Spacemon, Vol. 1 – Chapter 1: Gigan Station

Welcome to the first proper installment of Spacemon, the tale of a Pokemon TRPG campaign! It is a sci-fi space epic played using the Pokemon Tabletop United (PTU) system and GMed by fellow TAY author DragonStorm247. You can get caught up on the entire Spacemon saga here!

“Tram number three now departing for atrium.”

The computerized voice echoed through the dimly lit tram terminal. Arlon Jett rushed to the tram, just barely managing to keep the door from closing. The bounty hunter slipped onto the tram and made his way down the aisle, searching for an open compartment. He stuck his head in a few, only to find them full. Eventually he found one with only three other passengers.

“This seat taken?” Arlon asked the group of young looking individuals. 

“Nope,” said the young brunette woman, glancing at him with her cold grey-green eyes.

“Mind if I sit here then, luv?” Arlon asked her.

“Fine,” she said, returning to not paying him any attention.

Arlon took a seat and joined the rest of the passengers in the compartment in brooding silence.

Arlon found himself on the remote Gigan Station in Sector 25 in the Outer Rim. It was nothing more than an asteroid mining station, with not much more than a small shop and a refueling station for passing space travelers. Arlon had arrived here by hitching a ride on a freighter making a delivery to the station. It wasn’t exactly where he wanted to end up, but the freighter was headed back into Federation space, a place he very much wanted to avoid.

Suddenly, the power went out and the tram stopped moving, leaving the four travelers trapped together in the tram compartment. Arlon got up from his seat and tried the door, but it didn’t seem to want to open.

“That’s odd,” he said aloud. “Usually these trams have some kind of automatic release when they lose power.” He tried pulling on the door, but it didn’t budge.

“Hey mate, you mind giving me a hand with this door?” Arlon asked the dark-haired young man with glasses who had been sitting next to him.

“Sure,” the man replied. Arlon noted that he had a Romanov accent. He didn’t see many Romanovs this far out in the Outer Rim unless they were mercs, and this fellow didn’t really look like any sort of merc in the slightest.

They each grabbed a side of the door, then tried to pull it open. Despite their efforts, the door refused to budge.

“Damn door,” Arlon grumbled.

“Clearly we need the assistance of Pokemon!” the blonde man in the lab coat who had been sitting opposite of Arlon declared. He stood up and released a Rhyhorn, which just managed to squeeze in between the seats. “It’s up to you, #1!” he declared. “Break that door down!” The rocky creature easily busted through the door, startling several other passengers on the tram who had managed to get out of their compartments far more easily. 

“Excellent work!” the man told his Pokemon, recalling it and returning the Pokeball to his pocket.

“I don’t really think that was necessary, mate.” Arlon told him.

“Nonsense! We needed to get out of the room and now we can.”

Arlon shrugged and followed the blonde-haired stranger, the Romanov man, and the young woman along with the other passengers being ushered out of the tram by the station’s security personnel. They were led down the remainder of the track and soon arrived in an open atrium filled with confused and annoyed people inconvenienced by the power outage. In order to pass the time, many had decided to engage in Pokemon battles. 

“You lot fancy a battle?” Arlon asked the three people from his tram compartment as well as a group of four other individuals.

“Sure!” a young teenager from the other group said enthusiastically, clearly excited to do something other than wait around. They broke into two teams of four, Arlon finding himself teamed up with the three people he had shared a tram compartment with against the teenager, his younger brother, and a young couple who didn’t appear to be related to them.

“Alright Ironhide, let’s do this, mate,” said Arlon, releasing his Aron. Over the last few months, Arlon had grown quite attached to the little fellow. His Pokeball had been the only one Arlon was able to hold onto when he faked his own death to escape the Red Suns, the bounty hunter crew he used to run with before he was framed for the murder of their leader. He had little idea of where his other, much more powerful, Pokemon had ended up— at least the ones that had survived.

Arlon’s teammates sent out a Gastly, an Eevee, and the Rhyhorn from before. The team they were up against looked to be disadvantaged with a Rattata, a Roggenrola, a Bulbasaur, and a Magnemite.

“Yvonne, use Quick Attack on that Rattata!” the young woman commanded her Eevee. The little brown Pokemon charged at the Rattata and slammed into it, knocking it over.

“Ratthew, tackle it!” the young boy called out to the Rattata in response. The little Mouse Pokemon charged wildly at the Eevee, but it was too slow and the Eevee easily dodged out of the way.

“Wilhelm, Lick the Roggenrola,” the Romanov man instructed his Gastly. The ghostly ball of gas floated up to the Roggenrola and licked it with its spectral tongue, but the little rocky creature didn’t seem to be that phazed.

