Faller’s Field Guide 3
October 1st, 2022
Tohoku Region, Kanran-ishi Wildland
Llayda the Marill
Meet what can now be considered the third member of my team! Llayda is a marill that decided she wanted to join us while we were performing various research tasks for Professor Laven. She's a water-fairy type, Oleocauda aqua, and like the rest of my team, a member of the Lagomorpha… again.
Overview
The marill line is a rather primitive line of lagomorphs, closely related to the jigglypuff line. Oh also learned that since baby-stage pokémon can’t breed an evolution line can't be named after them. They're a far more temporary stage in truth. But back to the overview…
The marill line is ubiquitous across the Orient, aquatic omnivores that serve a role in the ecosystem similar to an otter, consuming vast quantities of fish, amphibians, algae, aquatic plants, over sixty different species across rivers, bays, estuaries, and coastal marshes can be considered food for them. Their ancestors are believed to have split off from the jigglypuff line around thirteen million years ago, around the time of the decline of the ancestors of the slowpoke line’s ancestors.
Their main unique trait shared with jigglypuff are the presence of special sacs, air sacs for the latter, and oil sacs in marill, for aid in swimming.
Description
Marill is pretty typical, when it comes to height and weight for a marill, at 42 centimeters and nine point four kilograms in mass. She's pretty normal though her Huge Power muscles are obvious at a touch.
Llayda is incredibly round, due to a combination of layers of fat, and her coat. Her hair is blue and hydrophobic, with a white belly of fur. Unlike say a rat that’s incredibly skinny without their fur, she’s a lot more similar to a seal, with a thick layer of blubber to insulate herself from the cold and to act as metabolic fuel that can last them days or weeks in hard times. Her head and neck are actually a lot longer than you think, because they tend to carry their necks in a sort of S shape close to their body so you can only see her cute snout.
Scared the shit out of me when she stretched her neck forward so she could catch a poor fish like some type of mammalian xenomorph. A dichotomy between long neck and no neck… nightmare fuel. Her jaw contains 28 teeth just like her fellow lagomorphs, with modified premolars like the nidoran-line. Her peg teeth and a modified premolar pair are used as canines, with two pairs of premolars taking on the role of carnassials, paired upper and lower teeth modified to act as enlarged self-sharpening edges.
Llayda has some interesting adaptations when it comes to being aquatic, she’s got a flattened cornea that refracts light less strongly than human or fish corneas with strong eye muscles to change the shape of her eye lens to create a sharp, clear image on land and water. She also has a transparent nictitating membrane that protects her eyes from debris, and she’s dichromatic, not far off from someone with red-green color blindness. The one difference however… is that she can also see UV light due to her ancestors evolving in the arctic before moving down south.
Which explains why she likes trailing her paws up and down my arm, she’s tracing my Blaschko lines… which is interesting because I’m not sure it works that way, it suggests her eyesight is quite strong. Her sense of smell is pretty comparable to Mirko, so better than my own but worse than Jericho’s and has special nostrils that can close off so she can hold her breath longer. Her ears are mouse-like, though they’ve grown a few inches as she gets closer to evolution. She’s got good hearing, perhaps a bit less sensitive than her fellow lagomorphs.
One unique feature of her species is a series of sacs spread throughout her body, turns out the ancestors of her species and jigglypuff evolved an avian-like series of air sacs connected to the respiratory system, allowing for a unidirectional breathing system maintained to this day. Nowadays many of the sacs are filled with special permeable oil designed as a combination of a swim bladder and a cooling and heating system. There’s actually a number of species-specific pathologies she’s susceptible to, depending on factors like injuries, birth defects and disease. For example she’s got hexagonal patterns of cilia in her respiratory system designed to filter out toxins and dangerous accumulations of gasses that protects her from some of the weaknesses of unidirectional saccule breathing like damage from smoke and poisonous gasses. If they were absent or removed… you can get the issue.
Her biology isn’t too crazy at a glance, it’s a rather interesting mix between a rabbit, a seal and an otter. Heavy layers of blubber make her round and cute, and provides the biological expression needed for Thick Fat, her super dense fur is important for insulation too since they’re not as big as other aquatic mammals, easily a thousand times denser than human hair, creating a layer of air that’s saturated with fairy dust, which is actually how they can Sap Sip by using fairy nature magic to metabolize grass-type energies. Their Huge Power comes from their leporine muscles, again using fey magic to augment their power to new heights.
Fairy magic is a… rather… odd expressions of Type Energy, illusions so real, and so powerful even reality can’t tell us otherwise. The things fairies conjure are fabricated but they are there, they could create an image of a flower… just an image but it can gain substance, perception feeds power into it, that illusory flower will adapt to the viewers. It will act like any normal flower, because the faerie will manipulate things to distract, to addle and trick, they will say it’s real so it must be real.
