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EVERYONE: The Alola Pokedex

And the usual few comments. The use of "I" early in the entry strikes me as being rather ... what's the word? Out of style? My brain isn't behaving today, no doubt the word will be painfully obvious when I look at this again.

I can tell you were having trouble writing this entry. I'm kind of surprised that you went for the bright light and energy method of evolution for metapod, instead of butterfree moulting off the cocoon. I wonder if you came across the same irritants I have in the official pokédex entries - namely, treating pollen, nectar, and honey as being interchangeable terms
 
@Beth Pavell

Thank you for reading.

I'll probably smooth the "I" over to "the authors of this guidebook."

The SM pokedex entries make a big deal about metapod's insides being liquid, and at that point the transformation was radical enough I decided to pull out the flash of light and some excuse about the liquid slush being a battery or something.

Nectar makes sense as a butterfly diet. Pollen is... A little bit of a stretch, but I'll go for it. Honey means they're actively antagonizing the local ribombee. Those all give very different implications and it annoyed me to no end.
 
The SM pokedex entries make a big deal about metapod's insides being liquid

Ah, that explains things somewhat, I've not really read a lot of the edgedex SM pokédex

Nectar makes sense as a butterfly diet. Pollen is... A little bit of a stretch, but I'll go for it. Honey means they're actively antagonizing the local ribombee. Those all give very different implications and it annoyed me to no end.

Yeah, I got the distinct impression that either the translators don't care, or the original authors don't know the difference
 
Ledian (Ledyba)

Overview

There is a peculiar sort of modern arrogance that history can be divided into two phases: the era of primitive mysticism and the Age of Science. The latter began only a few centuries ago. Before it no significant advances were made beyond, perhaps, the very basics of mathematics. Sometimes in their rush to repudiate ‘superstition,’ scientists rush to dissenting opinions when, in reality, the ancient wisdom was largely correct. Ledian appears to be one of those cases.

The ancient poets, from India to Kalos to Mexico, claimed that ledian fed upon starlight. In the late 1700s a man by the name of John Alabaster published a lengthy treatise on how this belief was the height of ancient foolishness. Cultures around the world had built and protected homes for ledbya near their fields because ledyba prey upon other bugs. The same farmers would also complain when ledian ate the fruit from their orchards. What place was there for starlight in their diet?

It is true that ledyba hunt bugs and ledian are very fond of fruit. However, it has been recently discovered that the cells on a ledian’s carapace appear to generate energy in reaction to starlight that isn’t from the sun. It is unknown what advantage they reap from this that they would not gain from simple photosynthesis. The leading theory, that they need only dim light, has been disproved routinely in experiments. It is further unknown how they evolved this trait as the only other pokémon to demonstrate similar attributes are clearly extraterrestrial in origin. And, while ledbya look almost exactly like a larger version of a baseline insect, their organ systems are closer to a klinklang than a butterfree, to the extent that their physiology is understood at all.

Ledian are fascinating and loyal pets that can hold their own in even international competitions. Unfortunately, “the cycle” (see Breeding) limits the times in which ledian are available and even further limits the amount of time most trainers will have to bond with their partners.

Physiology

All stages of ledian are classified by the Department of Agriculture as dual bug/flying-types. The department is currently in the process of reconsidering its prior ruling in favor of a bug/fairy typing over their stronger connection to moonlight than agile flight, aerokinesis or a traditionally avian build.

Ledyba have two segments. The larger of the two contains its wings and six proportionally small legs. The back of its carapace contains five black stars. The exact size and pattern of the stars varies between individuals. The second segment contains the ledyba’s head. Unusually for insects, their eyes are complex and quite similar to those of cephalopods or vertebrates in appearance. They have two large black antennae on their head. These antennae are used for smelling the world. Ledyba have scent glands located right beneath their antennae. They use these glands to signal their emotions, location and intent to other ledbya. Ledbya have a mouth, but as they have never been observed eating food or using bite attacks it is believed to be either vestigial or unusable until they evolve. They are counter-shaded; their bellies are yellow and their back is primarily orange.

