Wait, hold on. Where was he? Rowan stopped, gasping for breath, her legs dirtied by his trip through the mud. Th-there were usually Taillows all over this route... Where were they now!? His search had gone on for longer than he had intended, there was no way the battle had gone on for this long. Kira had likely fainted in a single blow and he wouldn't bet on that Yasha could take on an experienced criminal. Hopefully they had gotten away safely... Rowan hadn't intended this to be a flight for safety, but as it was, he was relatively glad to be away, a happiness he felt shame for...
Rowan blinked where he had stopped, his eyes having trouble to refocus as he heard that sound and the color in the edge of his vision. Th-that... wasn't a Taillow, but it was unmistakably a Pokémon! A-ah... But, that didn't matter, he was too exhausted to follow right now. He brought up Purrloin's Pokéball, which he had by his belt (because his parents probably conveniently bought one of those things that allowed a trainer to hold his balls by his pants for quick access), and let her out. He quickly grabbed around his fainted Purrloin, watching her injuries...
Oh, that had gone so badly. He didn't know if it would help, but he reached behind him instinctively to get his potion... Oh. Right. He had thrown his bag. It's gone. He looked down for a moment, looking for water which he could use to clean her injuries... No good. All this is swamp-muddy and probably dangerous. … Rowan blinked as he realized. That little thing had been blue. If there was anything he knew, that meant it might be a water-Pokémon. …
'Excuse me...?' Rowan asked, slowly wandering in the direction of the Pokémon that had bounced off. He made a mental note of which direction SHOULD be back, if his sense of direction was accurate. 'I might need some help. … Are… you there?' … He'd likely not get any answer. He'd slowly, still holding around his fainted Pokémon start wandering a bit in the swamp, carefully looking around and behind things for that blue colour, his eyes wide with frightened curiosity...
Responses to reviews. Feel like this thread has been still enough to do that.
MoonDoings
I don't know how to feel about this.
The golf bit was entertaining because I know a bit about golf, and there is a certain sense of hilarity that comes from imagining it played on the lunar surface and in low gravity.
However, I can gather that this entry was meant to be humorous and it reads like it is; I'm just on the outside of the joke.
Nope. No particular joke you missed. Just me having fun as I was writing. It's more for random feel-good than for humour in itself, but random humour just easily got mixed in when just casually writing about a group of friends. Haha.
This one feels disconnected. There's a series of events that don't feel tied together properly. They're ok, but no more than that. We did not feel engaged by them.
Completely understandable. I did feel that maybe the entry would become very boring to read if the reader knew it was just a bunch of friends trying different sports on the moon, but, I realize that even like that it's not very engaging. Oh, well. I had fun writing it!
First thing I suppose I want to say is about what is said in the notes. You could have easily called it MoonSports. It was pretty obvious from the first description that they were doing sports, and you didn't take moon out of the title so it was pretty obvious where this was happening. It doesn't affect any judgements or anything, just though I should comment on it.
Okay, so this is a nice as a concept piece. I don't know enough about physics to judge how you rendered the idea of sports on the moon, but I see you had fun coming up with your own interpretation and really interpretation is all any of us can do anyway. The weakness in this piece is that it really doesn't do anything. There isn't really a plot, or a direction, implied by this piece, so it ends up feeling more like a scene montage for an untold story than a story within itself. There is probably style bias in this opinion I am sure, but I think this piece would have benefited from something driving the plot. Maybe this isn't just a vacation, but some sort of high-school sports competition where teams are competing to go to the Martian Semi-Finals? I dunno, something like that, create the sense that there is more going on than pure description.
I'd like to note it wasn't CONFIRMED by the title, though, and I wanted it to be like that until he threw the ball into the air. Haha.
I did consider having some sort of overarching plot. Like, a match against a rival school or team or something like that in MoonSports, which had these five different parts they needed to win in and such... But, here's the detail. I find sport-stories boring, and I find that it would distract from the theme, which is “Sports on the Moon”. Hence, I made this entry which could completely focus on that, which was just a bunch of friends having fun trying out different sports on the moon. I was aware it would likely not be a great hit, but I had fun writing it! XD
And now for... other things.
<Snipped quote by platinumskink> Heh.
Note, while I had multiple things to comment on about the entry itself, the vibes are really nice. Just in case of misunderstanding there. Haha.
<Snipped quote by platinumskink> That might be true. We too did not truly get deeply into the characters. The whole had a rather impersonal point of view too. We struggled with figuring out how to do the dialogue bit. On one hand, we could've done a section of regular dialogue, but on the other we wanted to not break the general style. Neither option was good enough, really. Maybe next time we should explore having one character use “I”? See how we ganger tell a story from one angle without missing out on major elements being covered sufficiently for the reader?
Well, that might be a nice exercise. To tell the entire story from one perspective. There's absolutely nothing wrong with seeing the tale from all sides, it's interesting in itself, but it does make it hard to attach to individual characters. This can be fixed by giving the characters long enough sections for themselves, like you did in the start, one for Mellin and one for Werek. Then it hazed together, somehow. But, it can still be third-person, really, just as long as we know the individual's thoughts and such. Haha.
<Snipped quote by platinumskink> We guess this is the same section @Mchaggis described as “fetishisation”? It was not without flaws, no. We did not want it to be sexualized, but did perhaps fail. It's hard to describe traits like the ones making Mellin different from humans without highlighting the sexually dimorphic traits as well as the ones making wolves different from humans.
Imagine how difficult it can be to write such even as you try to avoid those parts that fit “naturally” in there.
