All spoilers for Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are unmarked.
Penny Saves Paldea is a Pokémon Scarlet and Violet fanfic by Katrina S. Forest / RowanandKatrina.
Once again, the Naranja Academy Treasure Hunt has arrived, and students are dispersing across the Paldea region in search of something they can call their treasure. Some seek battle, while others quest for things written in obscure books. Penny, however, plans to spend her Treasure Hunt looking for something much different than her peers are.
Something is causing the reality around Paldea to come apart at the seams. People and Pokémon alike clip through solid objects, blink out of existence, or move far too slowly. Worse yet, very few people seem to recognize that anything unusual is happening. Penny has decided to try and do something about the situation before reality falls apart entirely, enlisting the help of Team Star to keep an eye out for anything unusual.
There's just one little problem with Penny's plan. See, before deciding to save Paldea, she contracted the new kid at school under the guise of Cassiopeia to help shut down Team Star. Since she needs eyes in the field, this means suspending Operation Starfall and letting Juliana down, and Juliana kind of does whatever she wants to. So now there's a rogue student who could still dismantle the team that Penny has to worry about. At least she and the rest of Team Star aren't the only people who've noticed something is very wrong in Paldea.
The fic can be read here
on fanfiction.net and here on Archive of Our Own. It finished on August 14, 2023, and then split into two sequels, Primal Sources and Coded Sources. An Audio Adaptation by Katrina herself can also be found here on YouTube.
Penny Saves Paldea contains the following tropes:
- Adaptational Intelligence: In Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, Penny is fooled by Director Clavell's Paper-Thin Disguise of Clive. In Penny Saves Paldea, Penny instantly recognizes who "Clive" is, having paid attention to the fact that Clavell's almost always the one making announcements at the academy, listening to "Clive's" voice, and comparing the two.
- Adults Are Useless: Juliana gets annoyed with Director Clavell's struggling to listen to her advice and inability to be direct about what's bothering him.Juliana groaned. So it seemed, as with generations of children before her, she had to be the one explaining to an adult how to deal with his problems.
- And I'm the Queen of Sheba: Director Clavell calls Penny to ask if he can take part in Operation Starfall while also claiming to be a student named Clive. Penny's immediate response is to sarcastically think And I'm Mega Diancie.
- Ascended Extra: The Team Star admins take part in the journey across Paldea unlike in the games where they just stayed at their bases.
- Ascended Glitch: The fic is based on the premise that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet's numerous technical issues are the result of the Paldea region being in danger of being erased from reality.
- Big "NO!": Juliana lets one loose when Cassiopeia cancels Operation Starfall. She's mainly distressed because she's not sure how she's going to pay for her huge order of peanut butter without the LP she expected to earn from the operation.
- The Cameo: Looker appears in the final chapter.
- Continuity Nod: Penny's book about dealing with social anxiety references people from two previous Pokémon games. The author of the book is G.L. Allister (the G.L likely meaning "Gym Leader"), who's terrified of showing his face in public without a mask covering most of it. One of the book's chapters is about people being unable to recognize that Professor Kukui and the Masked Royal are the same person.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Blake points out in Chapter 40 that the heroes would have a much better standing with the police if the Team Star Admins hadn't ran and hid upon the International Police wanting to question them about the disappearances.
- Dress Code: Penny is puzzled that Naranja Academy's dress code forbids students from wearing Pokémon-shaped backpacks but allows them to wear helmets that completely obscure their faces.
- Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras: Lampshaded when Arven notices that people who seem important usually have a strange sense of fashion, with him specifically noting Penny's hoodie and Eevee backpack and Juliana's neon-colored school uniform as signs they're destined for greatness. He then wonders if he's also important, as he carries a giant bag around everywhere he goes. Although Arven has no way of being aware of it, he's correct on both counts because the three of them are part of an Ensemble Cast in a Pokémon game.
