[Pokémon] just a kid;; ricky's story

[luckgandor]

summary;; an abused teenager runs away from his family to start his pokemon journey. he ends up in the mysterious region known as mysste, leagues away from his birthplace in kanto, with no recollection of how he got there. and so, he and his Shinx Themba must travel to find out how he got there and who took him there, leading him straight into the heart of the region's most heated battles.

PROLOGUE
The boy makes his escape in the dead of night. There is no other time to make this risky move. If he wants to get out of the house without his parents noticing, he has to do it fast. He starts packing his bag when the air begins to cool outside, the sun's merciless rays finally putting themselves to rest behind the canopy of trees. He doesn't even need to go outside to know that it is time. Something inside of him just... knows. He feels his heart jump to his throat when his parents walk by his room a few times, voices raised in some petty argument, but he doesn't bother to listen to their words. After tonight, he won't need to listen to them ever again. Won't need to hear how much they hate him, how much they regret bringing him into this world.

The boy shoves more clothes into his bag, practically punching them in. He can feel his anger rising, as much as he tries to hold it back. What's the use in holding it in now? He won't be around for much longer. Once he's shoved several pairs of clothing inside of it, the boy zips up the backpack, looking around his room for anything else of value he wants to bring with him on his journey. He nabs his wallet with a few dollars still inside of it and shoves it in his pocket. It won't last for long, but it should be able to last long enough until he can get into town and start winning some battles. Then he'll have all of the money he needs.

After his bag has been packed, now he has to play the waiting game. The sound of his parents' footsteps echoing through the house has to stop before he can even think about leaving. He sits on his bed, ears pricked and listening, bag in his lap. He hopes this won't be one of those nights where his parents decide to stay up into the early hours of the night arguing. Thankfully, tonight doesn't seem to be one of those nights; they go to bed relatively early, and leave the boy to his own devices. He slings his bag over his shoulder, then slowly opens the creaky door to his room. There's still one more thing he has to grab.

He sneaks out of the room and down the stairs, careful to skip the creaky third step to avoid any chance of him getting caught. When he reaches the bottom of the stairs on feet quiet as a cat's, he quickly walks into the kitchen, covering almost two steps at the rate of one. His full bag thumps against his back, but he ignores it as he closes in on his destination: a singular cabinet underneath the microwave. He opens it up to find what he's looking for: a cache of empty Pokeballs. Unzipping his bag, he shoves as many of them as he can into his bag, counting a total of twenty. That's probably way more than he needs, but that doesn't matter right now. What matters now is getting out of here.

The boy gives one last look to the place that's been his prison for the past fifteen years. He doesn't think he'll miss it. No, he knows he won't miss it. With a final fleeting glance, he shoulders his bag and opens the front door, carefully shutting it behind him and then taking off down the street.

Ricky Bradley is finally free.

 

[luckgandor]

CHAPTER ONE


Ricky manages to run for five miles. That's an incredible feat for him, especially considering how out of shape he is. It's also five miles into the thick of the woods, which is even more impressive, in a way. When he can run no more, he collapses where he stands, falling to his knees and then to his stomach on the ground covered by pine needles. It's something like a bed, he figures. Cushion-y enough. He curls up into a loose ball, muscles twitching as his body has come to an abrupt stop. It's painful, but he doesn't regret it. He'd run for a thousand miles if it meant getting away from them.

Despite his exhaustion, Ricky doesn't sleep for very long. He wakes up the next morning before the sun does, the sky above him only just starting to turn grey. It would be best to get moving now, Ricky thinks. The sooner he can get a move on, the better. He stands up, ignoring the ache in his muscles as he does. Every atom in his body is screaming at him to lie back down, but he doesn't. He has to keep on going. He has to make it to the lab and get his Pokemon.

From where he stands, he can just see the roof of it over the treetops, and he gives a sigh of relief. He knew the lab wasn't far from his home, but he didn't know just how close they were. He's glad that he doesn't have to travel much farther; as determined as he is to get away, he doesn't know how much his body will be able to take. Traveling another five miles doesn't sound very appealing to him at the moment.

Ricky continues to trudge through the forest against his better judgement. He doesn't want to risk taking one of the trails and possibly encountering his parents; while he's sure they don't really care about him to begin with, there's no telling if they're looking for him. After all, abusers don't tend to be very happy when the object of their abuse manages to get away. Ricky grips the straps on his backpack hard, so hard that his knuckles turn white. He doesn't want to think of what will happen if his parents get their hands on him again.

But there's no time to think about that now. The lab is getting closer and closer, and Ricky is forced to swallow back his nervousness as he reaches the front steps. There are already a few people milling about, mostly young children. He guesses that most of them are probably around ten years old; the age he should have started his own journey. If only his parents hadn't held him back, he would have had five years of experience by now. At fifteen, he's definitely older than most people starting out on their journey. But, that isn't exactly his fault.

