Welcome to another exciting 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!
The faint orange light of Vandia’s Sunset Plains reflected off the crashed ship in the distance as its crew made their way back to it. Alex followed them to the landing site, where the ship was now ready to take off once again. Over the course of the few hours they had been gone, the ship’s repair bot had completed its repairs. Shane, the guy with the blue hair, glanced back at her with an annoyed expression on his face. It seemed to Alex like he and his crewmates were trying to get rid of her, which posed a bit of a problem; these people were her best chance to finally get off this planet and find the answers to her many questions.
“I want to go with you,” Alex spoke up as they began to board their ship.
“I don’t think we should take her with us,” Dmitri, the Romanov guy, said to his crewmates.
“I don’t either,” Morgan, the mean girl, agreed.
Feeling dejected, Alex looked back at them with a pleading expression on her face. She didn’t know what to say to convince them.
“Sorry kid,” Shane told her. “You’re not coming with us.”
They all turned and boarded their ship, leaving Alex behind.
“I am not staying on this planet,” Alex said to herself as she watched them go. She looked around for a way to sneak aboard the ship and noticed a broken section of the hull that hadn’t been fully repaired. Climbing in through the hole, Alex managed to slip aboard. The hole brought her to the airlock and she slid through the interior door just before it closed.
Wandering around the ship, Alex found her way to the bridge and noticed everyone was there. It was probably not the place to be just yet. Luckily for her, they didn’t notice her and she was able to slip away again. Next, she found her way from there to the personal crew quarters. Four of the doors were locked tight, but the fifth was open and the room was pretty much empty.
The ship soon started to rumble as it took off and Alex was knocked into the room. Regaining her balance, Alex sat down on the bed and held on tight while the ship broke out of the atmosphere. Once things settled down, she got up and looked out the viewport.
“Wow …” Alex gasped in wonder as she looked out into space. She’d never seen it with her own eyes before. She reached for a Pokeball on her belt and released her Umbreon, who she then picked up off the ground and held up to the viewport. “Check it out Ebony, we’re in space!” The Umbreon reached out and attempted to bat at the viewport with her paw. “Isn’t it cool?” Alex asked her Pokemon.
Suddenly, the ship made the jump to warp space and the Umbreon started squirming, kind of freaked out by the strange sight. “Calm down girl, I think we jumped to warp space or whatever. It can’t hurt you in here. C’mon, let’s go check out the rest of the ship.”
Alex and Ebony wandered through the ship, passing through the shield room and the mess area before ending up back in the labs Alex had explored earlier.
“This door looks interesting,” Alex said to her Umbreon as they reached the secured door she had seen when she was on the ship the first time. “Let’s see what’s going on in there.” She pried the keypad off the wall and was quickly able to hotwire the door to open as she was quite skilled with technology.
The door slid open and Alex stepped inside. The room was pretty empty except for the back wall, which was lined with cryotubes. Two of them contained what looked like some kind of large, cybernetic, insectoid Pokemon. “Woah, it’s like out of a movie or something,” Alex said aloud. “What’s going on here?” She hacked into the computer nearby and started perusing the data on these creatures. “Genesect, huh? These are like cyborg murder machines! Why do they have these here?”
Suddenly, Alex heard clanking footsteps outside the room. “Oh, shit.” She quickly recalled her Umbreon and looked for a place to hide. She squeezed behind the empty cryotube before realizing that it was transparent and not actually hiding her.
The crazy cyborg the others had called H ran into the room and immediately saw her. “Get out of there!” he shouted, seeming to think Alex was inside the tube. “What are you doing in there?!” He ran over to the console and started opening the tube.
“H what are you doing?” Shane asked as he ran into the room. “She’s behind the tube.”
“She’s in my cryotube!” H shouted back at him. “She needs to get out of the cryotube!”
Shane sighed, then walked over to the cryotube. He reached behind it, then grabbed Alex by the arm and pulled her out. All the while, Alex frantically tried to kick him in order to break free, but she was unable to land a blow. “Let go of me!” Alex shouted in a panic.
“Oh,” H said, realizing his mistake.
Unsure of what else to do, Alex grabbed two Pokeballs off her belt and sent out her Umbreon and her Lampent, causing Shane to release her.
“No, no, no. Not in here. Not in here!” H shouted. “Move! Out! Now! Any form of damage the Genesect endure … There’s a reason this door is locked!”
Alex started backing out of the room, keeping her Pokemon between herself and the cyborg as he advanced toward her. With each step he took toward her, she took another step away. Shane followed the pair at a distance and Alex wasn’t quite sure what either of them would do.
As the two closed in on her, Alex backed down the hallway, eventually ending up in the cargo hold. Suddenly, Shane vanished from sight and reappeared behind Alex.
“What the hell?!” Alex shouted in surprise, feeling distressed. She quickly positioned herself between her Pokemon, putting her Lampent between herself and Shane, who had sent out a Kelfi, and leaving her Umbreon to face H, who had sent out a Helioptile.
