Here's another drabble for us writers out there, and the things that inspire us :).
Drabble 24: Underhand
And with the mightiest of underhand blows, the Sky Uppercut, the beaten, battered, Blaziken blasted the Salamence in the chin on its pass for a Wing Attack that would have been the end of him. The huge beast tumbled through the air and crashed into the mountainside, defeated. Blaziken had finally done what all his fighting type friends had said he could never accomplish. As he jumped onto the unconscious body of the great dragon, declaring freedom for all the Pokemon who cheered for him in the valley below, he knew that this was the victory that would finally make him feel strong.
Grinning, Marshal tossed down his pen at last and blew the soreness from his achy hand. After a year and a half, he'd finally finished his first novel. It wasn't perfect, but it was his and maybe Shauntal's publisher would like it anyway, at least after a revision or two. As he sat up and looked around Shauntal's battle room, where she'd allowed him to work on his book due to its ample supply of pens, pencils, paper and books for ideas and curing writers block, his eyes passed over an old paperback titled. The Device.
He shuddered, remembering the first time he had seen and been curious. It was one of his girlfriend's earlier works and though it hadn't been a bestseller, it had certainly filled him with dread. It hadn't scared Marshal. Not much really scared him, except roller coasters and failure, but the gritty, relentless detail of the horrible machine in the story had made him shudder. It began with a cute little Teddiursa, drawn into a tiny, dark, metal cave by the scent of honey. That was when the horror began.
The cave was a trap, made for unsuspecting, innocent little Pokemon like the Teddiursa. It had locked steel walls around him, caging him and rolling him down a conveyor belt to where a gigantic Steelix was waiting in a hellishly deep cavern to eat him. It was by pure chance that when he fell from the conveyor belt and the Steelix was opening its maw to receive him, a kind Crobat had caught the Teddiursa and flown him into the safe little nook high in the cavern wall. The Steelix forgot about them, but there were other things in that Arceus-forsaken cave: Ruthless Druddigon, blind Primeape that would eat anything, lakes full of deadly Sharpedo. The two small Pokemon spent four years carefully navigating their way out of that place. They made friends of others who escaped the device that had brought them there, but all of them died on the journey home, from the ravenous cave Pokemon, or starvation or poison gas from the depths of the earth. Too many times Teddiursa had wanted to give up, but at last, when he and his friend Crobat finally made it to the surface, Hungry Druddigon were chasing after them. Crobat flew back inside, sacrificing itself for his friend, who was by now an Ursaring.
Ursaring was distraught by the loss of his friend, but determined not to make his death for nothing. However, the exit to the great cave was not truly an exit, but another cage that lifted Ursaring up into the ranks of the other Pokemon strong enough to survive the cave. It was just another part of the Device. There it was forced to serve Team Rocket, who created the whole thing as cruel assembly line to make the strongest Pokemon for its members. Ursaring never escaped the Device.
Marshal had argued with Shauntal for hours after reading it. So angry that Ursaring had suffered such a fate and wondering why anyone would make a story without a happy ending. Shauntal had explained to him that the reaction he was having was precisely the reason why she had given it that ending, to show that things don't always work out. Sometimes a terrible, dirty ending made for a better book than a happy one that the reader was expecting, one they've already read a hundred times. Marshal still didn't agree. After all, the point of a book was to teach the reader about what's right and wrong, but he couldn't deny how great The Device was. It had thrilled him, made him stay up long nights when he should've been resting for the next days training, unable to wait to find out what happened next. It was that book that got Marshal interested in horror, made him love it almost as much as the action and adventure genres.
Maybe next I'll write something scary, Marshal thought as he closed his notebook, picked it up and went to find Shauntal so he could show her his finished product.
IIIIII
Remember, even when your stories seem to take forever and there are little reviews for it, it's important to keep going. If nothing else, so you can say that you finish what you start :).