I admit you have me at a loss with the Mystery Dungeon stuff, but generally the pokemon are portrayed as being basically animals. As you said, they are depicted as sentient and talkative in Mystery Dungeon, so I might be incorrect, but even the minis (save Harry Potter's) don't often talk. I'm sure DoSAT has a slew of translators and so forth, but they aren't, as far as I have seen, used/tested on animals. Like I said, this could probably be handwaved thanks to DoSAT, so it shouldn't be much of a problem, but it is something to consider, since it would be ANOTHER piece of foreign tech being implemented into Cheesy, and thus something that could fail at exactly the right/wrong time.

Wow, first person to realize that Cheesy was a beta name and not the final name when I wrote the OP. I'd originally typed it on a whim and added "(Cheesy.exe?)" as a potential "full name" for the character. However, it's already grown on me. A lot. And I can see how it would fit, my name on here being Anonymouse and computer mice and whatnot...

As for the Internet, that might actually be a good intro story for him. He goes to the Decrepit Lab, finds a computer that through a plothole has an Internet connection, and surfs around until he ends up in the PPC. DoSAT made sure to block him from the Internet so he couldn't run off or something with knowledge of the PPC, got him to join the PPC, installed the CCAD and Universal Translator, and sent him to be trained. And he never got access to the Internet again because it got buried under all the other Cheesy tech problems that pop up, like the 2701 glitches in his system.

WynautWhy not give you that now? I was actually focusing more on the idea of a character being like this and not an actual character, but I'll go ahead and make a character around it.

Cheesy is a tech nut. Anything even remotely related to technology he views as SHINY, and if he has his way, he'll crowd his RC with so much tech that it'd be impossible to get from anywhere to anywhere in it... that is unless you're Cheesy. He, like most Porygon-Z, can switch between meatspace and the cyberspace in some device with ease. Half the time he's in his partner's remote activator or CAD, or even in the console, where he can send himself from room to room via ICEP (and therefore find out that HQ's ICEP network is just as confusing as its halls). Unlike most agents, he'll be able to feel the consoles' pain when they get destroyed, because he almost always sleeps in the things.

He often makes up his own terminology for things he doesn't understand, rather than call them the same things other people do, and often these terms are taken from either his home continuum or cyberspace- the HQ is the "Server", Gods are "Legendaries", Sues are "Viruses", things like that- and he finds it extremely annoying when someone corrects him, firing back that he KNOWS what they're really called and he couldn't give a Rattatta's ass, he's gonna use the term he made.

His body and mind are a glitch filled mess. It's been that way ever since he evolved into a Porygon-Z, and DoSAT messing with his code to install the CCAD and Universal Translator only made it worse. This translates to his body being in almost constant, if blunt, pain, which contributes to a foul mood if he's not distracted, and gives him the equavalent of hallucinations if his environment parsing system skips a beat. Up until his Porygon-Z evolution (which was fairly recent), he hadn't needed to deal with emotions, as he had none. This means he finds it extremely easy to fly off the handle with rage, or break down in virtual tears (or worse, a full-blown temper tantrum), or get far too excited than is healthy, over the tiniest things. He hates every second of it, and relies on almost constant distraction to keep himself from noticing that his meatspace body is completely scrambled, or the other 2700 error messages that translate in his head into pain.

This constant distraction takes many forms, from flying around the RC, to strolling around HQ's ICEP network, to giving in to his computer-precise OCD and sorting his tech collection for the 200 millionth time, to chatting with thier console (Consoles are sentient right?) and attempting to convince the stubborn overgrown alarm clock to play various tunes instead of [BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!], to- of course- missions.

Despite his race being capable of eating, he for some reason finds the whole process of digestion repulsive, choosing to use the potions supplied to Pokemon Trainer Agents and an internal file-browsing system to heal up and forget memories instead of using the Oran Berries typical of his sub-continuum and the bleeprin used by practically everyone in the PPC.

Well, the thing is, your omni-tool CAD (or a Pip-Boy CAD for that matter) would be subject to normal overheating and explosions, the typical hardware's reaction to the CAD crashing. If the omni-tool or Pip-Boy CAD crashed and exploded, the agent wouldn't have the time (or even the ability) to let go of the CAD. It'd blow his/her/its arm off.

The thing is, Cheesy.exe's CAD would still freeze up and crash with the same bugs, but they have different effects.

When a normal CAD would freeze up and overheat, Cheesy.exe using his combined CAD subroutine (yes, I'll go all out and make it a combined CAD) would get massive "headaches", freeze up himself (i.e. a paralysis effect), or even take damage. Note that by "damage" I don't mean actual damage, but instead, Pokemon-style HP that leads to fainting, not death- in other words, willpower.

And if the CAD would normally explode or melt, Cheesy.exe would faint.

In the Pokemon videogames (I'm ignoring the anime and/or manga here, kinda like how one would ignore the LotR movies in favor of the books), fainting is not loss of consciousness. Otherwise, if you told a fainted Pokemon to use an HM move outside of battle, it wouldn't be able to. Instead, HP measures willpower, and fainting is losing the will to fight. This would translate to Cheesy.exe not being able to kill a Sue, or not being able to pick himself up and continue the mission, or even right down to not being able to fight against Suefluence, depending on how I would want to take it.

