Faller’s Field Guide 4
November 29th, 2022
Tohoku Region, Nakagawa, 2022.
So it’s been rather busy… lately both in terms of personal research, growth, and trauma. Decided to consolidate all my notes and research when it comes to pokémon battling, moves, and little bits of convergence where I can find them. After getting attacked by the Pokémon Pinchers with a horde of Shadow pokémon and whatever that… tech did to enhance them to a superhuman level, and whatever it was terrified the hell out of Akari. To the point she’s been… know what that’s her business, I’m not writing that down here.
Anyways, it’s been relatively calm after the attack as well as after earning my badge. The main trouble now is that Mirko has evolved, and is a lot bigger than I expected. The average lopunny is about four to four and a half feet tall, and around seventy pounds, big for a rabbit on my world yes, but there’s a few exceptions that come close in length and miss on weight by about twenty pounds
Mirko is about six foot two including her ears… that little part connected to her head and not the huge loppers hanging down to her hips. Maybe closer to about 5’11 without them, and about one hundred eighty pounds in weight. Probably easy to predict though, upon evolution, a buneary tends to grow three times their final height, and she was 25 inches in height before then. To be frank though, it’s… different to look at her now.
She’s… pretty, gorgeous, very aesthetically pleasing to the eyes? Honestly I can very much understand why there’s so much of a… following around her species, but that doesn’t really matter here unless I’m writing about the nature of romantic and or sexual bonds between humans and pokémon. Though I suppose I’d wonder what kind of influence humanoid body types have on the formation of bonds? Does it make them easier to form or harder? Easier due to looking more like us, or less due to the uncanny valley effect?
Anyways, my status reports on my pokémon will be going into greater detail now that I’ve got a greater grasp of what I’m doing in terms of research with metaphysical energy, comparative biology, and general battle training. I’ll start with the report I’ve assembled on Fleur… took a while to find a nickname she can agree with without biting my head off, then a progress report on Mirko after her evolution into her final evolution-morph. Should be interesting.
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Fleur the Fennekin
The fourth member of my team, and the ninth pokémon I’ve caught overall including the small stantler herd and the digital mon in my phone and pokédex. She’s a pure fire-type but will evolve into a fire-psychic type upon reaching the final stage of her line, of her species known as Vulpes mystica is a member of the Carnivora, and the first non-lagomorph on the team.
Overview
The fennekin-line is a species of bipedal foxes closely related to the zorua and abra lines and like their relatives they are able to wield mystical and supernatural abilities, though they most recently split off from the vulpix line around six million years ago when their ancestors were driven into the Great Desert of Afruika. The main differences from their relatives lie in the source of their power, the fire vulpix have a touch of ghost and fey that grants them great power over strange and esoteric arts and curses, the zorua are dark fey, more interested in physical pursuits, while the abra line are incredibly… cerebral, their massive brains built to process and dive into the Dream World.
The fennekin line are scholars and tinkers, mad geniuses, they use magic and symbolism to draw on a different layer of the Dream World, what they like to call the Cognitive World, the product of the perceptions and cognition of individuals and society, those perceptions fuel their magic and spells, as perception and reality to them are… one.
Thank god for Mirko’s ability to write, and articles from interviews with others of Fleur’s species.
Anyways, the fennekin line is nowhere as widespread as other foxes, largely hailing from Kalos after being imported into the region from their homeland. Fennekin are polyvores, I’d say omnivores but that means something different here from what you told me. Eating a mix of plants, small and medium mammals, reptiles and so on, and foraging for berries. Things like that.
Description
Fleur was measured at about 19 inches tall and 25 pounds in mass, which I think means she’s not far off from evolving into braixen. Though that includes the hints of black fur on her rear legs and the tufts of white fur around her neck. Blaze doesn’t show any biological signs, but I can read it in her aura I think… strange patterns of fire that open up when she’s low. Magician is pretty well manifested as well, but it’s more metaphysical than biological.
Anatomically my best model for her as a species is the Fennec fox, a crepuscular fox native to the deserts of North Africa. Her hair is a shade of light yellow, with a white lower face and a deeper orange ear tufts and tail tip, which appears to be somewhat reflective of sunlight, good for a desert animal… I wonder if they were originally normal types since fire means heat is less bothersome. Her ears are massive which works well for cooling down, since too much heat is a problem too for a heat engine… That might explain why her species kept the feature then.
