cambrian seas

BEHOLD THE SHINY ANORITH HAHAHAHA

Took me 2 days to make this 💀

On your 7th birthday your older sister takes you out onto one of the routes surrounding town. She convinces you to go into the tall grass with her, she tells you to stay still and keep quiet, she hands you a singular pokeball. The pair of you come back with a Rattata trailing behind your feet. Your parents are watching the news with concern, something about a kid in Kanto. Neither of you pay it any attention, instead you run upstairs to find space in your room for your first pokemon to live.

When you turn 10 you start trying to be a pokemon trainer. Every kid in the area is after all, and you've spent the last three years memorising book after book on how to best look after Ace - it shouldn't be that hard! Except Mikey keeps on beating you and rubbing it in your face. You swear you almost had it one day, only you're distracted by a strange boy and his Totodile coming up the route. He comes by again later in the day. You challenge him to a battle. You lose. You offer your phone number. He accepts. You don't know why.

You keep calling him. He keeps answering. It's a weird dynamic the pair of you have. You call and talk about anything. He listens in mostly silence. You think it's nice, comforting even, to be able to just talk to someone. Reena isn't at home anymore so there isn't really anyone else. You wonder if he's annoyed. The other kids are always annoyed by you. When he speaks - it's rare but he does - he sounds happy though. As if he finds comfort in it as well.

He's gone farther than you could have ever hoped, Azalea, Goldenrod, Ecruteak, Cianwood. In 4 days he's done far more than you have in 5 months. You try not to let it get to you. Instead, you brag about Ace; the pokemon he manages to beat, yesterday he finally took down Mikey's Pidgey, did you know his fangs are really sharp? When he reaches Olivine something happens. It's on the news, something happened at the lighthouse. You don't know what exactly. You can't ask him. He deleted your number. Guess that answers if he was annoyed or not.

You see him again after 3 days. He looks exhausted, dragging his feet across the route. He doesn't seem fully aware of where he is going, he's muttering something you can't hear. When you call out to him, he stops. You can't tell if it's fear or relief in his eyes. However he doesn't ignore you. He gets your number again. Was it a mistake?

There is something happening, you know that much. He won't say what, he doesn't say anything, but he's scared. You know he's scared. His breath is shaky over the phone. You feel powerless. You feel inferior. You don't move from this singular route and yet he's collected 8 gym badges in just under a week. Those two feelings bring you to send Ace to him. If you can't help by calling him then maybe he can help in this way. If you can't help Ace be his best - then maybe he will.

There's a moment where things are different. He beat the pokemon league. He's the champion of Johto. Ace was in his team. You see him walk up the route. He's still tired but the fear is gone. He stops and talks to you, properly talks to you, about nothing of note at all. Nothing about his journey, or Olivine, or if he knows what you did. He just talks about his mama and the history book he had been reading before all of this. When he leaves again he seems nervous. Like he knows something. When you call later he's back to how he was.

He went to Kanto. You worry. In the last few years, Kanto hasn't exactly been safe. Not after what happened with that boy with the Pidgeot. Something about a guy called Helix, you weren't fully paying attention. He calls you for a change. He tells you he boxed Ace. He tells you what he's going to do is dangerous, and he doesn't want his friend's pokemon to get hurt. He tells you he isn't sure if he'll come back, but if he does he will explain everything, because you deserve that at the very least. You don't understand. He hangs up before you can ask. A few hours later the news reports that two boys were found at the top of Mt. Silver. He's one of them, the other is the boy from 3 years ago.

You visit the hospital every chance you get, hoping he'll wake up. While there you contemplate everything. You know now that you aren't cut out for being a pokemon trainer. You don't know what to do with yourself. You feel like you can't turn your back on this. A nurse comes in and hands you something he had. Apparently it dropped out of his bag. A pokeball with the letters "GS" on it. You've never seen it before, but she hands you it before you can ask about it. You take it home on accident. You wake up somewhere else next to a mythical pokemon and with your head full or noise.

It felt like a dream. You know that it wasn't. Celebi is kept hidden in your room next to Ace's bed. You take the GS ball with you whenever you go to visit him, in case he's awake and can explain it. Or whatever They were. You have a theory, but aren't fully sure.

When he finally wakes up there's commotion. You see him panic at the noise, something clicks. You drag out the nurses and doctors that had rushed in and wait for him. He breaks down. You tell him it's ok. He explains Them. He explains the Helix and Red and what happened on the mountain. He tells you he was there at Olivine, but he doesn't say what happened. You don't ask. You pull out the GS ball. He barely recognises it. You tell him you believe him. No one besides his parents do.

You spend a lot of time together. Actually best friends now, not just a one way phone call. It's still comforting, you don't know what you want, but at least you have this. At least he smiles now.

You watch it happen again and again. Person after person walking around with Them at their side. You watch the story play out in front of you as you always have. It's painful, it's horrifying. You can't look away. You feel that doing so would betray him. Doing so would betray yourself. You find that you can help in a small way, just by being there. You are an outsider in regards to the grander scheme, but you are one of the few that know.

You sometimes consider using Celebi to go back. Back to the very beginning, to stop any of this from happening. Doing so would mean you wouldn't have met him, but he would have been happier, right? However you've seen what happens when people try to mess with the world's path. It's tempting, but you bite it down and continue to watch.