“Alright Robert, use Vine Whip on that Eevee,” The woman instructed her Bulbasaur. The Seed Pokemon extended its vines and lashed at the Eevee landing a hit.

“Polarity, Thundershock that Gastly!” The teen commanded his Magnemite. The Magnet Pokemon focused its singular eye on the ghost Pokemon and shot sparks out of its magnets at it.

“Ironhide, use Metal Claw on the Bulbasaur!” Arlon commanded his Pokemon. The Aron ran up to the Seed Pokemon and swiped it with one of his claws, fainting it with a critical strike.

“Now #1, use stomp on the Rattata!” the man in the lab coat told his Rhyhorn. The rocky Pokemon ran up to the Rattata and stomped on it with a big and heavy foot, taking it out of the fight.

“Rogsy, headbutt that Eevee!” the man commanded his Roggenrola. The Mantle Pokemon charged at the Eevee and crashed into it, knocking it down.

“Yvonne, use Quick Attack on the Magnemite!” the young woman commanded her Eevee, ignoring the attacking Roggenrola for now. The little Pokemon quickly hopped back to its feet, then ran at the Magnemite and slammed into it, but it didn’t seem terribly bothered by the attack.

“Wilhelm, Night Shade!” the Romanov told his Pokemon. The Gastly blasted the Magnemite with psychic energy and it started to show signs of weakening.

“Use Thundershock again!” The teen instructed his Pokemon. It sent out another blast of sparks at the Eevee, which now seemed to be weakening as well.

“Use Metal Claw on the Roggenrola,” Arlon commanded his Aron. There was a loud clang as the little metal Pokemon swiped at his rocky foe, dealing a nice bit of damage to it.

“Now, finish the Magnemite off with Horn Attack, #1!” The Rhyhorn charged the Magnemite and gouged it with its horn, taking it down. Now the Roggenrola was all that remained.

“Rogsy, Tackle the Eevee!” the Roggenrola’s trainer ordered his Pokemon. It ran at the Eevee and slammed into it.

“Yvonne, use Quick Attack once more!” the young woman commanded her Pokemon in response. Despite being worn down, her Eevee charged forward and hit the Roggenrola as hard as it could.

“Now, finish it with Metal Claw!” Arlon instructed his Aron. Ironhide ran up to the Roggenrola and swiped at it again with his claws, bringing it down.

“Wow. You guys are all great at battling,” the Roggenrola’s trainer told Arlon and his teammates as he recalled his Pokemon.

“Cheers, mate,” Arlon replied as he headed on his way.

Suddenly, the main lights flickered back on; power had been restored.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience,” A voice sounded on the loudspeaker. “Power has been restored to the station. We just need to make sure everything is working properly before ships may leave the station. In the meantime, you may continue to use the atrium for Pokemon battles or search for wild Pokemon that come in with the asteroids in the mining bay. Thank you for your continued patience.”

Considering the fact that he only had one Pokemon at the moment, Arlon decided that looking for some wild Pokemon was a good idea while he was stuck on the station. He began making his way to the mining area in the lower section of Gigan Station. He arrived in a wide open area with a big ray shield on one end where the chunks of asteroids were brought in to be mined. Spotting a group of Geodudes and a Solrock hanging out on a recently brought in chunk of asteroid, he contemplated how to go about catching them.

Interestingly enough, the three individuals he had met in the tram all slowly filtered into the room over the next few minutes.

“We have got to stop meeting like this,” Arlon jokingly said to them. “Since you’re here, we may as well work together to catch those Pokemon over there.”

“Sure,” the young woman agreed.

Using their four Pokemon from earlier, which Arlon observed were the only ones they seemed to have at the moment, the unlikely team engaged the group of wild Pokemon. 

“Wilhelm, get up there,” the Romanov directed his Gastly.  The ghostly Pokemon floated up onto the asteroid and caught the attention of the wild Pokemon. “Now use Night Shade on one of those Geodudes!” 

“Yvonne, you get up there too, and use Quick Attack!” the young woman also instructed her Pokemon. With a few quick hops, the Eevee joined the Gastly on the asteroid and engaged the Geodudes. 

“#1! You as well! Stomp those Geodudes!” the man in the lab coat commanded his Pokemon. The Rhyhorn was surprisingly nimble and managed to get a good way up the asteroid as well. 

“Alright, Ironhide, Headbutt that space rock and see if you can’t knock one of those Geodudes down here,” Arlon commands his Aron. Ironhide charged the asteroid and smashed his head against it at full force. The asteroid shook for a second and one of the Geodudes near the edge fell down, landing next to Arlon’s Pokemon.

