Welcom to Inc Inc.

This is my fic that I've been making concept art for and which will be my primary focus in terms of major projects going forward for the time being. I will update this when I write and post the first chapter; I plan to do so on AO3 and possibly also here, so look out for a link!

The fic will be about attempting to redeem Darkrai from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, but also about uncovering and healing the trauma that made him into the villain he was in the game.

Here's the tag for the fic! I have more concept art in there c:

More engineering and furgonomics type concept art for I Can Fix Him!

Mostly, this one is focused on the setting of Treasure Town, and Team Starbeam's base at Sharpedo Bluff.

The climate there is in the subtropical zone btw! Treasure Town is kind of in the middle of the continent so I see it being fairly warm but not super extremely so. Sometimes it gets a little bit cold, but it doesn't tend to snow, and during the summers it gets pretty hot and they have monsoon kinda weather often.

ALSO I got the idea for spira bread from Jay Eaton's RttS! The spira bread here is a little different, being made with more seaweed/algae than RttS's spira bread, but that's where I got the base idea from! (speaking of, if you like these kind of world building engineering ergonomics speculative biology kind of topics, I highly recommend reading said comic! it's a wonderful read and currently on-going! Here's a link to the comic proper!)

Additional reference material for Sylvia and Ink!

Do note Ink's is not 100% accurate for her as a Ninetales (I moved the explorer badge onto the treasure bag) or her moveset (in my actual playthrough I did recently to recreate my lost save file, I ended up swapping my classic Wide Slash for Dark Pulse to take advantage of her higher special attack more (and also because I didn't realize it was AOE until recently!)

Here's some fun facts about their origins as characters:

Ink is initially going to a still a Vulpix while Sylvia is already a Delcatty because I actually had those specific pokemon as figures once! A family friend had a bunch of old pokemon figures they let me have, and while they didn't have Ninetales or Skitty, they DID have Vulpix and Delcatty!

The other reason she takes forever to evolve is because on my one save file as a kid, I could NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME FIND A FIRE STONE. I was playing without the wiki at the time so I had no idea that evolution items are restricted to spawning in specific dungeons (go to Mystifying Forest and Midnight Forest if you need them!), so I was just looking all over and having no luck. I literally got to level 96 with her and SHE WAS STILL NOT EVOLVED

They are both loosely based off a save file I had as a kid, wherein I got Vulpix naturally thru the personality quiz (multiple times, too, since I remember having another save where my partner was actually Eevee! btw don't pick Eevee as your partner unless you want a challenge. Runaway makes them panic and run off if their health gets low, creating an awful scramble to get them back before they get themselves into trouble), and then I had my bestie at the time either play thru the quiz herself to be given a pokemon, or choose one manually, and that would be my partner! Either way, that pokemon was Skitty!

Sylvia's personality only loosely pulls from what my friend was like, though, since I want her as a character to be more like the in-game partner character, both in terms of canon dialogue and my actual gameplay. Plus I don't want to straight up recreate a real person! She is more meant to represent the kind of friendship we had itself.

WIP concept art for tool ergonomics for I Can Fix Him!

I think the thing that brings me closest to connection with humanity is ergonomics. the designing of human made things made to be used by humans, to better interface with the human body and mind. and relatedly I consider it very humanizing (personalizing?) to do this for other beings, because non human sophonts would do this too.

So this will be a major world building angle for I Can Fix Him!; the inclusion of infrastructure and tool design and the designing of tools to be usable by the immense diversity of body shapes and plans and manipulators which pokemon have.

Here's the page from Freefall!

I'd also like to link a page from another of my favorite webcomics, The Book Written By Tiny Paws, wherein one of a band of neolithic sophont rats ponders a hypothetical solution to a problem which they could not solve. That problem was the greivious injury suffered by one of their companions, that resulted in them having to amputate the affected limb due to the unstaunchability of the bleeding. And they wondered, if only they could make needle and thread small enough to sew blood vessels shut. To them, with the technology they had available, that seemed impossible.

But it is not impossible. It is a question which neolithic humans likely asked, observing that blood moved in tiny tubes in the body... what if they could be reconnected? to stop bleeding and keep injured limbs still on without that limb dying and then poisoning the rest of the body as it rotted.

But we have figured out how to do that! That question likely asked in hopeless wishful thinking countless times millennia ago and centuries ago... We have answered it. Through the striving of countless humans one on top of the other like geologic strata, combining all their knowledge like bricks in a house, we have figured it out. We can make the needle and thread small enough to sew blood vessels closed.

So how did Darkrai get to the Hidden Land, to fuck up Temporal Tower? The only ways in are to have the Relic Fragment choose you and then go Brine Cave and then ride the ferryman Lapras (who is a person! he could judge you unworthy at any moment!) across the sea of time, or to have Dialga himself bless you with the ability to open Dimensional Holes (this is how Dusknoir gets in, Primal Dialga opens the Dimensional Hole for him or possibly grants him the ability outright). and there is no way in hell Darkrai was getting either of those, so how did he get in, and how did he open that Dimensional Hole in Dark Crater?

Well,

gonna post things Ive had laying around and some new things

btw this is what is taking me so goddamn long

BIG collective introductory reference sheet

Btw here's how the beby sleeps c:

curled up advanced style c:

More Darkrai biology concept art

figuring out what the insides are like

I decided on PMD2 Darkrai's injury BEFORE I decided on this for certain; all I knew was the majority of the body mass and guts were in the thorax, and that some of this def extended into the back

Dunno if any of you have ever used a CAD software (3D modeling software used for making machine parts and other industrial things), but that's what I think Palkia's powers are a little like.

here's what I mean by 'extrude' set to operation 'cut':

(you have no idea how much of a pain in the ass the Darkrai model was. only Pokepark's was available in a filetype that I could import into FreeCAD and then export into ANOTHER filetype that Fusion360 would understand and then I had to muck about a bunch to convert it into a solid so that it could be cut)

More about PMD2's Darkrai's injury below the cut!

WARNING for mild gore below!

So I have a LOT of feelings about the new Mega Darkrai, mostly of dissatisfaction

While it is a cool design, it doesn't feel like Darkrai to me. For one, Darkrai never really had THAT much of an eye motif; if anything it had that emo boy haircut, and that's about it.

Darkrai's real themes are the moon, and darkness/shadows. It is active on nights of the new moon as the dex says, it lives on New Moon Island, and it is part of the lunar duo. Furthermore it is associated with darkness, being able to clip into its own shadow, and in the Ranger games even drag people in there with it. It is the Pitch-Black pokemon, and its signature move is described as; The foe is dragged into a world of total darkness that puts it to sleep.

So, this mega Darkrai is meant to exaggerate those traits. and to NOT do NOTHING with its collar that looks like a maw full of bloodstained teeth!

Very importantly I wanted my mega Darkrai to be both very scary, but also to look like it might be painful or scary for Darkrai itself to go through. A major theme for Darkrai is fear; Darkrai both inflicts fear on others (the nightmares), and it is fearful itself.

Darkrai's iconic ability is used to drive off threats, and it seems to prefer to hide far away from others. Furthermore, it has been shown to do this specifically to avoid harming others. and even in PLZA, it has this behavior, urging people to get away from it just as much as it begs for help.

this one I actually came up with BEFORE I saw the official mega; I came up with it after considering potential death scenarios for my fanfic. One of them I considered was Palkia just kinda slapping his hands together over Darkrai and he explodes into shadow goop.

And this one was a fast and sloppy slasher movie monster take

hello here's another of the reference images Ive been scribbling for Darkrai biology to keep my lore consistent

I intend to have PMD2 Darkrai's trauma in my fanfic start early in his life, so I needed to have his appearance set down for any of those flashback scenes

'Don't Starve Teenbird' refers to one of these in their adolescent stage

I like to think the baby stage behaves most like a deer fawn; the parent will hide them somewhere deep in their territory, and they will just stay put there while the parent fetches berries for it and patrols obsessively.

Bonus under the cut!

long awaited image I kept meaning to make

I had the idea months ago after I realized that I had all these posable figures and that I could easily pose the heartless like the small ape jumping onto Sora

Images yoinked from here:

background

lot of headcanons in here, both my own and others (notably, the main sleeping posture comes from the sprites found here; the one laying down with the retracted plume is fanon but the sleeping sitting up is from the canon game sprites

The injury I gave him might seem extreme, but I feel there is no way Palkia actively trying to kill him would NOT leave a life changing injury

considering he is characterized in cannon as being cowardly, I also want part of his arc to be gaining bravery so that it becomes kind of thing that he no longer gets struck on the back due to him trying to run away

The mouth design I did like this because I wanted it to be frightening to the point of being unweildy, but not TOO far wherein itd look completely out of place on a pokemon. Darkrai here is NOT a carnivore, but his teeth are still wickedly sharp so as to look scary if he bares them when cornered.

long ago I came up with a pretty simple and cute alligator clip mouth design, but I feel it doesnt fit the tone of what I want to write here