- Got Me Doing It: Arven has a tendency to replace terms with similar-sounding food names when he speaks, at one point calling Team Star's Ruchbah Squad the "Radish Squad". A short while later, Juliana refers to the same group as the "Rhubarb Squad" while under emotional duress.
- Hero Antagonist: Director Clavell convinces himself that Team Star is somehow responsible for the glitching incidents, as though the delinquents are capable of unravelling reality itself.
- Hold Your Hippogriffs: Arven thinks "Not my circus, not my Aipoms " when he wonders why Juliana is buying several dozen servings of peanut butter.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
- The first Team Star boss Juliana defeats is Mela; this confuses Penny because Mela is only the second-weakest boss on the team, with Giacomo being the least powerful of the five. This is a nod to how Pokémon Scarlet and Violet players thought Mela would be the Warm-Up Boss of "Starfall Street" due to her being the only boss shown in prerelease material, when Giacomo is supposed to be fought first as his levels are the lowest.
- Arven interprets the tone of Team Star's whispers about his condition as being "as clear as a thirty-minute day." The day/night cycle in Scarlet and Violet has half an hour each of daytime and nighttime.
- Misplaced Retribution:
- Clavell decides to help dismantle Team Star because he thinks they're responsible for distorting reality around Paldea. While Team Star is actively interacting with the distortions, they aren't responsible for them; the team is gathering data on the phenomena for their leader so she can figure out how to stop them from happening.
- The International Police ends up thinking Team Star is behind the vanishings and pursues the protagonists to try and arrest them. Arven ends up having to explain what's been going on with Team Star and his life to one of their agents in order to get the protagonist's names cleared.
- Mundane Utility: The anomalies present around Paldea have the potential to destroy the region. Ortega's father found an anomaly that duplicates objects and is using it to clone Rare Candies.
- No More for Me: While reflecting on evidence that the reality around Paldea is being distorted, Clavell muses that he initially thought the strange occurrences were a side-effect of his preferred kind of morning coffee.
- Not Hyperbole: Clive tells Juliana that his problems with Team Star include their "actively destroying the very fabric of Paldea." Juliana asks if he means this figuratively, only for Clive to say that he's being literal; he believes the various bizarre phenomena occurring around the region have something to do with the team's actions.
- Off the Rails: The events that take place early on in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet are implied to have still happened in the fic, but the various glitchy phenomena occurring around the region results in Penny deciding she can't ignore what's going on anymore shortly after the school Treasure Hunt starts. She ends up cancelling Operation Starfall to prioritize preserving reality, causing one of the game's three main storylines to grind to a halt. Juliana, meanwhile, is unknowingly trying to keep the plot on-track by continuing to dismantle Team Star bases even after the operation's cancellation.
- Oh, Crap!: Way too many times to count but particularly whenever a glitch is seen in action and at the end of the second Area Zero chapter when Penny sees a Great Tusk and Iron Treads (Pokémon that look like Ancient and Future versions of Donphan) about to fight.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Discussed in Penny's book, which has a chapter about people who are unable to recognize that the Masked Royal from Pokémon Sun and Moon is just Professor Kukui in a mask and without his jacket. In the games in question, it's incredibly obvious that the two are only treated as different people to preserve kayfabe, to the point that the eleven-year-old protagonist has the option to outright ask "Professor Kukui?" when they first meet the Masked Royal.
- Shout-Out: Blake from Pokémon Adventures appears in Chapters 28, 40, 41 and 50, being referred to by his codename of "Arrester".
- Weirdness Censor: Several people around Paldea have observed the odd phenomena taking place, which include things like inexplicably slow movements, people and Pokémon phasing through objects, and invisible stuff that should be visible. However, the majority of the population either think the occurrences are the results of Pokémon being themselves or just ignore them altogether. Oddly enough, all the people who properly notice the phenomena are important to the plot of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet; namely Penny, Arven, various members of Team Star, Director Clavell, and Juliana.