Ledian are some of the largest flying insects, reaching heights of up to 1.6 meters in parts of the world that are both warm year-round and have excellent air quality. Alola is one of those places. Ledian have a proportionally large head segment. and a proportionally small ‘body’ segment. The two are connected by a short but visible neck. Ledian have a visible black dot where their scent glands are. Curiously, ledian have conventional compound eyes rather than the more complex eyes of their juvenile form. Their mouth also grows proportionally smaller even though ledian actually use it. Ledian legs become more specialized, with two serving as ‘feet’ used for balance mid-flight and four growing longer and developing hard, round tips that vaguely resemble boxing gloves. Ledian gain a darker red coloration upon their backs.

Ledbya appear to subsist entirely upon starlight. Ledian sometimes eat very sweet fruit or berries during long summers, long periods of continuous cloud cover, or during periods of abnormally bad air quality. Ledian have never been observed producing waste. Their digestive system, like almost all of their other organs, appears to be entirely different from known organic pokémon. The inner workings of ledian are still largely a mystery. Some organs (their ‘brain,’ their scent glands, their three hearts) readily appear to have a purpose. Most of their organs do not.

The amount of energy a ledian obtains from starlight appears to be based upon the number of stars visible, air quality, cloud cover, the phase of the moon and the length of the night. There is preliminary evidence that ledian energy production might depend upon the alignment of planets, long-term fluctuations of the Earth’s tilt and distance from the sun and the presence of nearby comets.

Behavior

Ledyba are some of the most gregarious of all pokémon, preferring to live in swarms of several hundred members. Ledian are less social, but still prefer to live in groups of six or more. In the wild they are known for forming huge swarms and, when attacked, grouping together and throwing up reflective shields around the entire swarm. However, particularly powerful or stealthy birds enjoy preying upon ledyba, which causes their numbers to steadily decline. Even with human training and protection, the total number of ledian in Alola inevitably declines to roughly 2000 at its low point.

Ledyba have long been known to find and kill other non-pokémon insects in their home. Ledyba emit a steadily stream of a weak insecticide from their scent glands and use their weak punches and wind attacks when their scent won’t do the trick. The purpose of these hunts is unclear, as they do not compete for food with these insects and they seldom attack ledyba except in self defense. However, they usually spare pollinators. This has made ledyba beloved by farmers, who in turn introduced them to Alola around 1850 C.E. This introduction has led to a decline in local insect populations, but the popularity of Alola as a rookery for large birds of prey (fearow, braviary, honchkrow, mandibuzz, talonflame, skarmory, noivern) has kept the ledian population in check.

Ledian also make a habit of hunting bugs. Unlike their juvenile form, they hunt down pokémon insects. They spare pollinators such as ribombee and butterfree. There are records of ledian going after vikavolt in the first few cycles after their arrival in Alola, but they have since stopped hunting vikavolt and vikavolt, in turn, have stopped hunting them. Almost all other bug-types are fair game. Ledian punches are surprisingly powerful and can be unleashed at rates of up to 130 total punches a second when counting all four arms. Ledian’s preferred tactic is to ambush a bug while it rests and unleash fast, targeted punches to a particular area on their target’s exoskeleton. The resulting force is not intended to break the exoskeleton. Rather, it is meant to put pressure on weak points elsewhere and cause the insect to burst open. Ledian hunt insects that do not compete for space and food. They then do not eat the remains or lay eggs in it.

Attempts to discern their reasoning through telepathy have proven unsuccessful, beyond giving the human psychic a deep-rooted fear that can last for weeks, months or years depending upon the length of the connection. Past editions of this guidebook have referred to the fear as simple arachnophobia. But, as the field of telepath studies grows more scientific, this no longer appears to be the case. The creatures telepaths see when they sync with ledian have nine long legs covered in spines that branch off into clusters of more spines, a core body that appears to be made up of a dodecahedron with giant, rapidly-moving eyes visible on each pane, translucent purple wings almost as large as the rest of the creature, and a constant scream one telepath described as “…a baby crying on a plane, but its voice is a car crash, metal on metal... the volume is always changing… I think it was saying something [like] if pure, all-consuming hatred was condensed to a single word…” Telepathic scans have further confirmed that ledian minds are structured nothing like those of any other observed insect pokémon. These traits have made their minds a subject of intense curiosity among non-telepaths in the field of telepath studies, and also a subject area almost no telepath wants to touch.