Ricky was born into an incredibly religious family. They kept him absolutely sheltered from the outside world for his whole life, only letting him go outside once he turned ten years old, but still not allowing him to go on his Pokemon journey. They said it would be too "unholy" to allow their child to run around willy-nilly about the countryside. And so, home he stayed, and was forced to watch as all of the other children of the town he lived in started off on their own journeys. He often asked why he could not go on his own journey, and was always answered with one word: "unholy." It was around this time Ricky began to question who he was, and his life.

Now isn't the time to be going down memory lane, however. He's got a starter to get, and as the line thins out, Ricky starts to step up the front steps, putting his palm out to push open the steel doors. When they refuse to yield under his palm, Ricky's eyes slowly roll down to see a "pull" sign on the door. Some of the people behind him have started to stare, and he turns his head in embarrassment. His fingers curl around the door handle, pulling it open and holding the door of a few of the people behind him. Politeness is something that has been instilled in him since he was a very young child, and he's not going to give it up now.

Shutting the door behind the final person to follow him through, Ricky pulls away and looks at the service desk in front of him. There are even more people inside of the lab than there are outside, and he starts gripping his backpack again. His knuckles are starting to turn white again as he approaches the service desk, pale-faced when the lab assistant looks up from her paperwork and sees him.

"Hello ma'am," she says absently, and Ricky visibly flinches.

"Sir," he corrects sharply, his jaw tightening. He knows it wasn't done out of malice, but he can't help but stiffen up. After so many years of being misgendered, it's just his body's natural response.

Thankfully, the lab assistant doesn't argue with him. She has a look of incredulity in her eye, but she doesn't say anything against it. Instead, she only mutters a quick "Alright", notes something down on a notepad, then looks back up at him. "Your name, please?"

"Richard Bradley." Technically, all new trainers are supposed to give their legal names, but Ricky signed up with his chosen name instead. Nobody would ever know. The lab assistant nods again, looks back down at her pad, and scratches a name off of the list.

"Alright, follow me." She gets up from behind the desk and comes around the side, motioning for Ricky to follow. He does, albeit a bit numbly, as she walks into a back room. This is it.

Ricky's breath catches in his throat as the lab assistant ushers him into the room, then closes the door behind him. Sitting in the room is a single table in the middle of the room, and sitting on that table are three Pokeballs. Each one is marked with a different sticker: one has a Shinx sticker, the middle one has the sticker of a Seel, and the last one is marked with a Fennekin sticker. Ricky's hands are trembling as he puts them over each of the Pokeballs, considering his options.

"What are their stories?"

Ricky's hands settle over the one with the Seel sticker. The lab assistant shrugs. "I'm not so sure about that one, but he's an old soul. We picked him up from a trainer who couldn't afford to keep him anymore."

His hands move to the ball to the right of it, the one with the Fennekin. "That one's a certified Service Pokemon. It was owned by a disabled trainer who bred and trained Fennekin specifically for other disabled trainers." Ricky pauses for a moment, his hands hovering over the Fennekin's ball. He is certainly disabled; an accident from his childhood left him with a permanently broken leg. Every once and a while, it would send a shooting pain through his leg and into his thigh, causing him some pretty extreme pain. He decided to save the idea of the Fennekin and come back to it later.

"And the last one." Ricky's hands go to the Shinx's ball, and the lab assistant's eyes narrow.

"That one's new. Apparently, his father was a bear hunter, his father's father was a bear hunter, and he's a bear hunter. However..." She pauses, looking slightly to the left. "His past trainer was killed by a strange Ursaring with a fiery red mane. In that attack, the Shinx was scarred on his face. Not long after that, his second trainer was also killed by the same Ursaring. He's determined to hunt it down and get revenge. I'm not sure if he'd be the best choice for a trainer like you."

Ricky tries not to flinch at the words. Obviously she had noticed his disability. "Any one of them would be a good choice... but I don't think I'll take the Seel." He pushes the ball slightly away from the other ones, marking it as the one he isn't choosing. Then, he grabs both the Fennekin ball and the Shinx ball in his hands, holding one of them in each hand. He seems to be literally weighing his options.

"I need a determined Pokemon who works for themselves," Ricky finally says. He sets the Fennekin's ball down, and holds the Shinx's ball in his hand. "I need a Pokemon who wants to journey just as badly as I do. This is the Pokemon I need."

And so the choice was made.

 

[Miz en Scène]

You know, a few years ago this section would've given some really choice comments or even a review to this fic within a few hours of it being posted. It's a really well-written gem with some unique qualities that I haven't seen much of (in this section at least) since getting back to writing/reviewing fanfiction, and I'm surprised that no one's said anything about it yet. If I have to hazard a guess it's probably because of your title and the way it's written give off a bit of a noobish quality to your story I guess? I guess it's the fact that it's the fact that you play around with punctuation, have everything in lower case, and have the words "<trainer's name>'s story" in there. These are all traits I've seen in new writers, and I kinda wanted to ignore your story because of it, but I'm glad I didn't. Don't judge a book by its cover I know, I'm sorry, but marketing is half the game, eh?

