Location: Alola Corruption Level: F+ Blessing: Blessing of Lunala

Synopsis: The world has been devoured, eroded, with nothing left, but some pieces of land held together and jettisoned through Ultra space itself, searching for a new world to call home in a last ditch effort for survival. The only hope is for these lonely lands turned spacecraft, this interstellar paradise, to make landing somewhere.

The leader of the conservation effort is Lusamine, followed around by obedient officers who are at her beck and call. Yuri and her colleagues are welcomed to the conservatory that is the Paradise. Though on the surface, everything thing is peaceful, not all is well.

Dissenters still exist. People still defy Lusamine's rule. Those under the banner of Team Skull insisting not to listen to this woman -- no good could come from continuing to let her be in control of their destination, of how things are run. Guzma is the loudest voice, calling her a false leader, a false human. She is merely a pawn in some greater scheme. That the monsters that sometimes plague the Paradise at night are from her own doings.

Turns out, he was right.

This Lusamine is in fact, Lillie, who switched places with the real Lusamine long ago. Adopting her features, her intellect and a purpose known only to Lillie herself. To connect all the worlds -- and to smash her Paradise into a new, unsuspecting world untouched by the disaster that is Necrozma. She will merge what is left of their old home into a brand new place and start over, with the people she deemed worthy.

Selene is her main enforcer and officer, willing to do anything Lillie asks. Because hat is her friend, even if she's wrong, even if she's no longer really Lillie anymore, until the bitter end...they will see this madness to its final end. Together.

Thoughts/Snippets/Story Beats/Concepts:

Those who don't obey are sent to the Nihilego prison, where the denizens are 'reprogrammed'. Or ultimately turned into little more than meat puppets under the control of the Nihilego and, ultimately, Lillie.

Turns out, it's been at least 30 'cycles' since Necrozma originally destroyed their world of origin. And all the people they see now are merely copies of their originals, their genetic structure conserved when they originally perished years ago. To date, Lillie has assimilated 30 different worlds and leading them all to the same repeated doom.

There is a room filled with 'Lillies'. All discarded bodies of herself that did not synthesize properly. They serve as parts for her experiments to create the ultimate being capable of withstanding living out in Ultra Space. The ones who did pass quality control are used as a new body for herself to switch consciousnesses with, continuing her life artificially.

The Lillie copies come out at night to attack anyone wandering outside curfew. They have attributes similar to Silvally.

The people found in Alola during the events of USUM have been conserved and can now be copied at any given time, though for the sake of the mental health of each copy, only one of each is ever made at a time. In a sort of boss rush, Lillie sends out copies of various members of Rainbow Rocket under her strict control to try and hinder Yuri's progress to destroy the next world.

The people of the Paradise speak as if in a hive mind, all sharing the same thoughts and senses. What one sees, the others, do too. This causes Yuri and her group quite a lot of trouble.

Each iteration of Lillie becomes less and less human, ultimately being capablee of fusing together with Necrozma in a final showdown with Yuri and her group. Ultimately, becoming the being she wished to avoid.

Selene is ultimately the one who deals the final blow to Lillie, saying that it's enough. It's time for them to stop. Get into your grave, Lillie...

