Though a dispiriting rain soaks most of ASB Central, the sky above the contest hall is clear and sun-warmed, courtesy of a team of dragonair working to make conditions as pleasant as possible for the open-air portion of the Grand Festival. As a result, not all of the spectators wandering the park outside the contest hall might ordinarily be interested in coming to watch a contest, but were enticed by the unnaturally good weather to drop by. A small crowd has gathered around one of the ponds that dot the park, where a cluster of judges and competitors is going through the final motions in preparation for their appeal round. When one of the judges breaks away from the group and moves out to center stage, the audience greets her announcement that the appeal round will begin with eager applause, craning their necks to see just who will be the first competitor in the spotlight.
Barubu and Brittany
It turns out that Barubu is first up. He looks more than a little nervous as he moves to stand in front of the crowd, but the pokémon he releases, Brittany the buizel, doesn't have such reservations. The young pokémon doesn't stand for long in front of the crowd before turning tails and bounding into the pond, where she promptly begins to swim in circles.
The surface of the pond is disturbed by fretful ripples as the buizel circles, a small vortex forming at its center. As Brittany circles ever faster, she inverts the small whirlpool, causing it to rise and spin above the surface of the pond rather than sinking to its floor. As the column of swirling water roars up from the center of the pond, Brittany conjures an orb of icy energy at the back of her throat and, aiming carefully for the base of the whirlpool, unleashes an ice beam that freezes the raging water solid. Working quickly, Brittany manages to freeze most of the whirlpool before it falls apart. A hollow icy column is left behind, teetering at the center of the pond. A kick from Brittany's propellor tails sends her rocketing out of the water and slamming into the frozen whirlpool, which shows a greater tendency to tip over than to shatter as she smacks into it. Nevertheless, the buizel does manage to smash the top of the column off as she collides with it, and the rest of it smashes when the whole thing tips over and crashes to the grass.
Brittany kicks off from the falling pillar of ice and lands neatly in front of it just as it hits the ground. She waves shyly to the crowd before she and Barubu walk off the stage, a small gang of squirtle janitors hurrying on in their wake in order to remove the remaining ice.
Negrek: 4.0
Unfortunately, "use water attack, then freeze it" appeals have been done to death,
and this one didn't do anything new with the concept. It would also be fairly difficult to shatter a big column of ice like that satisfactorily; a stronger pokémon than buizel might be able to pull it off, but if you're going to create a frozen column of water in the middle of a pond, its first inclination when you slam into it is going to be to tip over, not shatter, unless you're very careful.
Chiropter: 6.5
This appeal had a good water-related theme, but ultimately nothing differentiated it from the standard ‘make something and attack it’ routine. The aqua jet not succeeding in shattering the ice like you intended didn’t help, either.
Kratos Aurion: 4.8
Too bad Brittany wasn't able to shatter it the way you'd had in mind; ice in the sunlight is always pretty. Even if it had worked, however, this was just too similar to every other create-and-destroy appeal I've seen (not that you can tell based on what's available, but it's "a lot"), and by now they tend to be underwhelming even when they work the way they're supposed to.
Flora and Ashes and Scythe
Next to appear is Darksong, Scythe the ralts trotting along at her side. The little psychic type looks a little intimidated by even the modest gathering of spectators that are ranged around the makeshift stage, but he doesn't hesitate to step up when Darksong beckons him forward, right into the center of attention.
The ralts blushes and gives the crowd a shy grin, then turns up the adorable as far as he can, giving the crowd his best puppy eyes. Whatever self-loathing Scythe may be feeling as he puts on an unabashed display of cute, the charm seems to work well, and a few members of the audience "awww" appreciatively.
With that done, Scythe starts to walk just in front of the first row of chairs, then moves up to a trot and finally a run as he moves back and forth in front of the puzzled crowd, three more ralts flickering into existence behind him. The quartet slows to a halt, strung out in a line before the crowd, then rearranges itself into a rough square, a ralts standing at each corner. As one, they raise one hand, point it at the ralts in the opposite corner, and unleash a flurry of rainbow-glowing leaves, which lance straight along the square's diagonals. As illusory leaves meet illusory clones, the duplicates fade from view, but the insubstantial magical leaf that strikes Scythe simply dissipates, leaving him staniding alone to receive the crowd's applause. Darksong steps up to share in the glory for a moment, then leads Scythe off the stage again, looking pleased.
Negrek: 5.2
An okay appeal; nothing major went wrong. However, "make clones and then destroy them" is a tired appeal type, and you didn't do anything new with it here. Also, several other people had already posted appeals along these lines for this contest. The charm didn't really connect to the rest of the appeal, and you didn't do anything to play to a ralts' strengths or abilities here.
Kratos Aurion: 5.5
The charm at the beginning, while cute, really had nothing to do with the rest of the appeal, and that hurts you a little. It tends to be more impressive when all parts of the appeal make sense in sequence and flow together cohesively. The rest of Scythe's performance looked nice, but unfortunately double team + make a shape appeals are also starting to get a little boring. Better connecting Scythe's first move to the rest of it would've added more interest.