It is hypothesized that the so-called “ledian spiders” may be relatives of metagross, a pokémon that is also quite likely to have extraterrestrial origins. Metagross seem fascinated by ledian; ledian will attempt to flee from metagross, disregarding their own safety in the process. Ledian exposed to metagross with no escape route available will frequently attempt suicide. It is strongly recommended that trainers not keep both species on the same team.

All stages of the evolutionary line rest in the day and fly at night in what appear to be elaborate dances and social rituals. It is unclear what the purpose of these are or what they mean, as ledian are just as likely to perform them with a member of their swarm they appear to dislike as they are to perform them their closest partner in the swarm.

Husbandry

As ledyba need no extra food than natural starlight and produce no waste, they would appear to be ideal pets. Unfortunately, several factors complicate this analysis.

To start with, ledyba are uncomfortable living in groups of less than 20 ledyba. This is infeasible to replicate on most standard teams of six pokémon. Ledian are less gregarious, but still require either a full team of six pokémon or near-constant interaction with their trainer. They are intelligent and loyal creatures and enjoy play.

Ledyba prefer to sleep in their pokéballs. Ledian have no particular preference. However, ledyba and ledian both drain their energy reserves while they are in their pokéballs and will need to be let out each night. It is recommended that they have a guard pokémon, preferably an electric, rock, or ice type, to ward off birds.

Ledian are almost constantly releasing powerful scents to signal their moods. Sometimes these scents can be quite pleasant. Sometimes they are not. It should be accepted that a ledian trainer will gradually gain a rather distinctive scent due to their pet’s communications. Their fondness of cuddling does not help with this.

Ledian are some of the easiest pokémon to tame due to the almost absurd lengths they will go to in pursuit of the fruits they enjoy and their love of puzzles. Providing challenges or games with fruit as a reward will convince a ledian to practice their moves, engage in battle, or pick up eusocial behaviors for a comparatively low cost. Ledian do not appear to pick up weight when overfed, but it is best for a trainer’s wallet if they don’t overdo it. The more rewards a ledian gets, the less they will respond to the opportunity of obtaining food.

As the ledian’s life cycle ends, they will attempt to leave their trainer. They should be allowed to go as every surviving ledian is important for restoring the population at the end of the cycle (see Breeding).

It is extremely difficult to train a ledian alongside other bugs. Butterfree, ribombee and vikavolt, as mentioned above, are the only exceptions in Alola. Very experienced bug specialists can sometimes pull it off, but it’s a task best left to zookeepers and the world’s top trainers.

Illness

Ledian very seldom get sick. When they do there is absolutely nothing a veterinarian can do for them given their odd physiology. Ill ledian should be comforted, be exposed to as much starlight as possible, and left outside of their pokéball. Sometimes they will recover on their own.

However, tempting as it may be, ledian should not be overfed when sick. More than one ledian has come to view feigning illness as a trick they obtain fruit when performing.

Evolution

Ledyba grow steadily after birth through repeated molts until they reach a height of roughly 0.7 meters at roughly seven months of age. At this point their size remains stagnant for one to three months until they begin metamorphosis. The soon-to-be-ledian will drop down to the floor of the swarm’s nest and remain there, protected by other members of the swarm, for roughly two weeks. During this period they undergo repeated molting and rapid growth.

Ledyba only evolve when they have a ready source of protection. In most cases, this is their swarm. When a ledyba is held without other ledyba, something that is generally inadvisable but technically legal, ledyba will only evolve when provided a dark and sheltered area that remains a constant presence in their space for at least one month.

Battle

Ledyba are cowards that actively avoid battle with anything bigger than a few centimeters long. They are more likely than not to simply freeze up when exposed to an opponent.