Makes me wonder if their immunity to Dragons is in fact the metaphysical equivalent of ‘Nuh-uh, we’ve got shields, they beat rock’. Which uhh… I wonder if fairy magic explains why they were only discovered in the last few decades in some regions, that could confuse things.
Anyways, besides the fairy magic her biology is pretty neat, her muscles are optimized for a mix of raw power and endurance, an even blend of fast and slow twitch muscles. She isn’t good at hopping but can use her tail muscles to throw herself around. Speed wise I’ve clocked her at about fifty meters a second which still makes her about half as fast as Mirko. But her endurance is far superior to either Mirko or Jericho, letting her outlast them when it comes to general movement.
So in short; she’s strong, tough and incredibly well adapted to both survival and battle as a pokémon.
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October 16th, 2022.
Tohoku Region, Okido, Zenith Labs
Aura, Type Energy, Moves and Worldlines
So a lot has been going on over the past few days and weeks, a lot of progress has been made with earning the second badge, reaching a 2-star rating/level within a month of the season, getting tasked with walking into numerous Nodes to study them. Which ended up being quite fascinating when I looked into it, turns out there’s been a lot of work when it comes to mapping out ley lines, vessels through which the breath of the World flows.
Which does explain why just a minor quip let Laven adjust her scanner, they were already thinking about this stuff, but their research was all over the place and poorly organized. She ended up requesting a bunch of published papers that put her ahead on her research.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The ley lines of the planet are the channels of the World’s Aura, flowing from the top of the highest mountains down to the deepest depths of the ocean and tectonic realms, alignments between places of power, a network of life covering the entire planet. The Lifestream of the World.
Though unlike the pseudoscience of my world, ley lines aren’t straight, more like a cross between veins and a nervous system, shaped by the actions of those who live upon its surface. Closer to Feng Shei but weirder, since raw aura is Typeless (Normal?)… but ley lines can shift to other wavelengths, each with their own part played in the delicate balance of nature.
Which brings up an important question I’ve been asking myself. What is Aura? The energy of life sure, but that’s a facet of this world and not my own, and yet I have it all the same, and it wasn’t gifted to me… I had it all along, muffled by different laws of physics.
So it’s given me many ideas of what it can be. My pet theory is that it’s something like vacuum energy, perhaps the source of the very Big Bang itself, like two colliding branes smashing with all the heat of a newborn universe. Though in this instance, Arceus might be the key factor in why our worlds are so different. If aura or something like it exists in my world, perhaps it froze out in a very different configuration without the guiding hand of a literal God to act as a Prime Mover for a literally limitless source of creation. This world is closer to that Source, and for whatever reason was broken up into eighteen major delineations at the beginning of time.
So aura at the bare minimum is a fundamental energy of creation and life, and can be thought of as the manifestation of a fifth force, the quanta of the Big Bang. And Type Energy could be best described as the equivalent of the electromagnetic spectrum, the range of frequencies and their respective wavelengths and quanta energies. From gamma rays down to ELF radio waves, if those frequency waves somehow corresponded to aspects of reality and physical constants.
Type Energy carries with it, basically different aspects of the World, essential for the good working of the universe, operating together and ensuring the functioning of all things.
Sort of an Avatar: The Last Airbender kind of thing for anyone back home if you ever read this. Hopefully
Type Energy acts like an amplifier for certain kinds of energy, a dampener for others and so on, which does explain type weaknesses, resistances, and immunities. Scans of pokémon moves do seem to prove that much, the inherent properties of a Type can be easily measured. A more interesting discovery is that when it comes to dual types, the ‘flavor’ can be different, with altered properties and behaviors. A rock-ground type might lean more towards ground or rock type energies or be split evenly between them.
Type Energy is a pretty important aspect of reality when it comes to research and technology, because aura is essentially pure potential energy, a stem cell of creation. Generating it is pretty hard, but extracting it from the ground in the form of Dust, Gems and Stones is rather easy. It’s also how their tech can replicate pokémon moves, using easy sources of Type Energy and shaping them using complex waveguides and field shapers. Figuring out how to interact with Type Energy has let them create insanely advanced power conversion and storage devices.
By studying Electric TE, this world figured out how to create an electric charge that can interact with other kinds of energy, including aura and every kind of energy you can imagine. It allowed them to create a nearly lossless power and storage hyper-capacitor, and could be easily converted into other kinds of energy from heat to sound and more. Basically potential energy sparks, with incredibly rapid charging and lasting basically forever.
