#and ofc the giratina wings

[cottoncandyfrizz]

so long to you, beloved traitor

[harusha]

Tbh I want a Pokemon game where it starts off as normal, you’re a kid (11 to 16 y/o or w/e) and you have a rival whose kinda upbeat and all that but a bit of a jerk, just emulating classic Pokemon with all the tropes. Maybe make them (or a second rival) a member of the obligatory evil team. And all the Pokemon found in the region are new ones.

And you get a journal alongside your pokedex, and it records little side quests, flavor text (maybe on all the items you find, the thoughts of the PC on each location, etc.), and at the end there’s just a blank page with the current date at the top. Just standard stuff like the Sinnoh journal or FRLG flashbacks but more in-depth.

You go on your little quest, find out the villains are trying to harness the power of legendary Pokemon, just standard series tropes. However, the ones they’re trying to harness aren’t the cover legendaries but previous ones such as the beasts or lake trio, but you as the player will probably just assume they’ll target the cover legendaries sooner or later since again, series tropes.

And like FRLG, you can catch the legendary birds as soon as you can visit their dungeons (around midpoint), no post-game requirements.

No one ever seems to mention the cover legendaries however.

And, the “region” is a water-locked continent (albeit a small one so I guess region still applies if you wanna be a bit loose with the definition) with a bunch of municipalities with your generic gym quest, and everyone considers the horizon to the “edge of the world” and the gameplay emulates that.

If you try to fly with an “average” (ie. non-legendary) Pokemon, you’ll just hit a invisible wall and/or see vicious storm clouds in the distance so the PC will decide to turn back.

If you fly on the back of a legendary Pokemon however, you’ll be able to bypass the “wall” and storm. Maybe Lugia quells the storm, Zapdos makes it to where the lightning won’t hit you, etc. and you’ll just be flying over nothing but ocean for like 5 to 7 minutes real-time, no birds, no fish, no music or whatever just ocean waves and your Pokemon’s flapping wings.

And if you go for that long, you’ll finally see land and perhaps you’ll be thrown into a difficult dungeon where at the end, you’ll find one of the three cover legendaries at like lv. 80 and you decide to catch it, just like any player would. Maybe thinking the villain team will show up as soon as you do. They don’t.

If you do however, the world begins to distort slightly (random storms flying back, irregular behavior from Pokemon and worried comments from NPCs, mild though almost initially unnoticeable glitching, etc.). And the final page of your journal starts filling up with dialogue about the legendary you just caught, its behavior, and the weird occurrences popping up about your home region.

And if you decide to fly across the wall again (though this time in a different direction, perhaps in search of another “secret”), you’ll hit land again with the same concept, a difficult dungeon with one of the cover legendaries. You catch it again, and the world gets worst (more glitching, frequent storms, etc.) And your journal page fills up again.

If you decide to do it again, and also catch or defeat the final cover legend (same set-up), you irrefutably mess up your world. The glitching has gotten horrible, almost unbearable, and so forth. If you decide to go in the last cardinal direction, maybe hoping to fix what you did, you’ll instead just find a small, lonely island with a staircase going up.

You’re thrown into a cutscene where the world gets so messed up that it’s “reset” and you’re forced back to the title screen and it’s changed. The screen no longer has your cover legend but like Dialga or whomever and the title’s changed to like Pokemon Platinum (depending on version).

Turns out, you caught the previous forms of Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina and messed up the world to the point Arceus had to reset it.

Ofc, gameplay and story segregation comes into play and they can’t actually delete your save file, so it just acts like you did nothing wrong (and resets all that glitching and stuff back) so you can continue playing online battles. Maybe doing all of that also unlocks previous gen Pokemon in the wild for gameplay purposes.

And the dialogue for the Champion/villain leader changes slightly depending on if you do all of this post-game or mid-game as soon as the Legendary birds become available.

[phantompsychic]

((Headcanon time!))

Subject: Will’s Feelings on the Myths of Johto

aka Why Lugia is his favorite Legendary Ever

((As I said before, Will likes Johto. It’s full of such long and interesting history, and he’s the type of nerd who was always enamored with learning about all the various stories of, say, Feudal Johto, or its war with Kanto, etc. (and he did learn about Kalosian history too since his Dad was Kalosian, but that’s for another hc). He preferred listening to such stories rather than read about them, though. He didn’t really have anything against books, but it’s just that the stories seemed much more easy to listen to when spoken aloud by someone. Made it come more alive to him.

Anyways, as he got a little older, he began to notice that many bits of Johto’s history intermingled with mythical accounts of divine intervention by Johto’s Legendary and Mythical Pokemon. The two that interested him the most were Lugia’s intervention in a war/subsequent creation of the Whirl Islands and the legends of the Forest Guardian, Celebi. Ho-Oh and the Burned Tower was up there too ofc, but regardless, he was confused when so many of his classmates and even some teachers say that such accounts were just myths. He was still on the innocent phase of ‘but x said it/I read it in a book so how can it be false?’

The thing is, even as he reached his teens, he kept hearing and reading about the stories in many books. He didn’t get why there was so much confusion in Johto regarding the Legends. It kinda bugged him a lot that these Legends that played so much of a big role (supposedly) in parts of Johto’s history were possibly just a myth. If they were a myth, then what really happened, y’know?

And yet, at the same time, it also fascinated him.

Mysteries always made Will curious and hyperfixate on them. It tickled his curiosity, made him wanna investigate and find all their secrets. So, these conflicting accounts on the myths of Johto had a strong hold on his attention. In fact, both during and after the circus, wherever Will would stop in his travels, if he heard rumors of a myth or legend or any kind of mystery, he’d tend to want to investigate it. And as he traveled all over the world, he got to explore many different, mysterious places, even if exploring them went against his better judgement.