Ledian are naturally combative and can be disciplined to hold back from killing other bugs with the help of some wild pokémon and fruit. Ledian have access to highly targeted punches, even if they aren’t particularly strong, aerokinetic attacks, and low-level telepathic attacks. However, ledian are perhaps best used as supporting pokémon that set up telekinetic barriers, annoy the opponent or set up a sweep. If a trainer is willing to invest time and money on specialized training and TMs, ledian can learn a plethora of nasty tricks to capitalize upon their screens. Roost and drain punch compensate for their relative frailty, even with screens. Tailwind, agility, substitute, swords dance and baton pass can help set up another teammate. Encore, infestation and u-turn can help establish momentum. Ledian are also intelligent enough to know multiple tricks simultaneously which can keep opponents guessing as to whether ledian is a momentum-builder, a sweep enabler or an all-out attacker. This has given ledian a niche in competitive battling circuits despite their lack of bulk or power.

For amateurs with less time, resources and knowledge to put into training a ledian, it is best to go for a screen-augmented attacker route. Mix the classic protective screens (reflect, light screen, safeguard) with moves such as comet punch, bug buzz and air slash together and you’ll have a pokémon that can continue to play a role through either the end of the island challenge or the end of the cycle, whichever comes first.

Acquisition

Ledyba require a Class II license to capture, adopt or purchase. Ledian only require a Class I license. The disparity is in place to prevent trainers without the time, resources or skills to wrangle twenty or more ledyba from trying to do so.

The abundance of ledian and their evolutionary stage largely depend on the time in the cycle. To learn about ledian availability, consult a bug pokémon or agricultural supplies store. At some points in the cycle the capture of ledian is strictly prohibited. Late in the cycle when ledian are present and no longer living in large swarms, they can typically be found near orchards, gardens, plantations or some sparse temperate forests. Ledian are easily intrigued and bribed with fruit and, after they have let their guard down, hugs. Ledian can be overpowered and captured, but it’s usually best to get them to join your team voluntarily. Simply giving ledian food, attention and a community is enough to establish dominance over them.

Breeding

It is impossible to breed ledian in captivity.

Ledian operate on well-known cycles based around total lunar eclipses, which occur about once every 2.5 years. Eggs are laid during the eclipse and hatch two to three weeks later. Ledyba eggs are about the size of a ping-pong ball and look and feel more like a crystal than a standard egg. The eggs are translucent and the growing ledyba is clearly visible.

When the ledyba eggs hatch, there are suddenly hundreds of thousands of tiny ledyba in Alola guarded by roughly 1000 ledian. Predators, pokémon and otherwise, take advantage of this. When the start of the cycle coincides with the breeding season of migratory birds mortality is particularly high. By the time ledyba reach full size, there are typically only ten thousand remaining in the archipelago. Once all the ledyba have evolved roughly ten months in to the cycle, they begin to split off into smaller swarms of ten to twenty individuals. Individuals and swarms and gradually coaxed into captivity or killed off by predators until only about 50 swarms remain in the wild, with another 25 in captivity on large plantations. The remainder are held by private trainers or government-operated zoos and botanical gardens.

As the end of the cycle nears, the captive ledian will begin to leave their trainers to return to the place of their birth. On the night of the total lunar eclipse, the ledian will begin one final moonlight ritual, this one with a clear purpose. Details of this event are largely unknown as ledian react with hostility to humans approaching their mating grounds and have even been known to destroy drones sent in to observe. The next morning, the ground of the mating areas are littered with eggs. Ledian will spend the next six months fiercely defending their offspring. Most will die in this process as predators flock to the swarms.

The remaining ledian will begin to die off six months after the eclipse, unleashing powerful and incomprehensible psychic waves as they do so. Some captive ledian will choose to return to their trainers to die. Those that successfully return will embrace their human and initiate a psychic connection. Trainers report visions of vast fields of brightly colored stars and what appears to be a nebula in the middle-distance. The humans often report feelings of confusion and awe at mundane objects such as trees or forks in the following weeks, along with an overpowering sense of love for almost everyone and everything.

Subspecies

None known.
 
Well, this one was bizarre.

On the one hand I vigorously support the idea of mystery still having a place in a scientific age, because it damn well does, and it's not all confined to dark matter. I'm not sure what to make of how much mystery you've decided to pack into ledian. The entry kind abruptly veers off down an almost cosmic horror route, and I'm not sure whether it's supposed to be amusing in that regard. Or possibly you just didn't want to poké-ify Cochinella
 
@Beth Pavell cosmic horror's kind of the right impression here. I had decided I wanted them to kill bugs, but once I also decided to make them eat moonlight I had to find a reason they still killed bugs. I could have left it ambiguous, and I toyed with that for a while, but I decided giant space spiders was more fun.