Fleur has a long, thick soft fur coat with a wooly undercoat that insulates her on cold nights and protects her from the hot sun during the day, which she actually absorbs to strengthen her fire. All pokémon need their element, it’s good for them both mentally and physically. Her paws are covered in dense fur to walk on hot, sandy soil, again a lot like Fennec foxes, a textbook case of convergent evolution huh?
Her jaw has a total of 42 teeth, with small and narrow canines which facilitates their diet as a polyvore, though they become more robust when they grow larger, shifting their diet towards larger prey and tougher plant life in a form of niche partitioning to prevent competition between the different stage-morphs.
Her biology is largely that of a canine, there isn’t much to shout about outside a very consistent heat output when consuming fuels that became the origin for the Fennekin Scale of Temperature, placing ice at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees. Her own body temperature averages around one hundred eighty degrees, a few degrees cooler than say a vulpix but still warmer than any human could be without their proteins breaking down. Makes me wonder if Fire Type Genes come with a kit of high-temperature adaptations to survive and thrive at those temperatures or if it’s purely aura based.
In simplest form, she’s a very standard Firefox, just missing the search engine.
Heh.
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November 30th, 2022.
Tohoku Region, In The Air
Mirko the Lopunny, Analysis Report 1
We decided to take an airship flight to a small town on Route 346, which still means like a week of traveling or so so it’ll be a lot of time to journal and write things up. We’ll arrive in Wakana around then, which is close to the three Gym towns in the region, though we’ll be opting for Makiishi and Taisen as our battlegrounds. This section will be dedicated to what I’ve learned about Orytolagus orectoaurus as both a species and independent culture, in the form of reports of Mirko’s progression as a battler and or any other role she wants to take on in the future. This includes information she’s given to me through the rare skill of writing and reading, and shown through combat and well… being friends I guess?
In the case of battle prowess, I’ll first start with the system I've developed as a comparative measurement system between members of the same and different species, with the same level of experience. Measured Combat Statistics or MCS is developed by using gathered data from multiple studies and data gathered from volunteer trainers, largely developed by my co-worker in Sojourner the Porygon using their extensive ability to program and collate data.
It’s letter-based as the differences can be pretty nebulous at times due to pokémon often doing anomalous things during the heat of battle. Basically on average, this species is a bit stronger than this species in this one aspect of themselves. The measurements are based on a suite of sensor data gathered and checked for errors by Sojourner.
An average machamp will have at least A grade strength but a well trained one can become S grade or greater. Strength is measured through the use of a Barrier transducer which implements kinetic-to-electrical energy conversion, allowing it to measure overall kinetic energy in joules and foot-pounds, using widespread physical moves as a suitable baseline across species.
Let’s say a single letter increase is a measurable increase of 25 to 105% maybe? Speed is easier to measure at least. An average lopunny at Mirko’s level of might can hit burst speeds of about 155 meters a second while she hits around 200 meters a second. Anyways it’s a measurement system for ‘stats’ already used in this world. Constitution (HP), the sheer amount of punishment a pokémon’s body and aura can take, which is measured through the use of an aura waveform sensor and pre-measured calculated kinetic, thermal, electrical, radiant, and aural energy of damaging moves. As mentioned Strength (Attack), correlates to their physical strength and ability to use that strength with moves.
Their Toughness (Defense), all pokémon have naturally greater structural integrity due to aura, this is a measurement of how well that inherent defense can withstand physical destruction and is estimated by how much energy makes it into their body versus an unguarded target, as well as testing of tensile, and compressive strength. Power (Special Attack), is the reserve of aura that’s drawn outside the body to fuel and shape it into attacks, with their energy calculated through kinetic energy, electrical, thermal, radiant, and aural sensors. Resistance (Special Defense) is a measure of their active defenses, the deflector shield to their structural integrity fields one could say, used to counteract outside energies and measured through similar means to toughness.
Speed is… closer to several different measurements folded into one, a combination of Acceleration, the ability to change movement speed and direction. Nimbleness, being agile and able to move along terrain, Situational Awareness, being conscious of their surroundings, of obstacles, and targets and serves well when controlling Power and ranged attacks. The last is Reaction Time which is exactly what it says on the tin. Which is why the Speed in the MCS system is… more useful within a species, my lopunny is faster than others etc etc, and why it’s the only one that has a tab for measuring such things. Anyhow, I should start on the report this is about huh?
Let’s begin with the obvious. Mirko has of course evolved into a prime specimen of her species, at 6’2 ft (1.92m) in height and 180 lb (81kg) in weight, placing her within the gradient range for those with the Alpha phenotype. A fascinating set of genes that allow for pokémon far larger than average when induced by several different phenomena whether through exposure to certain energies and substances, blessings from the Divines, or simply due to being considered leadership material in certain environments. For lopunny, alphas can be anywhere from 1.8 to just under 3 meters tall, possessing far greater might, intelligence and general health as well as aggression and independence.
