{CaNT} Zero's Creepypasta; WIP

So this is a story about a boy named Ben. He drowned.

Wait, no, that's not it.

Here's my solo entry for the Creepypasta Competition in our lovely Project Dev Workshop. It's a work in progress, of course, so hang tight as the story grows develops evolves mutates by the day.

So far, here's my little idea: There are a lot of Pokémon with some pretty terrifying descriptions. Admittedly, most of the creepy descriptions come from Ghosts, Darks, or Psychics; but there are still enough for me to bring this idea to fruition.

Ever since I played Blue version back in the day, I've wanted a real live Pokémon. Mostly just to battle my friends and, I don't know, play soccer with. Those were my goals though, back then. I've been involved in conversations and forum threads about what would you do if you had real Pokémon and I admit, some of the results disturbed me. Beating up mean people, robbery, world-domination. Who's to say that if we could somehow manifest Pokémon from our games into the real world, people wouldn't do just that?

So here's the concept: In the near future, computer and biological technology will make real Pokémon a thing. You plug in your cartridge, push a button and WHAM! Real Pokémon. What happens if people's low-happiness (abused?) Pokémon get brought into the real world? Or to make it more rooted in the games, what if there's a Pokerus-like virus that makes Pokémon violent, like some kind of an offspring of Pokerus plus Shadow Pokémon? In the games they disobey their trainers regardless of badges, and in reality they just go feral and wreak havoc?

Since this happens in the future, I need to make some technology predictions: mostly, how far ahead from today in real science is bio-engineering completely new multi-cellular organisms, and how many Pokémon generations ahead will we be at that time? Also, I'm going to have guess that there's another shift in Pokémon savedata like there was between gens 2 and 3, maybe now between 9 and 10 there's a shift to actually hold Pokemons' DNA, genes, and psychological state in the data, not just their assigned stat values.

Or, if that's too much drawn away from traditional creepypasta, I skip all the technology stuff and just have someone (or multiple someones) have special/haunted games that can manifest their infected Pokémon to reality. That way also fits better into the usual past-tense of scary stories.

For now though, I'll do the futurey thing and see how I like it. That all begins in the next post.

Enjoy, and feel free to post here and tell me what you think so far!

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- First little paragraph up there: If this is following a technology timeline, then I'm going to have a couple of jumps from years and months apart. So that first piece is from probably the last part of the timeline: someone went crazy and used their Pokémon to take over the world (Or that Pokerus-ShadowPokemon virus made that Pokémon do it on its own) the first-person character being one of the people trying to stop it.

- That marketing director's name? I figure something Japanese-American would be nice, Nintendo being a Japanese company after all, so I figure out of the first and last names, one should be distinctly Japanese and the other a relatively ordinary European-influenced American last name. I don't see this guy being important very long, so it probably doesn't matter much.

- E3 takes place in LA, right? I've never been. I can't decide if hologram projection will be so prohibitively expensive it's only in a few parts of the world, or if it's just whatever and can be easily acquired by any theme park, cinema, or one-percenter that wants one. Easy to just change one sentence down the line.

- I'm hoping we have Sinnoh remakes by 2019. Unlikely, but I'll hope. Really, I'm thinking 2021 is probably more like it. Also, I do have augmented remake names for the Sinnoh games, but I want to be sure they fit here before the cat's out of the bag. I'm proud of them, and think they have a likelihood of being official when the time comes, if I'm lucky.

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So there we go. This is getting too lengthy for what I initially had in mind, so maybe I will trim out all the techno-science stuff and go with a more plain haunted cartridge with evil Pokémon inside, rather than all this extra non-spooky stuff (and save the science story for something else, perhaps?). What do you think?



EDIT: I can't seem to make new posts here. It just adds my next post to the previous. Anti-doubleposting, maybe? I wish I knew. Why here and not other places like the Literature Library?

 

I think I'm starting over from scratch: I'm going to keep the setting and that pivotal part about Pokémon being able to be made real somehow (I have three options: an official technology everyone has access to, an illegal/prototype technology that's not common, or haunted magic)

Also, here I'm starting a more traditional campfire story format.

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The lesson to be learned here is (tbd, something ominous)

This all happened a few years ago, about the time the Pokémon Naissance machine was invented. This was before mass production, and a few months before they had their final safety protocols implemented. A friend of mine, Jared, he became one of the beta testers for the machine through a family connection with some big nerd news website. He was really into Pokémon, more than I ever was, and one day during lunch at school he pitched me his idea.

"So you know how between gens nine and ten," He began, leaning low across the table and whispering excitedly. "The storage data in the Pokémon games changed?"

"Yeah." I replied with a full mouth, spraying a few flakes of my fish sandwich onto my lunch tray before swallowing the bite. "Because they started holding the genes for Pokémon, not just stats. They're actual AIs now."

"Exactly." Jared said, tapping one finger on the table excitedly. "And that's also the reason Nintendo's saying Pokémon from gens three through nine can't be made through the PokeNai? Because those ones don't have genes and all that stuff that makes it possible."

"I guess that makes sense." I said. And it did make sense. After all, there's a big difference between maybe a kilobyte of data per Pokémon before Gen Ten and the hundreds of megabytes needed afterwards. "I wouldn't worry about it though. By the time they make the Gen Five remakes in a year, every Pokémon will be actually make-able without triggering the anti-hacking mechanism they talked about."

"Since when am I that patient?" He straightened up and glared at me as if I insulted him. "I know a better way, a thing they actually do in real life with bacteria." He took a deep breath and looked around to make sure nobody was listening in. I suppose he was glad, for once, that nobody sat within three seats of us on the long tables. "Recombinant DNA" He jabbed his plastic spork in my direction with each syllable, hoping to drive the point home better.

I heard the term at study sessions before, but I wouldn't have my next Biology class until next semester. "So you mix the DNA, I mean the stats, of two Pokémon to make a new one?"

Jared rolled his eyes at me as if I was some kind of idiot for not understanding the concept. "No. You take one organism that has complete and stable DNA and insert specific genes into it to augment it. That's how there's woolly mammoths in the N.U.S.S.R. now. They took the incomplete DNA from mammoth fossils and stuck in some recent Elephant DNA from the gene vault. It would be like that."

I admit, I'm not much of a biologist or a computer engineer, so even now I can't disprove anything in the concept. "So how do you plan on doing that?"

For the rest of lunch and the first ten minutes of our next class (until he was threatened with detention and the teacher proved she wasn't bluffing), Jared went on about how he planned to use devkits to pull Pokémon out of Gen Nine games and put their data into more complete copies of the same species from Gen Ten.

He tracked me down in front of school at the end of the day just as I was about to climb onto my bus. "So what do you think of that plan?" He asked, eager and smiling wide.

"You might be on to something." I said. It was the most vague answer I could think of. "Just be careful with it, okay? I'll see you tomorrow."

He kept smiling and nodded to himself as I boarded the shuttle. "Yeah, I can do this." He said before getting on board his bus home.