This is a fic that I'm working on for Bulbagarden's Summer Bulbagarden Writing Month (the SuBuWriMo, so they call it). It's kind of ironic, though, that posted it at Serebii first and then here, due to the server being overloaded.
And here I present the fruits of tonight's labour, the first chapter of said story. I wonder if I'll actually be able to reach 100,000 words, which is the gold medal standard. Don't expect it, though - it took me a whole year to reach 100,000 words on Generation 2021. (mostly because of lack of work >_>)
There's also a commentary, running parallel to the work, exposing my intentions of the work. You can find it here: http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/f512/rise-silph-commentary-110760-new/
Without further ado!
Chapter 1 - The Monster in my Backyard
Running total: 2,143 words [Small revision. Engineering isn't exactly a trade. >_>]
So, comments? Likes? Dislikes?
I'll still plod on with Generation 2021, don't you worry about that.
UPDATE 04/06/2011: Re-rated MATURE for descriptions of drug usage.
And here I present the fruits of tonight's labour, the first chapter of said story. I wonder if I'll actually be able to reach 100,000 words, which is the gold medal standard. Don't expect it, though - it took me a whole year to reach 100,000 words on Generation 2021. (mostly because of lack of work >_>)
There's also a commentary, running parallel to the work, exposing my intentions of the work. You can find it here: http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/f512/rise-silph-commentary-110760-new/
Without further ado!
Chapter 1 - The Monster in my Backyard
[Bayesia Town – June 16, 1967]
The summer breeze blew by the trees as the sun began to lower from the sky above Bayesia Town. The birds chirped, the dogs barked, and the leaves – of birch and elm and oak – blew in the air. People were gathering in their cars to leave work, and children were gathering around the schoolyards for the last time for the next two months.
Yes, it was that time of year – summer break. One by one, the children left school. Some left with thoughts of ice cream on hot days and rowing canoes at their summer cottages. Others had prospects of travelling to faraway areas with their parents like India or Egypt. Some lucky fellows from the high school would even find their first job, perhaps working at the wood mill, perhaps labouring at the farm, or perhaps even doing secretary work for a law firm.
Donovan was one of these people. A strapping young boy, he was set on becoming an apprentice at his father’s electrician business. As he walked out of school that day, he was thinking about the job he’d be starting in August, once all the paperwork had been finished, and was planning out what he’d be doing for the rest of June and July, when those rolled around.
“Hey, Don!” called a voice that snapped him out of his thoughts.
“What is it, Bel?” replied Donovan. Belinda was his girlfriend, and he had a reputation to protect now that he had her.
“C’mon, I just thought I’d walk home with you. You know,” her fingers crawled across his arm, “to protect me from all those strangers.”
“You’re scaring me, Bel,” said Donovan. Whenever Belinda had thoughts like that, it was sure to end in chaos. “Let’s just go.”
As they walked in silence, they saw an ice cream truck pass by, and the smaller children whom they knew were from the school next to them ran up eagerly, money jangling happily in their pockets to give to the ice cream man. A squirrel darted across the road from them, narrowly missing a car. A butterfly the size of a small dog fluttered by—wait a minute. Donovan rubbed his eyes, and looked again. There was nothing.
Donovan dismissed it as just a large leaf flying by from the wind, and kept walking with Belinda. They passed the house of Old Ernie, the town’s oldest living resident. He had been alive for both world wars – Donovan himself had been born a few years after the second one had ended. It was said Old Ernie knew what he had been in his past life – as if such a thing existed, thought Donovan when he first heard of it. People claimed that he had ridden on large animals, and fought with dragons with fire on their tails and machines that looked like magnets and psychic beings who held spoons that concentrated their power.
But none of that stuff could be true – after all, over the past few decades, they had already established that the geologic record contained no such thing, right?
He had become lost in thought again, and promptly bumped into a telephone pole, shaking off two large-looking crows from it. Except... one of them was wearing a hat?
Must be one of the hippies’ shenanigans, thought Donovan, as he got back up. Those hippies were all around the place nowadays. It was some sort of anti-war movement, but all they did all day was smoke marijuana and lay around advocating peace and weed for everybody. Hardly the kind of person that Donovan wanted to become.
