[Pokémon] Pokemon Salvation: The rise of the Darkness (PG-13)

[dajman1996]

Notes: You know, I've always wondered what would've happen if I made Pokemon into foot soldiers, commanding tanks, jets, and the like. I mean, picturing Blastoise, brandishing two machine-pistols is pretty bad-ass, right? Anyways, read the story, hope you enjoy it, if you do, feel free to review it, but if you hate it, then what the hell are you doing on this page.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything that relates to Pokemon, or Nintendo for that matter.
Sorry, onto the story…
Mt. Blaze was covered in a thick, damp and misty fog. There was absolutely no visibility at all, and from Lieutenant Col. Tyranitar's point of view, it was one hell of a reckless mission. Flying a C-130 Hercules Plane with absolutely no visuals, and only radar to guide the bird. Tyranitar hated radar, thought it was unreliable, and nothing, nothing could compare to the quick eyes of a real, trained pilot Pokemon.
Which it was, because flying the plane right now, was Technical Sergeant Dragonite, one of the most elite pilots to ever don a flying helmet. The plane homed in closer, approaching the luminous mountain slowly, cautiously. The bridge fell eerily silent, and Tyranitar stared intently at his pilot, who was carefully manoeuvring the plane inch by inch, trying to avoid any obstacles that got in his way.
Tyranitar's radio headset emitted a shrill screech; someone wanted to contact him. He turned it on.
"What's the problem?" he grumbled, his voice gruff and battle-hardened.
"Yeah, sir, it's about the mission," came a nasal, high-pitched reply.
Tyranitar shook his head in disbelief. In all his years of warfare, he had never met, or served with a soldier as nervous, or a jumpy as Ampharos. The Electric Pokemon had signed up to the corps at a very young age, rising slowly through the ranks, and evolving along the way. It was only when he was promoted to Staff Sergeant that he evolved into his final form, but his personality and traits stayed the same.
"Ampharos, we've talked about this before," Tyranitar growled, agitated, "We go in, we raze the camp to the ground, and then we get the hell out, got it?"
"Well sir, I'm fine with the first, and the last steps, but I'm not so sure about the 'razing the camp' bit. Are we gonna blow it up, or storm it?"
"Whichever comes first," replied Tyranitar. "Now cut the link and leave me in peace. You should really find a therapist."
"Hey, that's not funny! Do you know what kind of therapists we have on this junker? It's called a Jynx, sir, a JYNX!"
Tyranitar snuffed a laugh, "Yeah, well from what I've heard, she's not so bad. Tyranitar out."
He closed the link himself, promptly switching his headset off. As soon as he did this, Lieutenant Blastoise, a veteran who had served a great deal of years with Tyranitar looked up from his monitor.
"Hey sir," he asked, "What was that all about?"
"Ah, it's nothing. Just ****ing Ampharos getting a little jumpy, that's all."
From his position, Tyranitar saw Blastoise smirk. "Ah, good ol' Amphy," he chuckled, "I've always enjoyed his pessimism. Did ya tell him to go see Jynx about it?"
"As always," mumbled Tyranitar.
Their conversation was interrupted by a sharp, continuous beeping noise which came from Blastoise's dashboard. The Shellfish reacted instantly, putting his headphones on, and flicking a couple of switches before announcing, "Hey, I gotta a call from Drago, says he wants a heads-up. Everyone listen in closely."
Tyranitar snapped up, suddenly alert. "Put it on the big screen," he said.
Blastoise complied.
The face of Technical Sergeant Dragonite, or 'Draco' as his friends called him, appeared on the enormous screen in the bridge. He immediately started talking.
"Sir," he said, "We're approaching the drop zone quickly. I still got zero visuals, but so far, so good. I got no impacts or damage taken on our jet, and judging by my radar, no enemy missiles have launched."
"Excellent job, Sergeant," retorted Tyranitar, "ETA?"
"Judging by our current speed sir, 15 minutes."
"15 minutes?" questioned the Colonel, "You sure 'bout that?"
"Sableye swears it, sir, and you know how accurate he is."
Tyranitar nodded in approval. Corporal Sableye was 'Draco's' co-pilot, and had incredible calculation skills, and could estimate the range of any weapon, just by glancing at it. Shifty, dark, but altogether a real good guy, Sableye had earned the respect of just more than Dragonite.
"Alright Draco," said Tyranitar, "Keep flying the bird nice 'n slow, when you reach within dropping range, give us the A-OK signal."
"You the boss, boss-man," replied Dragonite, his face keen, "Draco, over and out."
The face on the screen disappeared in a flash of black, and Blastoise looked up at Tyranitar, his face eager to help.
"What now, sir?" he asked.
"Blastoise, rally the troops, get them in single file," answered Tyranitar, whilst beginning to walk out of the bridge. "I'll be with you in a sec."
"Gotcha."
As the Lieutenant exited the room, Blastoise got to his feet, turned on the PA and began to issue orders.
"Alright everyone, I want soldiers in battle formation, now! All men capable of flight, report to the launch bay at once! Turrets and Medical Support team on standby! This is an announcement to all Pokemon on this plane; if you can hear this, you're in the zone."
Before going out to the docking bay himself, Blastoise yelled once more, into the microphone.
"Every female and male on this ship, whether you're a Scyther or a Chansey, Prepare yourselves, 'cause were about to enter hell."