Aura is in truth rather core to many aspects of this world and I can see why Professor Laven is so focused on it, it’s both incredible and important. I’ve been writing down my own research, largely modeling it off of concepts back home when it comes to things like qi.
Aura seems to flow within spiritual pathways, channels of the Self that stream with the infinite energy of life. In a less mystical term, these spiritual pathways are the veins and nodes needed for the natural flow of auric energy, a sort of… field of metaphysical biology that isn’t fully studied. Though it at least exists well enough for this planet to understand how to interface with them using technology. Else things like pokéballs, the PC System, and omni-trauma units wouldn’t work.
These pathways basically flow throughout the body, acting as a pseudo-nervous system when it comes to using aura and converting it into suitable Type Energy. They don’t seem to have the same ahh… spiritual significance that specific meridians or nadi do in some of my planet’s beliefs with the exception of seven nodes, points of access when it comes down to metaphysical energy manipulation.
Which does let me change the subject… towards Moves. I’ve been trying to break down moves for some time now, now that I’ve got personal experience with how flexible they are in reality. Every move I’ve seen channels either raw Normal aura when it comes to certain utility moves or channels Type Energy into a part of the body, mind, self or the Real outside their body. Nothing like it exists on my planet, aura isn’t exactly accessible.
But it does here, and that paints an interesting picture. Most of the abilities of fauna and flora on my Earth tends to be evolved behavior, instincts refined over millions of years, certain mutations and pre-existing traits selected for due to individuals with those traits being sufficiently fit to pass on those genes. Crocodiles can bite but they can’t use Bite or Crunch, cheetahs are quick but they can’t use Quick Attack or Extreme Speed. Plants can be toxic but can’t use Toxic, and so on.
Only a small fraction of the billions of species that have evolved, lived and died have the ability to invent, create, adapt and pass down information not through the genes of the body, but through the genes of the soul, memes are the root of civilization, the ultimate technology of a sapient species. Hehehe.
Moves have ties to physical biology, yes, biological structures make it easier to use, but moves are constructs of metaphysical energy, a designed framework, a technique created, iterated on, and passed down since the dawn of life. They’re quite literally designed, the technology of the soul itself, passed down from the Original One Him or Herself. It’s literally god who knows…
It means that moves can’t be just merely biological quirks, they’re frameworks and designs constructed over the last half billion years, ways to shape themselves and the world as they see fit. Which means I can do the same, break them down into their component parts and reassemble them into something greater, something new.
And that sounds interesting… but it also comes down to needing to understand the underpinning and structure of the Types themselves, which is why I’m doing research on ley lines, on the flow of life energies within the World. A bit like mystical telluric currents, so uhh… they can shift over time a bit. The interesting bit is that some of these shifts happen when pokémon migrate and alter the climate and environment, so there’s untested theories that pokémon themselves make use of the ley lines, pulling on the Type Energy of the World to terraform their territories. This is known for the Legendary Birds of Shamouti, since they sit on a climate nexus, their godly powers stabilize the climate on a global scale, serving as guardians of the World.
So it’s at least known to exist, the issue is confirming even non-legends do this, as it would explain how climate and ecosystems are created even when it goes against physics. And since ley lines can flow with Type Energy… it’s likely that these each have different behaviors and functions in the environment… but with how often the mystical and scientific community is at odds… figuring this out is going to take a lot of work.
At the least I can get some confirmation that a Dragon Force exists from my own knowledge and reading up on Unovan myths. A powerful manifestation of dragon-type energy, dense, powerful, the boundaries of the world in the form of rivers of power. It was used by the Kingdom of the Vale to power their civilization, and was their downfall as they fell victim to the endless cycle of war between Ideals and Truth that began over two and a half thousand years ago. To the point their calendar changes when one dragon triumphs over the other. An Ideal Age begins when Zekrom rises, a True Age when Reshiram rises while Kyurem can usher in either a Hollow or Harmonic Age.
I believe they’re currently about three hundred something years into a True Age which unified Unova once and for all, but a civil war a few hundred years ago destroyed a lot of their history to the point Ideals and Truth were reduced to myths. Even Kalos had a better memory of their gods, with those statues in Parfum Palace after their war ended up destroying a region that I think was equivalent to the Holy Roman Empire… It was Kalos, Paldea, half of Hedne, Antoria on one side against Galar, Eslovka and the other half of Hedne on the other.
This isn’t related… Wait, has this been transcribing my mutterings too?
So if there’s a Dragon Force layer of the ley lines it must be the same for the other Types as well with their own unique properties. So I’m going to study these energies underpinning the world, and see what I can unravel about the nature of Type Energy for myself!
It’ll probably be a hard task… but I think I’m up for the challenge.