dubiouslog

PLATINUM TEAM!
currently missing its sixth member which I have yet to meet :)

Stainless. I couldn’t really choose again Turtwig this time and didn’t want a Chimchar, so I had to go with Piplup. Except that I hate Piplup. I don’t mind Prinplup and I like Empoleon, but Piplup…blargh.
So I chose a Piplup wishing for him to evolve as soon as possible. I asked him to battle against Pearl’s Turtwig, and he lost. I just went back, healed him and rushed for the tall grass asking him to battle again. And he lost again. I began to feel upset, and suddenly I got it. It wasn’t him. It was me. How could I ask him to battle for me when I couldn’t even look at his face? I just saw him as a future Empoleon, not as the Piplup he was. I was not any better than the people I disliked, and what made me feel really sick was the fact I knew I was more concerned about my image than this Piplup, who trusted me in a sort of a blind way and whose trust had been betrayed from the very beginning.

Somehow, we got to Sandgem. I had to meet Rowan knowing that I failed him, and I failed Piplup. I entered the lab and handed the Pokémon back. Rowan looked at him, and said he had already bonded with me. That was because he saw in me what I could have become, not the jerk I had been to him. In a way, he learned from me; but while I wanted him to become an Empoleon because I disliked him as a Piplup, he wanted me to become a better person because he knew I disliked myself for what I had become.
I named him Stainless for his nobleness and I promised him that I would have done my best to become the person he saw in me. Even trying to be what he envisioned would have been enough.

Stainless is very shy and can be a bit short-tempered. This is because his high morals bring him to be quite judgmental over how other Pokémon behave, and tends to be easily angered by them not behaving how he thinks they should. He hardly forgives other Pokémon’s mistakes, probably because he knows he wouldn’t forgive himself if he was the one making such mistakes and ends up measuring any other Pokémon by his meter. We could say he has quite an ego. However, he usually doesn’t voice his opinion and keeps his reasonings for himself; also, his judgment doesn’t usually extends over people too. It’s more of a neurosis of his than else, actually.

Arcadia. I’m not really that big on horses, but there was something that clicked on that Ponyta and besides I couldn’t keep on training only one Pokémon forever, so that was it. Arcadia is currently the only female in an all-male group, but she doesn’t really care, because no Pokémon in the team is going to treat her differently because of that. In fact, if they dared to, she’d probably crush them to pieces.

If Stainless can be somewhat prone to anger, Arcadia has the shortest temper ever. She gets furious for, well, almost everything. Don’t try to argue with her if you like to be alive. Actually, even calmly talking with her can make her go on a rampage. She is easier to deal with when communicating with her in non-verbal ways, but you have to be good at it, else you’ll just annoy her. She also has a reputation for never caring about her own business and gossiping about everything, but obviously no one can object at that either.

Arcadia is very concerned about battling and getting better at it. She likes to think of herself as an invincible warrior respected and feared by everyone, and somehow she fits the role. She scorns friendship and claims that emotions only get in her way, but she’s able to pull off some nice teamwork nevertheless. It’s mostly her trying to have some attitude, actually.
She seems to have less temper tantrums when with Rigel, who has similar interests as her.

(also please don’t say anything about her in the drawing - this is my best attempt at a horse ever. I cannot draw horses to save my life)

Rigel. I got an Eevee from Bebe, and he was so friendly and eager to battle that I thought, why not giving him a chance? I named him Rigel, like the brightest star in the constellation of Orion, because as an Eevee he was sparkling with possibilities (yeah, Stainless-related, I know). I didn’t really know how to evolve him though, I had already trained an Espeon and a Glaceon and didn’t want an Umbreon or a Leafeon, so I went to the Underground to dig up an evolutionary stone, using the first one I would have obtained. I was hoping for a Thunderstone, and a Thunderstone was what I got :)

Rigel is naturally bright, cheerful and welcoming to everyone; not even Arcadia can be too angry when he’s around. Not unlike her, he’s addicted to not doing his own business, but his behavior is very rarely complained because he’s just too nice to deserve bitter remarks. Stainless seems to be irritated by his nosiness, but seldom to never lets his emotions be known.
Rigel is incredibly good-natured and seems to never get disappointed over anything. He will even faint with a smile, because he knows that to be a better fighter he has to lose and learn from his defeats too. Arcadia just cannot understand how can a dedicated fighter like him accept defeat, but their common love for battling usually transcends their different views on the subject.

Rigel has a thing for smelling everything and seems to be able to recognize when his opponents are most likely to attack through their smell. He thinks this is because of his mother being an Espeon.

Meta. In spite of him being a sentient man-made Pokémon, he’s actually very calm and collected. He has a very philosophical outlook on life and believes that, even if he’s just an experiment gone awry, he has no reason to freak out because he thinks the only difference between him and other Pokémon is that, while they either believe Arceus or Mew created their species or they don’t know where they come from, he’s sure of his origins and has nothing to object about being created by a man, just like other Pokémon have nothing to object about being created by a deity. When someone tells him that deities have their own reasons to create species and men created him only for experimenting purposes, he replies that if men replicated in him part of the biostructure on which Pokémon are based on, then he too must be part of the creation, somehow.
Meta is strongly religious, and is especially devoted to Uxie, Mesprit and Azelf; he believes that his final upgrade was imbued with their powers. He also feels thankful to his creators and wishes to meet them someday, for he thinks they must have received some sort of divine power to program it the way it is, with his glitches and everything. He believes his glitches are what allow him to be really alive and not just a complex machine as they give him the chance to shape his unique personality basing on how he perceives his software skips.

As any other Virtual Pokémon, Meta is able to merge with the Internet and revert to pure data form. Which is also why he’s addicted to porn.

Windrider. He was the scout of a group of Sneasels near Snowpoint City. It was the coldest winter they ever had; unable to find any food, they were slowly dying one by one. Windrider was the one in charge to explore the nearby peaks for some source of food. He found a beautiful warm oasis with plenty of food for them to feed until exhaustion; but before telling the other members of his group, he wanted to spend a day in that paradise with a special someone, a female Sneasel from another group who was very hungered and whose heart was trying to win since time…The two groups were allied, so he feared nothing and went to inform his love of the discovery. She accepted to meet him the next evening on a place they both knew so that he could lead her from there to the oasis he found. Windrider went to spend the day in the place he found, waiting for time to pass so he could meet her love. At the hour they set for the meeting he went to wait for her, but she didn’t show up. He left the mountains for the valley where the two groups lived, and then he saw it.
Apparently, someone from his group overheard their secret conversation and went to slay everyone to get the position of the oasis Windrider had discovered, without success. And the Sneasels in the other group defended theirselves killing everyone in the other. They were allies, but hunger does not care for such things. Windrider was the only living between the slaughtered corpses of everyone he knew and cared about.

Windrider left that place, it was too hard for him to fend for himself knowing what happened, the guilt his companion. He doesn’t care about evolving, he fears that if his body changed then something else would change within him and he would develop a split-personality between him as a Weavile and him as a Sneasel with everything he caused. Because of his trauma, he has developed an irrational fear of becoming mad and he tries his best to keep himself sane.

Him and Meta get really along. However, Windrider is developing something more for his friend, which obviously upsets him to no end.

—

VG dubbed this team “the shit parade” because everyone in this team seems to have some degree of neuroticism. Even that Scyther I got to train her later, she’s both serious and vain. what.
This shit parade defeated the League being ten levels weaker than Cynthia’s Pokémon, so I have taken pride in calling them like that. I think I have really bonded with them.