“Lumiera, Flame Burst!” Alex shouted, pointing at Shane’s Pokemon. The Lampent launched a small jet of blue flame at the Klefki, taking the Key Ring Pokemon down in one hit. “Hah,” Alex said, a smirk appearing on her face.
Just then, Dmitri ran into the room and threw out a Pokeball. A Gyarados burst out, the Atrocious Pokemon’s long form wrapping around some nearby crates.
“Go #6, use your Thundershock on the Lampent!” H commanded his Helioptile. The Generator Pokemon nodded and charged up some electricity, then blasted it at Alex’s ghostly Pokemon.
“Ebony, use Faint Attack!” Alex commanded her Umbreon in response. Ebody charged into the Helioptile, bashing him into the side of a nearby crate.
Meanwhile, H began charging up some electricity in his arm. Suspecting this was to power up his next attack, Alex knew she had to throw him off his game. She ran up to the cyborg and whispered into his ear, “The zombie Pokemon are coming. You should be afraid.” Seeming deeply unsettled, H grappled his feet to the ceiling and rapidly pulled himself up to escape.
Alex didn’t see that one coming, but now was not the time to stop and stare. “Quick, now use Flame Burst, Lumiera!” she commanded her Lampent. The ghostly Lamp Pokemon sent another lick of flame, this time at the Helioptile. Just as the Pokemon stumbled back to its feet, the fiery attack collided with it and took it out of commission. A smug look crossed Alex’s face as she felt she was close to victory. It was quickly wiped away, however, when Shane sent out a Clefable.
“R.A.G.E., use Dazzling Gleam on that Umbreon!” Shane commanded his Pokemon. A brilliant blast of light radiated out from the Clefable and collided with Ebony, doing a hefty number on her. The Umbreon managed to take the hit but she looked worn down.
“Ness, Waterfall,” Dmitri then ordered his Gyarados. The massive sea beast reared its head up in the air. then crashed its weight down on Lumiera, knocking the Lampent out of the fight.
“No!” Alex yelled, now very distraught. One second it seemed like she was close to clinching victory and the next she was totally outnumbered! “Ebony, Faint Attack that monster!” She shouted, pointing at the massive Gyarados in front of her. The Umbreon ran at the Gyarados and leapt into the air, crashing into the side of its head, knocking the Atrocious Pokemon to the ground. The Gyarados picked itself back up and let out a thunderous roar. It was clearly very pissed off.
However, H seemed even more pissed off. Rage burned in his eyes as he sent a blast of electricity down from the ceiling, zapping Alex. She felt her body spasm as waves of electricity flowed through it. She fell to her knees, shaken from the attack.
“R.A.G.E., use Sing!” Shane commanded his Clefable. The Fairy Pokemon hummed a soothing melody that put Ebony to sleep.
Defeated, Alex recalled her Pokemon. “How did I lose?”
Morgan sat on the Helix’s bridge as the ship flew through warp space en route to the Federation planet Delphyne, quite focused on her work. After the fiasco in orbit around Vandia, the crew had decided to hire a pilot. Without Arlon to fly the ship, it has become clear that they needed someone with the proper skills to fill that role.
In the meantime, Morgan was focused on analyzing the star map they had seen in the ruins on Vandia. Gilgamesh had clearly gone to the planet to investigate it. If she could just decipher it, she would be able to find Gilgamesh. She had been so intent on solving this puzzle that she hadn’t noticed that Shane and Dmitri had gone missing from the bridge. Her concentration was finally broken when she heard Dmitri’s voice over the comms.
“Morgan, you might want to come down to the cargo bay.”
“What? What do you want?” Morgan asked, quite annoyed by the interruption.
“Just get down here,” Dmitri insisted.
“Fine.”
Morgan made her way down to the cargo hold and the site she saw when she got there sent her over the edge. “How did she get in here!?” she demanded upon seeing that Alex girl from Vandia, the one she had assumed they had left on the planet.
Shane was about to explain the situation, but H cut him off before he could say anything. “Do not know,” the cyborg said, his voice full of rage as he began charging up electricity to attack. “But she will not be here much longer!”
“H. Please don’t do that,” Morgan told him in an attempt to get him to calm down.
“She’ll just be unconscious. She will feel nothing when jettisoned into space.”
Morgan saw a look of horror appear on Alex’s face at the cyborg’s words. The girl began to back away as she pulled out a Pokeball..
“H, it’s wrong to kill people no matter how much we may hate them,” Morgan said sternly
“But she broke into our stuff,” H retorted. “And we killed the people who shot at us earlier. We’ve been killing a lot. It’s what we do whether we accept it or not. Now let’s knock her unconscious! I will not have my perfection disturbed!”
“No,” Shane told him. He teleported himself between H and Alex and stared the cyborg right in the eye.
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Stop it, H,” Morgan told the cyborg coldly, sending out her Pikachu.
“As much as we wouldn’t like her on board,” Shane said. “She is now so … unfortunately, she’s staying.”
“And she will soon be off,” H fired back.
“You remember how well that worked with me, don’t you?” Shane asked in return.