For writers: How NOT To Write Dialog

Hey, guys! Like... All three of you.  Content has not been forthcoming because the past few months have been kinda crazy. First, Best Buy got weird. Then, I went full-time at Allegory, and quit Best Buy, and it was weird getting used to long days and consistent scheduling, and I had a bunch of stuff to catch up on at home. Which I didn’t, because of course I didn’t. And now, thanks to some financial crises coming up all at the same time, I’m being laid-off at Allegory at the end of the month. Yay, stress-induced mouth sores and motor tics! My favorite! So, this all means that I’m losing my job and my schedule stability, I haven’t cleaned my house properly for a month, it’s finally stopped raining and my lawn desperately needs to be mowed. Sounds to me like the perfect time to write another blog post! Today, I’d like to talk about writing, from the perspective of a reader.  As an aspiring writer, I read. A lot. A really, really huge lot. Part of why I have such a hard time getting anything done, in fact. I recommend this personality defect to everyone, it makes you smarter than TV will, in addition to being drastically more useful to someone trying to learn how to write, themselves. Writing is, at its heart, specifically for reading, isn’t it?  However, it’s also true that there’s no small number of things amateur writers can do to make themselves look like they need to read a little bit more. That’s why today, I’m going to talk about a few things writers often do that consistently take me out of the writing, specifically involving dialog.  1. Ridiculous children’s dialog.  Children are young and inexperienced, and as a result, their dialog is going to quite often sound very different from adults. However, since “young and inexperienced” does not universally translate to “severely mentally disabled”, there are some wrong ways to do this. Keep in mind when writing a child, what age and sex they are, what sorts of words they should (and shouldn’t) be using, what sorts of grammatical and pronunciation corruptions they should be using, so on, so forth. WHen in doubt, look up videos of children from the associated age range on YouTube. It’s very difficult to take your child character at face value if they’re 13 and everyone accepts their inability to pronounce the letter R as an artifact of their youth, and not a legitimate speech impediment. Your contemporary 4-year-old is probably not going to come across as believable if they never use contractions and they address their parents as “mother” and “father” rather than the significantly easier to pronounce “mommy” and “daddy”. That shit is creepy. If that’s what you’re going for, great! But more often than not, you probably aren’t. Perhaps the most important, is in hyper-pluralization. WHen children learn a grammatical rule, they try to apply it as a blanket across all examples they see. For example, words like “mice”, “geese”, “deer” et. al, usually get redundantly or incorrectly pluralized to something like “mouses”, “geeses”, “deers”, so on, so forth. What this DOESN’T mean, however, is sprinkling extra letter S’s into every second or third word of the dialog. If yours child characters is talkings like this, that’s not Timmy Toddler you’ve just written, that’s Skwisgaar Skwigelf.  2. Hyper-formal speech for no good reason. I always found the most unnerving, jarring, uncanny-valley part of The Matrix trilogy to be the parts where the characters are in the distant future, living in a grimy underground city, eating recycled protein paste and rubbing their USB ports together in carved-out stone alcove beds, but suddenly everyone has forgotten how to use contractions, and their vocabulary choice makes them sound like they’re reading off of a formal business letter. It gets even worse when you watch movies like Battlefield Earth, where the unwashed post-apocalyptic masses don’t even have the benefit of learning how to speak in such a stilted manner while plugged into giant cornstalks. It’s weird and it’s jarring, not old-timey and proper. This goes for all time periods, but especially for contemporary and futuristic. People are lazy. The internet, the biggest and most gloriously complex invention mankind has ever conceived of, was originally drawn up by college professors who didn’t want to get up out of their chair and use two different computers. It’s hard to believe that as time goes by, people will resort to more complicated and time-consuming speech patterns just for the hell of it. 