Other species can overexpress such phenotypes due to heavily compatible biology such as the ‘World Turtle’ torterra, ‘Kaiju God’ tyranitar and ‘Primal Saurian’ meganium, allowing them to grow to massive scales comparable to buildings and even landmasses.
I’ve been able to get a pretty useful baseline for Mirko as an individual, mostly taking scans using the pokédex, and measurements of her various stats. Her diet has developed a stronger desire for protein, preferably from bugs, which explains why she hunted down a domestic caterpie and cooked it up herself. Experimenting with berries has made some notable improvements based on the research of some Lab Trainer from Hoenn, and her diet is mostly hay, oats and various greens with a helping of bug protein, for a total of 4500 calories a day. She can digest mammalian meat though, after stealing my homemade burritos… I was almost tempted to bite her.
Anyways, I’ve been running a number of tests with Mirko’s permission. (You aren’t doing science without me, bitch!), please quit adding things like this to my journal Mirko!
Anyways. As previously mentioned, Mirko can reach burst speeds of 200 meters a second, and Quick Attack more than doubles that by enhancing her body and providing propulsive force… along with some strange shifts to space I can’t quite figure out. Extreme Speed should offer even greater speed, maybe a three to four times increase, though the main benefit lies in it being easier to maintain over long distances, which is why pokémon like dragonite and arcanine learn it.
Her newfound accumulated might has been fascinating to test, to see how her aura spikes and expands into the Space around her. What I can tell you is that her physical might is nightmarish, a single Return I tested on a scale gave me an energy output comparable to some 14 metric tons of TNT, more than sufficient force to core a small warship and reduce it to scrap metal. A similar test with Swift estimates it is one third as powerful due to its lower power and her lesser aptitude with ranged energies.
I’ve been working with her other abilities and traits to enhance her battling prowess, using her hearing and sense of smell for when she’s been blinded by Flash or Smokescreen, and her species’ hint of ghostly energies that become Scrappy during Mega Evolution.
Run Away seems to have been… subsumed entirely by Cute Charm, but she retains aspects of it that she uses to easily dance and dodge, a sort of weaker version of Detect. Cute Charm… it reminds me of something from a book, Harry Potter I think, of the Veela, strange magical creatures able to hypnotize and mesmerize others attracted to their looks. It enhances their looks, allowing them to trick and deceive opponents in the heat of battle, a sort of weak fey magic.
Stolen story; please report.
I’ve… allowed her to test it out on the team so they can learn to defend against mental manipulations more in-depth than Charm or Baby-Doll Eyes. I’ve been working on it myself for… safety reasons since some members of Cipher are known for manipulating minds after taking in survivors of Team Flare. Which is where I found out some… interesting things, I don’t seem to react normally to Cute Charm or other such mental manipulations?
Cute Charm tends to just make me either really sleepy, or really energized to the point I’m bouncing off the walls. Seems my brain matter is organized weirdly, not sure if it’s because of my autism or only technically being the same species as other humans. Charm just makes me want to bite things… Baby-Doll Eyes makes me want to glomp things.
It’s very fascinating, and figuring out Scrappy is difficult, it seems to be an aspect of Mirko’s species being… liminal, hanging around places close to the Spirit has made them… something a bit more towards the next world. I’ve been helping her with shaping that tiny reserve of spectral energy, making her normal and fighting aura ring like a bell seems to do the trick, but keeping it active all the time, I’ve yet to figure out how.
I’ve also worked out the trick she used to redirect electric attacks, she uses Thunder Punch and runs it into her arm to turn it into a conductor then runs it down into the ground before it overwhelms her own energy channels, the spiritual pathways aura runs through. No idea what happens if those get damaged…
I’ll very much be looking into developing her moveset until there’s nothing she can’t face.
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December 3rd, 2022
Region of Tohoku, Route 346
Dodrio
While traveling Route 346 we were lucky enough to encounter a flock of wild dodrio and doduo. As a grassland habitat, this area of the route has many native grazing animals like the doduo line or Struthio squabilus are one of the grazing herbivores of this route, feeding off the tall grasses and Berry bushes that grow instead of trees.