Thank you for reading!
 
Okay, aGeNdA, you've reeled me in with a space-themed entry (and lots of shitposts). And I am wholly impressed with your Ledyba/Ledian entry. It's got a fantastic amount of detail and never loses its academic tone. This is yet another example:

There is a peculiar sort of modern arrogance that history can be divided into two phases: the era of primitive mysticism and the Age of Science. The latter began only a few centuries ago. Before it no significant advances were made beyond, perhaps, the very basics of mathematics. Sometimes in their rush to repudiate ‘superstition,’ scientists rush to dissenting opinions when, in reality, the ancient wisdom was largely correct. Ledian appears to be one of those cases.

The ancient poets, from India to Kalos to Mexico, claimed that ledian fed upon starlight. In the late 1700s a man by the name of John Alabaster published a lengthy treatise on how this belief was the height of ancient foolishness. Cultures around the world had built and protected homes for ledbya near their fields because ledyba prey upon other bugs. The same farmers would also complain when ledian ate the fruit from their orchards. What place was there for starlight in their diet?
You've nailed the tone perfectly, which leads me to believe that you have a background writing articles (which you do, ayyy).
their organ systems are closer to a klinklang than a butterfree
Another surprise.
All stages of ledian are classified by the Department of Agriculture as dual bug/flying-types. The department is currently in the process of reconsidering its prior ruling in favor of a bug/fairy typing over their stronger connection to moonlight than agile flight, aerokinesis or a traditionally avian build.
I just wanted to point out that I LOVE the word aerokinesis!
Ledbya appear to subsist entirely upon starlight. Ledian sometimes eat very sweet fruit or berries during long summers, long periods of continuous cloud cover, or during periods of abnormally bad air quality. Ledian have never been observed producing waste. Their digestive system, like almost all of their other organs, appears to be entirely different from known organic pokémon. The inner workings of ledian are still largely a mystery. Some organs (their ‘brain,’ their scent glands, their three hearts) readily appear to have a purpose. Most of their organs do not.
I like that you've mentioned lots of organs don't have a purpose-- perhaps they only function in the world/place where Ledyba/Ledian hail from?
Ledian are easily intrigued and bribed with fruit and, after they have let their guard down, hugs.
This made me aww.

I gotta say, the cosmic horror part was great. I will never look at these smol bugs the same again. I'll stay tuned for more.
 
Last bug for a little bit. Entry ran long because covering four pokemon, as well as for in-universe reasons.

Ariados (Spinarak) | Ālìduōsī (Xiànqiú)

Overview

It is somewhat uncommon for two subspecies of the same pokémon to coexist in the same range. There are forces that encourage specialization, namely the drive to fill every untaken niche, but the pokémon in an area usually continue to interbreed enough that the subspeciation process is slow. Population drift of distinct populations in different environments is the best way for it to happen.

Ariados is the first pokémon discussed in this guide with two subspecies classified by the Department of Agriculture as having “significant populations” in the Commonwealth of Alola. These are commonly referred to outside of Alola as the Yangtze ariados and the Alolan ariados. Within Alola, the latter are just called “ariados” (spinarak as juveniles) and the former are referred to by their transliterated Chinese name, ālìduōsī (xiànqiú as juveniles). These names will be used for the duration of the article unless noted otherwise.

The ancestors of ālìduōsī, now extinct, were smaller, nimbler and more aggressive than the current pokémon. Even while the humans in their range despised the spiders, they had to respect the sheer durability of their silk, which was capable of withstanding slashes from all but the sharpest ofbronze swords. Eventually, the Chinese domesticated the species. Anthropologists have yet to figure out exactly how the happened. The folklore revolves around a woman who was cursed to become a spider for infidelity, married a male of the species and served as a dutiful wife, and was then rewarded with humanity by the gods. However, she still loved her spider children and raised them as her own.

