Maiming* - Tumblr Posts
"I do love a good old test of morality. And there's no better moral test than to take the form of someone or something helpless, walk in front of someone, and see how they react. My preferred way of doing so is by transforming into a Pokémon in need of help--usually a Murkrow, Togepi, serpent Pokémon, or Hisuian Zorua. I recall a girl of about sixteen years alone on a village bench in Hisui, who I approached in the guise of a Hisuian Zorua hungry for food. I begged and I begged--but first she ignored me, next she insulted me, and when I put my paws on her legs she picked me up and threw me. And I looked at her with the most enormous eyes, the words written in my wordless gaze: You THROW Volo? You throw Volo like the football? Jail for you! Jail for you for ONE THOUSAND YEARS!!!! Then as the girl must have said as she retold the story, my eyes began to glow. The cold winter night felt twenty degrees colder than before. I approached her at a trot, which turned into a lunge--
"And then I bit her hand off."
Oh, just look at that feral grin.
"Well, I didn't bite it off at first. At first I grabbed onto the hand she threw me with and I would not let go. I would absolutely have let go if she just apologized and admitted it was wrong to mistreat a Pokémon in need, but noooooooooo, she had to be one of those people who can only learn the hard way. She ran screaming all the way back to her humans, playing the victim like I had just attacked her out of nowhere, and the whole village who I can only assume failed to come together to teach her proper values came together to try and save her from the consequences of that. First her family tried to pry me off her. Then her friends. Then came the doctors with their steel tools. Then came the Pokémon Wielders with their Dark Pulses and their Night Slashes. For hours they struggled, but my teeth only sank deeper--until finally, I decided to end it by biting it off entirely. The legend then says I ran away from the village with the hand in my mouth, never to be seen there again. I think I may have gone back there a few times, but the part about me stealing her hand--it's absolutely true."
He smirks as he tells the story, watching the listener's gaze eagerly for some sort of a reaction. This little shit telling edgy stories about himself to get a rise out of people? More likely than you think.
The moment Steven turned ten, he set out on a journey across all the regions to collect and revive all known Fossil Pokémon. He succeeded in collecting all the canon ones, and they are on rotation for his Champion team. His most beloved one though is his Shiny Tyrantrum, Sue, who became his draconic bondmate. A bondmate is a Pokémon that you share both a strong friendship and spiritual relationship with; Draconids have dragon bondmates, only one per person.
Sue got in trouble, however, simply for defending herself in a manner permissible by draconic law--a law which sounds strange to us, but Pokémon are autonomous individuals and it is humanocentric to completely disregard their laws just because they are strange.
Steven's youngest half-brother Antoine, the one his abusive stepmother favored, was as arrogant as he was spoiled, and did the one thing you should never do in front of a dragon: mocking their name. He had been insulting her name to Steven behind her back for a while ("Sue isn't a very scary name for a dragon" and shit like that); Steven told Sue of the insults and she warned him to knock it off, saying that among dragons, misnaming someone was grounds for killing them (headcanon courtesy of one of my besties @landilizandra). But Antoine kept pushing, thinking that his mom would always protect him, just like she "protected" him from people trying to hold him accountable for his bullying at school. One day though he started making gagging sounds in front of Sue to mock how her true draconic name was pronounced, and she mauled him to the point he was unrecognizable right in front of Steven and their parents.
Antoine passed from his injuries, and the mom blamed Steven, threatening to lock him up and get him tried as an adult (he was 14) for Trainer negligence resulting in homicide. However, Sue took full responsibility before the law, meaning that even though Hoennese peoples acknowledged and abided by Pokémon laws to the best of their ability, colonizer law would have her put to death. Steven saved her by sneaking her to Zinnia, who herself had a Shiny Tyrantrum; Zinnia cleverly alternated the times at which she spent time with them and nobody was able to tell the difference. After the events of the Delta Episode in which Hoenn was reclaimed by its Indigenous peoples, Sue and Steven were finally reunited.
I'm never gonna recover from this
They’re used to it by now… but it’s still hard…