You aren't a host, though you aren't really human either. You exist in a strange limbo where you've seen and experienced too much to go back, but not enough to truly suffer the effects. This was your choice to stick to it, for his sake more than your own. You dont think you can regret it, not when the alternative was a life stuck to a single spot, destined to always be inferior.

Okay, I need to- I NEED TO EXPLAIN. Because my gosh twitch plays chat determination.

Normally for this glitch you have to first talk to the Old Man and watch the catch tutorial, then fly to Cinnabar somehow and surf the coast. If I understand this correctly. We did not have anyone who could Fly. Teleport can work too. ....We tossed that during Pokemon Tower. We could warp with blackout???? Apparently!! But to do so required a ludicrous plan to activate it since we needed to fly from Viridian specifically.

So! The plan:

We're mid levels because we've made it Cinnabar and no way are we risking PC for little ones. Have most of the team blackout in Pokemon Mansion except preferably one member.

Said member must get Poisoned so we can purposefully faint after the tutorial. Note we own two Poison types so knock them out for sure since they can't be poisoned later.

Make it back to the Old Man before fainting. Can't checkpoint anywhere because we need to get back to Cinnabar.

Part 3 turned out to be harder than we thought. Because we tried using the Weedle in Viridian Forest to poison us, but the only party member low enough for Gen I mechanics was our Hypno. (We tried with Onix, but apparently in Gen I if they don't do any damage they always miss? Well Onix defense was too high). We tried Onix anyway with the Wild Tentacool south of Pallet but for similar reasons needed a wild encounter of at least Level 20. So change of plans, went into the grass area to find Tangela with the hope it would randomly choose Poisonpowder. Once we got that done, we still had to Surf, bypass Pallet, walk the winding route to Viridian City to reach the man aaand

So close (⁠ﾉ⁠´⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)⁠ﾉ⁠ ⁠ﾐ⁠ ⁠┻⁠━⁠┻

While we COULD have tried that again, we fell back on Hypno and the Weedle and a third attempt was made with success! Team dead! Poison get! Cinnabar warp! Manage the menu to get in the water since you can't just click it in Gen I! Found Missingno!!! Killed it. Found another though!!! Where we caught it with a Master Ball which took some effort being in the middle of the menu. And apparently named it Bucket. ＼⁠(ﾟ⁠ｰﾟ⁠＼⁠)

They've been at this for hours and I am so proud of Chat right now.

And for those unable to watch the vid, our streamer celebrated this feat by "giving us" a plushie. <3

Anyway I may have some concerns about a broken OP mon on the team before we finish the gyms, but I'm just so happy to have watched this. ;w;

I am proud of my dumb daily recaps so come with me down memory lane as we prepare for our 10th anniversary next February. <3

twitch methodically checks every tile except the door

AJ and Alice formed the official Host Book Club at some point except they're the only members until Abe. So instead they're just sitting together reading history/science books and sometimes explaining said history/science to each other. It's relaxing.

Cly agreed with that cameraman in Johto that Aoooo is very photogenic. Yes even with how she glitches every photo or video she is in. Cly knows how to make it work and just has an entire album of photos of Aoooo.

Napoleon teaches Arty how to play card games and no one is happy about it but Arty is. Very good at it?? And he's enjoying himself. So it's fine.

D has decided that Jimmy needs a better wardrobe and so takes him out every other week to go clothes shopping. Jimmy appreciates the gesture but he just ends up picking out more hoodies every time.

Red and A have started to do mini competitions every now and again. It's all things that cater to them specifically though, things like "I can eat five pieces of toast faster than you", "I can make a better wood carving". Once A challenged him to a try not to laugh and realised very quickly how bad of an idea that was.

Anomalo from Fossil Fighters: Champions

Ok, so I use Em Carroll's His Face All Red to begin the horror unit in my graphic narrative course and today I had a student provide my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE TAKE on the comic.

They were like, "This isn't scary at all. It's a perfectly logical set of events."

And the class was like...what?

And they were like, "Clearly, the weaker younger brother didn't actually kill the stronger older brother. He bashed him in the head with a rock and, head wounds bleed a ton, so he thought he'd killed him, but he'd only stunned him. Older brother wakes up, climbs out of the hole, notices his coat is missing a giant chunk, and has a pretty good idea of what younger brother is going to do. SO he orders himself a new coat, has it delivered to a nearby village, waits two days for Amazon prime to show up with it, and then walks back to his home village on day 3 having decided to drive his brother absolutely insane in revenge. And then for the next several days he plays along with his brother's story and digs a hole next to his brother's house, except he doesn't stop there, he digs a tunnel that reaches back to the hole in the woods connecting the two. Because he knows that his brother is going to freak out at some point and go back to check if the body is still here. And when he sees his brother heading off into the woods one night, he hops into the farmhouse-hole and takes the short-cut tunnel to the forest-hole and puts on his old coat and rubs some sheep's blood on his face so that when his brother shows up he can roll over and be like 'whattup' so he'll lose his damn mind."

And then multiple other people in the class were like, "actually, yeah, if my sibling tried to kill me that's exactly how I'd handle it."

Does anybody remember [insect-like chattering]. Nobody [insect-like chattering]s anymore. Like and reblog if you [insect-like chattering]

Horseshoe Crab - Aluminum Foil Sculpture

I think Horseshoe Crabs should have missile batteries 

Fossil of dragonfly larva or I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about these graphics that depict the cambrian explosion as a LITERAL big bang explosion all day. They’re so fucking funny to me

canbedone / Adobe Stock

Literally kaboom