Needless to say, this almost certainly did not literally happen. It is also about the most plausible explanation for how relatively intelligent and asocial man-eating spiders were tamed by humans with no reliable way of harming or containing them. No other culture managed to domesticate their local spider species, and several of them are less intimidating than the historical record suggests the proto-ālìduōsī were. The leading theory at present holds that the domestication was accomplished by keeping the first colonies faithfully watched by captive arcanine. However, there is no evidence of arcanine being domesticated for another five centuries after the earliest known ālìduōsī farm and, when they were domesticated, it was hundreds of kilometers away in upper Manchuria.

For centuries, ālìduōsī silk was known and coveted as far away as the basins of the Congo and Thames rivers. Yet the spiders themselves never developed a long-term foothold outside of China, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago.

Anthropologists and biologists have been divided over why this was when arcanine and eevee, other domesticated pokémon from China, ultimately found footholds around the world before the invention of the pokéball. Part of this is a deliberate policy decision by the Chinese empires not to export the production of their most valuable commodity. During the Han dynasty smuggling a ālìduōsī out of the country was one of the few crimes that not only the trafficker but their entire family was routinely executed for.

Ālìduōsī also suffer from the fragility plaguing many domestic breeds crossbred and managed for hundreds or thousands of years. When compared to the tropical spider pokémon of South and Southeast Asia, ālìduōsī are slow and weak. Their main advantages lie in the strength of their silk and their cunning minds, but being slow-moving large targets without powerful venom makes them sitting ducks for birds or insectivores in tropical areas. Additionally, ālìduōsī prefer somewhat humid climates with lots of fast growing plants, particularly bamboo. This prevented their range from naturally expanding west. And Siberia is simply too cold for most large insect pokémon, save those with thick fur or special adaptations. The prevalence of talonflame in Europe likely prevented footholds from ever growing there as, even with guard pokémon, ālìduōsī would inevitably perish faster than natural reproduction would replace them. Colonies in the new world typically found themselves targeted and destroyed by local galvantula, which are larger, faster and deadlier than ālìduōsī and see other large spider pokémon as threats to their territory, even if they do not directly compete for resources.

The first attempt to raise ālìduōsī on Alola occurred before first contact with Europeans and was apparently unsuccessful. However, some of the descendants of those ālìduōsī would later retreat to the dense jungles of Alola and become ariados.

In the late 1800s, a British entrepreneur decided to try again. Using some ālìduōsī illegally smuggled from China, as well as some purchased from a desperate nobleman in Johto, he set up the first successful ālìduōsī plantation outside of East Asia. Alola’s climate meant that ālìduōsī have plenty to eat and never have to hibernate. The only other spider pokémon in Alola are aquatic and relatively docile or, in the case of ariados, generally tolerant of others of their species. Vikavolt were used to keep birds away from the plantation. After only two decades, Elisha Gage controlled no less than seven plantations across the islands and was well on his way to being the richest man in the archipelago. His political disputes with the king over taxation were the main impetus for U.S. intervention and the overthrow of the Alolan monarchy. Four plantations remain today near Malie city and, ironically, Castleton on Ula’Ula. Another two are located on smaller islands to the northwest of the Tapu Isles. Two are located around Melemele and one on Akala.

Gage’s company, now known as Gracidea Clothiers, is a multibillion dollar corporation specializing in ālìduōsī silk products and luxury clothing. They have since expanded into jewelry, private security, restaurants, bottled water, wine, and real estate.

(Full disclosure: Gracidea Clothiers is the second largest donor to the Alola Pokémon League, the publishers of this guidebook.)

Physiology

All evolutionary stages of ariados are classified as dual poison- and bug-type pokémon by the Department of Agriculture. All evolutionary stages of ālìduōsī are classified as pure bug-types. Neither designation is controversial.