“You okay, Don?” asked Belinda. “Even after crashing into a pole, you’re still your usual, absent-minded self.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” said Donovan, rubbing his head, as Belinda helped him up.
“Well, here’s where I leave,” said Belinda, pointing to a road that branched to the left of the one that they were walking off of. “See you sometime.”
“Bye...” said Donovan, blushing slightly. He always had that tendency, to get all loose in front of her. One of these days, it would kill him.
* * *
As he continued walking home, the sky got darker, bit by bit. A few cars passed along the way, now that the evening rush hour had set in.
Finally, he saw his house – 144 Penrose Drive. It was as clean as any house on this line of houses, with a small garden of flowers arranged in a neat little row next to the concrete walkway to the front door.
As he opened the door, he announced his presence. “I’m home!”
“Donovan!” said his father, Josiah. “Welcome home. You got your report cards today, right?”
“Here you go, dad,” he said, reaching into his backpack and bringing out a piece of paper with the Bayesia High seal on it.
His father scanned the piece of paper – on every row was a small red “A”.
“I’m disappointed in you, son,” said his father, grinning in jest. “You should have gotten me at least one B, then I could say you aren’t unnaturally good at doing well at school.” He slapped him on the shoulder, and said, “We’ll have dinner in about an hour. How about you get yourself cleaned up a little. You look a bit roughed up.”
It was true, Donovan found – he looked at himself, and his shirt had been torn slightly by the fall, along with getting dirty.
He climbed upstairs and took a quick shower before coming back down to watch the news.
Their TV was in full colour – a luxury for a family in a neighbourhood such as theirs. The anchor was talking about how somebody’s prediction for the world’s end. “...and according to one Biblical scholar, the world is going to end on July 21, 1968.” The anchor chuckled. “But don’t worry, that’s more than a year away, right?”
The anchor’s partner said, “Yep. That’s more than enough time to get all your investments checked out and your jobs quit, I’d say.”
They both had a hearty laugh at that, and moved on the the next item about how the hippies were, once again, stirring up riots – not in Bayesia Town, but in Goldback City and Airdows Town, which were not too far from here. The world was becoming a much smaller place now – his quaint little town in the nowheres of America was slowly becoming connected – through things such as airplane-operated mail, telephones, and now even widespread broadcast television. You could know in an instant what was happening, at least much more quickly compared to when his parents were still his age. All you had to do was turn on the TV, and find out for yourself.
Having a father with connections to engineering, Donovan knew of an even more promising technology – the computer. Just to think about it – a machine that could perform tens of thousands of calculations every second. It was absolutely mind-boggling, and would be a device of salvation for accountants everywhere, who had to be trained in operating adding machines, some of which took more than thirty seconds to spit out a single calculation. With a device such as a computer, accountants could simply punch in their numbers, and out would come the results in the time that it would take to do just one calculation on an adding machine.
It wasn’t just the office where such a device could be useful – already, people were testing out putting computer terminals in the home, linked up to a central processing unit in a special building designed for it, and allowing it to manage people’s lives.
There were talks, both in the newspaper and the school that they were in, that in just thirty years, the computer would remove the need for massive amounts of paper in the office, as they could simply feed everything into a computer, and have it manage everything. The only paper needed would be to give it input and receive output from it. Donovan was certainly hopeful about this – being an environmental advocate himself, the reduced need for paper would certainly reduce their impact on the environment. He had heard from scientists that the massive amount of pollution that they were pumping into the air would eventually cover up the atmosphere and cool the whole Earth down. That would be no fun – having to wear coats to work every day in an eternal winter.
Suddenly, a rustling noise shook Donovan from his latest spiel of thought. It came from the backyard, but the sound stopped as quickly as it had started.
“Donovan?” said a voice. “It’s time for dinner!”
“Coming, ma!” said Donovan, as he turned off the television and headed for the dinner table.