Anyway, before we start the review proper, here's a note on your summary:

summary;;[FONT=&quot] an abused teenager runs away from his family to start his pokemon journey. he ends up in the mysterious region known as [/FONT]mysste[FONT=&quot], leagues away from his birthplace in kanto, with no recollection of how he got there. and so, he and his Shinx Themba must travel to find out how he got there and who took him there, leading him straight into the heart of the region's most heated battles.[/FONT]

Summaries are overrated. Summaries are meant to be eyecatching, so if yours isn't going to be I say don't bother. Your work stands fine on its own, but I've seen so many variations on your summary for other fics that it just seems tiresome to read at this point.

But I digress. Review time:

You know what I like most about your fic? The fact that it's written in third person present tense. Not many writers use present tense, and it's actually quite difficult to pull off properly, with other writers I've seen faltering from the very beginning. I've heard Hunger Games uses it, but I've never read it, so I can't comment. For your fic though, I think it works very well in that from the very get go the reader is introduced to this almost stream-of-consciousness (but not quite) narration from Ricky that helps basically shove us into his shoes almost immediately after entering the fic. That does wonders for the reader actually empathising with your character, and it also gives it this really physical feel to it, like we're in the moment and we're going through this thing right now together with Ricky with all the anxiety and suspense that comes along with it.

Having said that, I actually do worry if this style of narration might come back to bite you. Like I said, present tense is incredibly hard to pull off, and it usually fits narration that moves fast. But the problem with things being fast is that you lose track of details on the way if you move too fast, so much so that you might actually start reading like more of a summary rather than a story. You shouldn't think that you need to be fast if you use present tense. Don't be afraid to linger and explore the sights and sounds. Revel in the atmosphere. We're here with you and you need to tell us more about the world we're in.

For instance, the reason I really enjoyed your first chapter is because of how fast-paced it felt. Introductions don't need to be drawn out. They should get to the point and hook you in from the first line. Your first chapter certainly delivers and it ends on a beautiful crescendo ("Ricky Bradley is finally free.") that leads nicely into the next chapter. But from there on, I feel like you start to fall into this trap of feeling like you need to continue the pace of the first chapter. Slow down! It's alright. You can take your time with the second chapter because we're already hooked. The problem with chapter two is that it's more of chapter one's pace, which is not great. Ricky's got his first taste of freedom, he's got emotional scars that he needs to deal with, and he's got a momentous decision (choosing a starter) that he needs to get through right? You could stand to write a lot more about all of that because they're really interesting topics, but you seem to blast through them like they're unimportant. Don't let your writing go to waste. Don't be afraid to linger. Don't go too slow and start to meander, definitely, but don't think you need to go full throttle all the time. Tell us a bit more about how he feels about these things. The reader can stand to know more about how Ricky feels now that his motivations are bared out like that. The most obvious sign that you're going too fast is that your last line in chapter two ("And so the choice was made.") mirrors the last line of chapter one ("Ricky Bradley is finally free.") in terms of the type of tone you're trying to affect. It feels like you're trying too hard to end on a crescendo like chapter one when you really don't need to. Like I said, slow down.

Anyway, enough about pacing (holy crap I wrote three paragraphs on that O_o). Another thing I think you've got great potential for in your fic is the conflicts you've set up for your character. An abusive childhood due to religion with emotional scars and also the whole gender identity angle. I think there's a whole lot of bitterness you could write about with regards to those two issues that Ricky's gone through. You don't often get the gender angle around these parts, so that's really refreshing, and the religious abuse thing is also something with great potential to be interesting for your character. Don't get me wrong though, I am a follower of one of the major world religions, but at the same time I can empathise with the whole judgemental/abusive thing that people who are different go through, and I can totally relate to that feeling, though not necessarily from the same angle.

But yeah, back to it being interesting. It has a whole lot of potential, but only if you write about it the right way. For instance, the gender/religion issues could do with a lot more development down the line and more foreshadowing back in chapter one. Right now it feels like you've shoehorned it in for the sake of conflict, which is not the best, but I think you could definitely add in a throwaway line at the beginning which sort of tells us about his problems without telling us directly about them. Basically "show don't tell". Like maybe he's got dresses in his cupboard but he prefers pants. Or maybe there's a religious icon in his house that he's not fond off. Stuff like that. That sort of thing does wonders for characterization and plot development without spending too much time on it. Showing and not telling is one of your most potent weapons as a writer. Use it well.

Anyway, ugh, I've written more than 1000 words on this review, so I'm going to stop here before it gets too long. I hope you read it and don't take it too harshly. The only reason I've written this much is because I feel like you've got a lot of potential as a writer and I'd hate to see it go to waste. Feel free to ask me about anything you might be unsure of or do tell me if you disagree!