 

[dajman1996]

I manged to squeez this in.

Chapter 1: Training is over....

The next 3 days went by really fast, soon with Squadron B and A in the briefing room. "Ok this is going to be the battle that restores the whole of the Pokemon world, Charmeleon's team would team up with Blastaoise's team and their pilots would be Sandslash, Dragonite and Sableeye, their communications and techie would be Porogon." Tyranatair annouced.

Raichu kept complaining to everyone about having Sandslash since it the big brother of the Sandshrew that Raichu picked on during Charmeleons first day. At the armoury they loaded crates of supplies such as food and camper kits. Weapons were loaded next on the plane they were flying in, Draonite annouced "Say hello to the the Dragon's Wing MK II. One of the fastest planes in the whole world and it's all ours with 5 star service for anything imaginable." Croconaw's jaw opened wide as he heard and gazed upon the ship. When they boarded the ship a last minuet message from Tyranatair was sent "Good luck gentlemen and may Arceus be with you." Sableeye started the controls with Sandslash, Dragonite took his position as Captain of the ship and annouced, "Please fasten your seatbelts, the flight to the drop zone would be approximently 20 hours and a few landing would be needed to re-fuel, meanwhile enjoy yourselves on the Dragons Wing MK II.

Raichu was on the last level on New Super Mario bro's on wii, while Charmeleon and Croconaw rested, Blastoise was reading the paper and his 4 elite Wartotles were either playing video games or watching T.V. In the cockpit Porogon was freqently scanning the area to check for enemies. Dragon saw a few Sandstorms start but avoived them quickly. "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" everyone was alert and got to their feet and rushed over to the voice. It only turned out to be Raichu dying in the last level. Croconaw gave him a punch on the arm saying "Next time you do that we're not comming."

"Ready....LAUNCH!!!!" annouced the commander, the dark Swellos and Pidgeottos launched into the sky carrying voltorbs, their mission was to stop the Dragons Wing MK II from reaching the Drop off zone. They were led by 3 Dark Fearows and soared through the clouds finding the ship.

Porogon saw a one red bleep first then scanned again to see dozens! "Captain Dark Flyers are attacking range 500 meters away from us." Dragonite speaked over the P.A "Passengers we hope you enjoyed your stay at the Dragons Wing MK II, we've just been notified by Porogon that a small army of Dark flying Pokemon are in pursit of us and we are going to battle mode please man your positions." Charmeleon lept up and ran over to the Back left machine gun turret while Croconaw and Raichi manned the Mortar.

"Attack!" ordered one of the Fearows, Voltorbs were dropped onto the ship and exploded taking off the first layer of the roof, "Wartotles use protect around the ship!" ordered Blastoise as he was on the homming turret. A field appeared around the plane protecting it from any harm, but soon the attackers started to come through the the field. "Die you dark basterds!" screamed Raichu as a mortar he just fired hit a group of Swellos, Charmeleon took down most of the ones about to charge to the plane. Suddenly a hole broke through the plane, "Damn the Fearow got in by Drillpeck!" Croconaw said as he saw it heading for the Cockpit!

Dragonite saw the Fearow and smiled, "Ok everyone going up!" The plane suddenly went verticle heading up to the sky, "Sandslash release the voltorbs!" The Fearow lost balance and slipped through the hole it came through and fell down to it's soldiers warning them not to go up. the Voltorbs fell down onto the pursiters and an massive explosion erupted when both came into contact.

"WHOOO HOOOOO!!!!" yelped Raichu as he saw their enemies blow up, "Drop off zone is now in sight prepare to drop off," Sandslash annouced, the view outside was a large base of Dark Pokemon. The Soliders except the ones on the cockpit jumped out with the parachutes landing directly 450 metres away from the guarded entrances by Machine gun armed Dark Marchocks.

"Ok the plans this we take out the guards and use stealth tactics until we find a way to level this place and then we go all out on them and get out before the place levels, Croconaw and Charmeleon do you have the charges?" Blastoise said, Both Pokemon prouduced 10 charges each. "Ok team lets just confirm our safety first to Porogan and start camp here tonight." Blastoise orderd.

 

[JX Valentine]

The title drew me in, so here I am. I have to admit it's a pretty interesting title.