* * *
After dinner, Donovan retreated to his room, where he read the newest Circuit magazine, about advances in the field of electrical engineering and technology in general. His family spent more than twenty dollars a month on these magazines, as Donovan gobbled up the information from every single one of these, which amounted to more than two hundred a year. Their family would then donate the old books to a university, who gladly paid them back for the chance to have an archive copy. It was money well spent, as he was well on his way to following in his father’s footsteps.
The theme of this month’s Circuit magazine was the home of the future, which centralized around the computer. This magazine gave him a good analysis of the suspicions that he had hereto only picked up from the newspapers and other media through which speculation such as this arrived. Now that there was an expert opinion on the issue, he would be sure to read everything about it.
First, he read that a whole year’s worth of daily schedules could be put into the computer system, to be read from at will. That he could believe. Then, the article talked about how computers could eventually be used to teach children. Donovan thought it was a little iffy; the computers that he knew now could barely understand their own language, let alone understand it well enough to teach it to somebody else.
As he read further, he noticed such things as the computer running the stock market. Now that was truly preposterous. A computer as it was already could perform ten thousand calculations per second, but to manage the stock market of such a hectic system of floor traders such as the New York Stock Exchange? That would require not only calculation, but more data than the computers he knew of today could handle at once. The ones they had now were already the size of a bank branch. How much larger would it have to be to manage such a complicated system of trades and transactions, all in perfect timing?
The magazine’s issue also included such things like space travel. The president of the time had challenged America to put a man on the moon before the turn of the 1970’s. The results of their labour so far didn’t seem promising – the only test they had put up at the time had exploded and the astronauts dead in the vehicle.
The rustling noise disturbed him again, and he turned off the light in his room, venturing out into the backyard to see what the fuss was all about.
This time, it was definitely there. Suddenly, some thing popped out of the grass. It looked like a mouse, but it had a yellow, zigzag-like tail, and small red pockets on its cheeks. It took one look at him, and screamed in fright. “Pikaaaa!” It then ran away, scurrying into a hole in his fence that he was sure wasn’t there that morning.
He returned inside. His father asked him, “Did you hear something out there?”
Donovan thought for a moment. What kind of a creature said “pika” instead of just squealing? He could distinctly make out those two sounds.
“Nothing, dad.” Whatever it was, it was probably just his mind making up sounds. He had to stop reading so many books about alien invasions.
* * *
As he tucked himself into bed, he couldn’t stop thinking about that little yellow creature. It couldn’t have been an auditory hallucination. He was sure he heard it say “pika”. The only thing he could think of was the pika, a rodent-like creature that lived in some regions of the Rockies. But none of those looked anything like the... monster that he had just seen, nor did they get their name from actually squealing out “pika”.
He went to sleep on that thought, dreaming of electric sheep and floating magnets.
The summer breeze blew by the trees as the sun began to lower from the sky above Bayesia Town. The birds chirped, the dogs barked, and the leaves – of birch and elm and oak – blew in the air. People were gathering in their cars to leave work, and children were gathering around the schoolyards for the last time for the next two months.
Yes, it was that time of year – summer break. One by one, the children left school. Some left with thoughts of ice cream on hot days and rowing canoes at their summer cottages. Others had prospects of travelling to faraway areas with their parents like India or Egypt. Some lucky fellows from the high school would even find their first job, perhaps working at the wood mill, perhaps labouring at the farm, or perhaps even doing secretary work for a law firm.
Donovan was one of these people. A strapping young boy, he was set on becoming an apprentice at his father’s electrician business. As he walked out of school that day, he was thinking about the job he’d be starting in August, once all the paperwork had been finished, and was planning out what he’d be doing for the rest of June and July, when those rolled around.
“Hey, Don!” called a voice that snapped him out of his thoughts.
“What is it, Bel?” replied Donovan. Belinda was his girlfriend, and he had a reputation to protect now that he had her.
“C’mon, I just thought I’d walk home with you. You know,” her fingers crawled across his arm, “to protect me from all those strangers.”
“You’re scaring me, Bel,” said Donovan. Whenever Belinda had thoughts like that, it was sure to end in chaos. “Let’s just go.”