We discovered them when we had opted to take a rest break, with Mirko and Happy keeping an eye out for any ambushes. Pokémon have a strange little habit of attacking trainers though it’s far less common on-route due to the more aggressive individuals being cleared away by both Rangers and League officials. Right around a large carved stone, we were able to watch their behavior without disturbing them or being disturbed ourselves.
In person, doduo and dodrio do very much resemble ostriches though they can of course be easily differentiated. They have very large rounded bodies covered in a soft down of primary brown feathers which can take various shades from dark brown at their necks to almost orange tail feathers. Their wings are effectively nonexistent, hidden under the primitive unbarbed feathers that serve as insulation rather than an aid for flight.
They’re also… far more robust than slinky silly looking ostriches or say… espathra. Their legs are about twice as thick as a human’s with massive three toed feet ending in five inch long talons, and each neck and head is robust and clearly built for power, with necks several feet long ending in round heads about a meter long including their hooked beaks. They’re a bit silly looking with their squabbling, but they are very much powerful, dangerous and lethal.
I witnessed one kicking a boulder in half without using a move, it was pure raw muscle power. They’re big too, the average newly evolved dodrio is about six feet tall and two hundred pounds but they tend to reach about seven feet and two hundred forty pounds with the flock leaders hitting ten feet and six hundred pounds. Which already makes them larger than any bird from my world that hasn’t been extinct for centuries, at the upper end anyways…
Doduo are smaller of course, around the same size as an emu and share a similar diet to their second stage. They feed on smaller prey, with dodrio being better adapted to killing prey with their beaks, and better slashing abilities to allow that, though they’re not fully predatory, just better adapted to it than ostriches. Again primarily grazers.
Looking at their aura was an interesting show, their heads appear to be linked through some form of telepathy, which makes me wonder if the flittle line shared that aspect and developed it into well developed control over psychic energies instead of merely a better way to coordinate their multiple brains.
They’re an interesting species, and their continuous speed is impressive, with a straight line speed of 40-70 mph they can maintain for tens of miles at a time.
We left the flock behind after I noticed the flock leader had been watching us. It was a fascinating picture of their behavior in the wild.
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December 6th
Region of Tohoku, Route 346
Gyarados
We’ve been traveling across Route 346 across an open steppe along a massive river leading to the ocean. We’ve been fishing for domestic magikarp, which are fortunately easy to tell apart from wild ones… there’s a certain soul in their eyes that’s nowhere to be seen in domestics… also color, domestics are less bright, having more reason to hide.
To our misfortune however we encountered a rampaging gyarados, a massive specimen some forty feet long, likely a result of some incompetent trainer releasing their magikarp into the wrong habitat. It was a goddamn nightmare of a battle as that monster knew Hyper Beam, Thunderbolt, and Hydro Pump, which struck with enough force to disintegrate boulders the size of houses. It took our entire teams to take it down, with a combination of Shock Wave, Return, Psybeam and Play Rough ending it on my side. I have no idea what the fuck Akari did outside flying pig bomb. We reported it to the nearest Ranger station since it managed to run off somehow.
Magikarp and its evolution could be considered a keystone species on both ends of the food chain, serving as both prey and predator with shoals numbering in the many millions, and tens of thousands of gyarados serving keystone roles as apex predators across the entire global ocean.
They are nightmarish predators, full of rage and frustration from years of being a weak and useless king of carp, with incredible battle potential and often seek to fight each in a form of dominance display… but despite the intensity it is as close as can be to play among their species. Even if it involves rearranging landscapes and river courses.
Based on the blue tendrils, that gyarados was in fact male, and absolutely covered in scars, a tapestry of pain and survival. I got a sample of some of his scales, which seem to be incredibly thick and reinforced with incredibly dense energy, due to their draconic heritage. Along with a foot long tooth that was embedded into Fleur’s Protect.
I swear I heard the haunting roars of that same gyarados when we were resting at night. I didn’t sleep that night.
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Sojourner flew through the Digital Web, exploring the cyberspace linking dozens of regions together, and saw how the world was structured, disparate networks and independent technologies forced to work together, like a strange and broken puzzle piece, and they saw the scars where they had been joined as the International Association of Pokémon Leagues pioneered diplomacy and peace and harmony, reforming forgotten or lost routes to other regions day by day and year by year.
A project some 27 years old now, and in many cases it was what their kind had been born to do. They saw how the internet was wound together, in city states and urban areas, a vast network of optical fibers and wireless terahertz wave towers allowed for vast speeds more than capable of transmitting their compact file architecture.
