- I hate kids.
- Yeah, I kinda do, too.
- They're just noisy, ya know? Like, this one brat the other day kept pestering me to give him a plushie. I didn't even know the kid! I think he was autistic or something. What normal person would do that? So of course I kept saying "No" and by that he understood "No, I want you to be more annoying!"
- Hah! I get it...
- Yeah? Or -Oh!- for example: I have this niece, right? And during a party in my house we had a moment to talk one-on-one. So of course she drops on me all of the meaningless bullshit of her life that she thinks I'd ever care about. "There's this kid that keeps bullying me for liking dancing and he keeps doing things that make the other kids not like me and whenever I ask about something he laughs at me and says it's obvious and blah blah blah...". Jesus CHRIST! I literally felt myself falling asleep in my chair-
- Well, I think what she said sounded a bit concerning, she should've...
- so of course from then on I kept blowing her off any chance I got. I actually sometimes teamed up with the other kid and pulled off a few pranks with him.
- What happened to the girl?
- The last time I saw her she looked pretty measly. Apparently she wants to apply for a dance contest, so I plan on stealing her shoes when...
SHOT THROUGH THE HEART!
As they were laying in the middle of a meadow, side to side, the lycanrock was unaware of lopunny's clenched left fist gathering up a mass of kinetic energy. He should've caught on the moment he saw her right hand switching the MP3 player to her Bon Jovi album collection.
In perfect synchronization, the Focus Punch landed at the singer's first word.
AND YOU'RE TO BLAME!
The second verse echoed in the silence of night, as the earth parted, dust, rocks, bugs and blades of grass flew skyward, scaring off a nearby flock of birds, not to mention waking up half of the forest.
You give love... a bad name!
As if these words were directed straight at the now-spazzing-out nightwolf, Jean smoothly pointed her finger to the struggling mass of pain and confusion, knowing that despite the numbness of his limbs and the ringing in his ears, he's still conscious enough to understand one thing above all...
He done fucked up.
Hi.
My name's Memaythink. Memay for short.
You might be thinking - "What kind of a Pokemon fanfic starts out in the middle of a friendly conversation suddenly turning into a strangely justified, swift and unexpected punishment?"
- "the best kind of fanfic."
Let's back up a bit. And by "back up", I mean explain our main hero's whole life story.
A single life, even the most average and uneventful one, is still filled with thousands of strange little experiences that, in a roundabout way, shape a person into who they are.
Jean never had the luxury of a simple-to-understand, tragic, one-note backstory. Both of her parents are alive and well. They've tried their damndest to shape her into a functional member of society. Aside from having a cool sibling, there was nothing lacking in her childhood. Certainly nothing that would create a deep-seated psychosis she'd carry into adulthood. Well, maybe there was one:
Her ego was dead.
Bullies are kinda like war-torn zone. Any two people can experience being bullied in mostly the same way and come out with radically different conclusions. One kid would harbor a buried hatred of everyone and everything in the world. Another would see it as a source of motivation, to become better and get one up over the bullies Yet another would live a life of fear and shyness, becoming paranoid of showing weakness or making themselves known in any way. There are ones who would dedicate themselves to stopping bullying by all means necessary. There are the ones who would become bullies themselves, or even come out relatively unscathed, thanks to the support of their family and friends.
Jean's friends were her bullies.
It's not like they had no reason to pick on her. Little Jean had a very short temper, a hatred of being laughed at behind her back or pushed out of any group activity. She took herself way too seriously, seeing any show of her own weakness as a gigantic embarrassment and reason enough to sulk. And she did show her weaknesses. A lot. Being born with the Ability Klutz is like the ultimate middle finger from Arceus. Jean was impressively forgetful, aloof and unaware of her surroundings, unable to pick up on most social cues, developed an aversion to physical contact of any type, a strange, unconventional personality and generally no reason to have any close friends at all.
But it all changed one day...well it was more of a few years of gradual changes. She met an experienced Trainer that found her generally useful for low-level Contest teams and kept her around for many years, at first thanks to her results, later on for their matching personalities and...
A lack of a good partner of the opposite sex.
As if you wouldn't.
Anyways, the greatest change having a Trainer brought to Jean's life was the discovery of a little thing knows as...