As they walked in silence, they saw an ice cream truck pass by, and the smaller children whom they knew were from the school next to them ran up eagerly, money jangling happily in their pockets to give to the ice cream man. A squirrel darted across the road from them, narrowly missing a car. A butterfly the size of a small dog fluttered by—wait a minute. Donovan rubbed his eyes, and looked again. There was nothing.
Donovan dismissed it as just a large leaf flying by from the wind, and kept walking with Belinda. They passed the house of Old Ernie, the town’s oldest living resident. He had been alive for both world wars – Donovan himself had been born a few years after the second one had ended. It was said Old Ernie knew what he had been in his past life – as if such a thing existed, thought Donovan when he first heard of it. People claimed that he had ridden on large animals, and fought with dragons with fire on their tails and machines that looked like magnets and psychic beings who held spoons that concentrated their power.
But none of that stuff could be true – after all, over the past few decades, they had already established that the geologic record contained no such thing, right?
He had become lost in thought again, and promptly bumped into a telephone pole, shaking off two large-looking crows from it. Except... one of them was wearing a hat?
Must be one of the hippies’ shenanigans, thought Donovan, as he got back up. Those hippies were all around the place nowadays. It was some sort of anti-war movement, but all they did all day was smoke marijuana and lay around advocating peace and weed for everybody. Hardly the kind of person that Donovan wanted to become.
“You okay, Don?” asked Belinda. “Even after crashing into a pole, you’re still your usual, absent-minded self.”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” said Donovan, rubbing his head, as Belinda helped him up.
“Well, here’s where I leave,” said Belinda, pointing to a road that branched to the left of the one that they were walking off of. “See you sometime.”
“Bye...” said Donovan, blushing slightly. He always had that tendency, to get all loose in front of her. One of these days, it would kill him.
* * *
As he continued walking home, the sky got darker, bit by bit. A few cars passed along the way, now that the evening rush hour had set in.
Finally, he saw his house – 144 Penrose Drive. It was as clean as any house on this line of houses, with a small garden of flowers arranged in a neat little row next to the concrete walkway to the front door.
As he opened the door, he announced his presence. “I’m home!”
“Donovan!” said his father, Josiah. “Welcome home. You got your report cards today, right?”
“Here you go, dad,” he said, reaching into his backpack and bringing out a piece of paper with the Bayesia High seal on it.
His father scanned the piece of paper – on every row was a small red “A”.
“I’m disappointed in you, son,” said his father, grinning in jest. “You should have gotten me at least one B, then I could say you aren’t unnaturally good at doing well at school.” He slapped him on the shoulder, and said, “We’ll have dinner in about an hour. How about you get yourself cleaned up a little. You look a bit roughed up.”
It was true, Donovan found – he looked at himself, and his shirt had been torn slightly by the fall, along with getting dirty.
He climbed upstairs and took a quick shower before coming back down to watch the news.
Their TV was in full colour – a luxury for a family in a neighbourhood such as theirs. The anchor was talking about how somebody’s prediction for the world’s end. “...and according to one Biblical scholar, the world is going to end on July 21, 1968.” The anchor chuckled. “But don’t worry, that’s more than a year away, right?”
The anchor’s partner said, “Yep. That’s more than enough time to get all your investments checked out and your jobs quit, I’d say.”
They both had a hearty laugh at that, and moved on the the next item about how the hippies were, once again, stirring up riots – not in Bayesia Town, but in Goldback City and Airdows Town, which were not too far from here. The world was becoming a much smaller place now – his quaint little town in the nowheres of America was slowly becoming connected – through things such as airplane-operated mail, telephones, and now even widespread broadcast television. You could know in an instant what was happening, at least much more quickly compared to when his parents were still his age. All you had to do was turn on the TV, and find out for yourself.
Having a father with connections to engineering, Donovan knew of an even more promising technology – the computer. Just to think about it – a machine that could perform tens of thousands of calculations every second. It was absolutely mind-boggling, and would be a device of salvation for accountants everywhere, who had to be trained in operating adding machines, some of which took more than thirty seconds to spit out a single calculation. With a device such as a computer, accountants could simply punch in their numbers, and out would come the results in the time that it would take to do just one calculation on an adding machine.
