand.

As you could probably tell, I was a street punk. I was sixteen and homeless, with no one to help me. Maybe I should introduce myself.

My name is Tyro; I can't really remember my last name. I'm a pretty hot looking guy if I do say so myself. I'm about 1.6 metres tall with brownish hair that doesn't grow, that hangs over my green eyes. I'm skinny but got decent muscles. I've got an earring of a Tyraniter fang which I stole in my right ear.

I turned sixteen last week but I had neither birthday party nor presents. Ever since I was fourteen, I had been living on the streets of Saffron City in the Kanto region. My parents never appreciated me, always favouring my younger sister, whose name I can't remember.

So when I was fourteen, I told them exactly how I felt, how unappreciated and unloved I felt. They called me a little basterd for being for being so selfish and kicked me out with the clothes on my back.

I had no home, no money so I lived on the streets. I found a local gang who introduced me to a life of crime. Don't get me wrong, I don't like it but I gotta do it to survive.

So that's my story right? So that leads back to where I am now, in an ally, crouching behind a dumpster, clutching my knife and waiting for someone to come along. I have gloves to protect my hands and a balaclava over my face

A man wearing a suit and holding an umbrella walks along the foot path. He can't see me unless he stands directly in front of it and looks in.

He's about a metre away now. I get ready to strike, like an Arbok strikes a Rattata. I am the Arbok, he's the Rattata.

He passes in front of me and that's when I strike. I leap out and punch him in the face. He starts falls back so I grab his arm and pull him into the alleyway. He starts to run away like a manic but, not looking where he was going, he knocks into the chain link fence at the very end of the ally way, and falls down. He grabs a cell phone and starts to dial.

"I don't think so." I snarl as I lifted my foot and kicked it away. It slides over near a bin, out of his reach.

The man tries to get up but I threaten him with the knife "Don't even think about it *****. Now gimme your wallet."

He refuses. He doesn't think a kid will stab him. Well, I'll show him.

"I said; give me your ****ing wallet!" I scream as a push the blade to his throat. Drops of blood begin to appear. He gasps and hands me an expensive looking wallet with lots of cash. A few credit cards are there as well. Useless to me. I snap them and throw them at him. He also has an expensive gold watch on.

"Gimme that to." I demanded and he hands me it.

He now just sits there. I should let him go but it's quite chilly.

"Hey, I'm cold, hand over your clothes."

"No." he speaks for the first time, in a high voice. He's probably gay I decide in my head

I lay into him, punching his face and neck while kicking his body. He falls to the side as bruises began to develop. I grab his coat and pull it off him. He submits the white shirt underneath as well but the pants stay on.

I press the knife into his shoulder blades, just enough so the skin breaks. I growl in his ear "Hand them over!"

He removes them so all he has on is his underwear and a singlet. He starts to get up and stagger away but there's one more thing I have to do.

I run up and grapple him around the neck, my knife sliding into his neck at the same time. He gasps and falls backwards, nearly on top of me but I quickly side step out of the way. As a final blow, I drive the knife into his back before removing it and wiping it clean.

Calmly, I walk away from the scene, pulling on the clothes I stole and putting my knife, his watch and wallet, and my balaclava in the pockets. I leap the fence and run through the alleys.

I reach an old abandoned building. I climb in through a hole in the wall and enter the building. It's my home I guess. It has no electricity, heating or water. I've got an old mattress for a bed with thin blankets and various stolen items littered around.

I fall on the mattress an fall asleep. I have a strange dream. Lots of colours and lights swirl around before a monster starts to rampage. Odd.

I wake up and that's when things start to go bad. A bald black man wearing a suit and sunnies stands before me. He says nothing but "Seize him."

Two people, who I assume are guys, grab me. One cups my mouth and forces my arms behind my back while the other injects a needle into my arm. They then release me and I fall to the ground and everything goes black.



Great, it's cold again. But more like freezing cold like I've been swimming in winter.

I'm floating in a green coloured liquid in a steel tank with part of the front side being made of glass. It's so long I can't see the ends.

I try to swim away but I have no strength and I'm shackled to the bottom. My arms are shackled to the roof above the tanks through holes in the top. My limbs feel heavy, my head light and my skin looks purple.

A rather formal looking man approaches the glass prison where I am. He studies me before turning and issuing an order to unseeable people behind him.

The water clears slightly and I see more of my prison. The room the tank is in is a lab of some sort which is underground by the look of the earth walls and floor.

A scientist approaches the formal looking man and talks to him. The first man nods at the scientist who heads to what seems to be a steel table but with buttons, dials, levers and screens all over it. A control panel of some kind; this doesn't look good.

The man presses a button, and then pulled a lever. My legs were released of the shackles and the top of the tank was opened. I was pulled out by the shackles on my arms and I hung like a rag doll. I was fine until I hit the air; it was like I was drowning in oxygen. I was like a fish, unable to breathe in air.

A mechanical arm with a two pronged claw on the end descends from the low ceiling. Wires and tuber are poking out of it. It makes a whirring noise before plunging into my chest near my heart!

I give an animal- like roar as the tubes show a purple sludge being pumped into me. I squirm and throw myself around that the arm starts to break. Strength fills me like I drunk Red Bull. I grit my teeth and roar "NO!"

The arm breaks off at the hinge followed by the shackles. I plunge into the tank and hit the bottom with a heavy TWACK. For a strange reason, now I hear voices.

"Idiot!" yells the formal looking guy "Jackson, secure the tank, secure the tank."

"Yes Lexon, yes sir!" Jackson yells back as he hits a red button.

That's MR Lexon!" snapped Lexon.

The tank top begins to go down but I am too quick. I swim towards the top and leap out before the top closes. I crouch down as I land just as a thought comes to my mind. Where the hell is this power coming from?

The humans back away like I'm a vicious Pokémon, ready to strike. Wait, what? Why do I call them humans, I'm human aren't I? What the hell is wrong with me?

Lexon stepped forward, his arms raised out, "Ah it's successful! We have achieved our goal of making a truly controllable Pokémon. A perfect weapon for us! We now have control over the beast that'll help us control the world.

I feel a flush of anger ripple through me. Beast? Control? Weapon? This flush of anger is soon replaced by an emotion I knew little about. Hatred. It fills me like a balloon is swelling inside me. I try to resist it, fighting it but then, a voice in my mind speaks to me. It hisses like an Arbok was talking to me.

"Crush them Tyro!" it snarls "They want you to be a tool for them? Do you take that? No, kill them and show them the mistake they made!"

I gave a snarl and lunge forward and my body begins to change. My skin bubbled like wax as it turned a disgusting purple colour. My arms and hands bulged into something a monster would have. Finger with claws as long as knives grew out and my arm was as thick as a cannon.


Then my body grew, my head touched the ceiling before smashing it. I grew skin that was a thick as armour with spines lining my back. My head grew longer and a crystal erupted out of my fore head. I resembled a great purple dinosaur cross monster- And I loved it.

I roared as I grew again. I hit the roof of the 10 story building and leap out, bursting the walls. I would have been a good 20 stories high; I looked like a Nidoking, except taller, heavier, musclier and more vicious.

I roared and stomped around, knocking over the buildings. Tool they called me, thought they could control me they did, well control me now!

The surviving Lexon crawls out of the rubble. I jerk my face to his level to see his shock.

Oh yes, revenge is bitter-sweet.

I'm just going to review in the stream-of-consciousness method first and maybe then the summary, if I have any more notes to say. SOC reviewing is basically writing down all of my thoughts about the story with no editing. There will be a srs bzns review after that.

• Um, all hair grows. It's in the nature of hair. Maybe his just grows slowly?
• Yeowch. Parental abandonment for feeling unloved? Something tells me Tyro's parents were a little too friendly with the bottle or something. By the way, were you trying to bypass the filter (is there a filter for that word? I never use it...) by saying 'basterd' or was it a genuine typo?
• There's no period after 'over my face'.
• That 'I'm the Arbok, he's the Ratatta' thing was really not necessary...
• Lots of tense changing in the fight scene. Pick one and stick with it.
• There should be a comma after 'i don't think so', not a period, since if he's talking and there's an action after it it's not a full two sentences.
• Calling the dude a curse word should be seperated by a comma, 'cause it's referencing the guy and isn't absolutely necessary for the sentence to make sense.
• Is 'I said' a sentence on its own? Why is there a semicolon there...?
• Gay, judging from the guy's voice? He must be quite an immature fourteen-year-old piece of city scum to think something like that. Also, there's no period.
• Still no use of comma before 'but'.
• What should have been a twenty-minute-or-so trip was reduced to half a sentence? Show, don't tell.
• DRAMA !!!
• Of course you can't see the ends, Tyro - you're floating in something slightly larger than your body, and so your vision wouldn't reach down or up that far.
• An exclamation point? Oh dear.
• I think maybe Tyro meant 'thwack'?
• No period, a comma where an ellipsis should be, and strong emotion shown with a period. Lovely.
• No period after Mr., even though it's an abbreviation for something.
• Goodness, the transformation process wasn't very long at all. Let's take a wild guess and assume he's called 'Toxogod'...
• A street urchin now knowing much about hatred, when he hates his place in a gang? Ummm... right.
• No period after 'it snarls'.
• Snarl is used again. Vary your word choices, pal.

Overall, I know you were trying to create a very vengeful mood here, but it just didn't work out. You jumped right from the exposition to the climax (with something that could maybe be called 'rising action' but seemed like an excuse to highlight how terrible Tyro is), and so we never got a chance to know the character, come to like the character, or relate with the character. The tyrannical rampage through the lab wasn't particularly emotional either; in a scene like that, we're supposed to feel his fury as he enjoys and conveys to us every glorious second of it, everything he squashes being described in violent detail. Overall, what was probably meant to make the reader think "Man, this guy is really bad!" just made me say, "Um, alright, that's really too bad. See ya. Bye." I didn't feel for Tyro at all. I think maybe you could try focusing more on the meat of the story - one-shots are difficult because you need to get the characters to have distinct personalities and let the readers form opinions in a chapter's worth of space. Like I said before, focus on what happens between the beginning and the end to give some more characterization to your MCs (brushing up on punctuation mark usage wouldn't hurt either).

Bottom line: I get the feeling you rushed this story (timing, description, grammar, almost everything). Give us more time to understand the character before a twisted, nightmarish, and RANDOM experement is performed on him, and think about it more.