(Dragon):
Riss is still kind of busy, so I'm only allowed to explode with half the squee I've been holding in reserve. Stay tuned for further squeesplosions later in the week, featuring content that actually applies to people who aren't me. :B


So we mentioned that it's been a while since we played any kind of Pokemon games. We'd kind of forgotten how stuff was supposed to work. Recently, Riss was looking over our stored Pokemon in the game--most of them we've gotten from the Pokewalker, where you can let your critter wander in a variety of landscapes that have only one or two types of wild Pokemon to catch. "This is crazy," he says. "We've got, like, twelve Magnetites. I'm going to start just letting these things go."

For some reason, we'd been thinking that you were only allowed to use one Pokemon of any given type in your team, but when I noticed that we really did have a dozen or so of each of these supergeneric species, readily available for inclusion into our group at ANY TIME...I realized that there was absolutely nothing in place that enforced a Variety Pack approach. And that's when I was struck off my ass, like Saul, by a mighty vision that unfolded from the heavens.

A VAST, CONQUERING ARMY OF DUNSPARCES.

Guys, this is the best idea EVER. Remember how awesome my Dunsparce was when I first started talking about it? It's gotten EVEN BETTER. No shit, when she was L20 I literally destroyed the entire Goldenrod Gym--all the subordinate trainers AND the Gym Leader--in a glorious crimson tsunami of martial perfection, using just that one Pokemon plus a Super Potion halfway through. She's a monster without peer.

(Technical details: Right now, she still has Rage as a standard attack. But now she also has Rollout, a five-turn move that boosts its attack power with every successful hit, and which you can boost even more upfront by using Defense Curl first. So Rage, Defense Curl, Rollout, and Yawn for those pesky bastards who just won't stand still and die. XD)

So Riss was thinking that we could just go back to that cave and catch five more Dunsparces to make me happy. I don't think I described where this is before, so TAKE NOTES THIS IS IMPORTANT DAMMIT. So far, we haven't found Dunsparces anywhere else. There's a cave at the eastern end of Route 31. Follow the only path inside until you get to a pair of boulders that can be Rock Smashed. The topmost one sometimes has an item under it, and the bottom one triggers a Dunsparce attack.

We caught a couple more, and it turned out that they were both males. "You know," I said, "instead of wandering in and out of here to reset the encounter, we should take advantage of the creepy sex circus that is the Pokemon Daycare and just breed the ones we've got." We were in agreement, so off we go to park our snakepotatoes at the Love Shack.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember the Daycare taking way longer to do anything worth mentioning. I remember leaving a Magikarp there for ages, waiting for it to get to L30 so it would turn into a Gyarados--we practically forgot that the damn thing was there at times. And I forget if we even bothered to try and get eggs out of any of our critters. All I really remember was how Ditto was like a formless Ho' Blob that you could breed with anything of any gender--even things that HAD no fucking gender--and still get an egg out of it. Man, we loved our Ditto. As a PERSON, I mean. ;_; I think there should be a Pokemon Rights movement designed to liberate Dittos from their lives of sexual slavery, because this situation just doesn't feel right.

...Anyway, we'd taken a look at the two male Dunsparces that we picked up before. One of them, who had gotten the grimdark name of Doomtater because I hadn't been able to look at his stats before naming him, turned out to have a [Lonely] nature and the [Run Away] ability, which I think means that he's like the Dunsparce equivalent of Ikari Shinji. :/ But since my heart goes out to roneri boys, I picked him to stay at the Daycare with Quetzal, our well-blooded killing machine whose level was four times higher than his.

And I think that if this game were more sophisticated, we would have gotten some dialogue popups like these as we were blissfully riding away into the distance on our bicycle:

DOOMTATER: {No, don't leave me here with her!! Come back!! Save meeeeeEEEEEEEE---!!!}
QUETZAL: {SHOW ME THE FURY THAT LURKS WITHIN YOUR VEINS, BOY!!}
DOOMTATER: {--EEEEEEEEEEEEEE--}
*sound like a screen door slamming over and over*
QUETZAL: {FOR THE TRAINERRRRRRRR!!}
DOOMTATER: {x_X}

Only they would be speaking Pokemon and we probably wouldn't have understood, but still. Long story short, we get a phone call thirty minutes later from the Creepy Daycare Grandpa (who surely does not have an elaborate network of hidden cameras strung up all over the holding pens, SURELY o_O) who tells us that the Dunsparces have already asploded with eggy birthings. He explains to us that he has no idea where baby Pokemon eggs come from. SURE, GRANDPA. ANYTHING YOU SAY.