The Rhyhorn joined the Eevee and Gastly atop the asteroid and, on orders from their trainers, they managed to knock out the Geodudes that remained.

“Now, focus on that Solrock!” the young woman told her Eevee.

“Ironhide, use Metal Claw on the Geodude!” Arlon instructed his own Pokemon. The Aron swiped at the Geodude and hit it into the side of the rock. While it was still down, Arlon threw a Pokeball at it and successfully captured it.

In the meantime, the other three Pokemon worked on whittling down the Solrock. The young woman then threw a Pokeball and captured it without much of a struggle.

“You lot are pretty handy in a battle,” Arlon told the strangers, but they didn’t seem to pay him any mind. They seemed to be too busy looking around the mining bay. “Don’t say much, do ya?” he mumbled before walking over to the ray shield and looking out into space.

Suddenly, he saw movement amongst the asteroids. There was a ship out there and it was moving awfully fast. As it flew out from behind an asteroid, Arlon recognized it as the UAS Corsair, the frigate belonging to the Red Suns! He had no idea what they could possibly be doing out here, but as a starship pilot himself, he knew an attack maneuver when he saw one.

“We need to leave now!” Arlon shouted to his new acquaintances.

“What are you talking about?” the young woman asked.

“Have you looked out there, luv?” Arlon asked her coldly, pointing to the ship barreling toward the station. “This entire station is in danger.” While he hadn’t had any brushes with his former crew since he faked his own death, Arlon had heard the reports. Every since Devlin Garth took over the Red Suns, they had become quite ruthless, relying increasingly on force and the hiring of pirates.

They all rushed back to the main area of the station, which was soon shaken by a large explosion. Screams and shouts rang out as people began running around in terror and confusion. There was another blast as a large section of the wall was blown out and a group of four heavily armed men came running through, quickly killing the nearby security guards. The foursome quickly hid, except, of course, for the eccentric guy in the lab coat. For reasons that escaped Arlon, the guy walked right up to the pirates.

“Oi! Where do you think you’re going?” one of the attackers, a man with a gruff voice, demanded.

“To the ship, of course!” said the eccentric fellow.

“You hear that, boys?” the gruff-voiced man addressed his comrades. “He says he wants to go to the ship.”

They laughed as they grabbed their victim and threw him into their boarding craft.

“Idiot,” Arlon mumbled under his breath. He couldn’t just let him get himself killed, though, and decided to go rescue him.

While two of the men were distracted with their captive on the boarding craft, Arlon snuck up on the other two. Coming up behind one of the pirates, he quickly grabbed the pistol out of the man’s holster and put it up against the back of the other’s head.

“Let him go or I’ll shoot.”

“Hah. You ain’t got the guts to—”

“Yes … I do,” said Arlon, before pulling the trigger. The man dropped to the floor in pain. He was down for the count, but not dead. The damn idiot had it set to stun! Arlon realized.

In the confusion, the other members of the group jumped into action. The Romanov guy fired off a burst of psionic powers at the pirate that Arlon had just disarmed, putting him to sleep. Meanwhile the young woman attempted to hack into the station’s computers and access the mining tractor beams to trap the Corsair. 

“Oi! What’s going on out here?!” the gruff-voiced pirate from before shouted as he and the other remaining one came running out of the boarding craft. When they saw Arlon and the young Romanov man, they reached for their Pokeballs. “You lookin’ for a fight?”

“Damn right I am.” Arlon shouted at him, reaching for his own Pokeball and sending out his Aron. The Romanov followed suit and sent out his Gastly. The pirates responded by sending out a Kadabra and a Magneton.

The Pokemon were left to battle on their own while the pirates and Arlon dove for cover and started shooting at each other. The Romanov quickly picked up a pistol off one of the downed pirates and ducked into cover as well. Laser fire flew across the atrium, the Pokemon dodging and weaving through the blasts as they duked it out.

Suddenly, the eccentric man’s Rhyhorn came charging out of the boarding craft, crashing into the Kadabra. The man himself was soon to follow. He stepped out of the craft, then fired electricity out of his hands at the pirates. One of them started spasming and fell to his knees, stunned! Arlon quickly took aim at the pirate before he could recover and fired. The shot hit him in the shoulder, taking him totally out of the fight.

Having successfully trapped the Corsair in the station’s tractor beams, the young woman sent her Eevee into the fray. With the additional assistance from the Eevee and Rhyhorn, the Aron and Gastly were able to overwhelm the Kadabra and Magneton by the skin of their teeth. Arlon took down the remaining pirate with another shoulder shot and the fight was won, but just barely.

Just then a voice came blaring out of one of the pirates’ comms receivers. “Package secured. Is the boarding craft secure? Anyone there?”

