Return to Lynwood, Chapter 11

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7
Chapter 8 - Chapter 9 - Chapter 10 - Chapter 11

The next morning dawned just as cool and foggy as the last. This was usual for the Haunted Woods, and Isengrim enjoyed the frequent cloud cover over the region. Werelupes were creatures of the night, and the sun often hurt their sensitive eyes and overheated their thick-furred bodies. Isengrim and his pack used to be largely nocturnal, but over the past few years had eased into being more active during the day, to better facilitate relations between them and their diurnal allies.

Not to mention his owner was a morning person. By the time Isengrim was ready to open his eyes, Terra was already up and about, nibbling on a bit of bread and dried fruit for her own breakfast before she helped a groggier-looking Pharazon get Gwyneth fed and watered. Suhel and her packmates had gone off on another hunt. Connor was still asleep, while Lexora had been woken up by her own coughing a while ago, and never managed to get back to sleep.

 

 Yeah, no, 10 years old is waaaaaay too young to be coming of age.

Takeshi Shudō, the head writer for the first seasons of the Pokémon anime, wrote some novelizations of the first episodes of the anime where he went more in-depth about the society of the Pokémon world as shown in the anime. In the anime universe as Shudō envisioned it, people were legally considered adults at age 10, which is why Ash and Misty can romp around Kanto without any adult supervision, and why 10 is the minimum age one can be registered as a Pokémon Trainer.

Seeing as Professor Oak shows up at the end of the game to congratulate Red on becoming Champion... it was the perfect opportunity to unleash his insanity upon readers again. :)

Return to Lynwood, Chapter 10

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4 - Chapter 5 - Chapter 6 - Chapter 7
Chapter 8 - Chapter 9 - Chapter 10 - Chapter 11

The trip to the old keep would take two and a half days from here, but they would be far from boring ones, Isengrim thought as they began their march through the forest. The Haunted Woods was full of wild beauty, and the company couldn’t be beat. The only things dampening his mood were the curse, Connor’s struggles, and the nagging fear that someone or something might have found the staff by now. After all, it had been nearly fifteen years since that keep was destroyed—more than enough time for looters to comb through the ruins.

But he tried not to let that get him down. After all, the air was cool and clean, the trees were aflame in autumn colours, and he and his party chatted and sang as they went. Lexora was quite good company, and the secondhand shopkeeper had a great deal of secondhand stories from her father about his globetrotting business exploits.

Isengrim was fascinated with everything Mr. Fitchet had seen and done in places like Shenkuu and Krawk Island. Someday he would have to figure out a way to travel over Neopia more widely without causing too much trouble. The fact that he still had business ties to quite a few individuals on the wrong side of the law had made his dealings with other kingdoms complicated, and lately the fact had begun to set less and less well with him. He thought that when he returned home, he should devote some time to trying to figure out a solution.

 

 I feel bad for Blue, honestly. He seems to spend most of his time waiting around for Red to show up. Who knows how long he had to sit in that Champion's room bored out of his mind.

 Agatha's line when you challenge her is a really intriguing bit of character development... that never gets brought up again. Also she's nowhere to be seen in Gen II which takes place three years after Gen I. I dunno, maybe she and Oak got married and she realized there's more to life than Pokemon battles?

 More doodling, this time for a My Little Pony fanfic I've been working on (which explains last month's geek rant). 

This is a concept design for the evil version of mirror-universe King Sombra, as the fic is a follow-up to the MLP:FiM graphic novel storyline “Reflections”. That story arc revolves around an alternate-universe Equestria where moral alignments are reversed, meaning that universe’s versions of Celestia and Luna are evil while King Sombra is good. Regular Celestia finds her way into this universe during her studies under Starswirl the Bearded, and she and Mirror-Sombra strike up a relationship that is severed when Mirror-Sombra absorbs the evil inside Mirror-Celestia and Mirror-Luna to prevent them from trying to take over regular Equestria. Celestia is also forced to seal the passageway between the universes to prevent them from becoming inextricably entangled.