T
You see, I left out one other tidbit about the cream-colored rabbit's childhood - she loved to dance. And she was damn good at it. Whenever Jean heard a song she had an even mild admiration for, it was as if her body started to move on it's own, almost mechanically, yet visibly triggered by instinct. She didn't just bop up and down to the beat of the song, her hands and legs did weird, specific and, on some level, fitting movements that accompanied the most specific of notes.
However, this uncanny ability wasn't discovered in her for a very long time. It demanded a very specific set of circumstances to be performed:
1. She had to be drunk. Out. Of. Her. Mind. Without suitable alcohol density her conscience will just physically prevent her from performing the most interesting of her moves.
2. Jean has to have heard the song at least once and liked it. Seems obvious, but considering her very specific taste in music, this can become a bit of a burden for any DJ who would want for the Lopunny to drop some sick moves on the dance floor, only to realize nothing on his playlist is able to "turn her on", for lack of a better word.
1b. She has to be alone. This refers both to when she's putting on a pair of headphones, giving all her heart and soul to a phantom audience of her own room in the middle of the night, as well as when she needs a bit of space and no dance partner in the middle of a disco crowd. If you try dancing together with her, you'll either be confused by her rapid movements or bored that she doesn't know anything aside from the basics partner dancing.
With time, these caveats became more and more liberal, as she kept learning new dance moves and songs. Jean was now more laid-back, willing to be more open and honest about her weaknesses, willing to go with the flow and oh yeah that whole death of ego thing turned out to be pretty useful after all
While Jean never had any favorite genre and her tastes stayed pretty eclectic, her trainer loved nothing more than 70's funk and motown. As such, she didn't share a ton of her own favorites with him, knowing he'd find most of them questionable.
By the way, I lied. Jean did have a genre that imbued her with more wonder, excitement and joy than any other. Mashups. Neil Cicierega, the youtubers Triple Q, Cyrakek and BotanicSage, she even considered Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" to be an early part of that movement. Of course, she didn't blindly like anything that fell into that category. In her mind, creating a good mashup, or even an interesting one, demanded a very specific mindset. Being able to find a way for two songs to work with each other is no easy feat. It demands a fundamental understanding of what music is, which parts of it affect people universally and what formulas have repeatedly appeared in it's history.
In a way, a mashup is perfect evidence that all songs, heck, all art is fundamentally the same. While an artist will try to put tangential details that differentiate his creations from those of others, the fundamental message he'll try to send will always be this:
"This is how I understand myself and how I fit into society"
Well, okay, it's not all art. Just, like, most of it, right?
One of Jean's biggest flaws is that she has a tendency to overgeneralize things. She's very aware of it, often times not believing words that come out of her own mouth as she is speaking them. Maybe due to her desires for "a simple life" and a preference for instinctual understanding over actual understanding, Jean reflexively tries to sum up any new information gained to it's most basic components, disregarding the details.
Speaking of details, the world our main hero inhabits is a pretty strange one in enough of itself. It can be summed up as such:
The real world, with the same history and culture we have, but Pokemon have replaced both animals and humans.
This only raises more questions, doesn't it? Well, let's answer them all.
"What about Berries?"
They're all blatantly based on fruit. Everyone eats fruit.
"Do Pokemon eat each other?"
The don't call themselves Pokemon. They're all just people to each other. And yes, the strong eat the weak. Technically everyone has feelings and a soul(you think animals don't?), but it doesn't stop us and it won't stop them.
"Why are there no humans when you mentioned a Trainer?"
You think there aren't any mons smart enough to take on a tactician/leader role? C'mon.
"Do the Pokemon games exist in that world?"
Yes, they're a long-standing series of extremely realistic RPG's. Still, the turn-based combat system is considered a watered-down abstraction of the real thing.
"Why didn't you capitalize 'Lopunny' and 'Lycanrock'?"
Do you capitalize 'wolf' or 'bunny'? Or 'animal'? Or 'cage'?
"How did their culture and history turn out exactly the same as ours?"
Suspension of disbelief. If there are technically infinite universes, there exists one that turned out just like that. If you have a problem with that, thank you and goodbye.
And from now on I'll (hopefully) keep my tangents to the author's notes and away from the main story. This first chapter is a bit of a mess and apparently much shorter than this site's average (about 5000 words/ch, jeez). I'm also aware this is technically a songfic, which isn't allowed on Fanfiction, but I'm apparently also kinda on the legal boundary? Leave reviews plz