Arlon quickly grabbed the comms receiver and answered, “Yeah, everything’s fine here, mate … Uh … area secure.”

“Who is this?” the voice asked. 

“Uh … Private Ryan?” Arlon said, not really having the time to think of something convincing.

“Ha ha, very funny. Hold the craft. We’re on our way back; we got what we came for,” the pirate on the comms replied.

“Wow. I did not think that would work,” Arlon said with a slight laugh.

“Uh … It looks like they’re going to fire on the station,” the young woman announced.

“Shit,” said Arlon. “We need to get out of here. Let’s see if we can’t find us a ship.”

The unlikely group of allies ran to the hangar, where they found a selection of four different ships.

“This one!” Arlon yelled, headed for a Vulcan bucket class ship. It was a common Genevan model which he had some experience flying. “It’s small and agile. Good for the asteroids.”

The foursome boarded the ship, then Arlon slipped into the pilot’s seat and fired up the engines. He quickly sealed the airlocks and gunned it out of the hangar.

As they made their escape there were more voices on Arlon’s stolen comms receiver. “Package transmitted,” said the voice from before.

“Good work boys,” another voice replied. “Now get yer asses back to the ship before we fire on the station. Y’all got thirty seconds.” Arlon immediately recognized the voice of Devlin Garth, the ruthless new leader of the Red Suns.

“But boss, we’ve still got men on board,” the first voice responded.

“They’re expendable!” Garth shouted just before Arlon flew out of their range. A bright flash of light filled the viewports as Gigan Station exploded behind them.

Notes: This session was so long ago that I barely remember the interesting stuff that happened. The original chapter was posted before I added the Notes section to these posts. It was well before I started taking notes on the sessions, let alone recording the audio! The original was completely written from memory and it was actually the first three chapters lumped together since they were more or less just short blurbs. As such, the original version was missing many details that I really don’t remember now. In going back and rewriting this chapter, I fudged a lot of the insignificant details to create a tighter narrative.

One of the major things I did with this chapter was add more dialogue and more active Pokemon battles. It was hard to capture that with the very brief descriptions that were in the original chapter and without notes on the session, I had to make up a lot as I went along. Even if it didn’t end up playing out exactly how it did in the game, this chapter does a great job of capturing the story of the first session of Spacemon.

Another key thing I did was add in Arlon’s accent. It first showed up in his first appearance in Volume 2.  The reason he didn’t have an accent in the originals is because at the time I wasn’t very good at doing accents for RP yet so doing one for such an extensive amount of time was difficult. I added the accent once I switched over to Alex as my character, since I would only be voicing Arlon in the few appearances he made in Volume 2 which was much easier to do.

Considering the fact that I wrote Arlon’s origin story last week, I decided to sort of start this chapter continuing where that adventure left off. But it is written in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily have to have read it to get into this story.

Update 9/1/21: What’s this, the third iteration of this chapter? The original version is long lost to time, and was basically just a recap of the session. By Volume 2, Spacemon had become formatted like a story and once that volume was over, I went back to Volume 1 to bring the quality up to par. Now, I’m going back to bring all of the original series up to the current standard. This chapter needed a bit more work than Arlon’s origin. I moved some of the exposition about the Red Suns around to improve the flow and give readers the proper context closer to the beginning of the chapter, updated some descriptions, and, of course, converted to past tense. I also added nicknames for the random trainer Pokemon! In Frontier, I set the precedent of naming pretty much all trainer Pokemon for the writing, so I decided to carry that through for consistency. I didn’t bother with the pirate Pokemon, since that was already written in a way where the names weren’t used. I think the thing that still stands out to me about this chapter is when I shot the pirate point-blank to the back of the head and he lived because RPG rules. It’s still something we all joke about all these years later.

Post-Chapter Challenge: Here we are, back where it all began! If you’re a longtime reader, then you are already quite familiar with this setting, and, if you’re new, you have only just begun to scratch the surface!

So for today, I would like you to come up with your own Pokemon setting. Spacemon is a sci-fi setting but you can pick fantasy or modern day or whatever. Be creative! Is there a dark tone to the world, or is it more lighthearted? What is the role of Pokemon? Of trainers? What sort of challenges and adventures would await players starting a campaign in your setting?

That does it for this chapter. As always the Spacemon gang and I will be monitoring the comments to foster discussion and answer any questions. Feel free to give feedback and critiques of the writing so I can improve it for the future, or just leave a comment with what you think about what went down in this chapter or what you think might happen next! You can also revisit past chapters, check out the rest of the Spacemon saga, join the Spacemon Discord server, or like our Facebook page to stay updated on all things Spacemon! Click here for the next exciting installment of Spacemon!