Spinarak are small arachnid pokémon with six legs and two body segments. Their legs are covered in uneven yellow and black stripes. The rest of their body is covered in a mottled green pattern. Most spinarak have features resembling two eyes and a mouth on the back of their body to ward off predators, although their mottled coloration sometimes obscures it. Spinarak produce and release silk from their larger rear segment. Despite common misconceptions, spinarak do not release silk from their anus or genitals. Instead, it is released from a series of nearby glands which each specialize in a specific type of silk. Spinarak’s smaller front segment contains the bulk of their central nervous system, although this also spreads into their hind segment and even their legs. The head segment also contains their mouth, venom sacs and eyes (unlike most spider pokémon, all subspecies and evolutionary stages of ariados only have one pair of eyes). Spinarak release venom from a stinger located just above their eyes. Spinarak venom is slow acting and primarily serves to weaken the target’s immune system and interfere with their circadian rhythm. The damage it deals is meant to be long-term.

Xiànqiú are slightly larger and bulkier than spinarak. Their legs are proportionally shorter and, instead of a mottled coloration, they are very bright green with a clear face pattern on their back. Unlike spinarak, they are somewhat poisonous throughout their entire body but can only emit rather weak venom from their stinger. Xiànqiú are not particularly well equipped for hunting prey and rely mostly upon feedings from either humans or their mother to survive.

Ariados have long, spindly legs with pale yellow and grey stripes. Ariados’ main body is covered in chaotic pale green and yellow patterns, often but not always with a distinct black face marking on its back. Like most arachnids, ariados have eight legs. However, one pair is very small and located near their silk glands to manipulate and cut their silk. Spinarak and xiànqiú have only four legs in the traditional position. All subspecies of ariados gain two more legs on their back which they use to grab branches above them or other points on their web, as well as defend themselves better against birds and other aerial attackers.

Ariados have more pronounced mandibles and stingers than their juvenile form and their purple eyes are well known in Alola for glowing in the dark. Their venom is almost identical to that of spinarak, although their larger size allows them to possess more of it. Male ariados frequently grow up to 0.7 meters in length and 35 kilograms in mass, with females reaching lengths of 0.8 meters and masses of 40 kilograms

Ālìduōsī are substantially larger than ariados. The females can reach lengths of up to 1.3 meters and masses of up to 100 kilograms. The smaller males only grow to around 1 meter in length and 80 kilograms in mass. Their coloring is also notably brighter, consisting of yellow and pink stripes and patterns throughout their body with a very distinct black face marking on their back. Their mandibles and stinger are larger still than ariados’ and colored pure white. These were both traits ancient farmers selected for aesthetic reasons and a warning to predators that they are quite deadly. This is something of a biological lie: while their juvenile form is still rather poisonous, the adults have roughly the same quantity of poison spread throughout a much larger body. It is speculated that their ancestors were, in fact, poisonous enough no bird would eat them and venomous enough to kill an adult human in less than a day. Farmers probably selected against both traits at some point, as the risk of getting killed by their livestock was more important than the risk of their livestock being killed by birds.

Ariados silk is less easy to work with and color than ālìduōsī silk, but it is also far stickier. Ālìduōsī silk can be stronger than steel and lighter than almost all other cloths. Ariados silk is less durable and lightweight, but they produce more of it relative to their mass. The stickiness of the silk makes it better for snaring prey and worse for clothing humans. Ariados silk is also thinner than their domestic counterparts. This makes their webs more difficult to see.

Ariados live up to two years in both the wild and captivity. Male ālìduōsī live up to three years in captivity and females live up to five years. No substantial wild population of ālìduōsī exists anywhere in the world.

Behavior

Wild spinarak old enough to have moved away from their mother’s web tend to stick to the canopy. They do not make proper webs, instead relying on small networks of tripwires to snare smaller bugs (pokémon and otherwise), young birds and small mammals and reptiles (mostly non-pokémon). The spinarak will drop more strands onto their prey from above or using their ability to shoot out strands a distance of up to fifty centimeters with reasonable accuracy. They will then either finish the prey off with their mandibles or, if it is too large to end in a single bite or too dangerous to get close to, they will stand motionless near their prey until it falls asleep, at which point they will either sting the prey or kill it.

Ariados build elaborate webs spanning from the ground to the canopy. Their webs contain three distinct regions. The first is a dense “house” compartment that the ariados sleeps in during the day to avoid predators that could pick them off their web. The second is a typical spiderweb in the canopy spanning from branch to branch. This is used to capture birds and small creatures who unwittingly crash into it. The ariados will typically approach them from behind and either finish them off immediately or sting them to slow and sedate their prey so it doesn’t damage the web or alert other pokémon. The ariados will then eat the prey when it is hungry.