That being said, I'm going to start off by saying there's a lot of various grammatical errors throughout this work. There's random capitalization, oddities in punctuation (including over ten dots for an ellipsis, whereas an ellipsis only has three, a lack of an apostrophe in some contractions, and paragraphing errors), misspellings ("buiid"?), misused words (one instance of "one" instead of "on," for example, or the use of the contraction "it's" instead of the possessive pronoun "its"), and so on and so forth. All I can say to that is proofread before posting because a lot of them are very simple mistakes. Alternatively, get a beta reader (via the Beta Thread in Writer's Lounge) to help you go over things.

Either way, you'll need to get the language part of this story up to standards. Correct spelling and punctuation isn't something that's irrelevant to your writing. It's actually a huge part of writing fanfic because the better your presentation, the easier it will be for your readers to get through your work. Glaring errors tend to be like potholes in the middle of the road. The more of them you have, the bumpier the ride is for someone who's driving in a car. Likewise, they can't travel down your road at ninety miles an hour. Instead, an error might slow them down because they realize it's an error, and in some cases, the errors can change what the sentence is trying to say.

That and it's just good form. The better your language skills, the more it tells a reader you spent a lot of time writing this out. It might be sad that your readers will judge you based on whether or not you proofread, but it's true.

All that out of the way, I'm not going to point out every little error. If I did, we'd be here all day. Instead, I'll point out ones that might change the meaning of your sentences but focus more on plot, characterization, and description.

'Kay? Awesome. Here we go!

All the humans have left the Pokemon world, leaving everything behind even Pokemon.

Right off the bat, you leave open a potential plot point. While the Mystery Dungeon world might have had humans and no longer does, yes, it's also a visual medium. We can see what the MD world is like for ourselves. In writing, though, you'll want to give reasons why things like a mass exodus of humankind happened. Remember, humans in general tend to be little pissants. We'd colonize any bit of land where we can still breathe, and we're not exactly easy to chase off. Unless there was a global catastrophe, humanity would probably want to keep that planet of theirs for as long as possible.

Now, you might say that this will be answered in future chapters, but you'll also want to remember that, as I've just said, humans are pissants. What this means is that the result of whatever happened to cause them to leave a planet en masse would probably be obvious. They might have drained the environment of resources or made it completely uninhabitable. They might have been fighting a war that eventually died down after all the people in it killed each other off (which would have ravaged the landscape on top of everything else). They might have done God knows what else, just so they can escape. Either way, it probably would have affected Pokémon by either denying them of a home or resources, killing off scores of them, and so on and so forth. If you're going to do a background description, this is probably going to be important to note.

It started peacefully but some Dark Pokemon who were released from their Dark Ball,

Wait, what? There were dark Pokémon sealed away? (Or did you mean Dark-type Pokémon? Either way, why weren't they allowed to roam free like every other type of Pokémon? Granted, you're saying they're evil, but are we talking the average Umbreon here or just things like Darkrai?) When did that happen and by who? And if the humans sealed them away, why are they just now breaking free?

Is this the reason why the humans decided to uproot and run? If so, why wasn't this mentioned earlier?

Charmeleon knocked on room 13

...By teleporting there? I mean, wasn't he just in Poliwrath's office? (Remember, your audience can't see into your head, so you'll actually need to give us the description of what's going on and what things look like. That way, we can imagine what's going on.)

Charmeleon put his things down and settled in.

...Wasn't he also assigned room 15 and not room 13?

We maybe able to get some of that stuff if the lower ranks try to take them, you see we're Lieutenants

Wouldn't Charmeleon already know this kind of thing if it's common in that base? Or was he newly promoted?

"You gotta enough balls to take uour Pizza so you're aksing for it."

...How is a lieutenant of a military branch able to bully a recruit over something so trivial? That would be an abuse of power, which is neither professional in any sort of army nor something that would be put up with by the higher ups of a military branch. (Sure, higher ranks are tough on lower ranks, but usually, it's not over the last slice of pizza.

Charmeleon was surprised they had a Wii in their room

So am I. I mean, humans are already gone, and by the time the Pokémon would grow the intelligence to develop their own tech (including ways to replicate modern human devices), human tech might not survive thanks to being left up to the abuse of time and nature. Think about what would happen if someone left their DS in a forest for a decade or two. After that kind of exposure, it might not work as well as you think, if you knew what it was in the first place.

Charmeleon picked up his remoted and they smashed the night away until 3 am.

There's also such a thing as lights out in the military, especially if you're in barracks.

Raichu kept complaining to everyone about having Sandslash

Also not something that would probably happen in the military.

Raichu was on the last level on New Super Mario bro's on wii, while Charmeleon and Croconaw rested, Blastoise was reading the paper and his 4 elite Wartotles were either playing video games or watching T.V.

