Prologue to the Apocalypse

When I began to write the Prologue, I knew only one thing. I had a protagonist who was running from a venusaur. The venusaur was tall. The instant I began to write, the name seemed obvious to me. Red. Named after the protagonist of the manga, which is easily my favorite adaptation of the genre. From there, the tale wrote itself. I had very few problems. The first was simply word choice. I almost wrote ignoring the searing streaks of red they left on his exposed face and arms, but then I realized crimson would flow better considering Red's name. Then, as I wanted to delay actually naming the pokémon for as long as I could, I spent a bit of time figuring out one- or two-word descriptions for the charizard like dragon or reptilian monstrosity. I gave up very quickly, as you can see, and I waste no time introducing the blastoise. It's been too long to recall what my wording had been, but the bit about the behemoths battling was, originally, one of the most awkward things I'd ever seen written. I think I fixed it in the end, though. I didn't start writing with Red in a valley, but the magic of writing is such that I made it so he had always been in one, able to be trapped. I liked the effect of thoughts dulled and I felt a surge of pride at the inclusion of the word precluding. I realize it's neither uncommon nor particularly 'educated,' but it isn't part of my normal speech patterns, so the inclusion indicates vocabularic (I just made a word!) progress. I remember looking up 'twenty meters' on google to see how tall it was, but it just gave me unit conversions, and sixty-five feet is as meaningless to me as twenty meters. I settled on it because I knew it was massive without being too extreme. Besides, I can change the height of venusaur later. This was just a dream. I admit that the SolarBeam bit was partially inspired by reading the pokémon manga. Describing the beam's advance worried me, as writing action can fail horribly and just drag a moment that should take an instant on forever. I wanted to fully describe it without lingering. I set a two sentence limit, and I met it. I know the 'It was all a dream' bit was already cliche when Dorothy pulled it, but at this point I was still thinking in more cinematic terms, and I thought this would be the best way to introduce the world. The usage of errant thought made me happy in the same way thoughts dulled and precluding did. I chose sixteen after a bit of thought. We all know Ash is ten. No one would send ten year olds into this world. Twelve is still far, far to early. Fourteen is adulthood in some cultures but still young. Sixteen, well, at that point I think most would be strong enough to survive and smart enough to not be a complete idiot. I invented The Calling on the spot, almost making it The Choosing or The Ritual, but I thought 'choosing' was to bland and 'ritual' implies too much... ritual.

I'm not even going to re-read this because I know I rambled. Incessantly. That's what you came here to read though.