 3. Middle-English pronoun abuse. If you’re trying to write Middle English, on the other hand, don’t just sprinkle in the flowery pronouns to sound pretty. There are appropriate times to use thee, thou, thy, thine, and ye, and they are not interchangeable, and it’s *really* embarrassing to use them incorrectly and have someone who understands them, have absolutely no idea what you’re trying to say.  I won’t go too deep into grammar and specific use, but a simple reader’s digest is that “thou” and “thee” are simple second-person pronouns, subject and object respectively, “thy” and “thine” are possessive forms, and “ye” is the plural. There are a whole bunch of really good, quick-and-easy guides on when to use these pronouns, along with more Middle English stuff such as early contractions and grammatical corruptions that sound cool and help to add immersion to your work. Since it really is sort of a different language, it’s important to understand it before trying to write it. The alternative is to just keep being the literary equivalent of that pixie-cut mommy type driving the burgundy GMC Acadia with an unrealistically large stick figure family and “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” on the liftgate window, who tries to communicate with the Latino cashier at Best Buy by adding “el” to the beginning of every word and ending them all with “-o”. 4. Stammering. Like, a whole lot. Emotion in dialog is a funny thing. When the word choice and punctuation are just right, and the line breaks reflect pauses and body language, the reader can really be drawn in and feel like part of the story. On the other hand, some people just make everyone fucking stammer all the time like the poor character has just finished recovering from a stroke. I don’t know about you, but that *really* takes me out of the moment. This is especially common when a character is being portrayed as shy or nervous, and for some reason, amateur writers seem to like to turn the stammer dial up to 11 when writing dialog for a sexually submissive character in an erotic scene or story. In these situations especially, it makes absolutely no sense. If your character doesn’t have some sort of neurological disorder or a severe stutter, and isn’t freezing to death, th-then th-th-they sh-shouldn’t b-b-b-be t-talking l-li-like th-this. Normal people will stutter or slip in speech once in a while, especially when they’re stressed or excited, but sounding like Porky the Pig is not normal, and it certainly is not sexy. Seriously, think to yourself for a moment. When’s the last time you heard a real person, excluding those dealing with an actual stutter, or currently dying from hypothermia, who sounded like that? And no, the token shy new kid in the latest Fantasy-Themed High-School Of The Week anime doesn’t count as a real person. 5. Obtuse F-bomb surrogacy. This is almost exclusively within the realm of sci-fi, generally limited to young authors attempting to be edgy but worried their friends or family might see their work and think they’re uncreative or vulgar. It’s happened a bunch on network television, as well, but the extent is quite different. Imagine a dark and serious sci-fi adventure following the exploits of a sexy cyborg mercenary badass involving gratuitous, graphic violence, complicated, deep adult themes, and occasionally even fairly explicit sexuality, and the strangely incongruent use of hyper-sanitized nonsense versions of contemporary profanity.  One moment, our heroine is  murdering a band of armed thugs with a piece of broken pipe, and the next, she’s telling someone to go frell themself, or that she can’t find her fracking space helmet. It’s true, language changes. New words replace old words, the meaning and common use of such words changes and evolves to suit society’s agreed-upon use of said words. However, I promise you that this isn’t going to happen to “fuck” for a very, very long time. The word “fuck” has been in documented use in current form since as early as the 12th century, and came into relatively common use as early as the 14th. If we’re using the word in essentially the same context with virtually the same meaning more than 700 years later, and it only gets more popular, more widespread, and more socially acceptable by the day, it stands to reason that another 700 years probably won’t have a huge effect on its linguistic use as the ultimate profanity multitool. To keep it right to the point, your audience (me) is going to find the tone bizarrely discontinuous if you’re fine writing about some very dark, adult themes involving graphic violence, death, and eroticism all silhouetted against the backdrop of a grand battle to rescue humanity from the brink of cosmic oblivion, but your protagonist isn’t allowed to scream “Fuck” at the top of his lungs when he stubs his toe. You know, like normal human beings do. If you’re concerned about being seen as vulgar or uncreative with your dialog choice, then maybe use some other words in addition to “fuck”, like normal people also do. And on the off chance you’re writing for younger audiences who shouldn’t really be seeing that kind of language per modern social standards, then perhaps the adult themes, graphic violence and eroticism were a bad place to start. Just say “Fuck”.  By not showing these issues in your writing, regardless of whether that’s by not having done them  in the first place, or by eliminating the ones you find yourself guilty of, you make your dialog dramatically more relatable and more readable, and by extension, you and your work look a whole lot more professional.  So, now that that’s done, I’d like to talk about my own writing project a little bit. It’s a long time in the making, a science fiction piece involving heavy cyberpunk and space opera themes, centered around historical allegory. Imagine about 600 years in the future, where mankind has industrialized, though maybe not perfected, long-range, faster-than-light space travel. Finding habitable planets to colonize is hard and costly and time-consuming, and terraforming planets to make them more suitable for human life is only slightly less so. In 2686, humanity is only a scant 45 years past its first large-scale interstellar war, which has just totally decimated the economy of the Core Systems, the nation which really kinda started the whole thing as a land grab. Clifford Cryer is an aging private security contractor who, aside from heavy cybernetic alteration, is not quite human.  His entire subspecies was genetically for the purpose of reinforcing dwindling troop reserves during the latter half of the war, and when they came home after the Core Systems surrendered, the economy didn’t really know what to do with them. With each passing day, the sentiment against the cruel and excessive sanctions placed on the Core Systems by their enemies in the previous war cause public sentiment to grow against foreigners and nonhumans, and things take a turn for worse when his home is rocked by a massive terrorist bombing. As a result, Cryer is framed as one of the perpetrators in a massive conspiracy, forcing him to decide whether it’s more important to him to fight for survival, or to fight for the truth.