Usually, when Will investigated the spot of some mystery or myth, he’d be able to ‘sense’ something in the area. Be it something off or the actual presence of a higher power, ever since he was a kid, he knew when some ‘unusual’ power was near, and he learned to trust it, even if it wasn’t very exact.

Even though he was already pretty confident in its ability, there was one incident in which Will became fully convinced of his sense’s ability to detect true living myths/Legends and to never doubt it again (detailed in next para; skip it if you don’t feel like reading it).

During his travels, he explored the woods outside Veilstone City in Sinnoh. He’d heard of a secret path that led to an ‘evil 4th Lake of Sinnoh’, and he wanted to check it out. And, well, he didn’t even need to ‘search’. Even on the main official path leaving Veilstone, Will could feel an unnaturally powerful presence coming from the East, into very deep woods. All he had to do was follow its ‘pull’ so to speak, and soon enough he wound up at the Spring Path. As he went along, though, he noticed that his sixth sense was starting to react more and more the farther along the path he went. It felt very much like the sense he got when he was near Ghosts, and while it unnerved him, he at least wanted to put on a brave face and push farther until he at least caught a glimpse of the 4th Lake. Eventually, he reached a clearing, spying the edge of a large lake at the bottom of a depression. Just the way the lake sunk INTO the ground as opposed to being even level with an islet rising UP at the center was enough to tell him he had indeed found the ominous 4th Lake, Sendoff Spring. And it was a good thing he was able to take note of all this so quickly, ‘cause the very next moment after he set his eyes on the Spring, his sight became momentarily blinded as an eerie vision flashed before him. It was his sense, which was going absolutely crazy, flashing him a vision of a dark, six-winged monster swooping through the shadows. The level of cosmically horrific strength he sensed, paired with the frightening vision, was so overwhelming that he turned around right there and fucking ran all the way back to the main route. Of course, what he saw was a vision of Giratina, but he didn’t know that till he found the right book at Canalave Library.

So, even though this incident gave Will fucking nightmares for weeks (and still does on occasion), it did do two important things for him. First, it affirmed that he could indeed sense real, living Legends if he was even a fair distance from them. Second, it jogged his memory.

See, at first, Will had thought that incident in Sinnoh was the first time he’d ever experienced his sixth sense showing him a vision of the thing it was detecting, but the shock of ‘seeing’ Giratina made him remember he’d ‘seen’ another creature with it before.

It was when he was very little. Around 4. His parents had taken him on a vacation to Cianwood to chill at the beach. Now, even before they arrived at the beach, he heard all the old stories around town about how bad children get shipped off to Whirl Islands to be punished by a monster etc., making him reluctant to go. It took his parents’ constant reassurances they were not taking him to the Islands to calm him, but once they got to the beach, Will quickly started to get upset anyways. He couldn’t stop crying because he kept seeing a ‘bird with a mask’, believing that it was gonna come ‘take me away to the Whirl ‘lands and punish me’.

Reflecting on this memory now, Will realized, he had been sensing Lugia, all the way out on Cianwood’s shores.

So, naturally, when he returned to Johto later on, shortly before he officially applied to be an Elite, he set out for the Whirl Islands. He had to see for himself if he could still sense Lugia, or if he was even remembering that correctly. Of course, before he hit the Islands, he decided to check out the other mysterious locations in Johto, such as Ilex Forest, too. Unfortunately for him, though, he sensed nothing. Not a thing from any place he visited in fact. It kinda felt disheartening not finding any signs of proof for his home region’s myths, but he still went thru with checking Whirl Islands as well.

He started Surfing towards it on his Slowbro from Olivine, and initially, he still felt nothing. By the time Olivine was a dot on the horizon, he started to second guess himself a bit. Perhaps he’d just seen a Murkrow or Delibird as a kid and he was remembering wrong, y’know? But no, for once he was happy to be wrong; once he was a little deeper into the ocean, he got a similar feeling to when he was on Spring Path, though not as strong. A litter closer to the islands and sure enough, Will began seeing visions of a ‘masked bird’, surrounded by water. Seeing as he wasn’t running away like he did at the Spring this time, the visions persisted, flashing by every so often. His sense was naturally screaming ‘danger’ like it always did when it detected something, but he didn’t turn away this time. Stepping onto the Islands proper, which notably felt very intimidating to him, he kept pushing onwards through its cave systems.

Again using his ‘sense’ to lead him down the right path, he eventually did come to the imposing waterfall that comprised Lugia’s chamber. Here, his sense again was going crazy, and the scale of the room was quite intimidating to Will as well. The visions were pretty regular while he was in this room, but he could still tell that the ‘source’ of them was farther away. Later on, he read about Lugia in more detail, taking note of how Lugia lives at the bottom of the sea in fear of causing damage to others. So, having ‘seen’ where Lugia lives, Will now felt instant empathy for it. He knew what it was like to have to isolate oneself to ensure your powers don’t hurt anyone, and he also knew what it was like not being able to return to your former home. It made him feel bad for it, even though he was also aware that for all he knew, Lugia liked the bottom of the ocean.

Nowadays, Will still occasionally visits its chamber in the Whirl Islands, both because of his infinite mystification with the Legendary Psychic-type and to ‘give it company’ on the off chance it actually wants human company. He doubted it cared, but y’know just in case right? He never touches or destroys anything while he was there, not even fight the wild Pokemon (Teleported out of battle), so he’s doing no harm. He just sits there, really, thinking, awestruck by simply feeling its presence))