Combined with the fact that once he's 'rebooted' (fully healed) and back to normal, he can use his CAD subroutine again as if nothing had ever happened, and the fact that running the risk of fainting wouldn't be anywhere near new for a Pokemon, and it looks like a great idea to DoSAT.

One misspelling, no matter how many times it's repeated, always creates the same mini. Otherwise we'd have dozens of minis with the same name for common misspellings, and that would just be a mess for the adoption agencies.

This all reminded me of something. There was a thread a while back, I think a few months before I vanished, that proposed that minis would increase in mental power if they were invoked enough times or in a significant enough capacity. In that context, it was about "canonical" minis (misspellings that pass by the editors somehow and wind up in a finished work, i.e. the mini-Gohma "Knox" or the mini-Luggage "Sibyl"), but by that same principle, since the mini-Missingno "Pokemon" has been spawned hundreds of thousands of times, across the Internet and elsewhere, it must have accrued a massive amount of intelligence by this point. Even though I doubt it's been used in a canonical capacity, it's had a monumental amount of exposure to the readers of the world at this point.
To give that its logical extension, somewhere in the Pokémon multiverse, constantly being ripped from fic to post to list to blog, there is a single glitched mini, now made not only sapient but super-intelligent by its constant invokation. I'd imagine that said intellect combined with the fact that it's constantly being ripped across Word Worlds rapidly and incessantly has by this point given it at least some level of meta-cognizance, which would be extra-fun. If BBC-Sherlock can figure out he's a fictional character within minutes of being trapped in a plot hole, think of how much easier it would be for a being not only detached from reality by virtue of its species, but because of the many worlds of varying quality it's constantly being pulled into.

Okay, that probably isn't nearly as interesting an idea as I'm currently thinking it is, but I'd bet someone could make a plot device out of that at some point.

Said job being to wrangle up all the Mini-Missingno. this thread alone has created.

Because according to the PPC wiki, the Pocket Monsters (using translation of Japanese name to avoid minis) continuum is "particularly susceptible to Minis" due to all the names with the accented E, like- no, I'm not gonna give examples, we already have too many mini-Missingno. floating about.

I say that we place one spelling aside- say, no accent, or apostrophe-E, or E-apostrophe- as an acceptable, won't-generate-minis solution to this problem, as practically nobody in good old America (except for those who type in Spanish or something) has a keyboard capable of placing down an accented anything (unless you use an Android or Apple device with onscreen keyboard, but nobody's gonna type a fanfic on a phone or tablet.)

I propose the no-accent whatsoever version, as a good look around the Net shows that it's what most people that don't have accents use. Besides, a search for the no-accent version in Google (or the Wiki, for that matter) also turns up the accented version, and vice versa. Don't think you can say the same for the apostrophe versions.

Okay, that's it, "Cheesy" is a nickname.

Well, without the accented E anywhere on an American keyboard, I'm forced to spell it as "Pokemon". Besides, half the Internet uses "Pokemon" for that exact same reason. But I can see where you're coming from.

On the subject of finding computer bugs, you're right, it does take FOREVER to find a bug in a computer program you're debugging. I have firsthand experience- a 0 instead of an O and you'll be sitting there forever trying to figure out where in the name of Arceus the problem is. However, why are you trying to find the bug in the first place? Because the computer threw up an error or something freaky happened. While Cheesy might not be able to pinpoint exactly what's wrong with the picture at first, he'll know almost instinctively that something is wrong.

On the subject of the CCAD subroutine (yes, it'll be a CCAD), that was the plan in and of itself, although I was thinking more Cheezy trying to read to his partner the results, going faster and faster as the subroutine freaks out, maybe even twitching a little, and the partner having to physically slap him to snap him out of it- or, if he happened to aim the subroutine at a wraith, having a BSOD-style stop error (read, fainting). So yeah, the partner would carry a bottle of Max Revives or something.

As for the Mystery Dungeon sub-continuum, I was actually thinking his being from there for language compatibility reasons. Then again, Pokemon from said sub-continuum are substantially more, ah, sapient than thier main-continuum counterparts, so I'll still go with PMD. As for actually breaching the language barrier, we're already going with Cheesy having a CCAD, might as well have a Universal Translator installed as well.

And finally, partner. I'm not as familiar with the canons you brought up (except Harry Potter, but I'm not much of a Potter nut), so I wouldn't be able to do them justice. However, the prospect of Cheesy and the partner confusing each other with science and magic is admittedly a fun one... perhaps a unicorn from MLP?

Lest this thread dissolve into an impenetrable technical dissertation, I'll keep questions of things like what level of hardware support is required for a CAD program* to a minimum, and instead just say how fond I am of the idea of Cheesy.exe actually perceiving Sues as fundamentally foreign to our reality, literally impossible to parse.


*As I understand the Porygon line, their "bodies" are themselves somehow determined by software, so in theory Cheesy.exe could manifest any physical object so long as (s?)he had the appropriate software.