Well, er, it's entirely fine that she's naked at a time and that you describe how she looks or that he avoided looking at places. But, the parts that made me uncomfortable were
She could smell that he found her attractive, but she did not have time to deal with such right now. Besides, her body was not in the right part of the cycle to reproduce. She knew men and women found it enjoyable to try even when outside optimal time in the cycle, but she saw no reason for that herself.
She would mate when Nature deemed it appropriate, not a moment before. It was not that she found him unappealing. It simply was not relevant at this point.
Though he naturally desired her, some part of him told him that she had no interest in him. Or rather, that she desired no mating at this time.
Though one part of him was naturally disappointed, another was relieved. He did not think that he was quite ready to have children of his own, especially not with his dead cousin’s twins to raise.
That might help her companion ignore his animalistic urges to mate.
… Yeah. Those three parts, I believe. I'm not sure that needed to be addressed. Eh, oh, well.
<Snipped quote by platinumskink> Aye. You are. With more time, she could've been much more. Maybe even we could've given the Settled more life? More justice from their point of view? Unfortunately we ran out of days to write.
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<Snipped quote by platinumskink> The settled were not meant to be “evil”. We had initially hoped to make both sides reflect both good and evil. That individuals can be evil, not entire societies / civilizations.
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<Snipped quote by platinumskink> Naming him could’ve been relevant, yes. If we had written a more sexualized story, it might’ve involved him serving a female treeperson and perhaps undergoing a transformation? Might have been better if he had both been named and brought in earlier. Maybe even several like him, with some falling under the sway of the treefolk, while others were wiser and managed to run and fight back?
Well, er, about that last number of lines, what you do with your Settled is entirely up to you. As my opinion on the Settled, it's as I said. What I mostly felt was that the Settled side no longer had their one reason why I would root for them. I could care about them in the first paragraphs, when Mellin was representing them, but she was plucked out rather quickly, as was the point of the story. Thereafter they were not represented by any characters the reader could relate to, anymore, hence no characters that make us feel the conflict of two not-good-nor-evil sides. Just these placeholders to tell us about what's happening from the Settled side... Yeah. Oh, well. Time, I suppose.
<Snipped quote by platinumskink> Who knows? Maybe it ended up doing something? It certainly should do so post-story. After all, the moon did turn into a smaller version of the planet everyone was on. With more time to write, we might have been able to give it a direct role. Its change was mostly related to the title and the earliest WIP version of the story. There we had a prophecy involving the moon turning green.
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<Snipped quote by platinumskink> This might have been an error of ours that snuck past editing. Chronologically, the continued raids occurred before this peace. It was thought to be a peace through the Settled losing the war.
Acknowledged. I'll chalk that up to you running out of time, then.
@Silver A short story is forgiven for being all text or it all being build-up for a twist if it's good enough! XD
@WiseDragonGirl Teh-heh. Acknowledged. You're welcome. Indeed, this read more like a song to me than it did a poem. I wonder if I'm doing that wrong, trying to sing any poem I come across? Am I supposed to just read poems, or... Yeah, no idea. So I sing them. Not sure if my melody was the same as yours, but I liked it. XD
Rowan dashed with all his energy, looking around the landscape. Wh-why was the place so incredibly bare NOW!? It felt like it had been filled with Taillows earlier! Now they were, like, gone! The mud made this really hard to run, but, Rowan ran around all the time with his friends in Dewmeadow. You didn't get anywhere fast in Dewmeadow unless you ran, and as impatient kids, this resulted in that they typically ran everywhere. So, if it was something Rowan definitely could do, it was run. He had never considered using it for running away, though.
But that wasn't what he was doing! He reached the first tree and gazed upwards with panicky eyes as he grasped onto the tree.
'T-TAILLOWS!?' He asked loudly, staring up into the tree, looking for any kind of movement. None. He didn't even startle a bug. 'K-KH!' Rowan ran on towards the next tree, however far that might be, his mind also trying to keep track of where he was so he could run back when he was done. For now... 'TAILLOWS!' He shouted a bit more as he ran as quickly as he could trying to catch up to an unsuspecting Pokémon.
After numerous trees he'd likely realize he was maybe scaring the Pokémon away by shouting like that, and stopped doing that, hoping that he'd have better chances when not shouting. He kept running, attentive and panicked eyes looking around and up into trees for Pokémon. He had no idea what might have happened back in the battle. ________
@Pikmin Eye Hm. I could do that. I was totally still waiting for an authoritative post saying if Rowan found one or not, but with that I wasn't expecting Mara to dramatically start looking for him. I'll warn that I'll be pretty busy all of today and tomorrow, though. Haha.
Oh, well. Lesse if I can rush one out.
Edit: Er, there doesn't appear to be any woods. Just the occasional trees sticking out of the ground and hilly, muddy terrain, if I am reading this description accurately. Oh, well. ... Maybe a cluster of trees is acceptable? That which Mara mentioned, haha.
So, um. Rowan didn't stick around to see the effect of his thrown bag. So, unless someone grabbed him or something, he's currently running down the horizon full-speed looking for Taillows like his friends were depending on it. Can't really respond on the conversation going on like that. Haha.
@Pikmin Eye ... Huwah? I'm confused. Did I say something wasn't alright? I was making silly commentary. The post is entirely okay by my standards. I'm satisfied. ... Er. Did I sound in some way I didn't intend? Um. Redo what, and why?
Oh, and
@Delta44 Just wait 'till the GM comes back~ Your presence is otherwise acknowledged~
I think it has with the last departing location to do? Did someone vanish? I was so caught up in that battle, I didn't pay attention to anything else, sorry if I'm suddenly not up-to-date... XD
Savo,
Xaltwind,
Lunamaria Hawke,
Kon Kon,
vue2026,
Floofenstein,
RPM,
Renose,
Rune_Alchemist,
adncod
