It was late spring when I was born. I learned and grew during the summer, then in autumn I had realized something important, hence the food storage.

Winter was coming.

When it came, it came HARD. As it did it covered the place in a thick blanket of wet sticky white stuff. Ick. It stuck to my fur!

Well at least it melted easily when I turned up the heat with some moves like heat wave, but ugh.

The snowstorm had dropped at least half a foot on the valley, though it piled up around my home due to the sloped roof preventing it from piling up on top. I’d heard of roofs caving in due to excess snow and had been anxious about that. Water is heavy after all, even frozen.

Fortunately I’d been prepared for the cold season, having prepared my house and stores for it. Others… not so much.

Most of the local bird population, pidgeys, spearows, and so on had flown south for the winter, carefully so as not to trigger the surrounding regions bosses. The ones that remained were cold resistant. But there were plenty of others who didn’t have that option.

The smarter among them, like the squirrel-type pokémon, had been preparing by gathering nuts and other storable foods. They’d been those I’d cooperated with to absolutely stuff my storage room with food.

However, the majority of the local population had done minimal preparation at best. After the first snow, those slackers came to me…

“You brought this on yourself.”

I glared at the pidgeotto. I’d been surprised he’d stayed instead of migrating south, but he said it was his duty as a guardian. At least he’d been prepared like me.

I’d given a few of my friends places in the back two rooms of my home, but that had led to more and more pokémon asking to stay there.

Sighing, I set some rules and let them stay. I did take care to ensure the storage room was locked unless it was being accessed or guarded. I didn’t want some thief coming in and taking the fruit of our labor… Actually…

I rebuilt my house. Not completely, but enough to protect the food and my privacy.

I’d considered hauling in more stone, but decided I already had enough earth to use.

OH! Before I forget, I had found some iron and fixed up the doors. It was reaallly important to me after a door broke the third time. Using metal bending was hard compared to other types of earth. I could get only a single door finished before I had to rest and recharge my PP.

Enough digression.. building!

I decided to separate my room and storage from the visitor housing. Doing so was easy enough, but I decided to do more, since even after the two rooms were full, there were still others wanting in.

I dug a basement.

It took a week, since I was really careful about shoring up the home above. There were nice strong walls both around the outside as well as separating the area into smaller parts. Some groups were not so friendly with each other, so being separated would hopefully reduce tensions before they got themselves kicked out for fighting.

Fighting still occurred, and a few entire species were kicked out for breaking the peace.

I’d debated between making a ramp down to the basement or stairs, but decided a ramp would be best. Stairs are great for humans, but pokémon do not move in the same way, so a ramp was better.

Since the first two rooms were on the back side of my house, I extended the roof and made another hallway and door that led to them as well as the ramp to the basement. It wouldn’t do to allow too much cold air into the place, though there were some fire-types who could warm it up easily enough.

Once I was satisfied, I closed off the original hallway.

Ahhh, blissful silence.

Large groups are LOUD! And it’d been very irritating to not be able to enjoy the silence that my home had previously enjoyed.

Once the housing crisis was dealt with, I was able to go back to doing what I really wanted to, practicing with my abilities. While I did get out and exercise and practice every day, I spent most of my time in my room. Mew fur is short, and while it helps maintain my body temperature, it only goes so far. Thus I preferred to stay in my nice warm room., throwing out a low power fire-type move to heat it up if it started to get uncomfortable.

Satisfied for now with my achievements with earth, I moved on to playing with air, fire, and water. All three were a much easier than earth. After all, they are not as solid, making them easier to manipulate.

I include ice with water since it is just a form of it. I also had a LOT of it to play with… Though it required me to go outside to use what I had available.

I may have made a few snowmen… armies. Also a couple of ice fortresses for them to be housed in. Then I made slides, ladders, and other stuff to play on…

This may be my second life, but I’m not even a year old! I wanted some toys!

Also, they were popular with the others, so my playground became a bad place to practice unless I was wanting to be constantly asked to make another one of this or that. Or to unbury everything after it snowed.

I glared back at a smirking pidgeotto. I know, I know. ‘I brought this on myself.’ It seemed like a good idea at the time…

At least it was good practice.

I decided I was good enough with manipulating my PP to do stuff outside of the premade moves for the time being, so I decided to work on something else.

It was time to try and work on the shapeshifting. Plus, if I got it down enough, I could pop out a nice thick coat of fur to protect me from the cold.

I started small, using the premade Transform move to take the forms of other pokémon. The skill had safeties built into it, so I wasn’t going to become some horrid monster if it failed. Doing it this way, I wanted to focus on the feeling of transforming and apply that to doing manual changing. Like into a human, which was normally impossible.

Transforming was a very interesting experience. I became another pokémon with a thought, and could change back easily, but when I was in a specific form I felt somehow off. Taking a moment, I realized it was like what I’d experienced all those years as a human.

I was in a body that was not natural for me, which made me uncomfortable. Thinking of the implications, I decided to never hold another form longer than I had to. I escaped from dysphoria once, and had no intention of forcing me to endure it again.

The question was, what did this mean for when I tried to assume a human form? Would I suffer for it, or would I be able to…

To prevent being caught, I needed to assume a perfect human transformation. What makes a transformation perfect? I had hopes that my thoughts were going in the right direction. After all, how could a transformation be perfect if it made the user uncomfortable?

Whatever form I chose would have to be one that fit me.

I spent the rest of the winter practicing transformation. I was determined to find my perfect form, no matter how long it took.

Telerean

Well, it looks like so far the last poll is trending towards letting d20-sama choose about posting my other stuff. I’ll give it till I wake up tomorrow (whenever that is) before seeing what the final verdict is.

I'll eventually post at least some of them, others are total garbage or reveal too much IRL stuff, so the results of the poll below will come into play when its time to post the first one.

I do have to warn ya’ll, not a single one of my stories has an ending, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. I get good ideas, write it out, but eventually reach a point where I have no idea how to continue without breaking things. I do get new ideas occasionally and go back to these, but that maybe nets me a few pages most of the time.