Chiropter: 6.5
The first part was cute, but didn’t really connect to the rest of the appeal at all. The square formation Double Team did stand out slightly from the usual use of that move, though not much.
Shadow Serenity and Koyomi
Continuing this set of appeals is Shadow Serenity, and his choice of pokémon proves to be another water type, Koyomi the staryu.
It's impossible to tell what the five-pointed pokémon might be thinking as it balances on its edge in front of the audience. As Shadow Serenity smiles and gestures to the pokémon, however, it suddenly shrinks to about half its original size and begins to levitate up from the grass. The staryu tips back until it lies parallel to the ground and rises to around the height of Shadow Serenity's knee. From there, the star-shaped pokémon takes off around the arena, spinning madly and looking like a possessed frisbee as it whizzes at random over the grass. As it spins, it begins to spray a small water gun from the tip of one of its points, creating a swirling cascade of water in the air around it. Koyomi begins to grow back to its normal size, the size of its water gun increasing with it as a matter of course, until it returns to its original size, stops spinning and spraying, and floats back to Shadow Serenity's side, where it sets itself down once more and observes the crowd through its glittering core.
Shadow Serenity grins and bows as the audience applauds, then recalls Koyomi and hurries from the stage.
Negrek: 8.0
I like this one a lot. It's very different than what you usually see. There are a couple small issues, though--firstly that using minimize makes your pokémon smaller and thus more difficult for the audience to see, which is not really what you want. And, while it's a clever idea, it doesn't have much going for it other than novelty--if you could have come up with some way to make the display more pretty, exciting, what have you, it would have been a top-notch performance.
Kratos Aurion: 7.2
Very pretty. Simple, but pretty. I think you could've done something a little flashier than simply changing size, but it still came together well.
Chiropter: 8.5
Apart from Minimize, which I didn’t feel really added much to the appeal and mostly just took up an action (though it was at least an original choice), I liked this performance; it had a very original feel to it, and worked well with Koyomi’s strengths.
Kusarigamaitachi and Lodestone
Contest veteran Kusarigamitachi ends this round of appeals, though it walks to the center of the grass rolling a pokéball between its hands rather than leading a pokémon. After a brief smile for the crowd, it hurls the ball as high into the air as it can. The audience's eyes follow it higher and higher into the sky, forced to squint against the glaring blue.
The pokéball splits open at the apex of its arc, spewing Lodestone the metang into the air. The crowd only has a moment to register the dark circle of the metang's body silhouetted against the sky before Lodestone plummets towards the ground, one clawed arm preceding it, holding a silver-glowing ball of steel energy at its tip. Waves of glittering steel energy spray from the edges of the meteor mash attack, stretching around and out behind Lodestone in a glowing tail as it rockets downwards. Lodestone slams into the earth with a sturdy thud and a spray of earth and excess steel energy. Its free arm thumps twice against the earth as soon as it has made its landing, and its forceful impact is shortly followed by a series of increasingly powerful tremors as an earthquake rattles up from the depths to answer the metang's call.
Even as the earthquake sends waves of seismic energy rippling out from the crash site, Lodestone is preparing for its big finish. Its eyes blaze red as it lets the energy in its body build up to dangerous levels, and its whole metal body briefly glows with energy before exploding with a roar and a prodigious ball of fire. The audience, who was already getting rattled by the earthquake, is further disrupted as several seats in the front row are knocked flying by the force of the explosion, the shock wave that follows toppling a few more onlookers to the ground.
Kusarigamaitachi, who had wisely retreated to the far side of the pond for safety's sake, rushes in to retrieve Lodestone's pokéball, which by now has fallen, forgotten, to the grass. It recalls the smoking remains of its pokémon before the crowd can fully recover and gives a quick bow to scattered, hesitant applause, before jogging off the stage, once more rolling Lodestone's pokéball between its hands.
Negrek: 10.0
Awesome. The appeal was tight, with all its parts coming together for a coherent, and very impressive, performance. It also worked perfectly with metang's natural abilities--while I guess what you were going for was "meteorite," I couldn't help thinking of this more like a crash-landing (and subsequently exploding) UFO, given metang's shape and robotic nature. It's nice to see an appeal that's explosive but manages to be more coherent than just "blow stuff up because blowing stuff up is cool and impressive-looking."
Kratos Aurion: 8.9
I guess it's too much to ask for anything graceful and pretty from you, isn't it? Anyway. Quick, to the point, spectacular and sufficiently frightening, though a hair too short for my taste. It also would've been even nicer if the seams between the three attacks, particularly meteor mash and earthquake, weren't noticeable, but I guess there isn't much you can do about that (and it would've gone by even faster if it were seamless, so).
Chiropter: 9.5
Nice. My only complaint is that we didn’t get much of an opportunity to take in Lodestone’s presence before everything happened - it made the appeal seem just a tiny bit rushed to me. Other than that, excellent.
While the crowd recovers from the excitement of Kusarigamaitachi's appeals, the judges confer and decide upon their score. When everything has been worked out, the final numbers are at last displayed:
Final Scores
Kusarigamaitachi: 28.4
Shadow Serenity: 23.7
Flora and Ashes: 17.2
Barubu: 15.3