“Well yes, but you’re my rival and I refuse to have multiple rivals unless something else changes, but at the moment I only have one rival.”
And with that, H grappled up to the ceiling and began charging up again. Seeing this, Alex turned and ran at full speed away from the cyborg, but it was not enough to escape his attack. Alex let out an excruciatingly pained scream of anguish as the lightning struck her in the back.
“No!” Morgan yelled as Alex’s unconscious body collapsed on the ground. “Jean, Volt Tackle now!” Her Pikachu dashed across the floor, then leapt into the air. The Mouse Pokemon slammed into H and unleashed his stored electricity, causing the cyborg’s numerous cybernetic augmentations to overload and shut down. With his magnetic feet shut down, H fell from the ceiling and landed right on his head, knocking him unconscious.
“Shane, Dmitri, restrain him,” Morgan quickly instructed her crewmates. “I’ll take her to the med bay.”
While Morgan quickly rushed Alex off to the med bay, Shane and Dmitri carried H’s unconscious body to his lab. Shane kept an eye on the cyborg while his Romanov crewmate grabbed some cable and tied him to a support pole.
It was not a moment too soon, because as soon as Dmitri had finished securing the cable in place, H began to come to. “Where did she go?” the cyborg asked angrily.
“None of your business,” Shane answered coldly. He was quite angry himself because of H’s actions.
“Of course it’s my business,” H responded. “She messed with my business, so I will mess with her business.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Shane told the cyborg. With that, he turned and stormed out of the lab.
As Morgan entered the med bay carrying Alex’s unconscious body, she was greeted by the new medical bot that she had created. “Greetings, Master Morgan. How may I assist you?” its computerized voice asked.
“MARIA, access identity logs,” Morgan instructed as she laid Alex on the table. “Register new entry. Name: Alex. Priority: 3. Assist. Administer sedatives, keep asleep as long as medically advisable.”
Once MARIA got to work, Morgan decided it was a good time to look through Alex’s things to see if she could find out anything about their new passenger. Looking through Alex’s bag, Morgan came across various Pokeball parts, Pokeballs, potions, and a Pokedex. The Dex seemed like the best place to start, so she picked it up and began searching through it.
It was registered to an Alexandria Hawthorne, a sixteen year-old girl of mixed Genevan and Sinai parentage. Based on the files on the Pokedex, including bits of old news articles and Alex’s personal journal entries, Morgan pieced together that this girl was the daughter of Dr. Robert Hawthorne, a renowned Genevan archaeologist, one of the best in his field. He mysteriously vanished around twelve years ago. Morgan was only eight at the time, but, being from Geneva herself, she remembered it being a big deal in the news. It seemed like Alex had been almost entirely on her own since then.
“That explains why this girl is so maladjusted,” Morgan said to herself. She now found herself feeling quite sorry for Alex.
Looking through a few more journal entries, Morgan discovered that Alex had been pursuing leads about her father’s disappearance. She recently discovered that he had been looking for something known as “The Mirror” at the time of his disappearance. This lead had convinced Alex that she needed to leave Vandia to find answers.
“That explains why she snuck onto the ship,” Morgan mumbled. She glanced over at the girl, still lying unconscious on the table. They were going to have a very serious conversation when she woke up.
Notes: Guys, why are you being so mean? Guys, I’m just trying to join the party. GUYS!
Goddamn they did not want to accept a new character. RP is getting in the way of the plot! The entire session was spent trying to join the party and technically I still haven’t joined it. Apparently the other characters are very resistant to bringing new people into the fold. Where’s Arlon Jett when you need him? I bet Shane wouldn’t have made it into the party without him! He would recognize and appreciate Alex’s resourcefulness and I don’t just say that because I play both characters.
All that aside, it was great to get back to this campaign! I think my new character will prove more interesting than my last. I really put in the effort to make her much more interesting and fun than Arlon was. I also challenged myself by creating a character that is quite different from myself.
We experimented with recording the entire session to assist with writing these write-ups here. I think it really helped me to produce a tighter narrative. It’s starting to feel more like a story than just the synopsis of a TRPG session. I’m hoping with more feedback from you guys I can continue to make these better reads!
Update 10/12/21: Again, not too much work was needed here. I converted to past tense, made sure things were kept to a consistent perspective, touched up some wording, and added some extra details, some of which were imported from the Blueshift chapter based on this one. For the most part, those details were extra descriptions since this chapter was pretty barebones, but there were a few important inclusions that had been added for Blueshift such as the mention of hiring a pilot and a fleshing out of the bit where Shane and Dmitri tied H up. Speaking of that part, I also reordered some of the bits at the end to flow better as individual scenes instead of hopping around to different perspectives in one scene. And that was all that needed to be done.
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!
Get involved!
Comments
“What the hell?!” Alex shouted in surprise, feeling distressed. She quickly positioned herself between her Pokemon, putting her Lampent between herself and Shane, who had sent out a Kelfi, and leaving her Umbreon to face H, who had sent out a Helioptile.*
Nothing personnel, kid.