We head back and pick up the bundle of joy. Maybe the speed was a fluke. But no, thirty minutes later we get a call again. We pick up that egg, and then, as we're heading off, we decide to turn back around and get our Dunsparces out of the pen so that they will stop having bored and desperate Daycare prison sex won't cost us too much to get back, and it turns out that we missed the last call and there was yet another egg waiting for us.

Doomtater went up 10 FUCKING LEVELS over the course of this ordeal, suggesting that Quetzal was not only badass enough to conceive and give birth three times but had also designed an aggressive military training routine designed to make a man out of her little L5 partner while she had him all to herself. Doomtater will likely need several years of therapy once his memory returns. o_o; Quetzal went up only one level. Her little wings probably got a bit stronger after she spent an hour and a half nailing her boypotato to concrete walls. c_c;; JEEEEEZUS.

So, at the moment, our party is saddled with three little byproducts of Quetzal's ENRAGED AND SAVAGELY FRUITFUL LOINS. Given how prolific these damn Pokemon are, I don't think that we'll ever have to catch a Dunsparce in the wild again.

But their sheer prolific-ness has caused me to expand on my original vision. Before, I thought that it would be enough to just have a solid team of six, so that I could field an all-Dunsparce killteam whenever the whim struck me. But now...now I feel like my Pokemon dream army may truly become a reality. Now I envision an entire storage box packed with stonefaced, bloodthirsty Dunsparces, each one tested in the fires of war, each one fanatically loyal and bred from only the finest lineage of asskicking snakeangelbees. (Which is to say Quetzal. I think we've established that she's our Warrior Matriarch. At the very least, she would probably crawl out of the Pokewalker and eat our face off while we slept if we tried to give the job to anyone else.)

I think I need to start asking Riss to draw me more fanart, this time of a squad of my world-destroying Pokesoldiers all dolled up in their MkVII Adeptus Dunsparces power armor, with bolters tucked under their ickle wingies and power mittens barely visible under their shoulderpads. They could be climbing over a pile of "fainted" Pokemon who lacked the strength to withstand their onslaught, lifting high (somehow, without arms...) our standard as they claimed planet after planet in the name of Dunsparcekind!! It would be beautiful. I would probably weep manly tears of restrained joy at such a heroic sight.

Since Pokemon are usually depicted as speaking using different parts of their species name, I'm sorely tempted to call my army "the SparDuns." TONIGHT, WE DINE IN HELL~!! I dunno, though. It doesn't sound very Space Marine-y, so maybe I'll think of something better.

Regardless, if I decide to have thirty or so Dunsparces in my army, it's now possible to specialize them so that they can fill different roles in combat. Sure, a group like this won't be as flexible as a Variety Pack, but I'm going to research their moves and the HMs that they're able to learn and see what I can do. I'm thinking that, at the very least, we can have combat and support Dunsparces, with the latter having all the status-affecting moves so that they can loosen up the enemy before the big guns roll in. That way, I won't have to worry about finding the perfect combo of four moves to try and get a do-everything fighter. Every Dunsparce is valuable to the war effort~! :D

So now I have to name all our future male Dunsparces after inspirational Space Marines. I need to figure out a naming scheme for the females, though... It would kind of be funny if all the ones that hatch in the future are boys, so we'd have one brutal brood queen at the top of the command structure and a bunch of genetically-similar dudes doing her bidding. XD

In short: THIS IS KIND OF DUMB AND CRAZY BUT I LOVE IT SO MUCH THAT I WILL TOTALLY MAKE IT HAPPEN. Just watch, guys. Someday, we'll be able to post a screenshot of a box full of Dunsparces that are capable of tearing down any Pokemon in the Pokeverse, except possibly for the PokeEldar, who are cheating psychic motherfuckers. And...stuff. ^______^


Also also...Riss is recovering OK, but he's still in really bad emotional shape after recent bad stuff. Beam Happy Healing Light at his head from afar, puresu, because he needs some love right now. It will make us all happier! :D

--D.