It wasn’t just the office where such a device could be useful – already, people were testing out putting computer terminals in the home, linked up to a central processing unit in a special building designed for it, and allowing it to manage people’s lives.
There were talks, both in the newspaper and the school that they were in, that in just thirty years, the computer would remove the need for massive amounts of paper in the office, as they could simply feed everything into a computer, and have it manage everything. The only paper needed would be to give it input and receive output from it. Donovan was certainly hopeful about this – being an environmental advocate himself, the reduced need for paper would certainly reduce their impact on the environment. He had heard from scientists that the massive amount of pollution that they were pumping into the air would eventually cover up the atmosphere and cool the whole Earth down. That would be no fun – having to wear coats to work every day in an eternal winter.
Suddenly, a rustling noise shook Donovan from his latest spiel of thought. It came from the backyard, but the sound stopped as quickly as it had started.
“Donovan?” said a voice. “It’s time for dinner!”
“Coming, ma!” said Donovan, as he turned off the television and headed for the dinner table.
* * *
After dinner, Donovan retreated to his room, where he read the newest Circuit magazine, about advances in the field of electrical engineering and technology in general. His family spent more than twenty dollars a month on these magazines, as Donovan gobbled up the information from every single one of these, which amounted to more than two hundred a year. Their family would then donate the old books to a university, who gladly paid them back for the chance to have an archive copy. It was money well spent, as he was well on his way to following in his father’s footsteps.
The theme of this month’s Circuit magazine was the home of the future, which centralized around the computer. This magazine gave him a good analysis of the suspicions that he had hereto only picked up from the newspapers and other media through which speculation such as this arrived. Now that there was an expert opinion on the issue, he would be sure to read everything about it.
First, he read that a whole year’s worth of daily schedules could be put into the computer system, to be read from at will. That he could believe. Then, the article talked about how computers could eventually be used to teach children. Donovan thought it was a little iffy; the computers that he knew now could barely understand their own language, let alone understand it well enough to teach it to somebody else.
As he read further, he noticed such things as the computer running the stock market. Now that was truly preposterous. A computer as it was already could perform ten thousand calculations per second, but to manage the stock market of such a hectic system of floor traders such as the New York Stock Exchange? That would require not only calculation, but more data than the computers he knew of today could handle at once. The ones they had now were already the size of a bank branch. How much larger would it have to be to manage such a complicated system of trades and transactions, all in perfect timing?
The magazine’s issue also included such things like space travel. The president of the time had challenged America to put a man on the moon before the turn of the 1970’s. The results of their labour so far didn’t seem promising – the only test they had put up at the time had exploded and the astronauts dead in the vehicle.
The rustling noise disturbed him again, and he turned off the light in his room, venturing out into the backyard to see what the fuss was all about.
This time, it was definitely there. Suddenly, some thing popped out of the grass. It looked like a mouse, but it had a yellow, zigzag-like tail, and small red pockets on its cheeks. It took one look at him, and screamed in fright. “Pikaaaa!” It then ran away, scurrying into a hole in his fence that he was sure wasn’t there that morning.
He returned inside. His father asked him, “Did you hear something out there?”
Donovan thought for a moment. What kind of a creature said “pika” instead of just squealing? He could distinctly make out those two sounds.
“Nothing, dad.” Whatever it was, it was probably just his mind making up sounds. He had to stop reading so many books about alien invasions.
* * *
As he tucked himself into bed, he couldn’t stop thinking about that little yellow creature. It couldn’t have been an auditory hallucination. He was sure he heard it say “pika”. The only thing he could think of was the pika, a rodent-like creature that lived in some regions of the Rockies. But none of those looked anything like the... monster that he had just seen, nor did they get their name from actually squealing out “pika”.
He went to sleep on that thought, dreaming of electric sheep and floating magnets.
Running total: 2,143 words [Small revision. Engineering isn't exactly a trade. >_>]
So, comments? Likes? Dislikes?
I'll still plod on with Generation 2021, don't you worry about that.
UPDATE 04/06/2011: Re-rated MATURE for descriptions of drug usage.
Last edited:
