kori / rex 🍉

Zira's lore is virtually unchanged, but Vivian has undergone a major overhaul. I have an old short story document, wherein I went over his initial meeting with Zira, and it had him established as living in an abandoned mad scientist laborary in a bunker underground, and teaming up with Zira. However in that version (and remember, this is very old! I wrote the story I am referencing waaaaaay the fuck back as a teenager, at age maybe 15 or 16 if that; which would have placed the story being written between 2014 and 2016), Vivian had a whole other angle to his backstory that I may or may not scrap or completely redo, in which he was a rogue mega BEFORE THOSE WERE AN OFFICIAL CANNON THING!

In that old version, Vivian had a time period wherein he had been forced into a permanent mega evolution for about a year, and either the people at the underground now dilapidated laboratory helped him, or Zira and her coworkers did. Either way, afterwards, he elected to be part of an experiment in cybernetics that resulted in him getting his robotic arm - to fill the gap left behind by the overwhelming mega evolution power he couldn't stop involuntarily craving (I do nooooot pretend to know how to ACTUALLY deal with such a thing, I am not a doctor of any kind and I deeeeefinitely was not and did not as a teenager! it was the just the story that I wrote at that time).

ALSO in that old version, Vivian's lab was a decommissioned branch of ZIRA'S lab's parent company. This branch was originally tasked with studying and containing anomalies a lot like SCP - but went rogue and started CREATING them instead, causing them to be disbanded. Vivian then moved in AFTER this fact, only learning of the true nature of the things behind the doors he'd boarded up when Zira came to investigate and explained it to him.

In that version however Vivian was a distinctly wild pokemon, even if he did tend to get himself involved in human shenanigans from time to time.

In the new idea, I'm placing Vivian's involvement with the labs way earlier in his life, and also making the labs their own separate thing independent of Zira's labs (though she is still sent to investigate, just for different reasons). I haven't exactly decided how I want this involvement to start, but I'm on the fence between either having Vivian have been RAISED by the Secret Labs, or to maybe rework the rogue mega backstory from the old version (possibly having it be that team Plasma experimented on him, got in way over their heads, and then tipped off the Secret Labs to him so THEY could go profit from that horrible mistake instead).

I do know that Vivian functioned as the Secret Labs living security system, using his Bad Dreams ability and constant patrolling to deter people from entering the area, and detaining them with Dark Void if they got in. And Vivian also defended the lab boys from hazardous anomalies.

For the Secret Labs themselves, they are kind of like if SCP was ran by Aperture Science; they are made up of mostly rejects and holdovers from various evil teams (notably team Plasma, as all of this takes place in Unova, or closeby), and they deal in the containment and study of supernatural anomalies. And they are named like that (with their staff even being called 'lab boys'/'lab girls'/'lab enbies'!) both because I'm bad at at naming things, and because I think it's something they'd genuinely do - and that that such a comically obvious name would be a good cover in-universe!

The Secret Labs had a clearance system a lot like SCP, going from 1 (guests who are merely given permission to exist at the labs At All), to 4 (the top command who decide all the rules and are the only ones to have access to all anomalies in the facility), and they classified anomalies with a similar system, from Safe, to 'Godey' (equivalent to the moderately dangerous 'Euclid' classification from SCP, and sharing a similar naming by referencing an in-universe architect where SCP references a real-life mathematician), to 'Distortion' (highly dangerous anomalies, with the name referencing the Distortion World of pokemon lore).

The labs were abandoned, however, following the escape of a Distortion-class anomaly, and the enactment of their second highest level emergency protocol (the highest is to simply blow the entire facility up, staff inside or not, in the hopes of annihilating the threat). The entire lab was evacuated, all anomalies either taken out or destroyed, the lower level sealed with the anomaly inside... and Vivian left behind to continue guarding the place. It's some time after this that Zira goes to investigate the labs, and meets Vivian there.

The robotic arm btw, in this version, would be a genuine prosthetic following an SCP-level workplace accident, just... made by the type of people who'd do great working at Aperture Science.

If I DO do the 'Vivian was raised by the lab boys' variant, that one I know I will have to handle with immense tact, as it carries with it some Fucking Heavy themes - and if there is one thing I have learned as a writer, to improve any work of writing, it is to know what, and when, to handle with immense tact.

ANYWAY, here's some potentially VERY dated music I listen to when I work on Vivian!

Lemons by Rchetype Lemons (Parameter Mix) by Rchytype You Monster by Will Bedford Device Has Been Modified by Victims of Science

Here's also some fossil evidence of Vivian and Zira!

Normally I do not share my old art, as it tends to age badly (I had to scrub the text out of some these!), but these are actually tolerable