There's definitely no room for that kind of thing on a military airplane. I mean, when you're about to go on a mission, there's just you and the supplies you'll need because the rest of the stuff is dead weight. You're flying into a war zone, where you run at a risk of being shot down, and you need to do it quickly. You just can't bring aboard luxury items.

Not to mention you can't use TVs onboard any plane to begin with. That kind of thing screws with the plane's instruments. Sure, there's built-in TVs for commercial passenger planes, but these tend to be in the luxury (first class, business) parts... and again, only on commercial passenger planes.

I'd hate to be nitpicky, but while it would be cool to read a fic about a war done right (i.e., with actual soldiers), it feels a lot like most of the military presence in this fic just exists because it's cool. There's no real research, even rudimentary stuff, done into the military aspect, so it just feels like you're having a bunch of kids being sent out to fight instead of actual trained soldiers. Even just a little bit of research into how soldiers act, are trained, and are put up would be nice. As it stands, it's hard to take this seriously when just before a bunch of soldiers are being sent into a war zone, they're sitting around playing video games. (This goes especially for the bit about Raichu screaming.)

"Ready....LAUNCH!!!!" annouced the commander,

Because of the fact that the scene up until this point takes place within the plane of the good guys, you actually imply that it's another good guy announcing this bit. As a result, the part about the dark birds seems to come out of nowhere because you don't specify which commander is speaking (so the readers end up thinking it's the commander of the protagonists, not their enemies).

Porogon

Okay, you do this a few times, so I'm just assuming this isn't a typo. Pokémon names can't be picked up by your normal spell-check, so you should probably look up the names on an online Pokédex to make sure you're spelling them correctly.

Porygon, not Porogon.

This is also going to be the only error I'll point out that doesn't change the meaning of your text.

Charmeleon lept up and ran over to the Back left machine gun turret while Croconaw and Raichi manned the Mortar.

Wait. They're Pokémon. Why aren't they attacking with their actual attacks? If they were able to build the plane themselves, they would have at least taken into consideration how to attack without annihilating it in the process, and besides, you've got things like Raichu's Thunderbolt or possibly even Charge Beam that can probably reach the birds through the clouds.

Suddenly a hole broke through the plane, "Damn the Fearow got in by Drillpeck!"

This is the sort of thing you actually want to avoid. Instead of having a character tell us what got in and how, show us the Fearow's beak punch through the cockpit, and show us the Fearow climbing through. You want to get the reader to imagine what they're seeing, and to do that, you have to give us details instead of having someone just tell us what's going on. We can't visualize that Fearow coming in. We can only imagine Croconaw shouting about it.

The Fearow lost balance and slipped through the hole it came through and fell down to it's soldiers warning them not to go up.

And none of the good guys went through, either? I mean, Fearow's got wings. It could easily just take flight to stay inside the airplane, and if not, it's probably used to air combat anyway. This is in contrast to, say, Raichu with its furry paws and not much to grab onto.

"Ok the plans this we take out the guards and use stealth tactics

Even though the dark forces knew they were around, considering they sent several air combatants as a welcome greeting?


Overall, it's an interesting concept, but first off, you've got to proofread. I've already established why, so I won't go into it much further. All I can say is that this is riddled with all kinds of errors, so it was actually a bit difficult for me to take seriously.

On top of that, a war's always fun to write about, but you don't seem to think too much about how military operations actually work, even though your characters are in the military. I wasn't able to really get attached to anyone, in part because it was hard to take your characters seriously when they were playing video games more often than getting ready for the combat they were about to face. They weren't even meditating that much. In a scene that could have been spent giving us a glimpse of your main characters by explaining what they had to do with the war, there's just... literal leisure time.

That and for a military fic, there's not much here that indicates they're in an army instead of at a summer camp. There's the older kids bullying the newer kids, there's games, there's very little training going on, and you gloss over the actual briefing. I would suggest Googling for information about life in the military or even asking soldiers themselves to figure out how to give your story a more serious air to it.

Beyond that, when it comes to battling, there's... not much to say. I'm curious to know why Pokémon are using weapons instead of their own attacks. I mean, they've got built-in weaponry most of the time, and they're already using Voltorb in lieu of explosives. Additionally, the battle didn't last very long at all. Most of the air battalion was taken out in basically one or two shots from what I can tell, and you have a tendency to tell us what happened instead of showing us the explosions and the attacks. (Most notable was the part about the Fearow, but even beyond that, you do things like have Charmeleon take out the oncoming forces without actually showing us how he did it.)

In all, it's an interesting concept. You mix the mystical (with the dark forces) with the gritty (technological military). The problem is that the presentation could use a lot of improvement, and as such, it's really hard to get into the story and care about the characters. You can fix this, though, if you take your time and be sure to add in detail. Show us what's going on instead of telling us. Proofread. Do research. The easier it is for us to take this story seriously, the more inclined we'll be to get attached to your characters.