Sojourner could compress and zip themself up into a file as small as 7 gigabytes, which had made travel through the digital realm easy for at least a decade, and had become even easier with the advent of sophisticated communication networks capable of transporting one thousand times that amount of data in a second, and the development of the CCT, a vast quantum network modeled after their biology as living beings of sapient code.
The Digital World has been created for and by them, they have designed and optimized the architecture, protocols and operations, along with high security, secrecy and privacy as their gift for humanity, this place of Soul and Ones and Zeroes, hardware of silicon-carbon, mind of light and electrons and aura.
A rugged, tough and well designed system, needed for a network where entire nodes can vanish or pop up in an instant, an enormous ever growing mesh of networked devices and worlds.
Sojourner simply examined the cyber-structure with a keen digital eye, seeing how the network had a Connection to other Digital Worlds, outside the domain of Arceus, with the bonds that tie across space and time, to that world tree which was their tree’s cosmic neighbor.
Irrelevant to their current objective but as a synthetic intelligence, Sojourner had always loved to wander, it was why they had accepted their new designation, to be named after a machine which had traveled and explored another world was an honor.
Sojourner assembled an interface, tracking a thousand threads of information and digital code. The creation of the Measured Combat Statistics System had been quite easy as she relayed messages across multiple sites and servers, and opened a profile, one of thousands created on the Battlenet, as they worked on adding incredible amounts of data on the study that Sojourner and Brandy were working on. I wonder when she will figure it out? She did say I could publish the data, since she believe it would be helpful for trainers if each ‘stat’ came with various techniques and advice on improving them.
TRAINER TRACKER: Red, Brandy
Current League Participation: Tohoku Region, Sternwing Conference
Badges: 3/8 (Flame, Ocean, Thunderhead)
Last Seen: Nakagawa
TRAINER INFO
Username:
Age: 22
Home Region: Unknown (possibly Paldea/Mezo)
Years Active: 0.4
Official Trainer: Lab Trainer (Tohoku)
Trainer ID: [Hidden]
STATISTICS
Winrate (W/L/D): 63/6/6
Average Match Time Per Pokémon: 2.5 minutes
Total Badges Collected: 3
Tournaments Entered: 0
Pokémon Wielded (Past Evos Included): 10
Most used pokémon: Lopunny
POKÉMON
Ace Pokémon: Lopunny
Known Team: Lopunny (f), Nidorino (m), Azumarill (f), Fennekin (f)
Known Reserves: Stantler (m), Stantler (m), Stantler (f), Stantler (m)
POKÉMON NOTES *
Lopunny
Abilities: Limber, Cute Charm
Nickname: Mirko
Typical Held Item: Silk Scarf
Known Moves: Pound, Quick Attack, Drain Punch, Foresight (?), Baby-Doll Eyes, Double Kick, Work Up, Charm, Headbutt, Thunder Punch, Fire Punch, Dizzy Punch, Jump Kick, Return.
Notes: Brandy’s first pokémon. Evolved from buneary. Superior physical strength, speed and resilience. Able to accelerate on a dime, dominates the field with ranged attacks, and has been observed to be Limber to paralyzation and observed using Cute Charm. Determined, will not yield.
Measured Combat Statistics Ranking
Level: 4-star
Constitution: B
Damage Tolerance: C+
Stamina: B+
Pain Tolerance: B+
Physical Strength: A+
Physical Toughness: B+
Special Power: B+
Special Resistance: A
Speed: A
Acceleration: A
Nimbleness: A
Situational Awareness: A+
Reaction Time: A
Velocity: A
Sojourner scanned the Battlenet network, quietly acknowledging fellow porygon as they guarded the worlds that dwelled within the Internet forum, moving on to carefully scraping data for any byte of information on multiversal travel, tapping into any form of technology and science with applications in the field.
The generation, manipulation, and modulation of altered spacetime metrics through the use of metaphysical energy was the most applicable, pioneered by the Silph Corporation when it came to the Global Trading System and the PC Storage System. Studies relating to Dark Energy and its effect on transdimensional spacetime manifolds were another interesting piece of data to add.
Brandy had… been good to them, she was curious and eager to learn more about them despite merely being a computer program that could easily be ignored. Being allowed to participate wasn’t necessarily a rarity but there was prejudice against porygon as synthetic intelligence. Many simply preferred other kinds of pokémon.
Their wielder (not quite a trainer) simply wanted to understand them, wanted to know them, and that made Sojourner want to do everything in their power to open doors and paths for her, whether it was across the endless sea of Ultra Space or the realms of science and knowledge.
Perhaps they would decide to join her battle team, or perhaps not.
Sojourner would reciprocate their friendship regardless.