The third portion of an ariados web is a series of thin tripwires spread out near the forest floor. These wires are attached to spools higher up in the web that can contain up to a kilometer of thread each. Once a creature snags itself on one of the threads, it will likely continue moving on none the wiser until it reaches its nest or resting spot. The ariados will then stalk the forest floor at night, following the thread until it reaches not only their sleeping prey but likely their entire family. If the prey are too large, powerful or numerous to take on in one sitting, the ariados will simply craft a web around the den and wait, occasionally landing stings or bites when it is safe to do so. Eventually the prey will die from infection or starvation, or at least fall into a deep enough sleep from the venom’s effects that the ariados is comfortable killing them. Ariados can sometimes consume quantities above their body weight over the course of a week from these feasts.

While ariados and ālìduōsī can drink water, and often will in captivity, they are also quite capable of subsisting only off of their prey’s bodily fluids.

Ālìduōsī build elaborate structure more closely resembling a bird’s nest than a spider’s web. They prefer to find several nearby trees or bamboo poles and weave the structure between them, suspended entirely in midair. The exact form of it seems to be learned from the spider’s mother and other nearby spiders rather than being an instinctual habit. For reasons unknown, ālìduōsī abandon their webs about once every six months and find a nearby location suitable for creating a new one. If their web is destroyed or severely damaged they will often abandon their current site prematurely. This is when their silk is harvested in captivity.

Ālìduōsī do not actively hunt in captivity, but they will eat anything that lands in their web. Recently abandoned ālìduōsī in the wild have been observed scavenging nearby kills at night and retreating to their nest in the day.

Something many people find offputting about both subspecies is how friendly they are towards people. Both will seldom attack, much less kill, humans. Ālìduōsī and captive-raised ariados will often seek out and approach humans who enter their territory, especially at night, to greet them and maybe beg for food. Some wild born ariados that have never had a trainer have also been observed doing this. Captive-born spinarak will happily climb all over their trainer and other familiar humans. Xiànqiú are more cowardly and are frequently under their mother’s watchful eye, but if they feel safe they sometimes will. Ariados have been known to attempt this but, given their large size, they usually fail and knock their trainer over. They then scurry away and hide out of either embarrassment or fear of retaliation.

Husbandry

All stages of the ariados line are carnivores, although they sometimes will not reject plant-based treats. They can be fed pre-prepared food mixes such as dog, cat or insectivore food. Meat intended for human consumption, either cooked or raw, is also good. It is best to vary an ariados’ diet over time. Food should be used as a reward for good behavior to help tame them, especially if the spider was captured as an ariados. Placing food around the environment and making the ariados hunt for it is also good for their mental well-being and prevents them from becoming entirely sedentary.

In the wild, ariados avoid defecating near their web as the scent alerts some prey species to the presence of spiders. Instead the ariados leaves their web at night and walks up to three kilometers away (although usually no more than one, especially if they have young) to relieve themselves. If the ariados is a mother with young, she will bring the entire colony along either on her stomach, her back or trailing behind her, depending upon the spinaraks’ age. It is remarkably easy to train ariados to defecate outside in captivity. This is also a chance for exercise, especially if the walk goes on somewhat longer than is strictly necessary. Ariados are very fond of long night walks and can be taught to hold a leash on one of their back legs.

Ariados will attempt to build webs almost anywhere they go. These can be difficult to clean up, even with special web dissolving fluids (which can be rather expensive). It is best to keep ariados in their pokéball when staying in an indoor space you don’t own, or an outdoor space where you aren’t allowed to leave webs (check the rules or ask the owner everywhere you camp).

Ariados don’t mind their pokéballs in the day; spinarak prefer them. Ariados also don’t mind their pokéballs at night so long as they are also allowed a walk and given food as bribery.

Ālìduōsī and xiànqiú are generally calmer and lower maintenance. The exact diet they are fed in captivity is a trade secret, but it is known that they are omnivorous and that the plants in their diet are the key to the texture and quality of their silk. They seldom leave their webs but will defecate in a nearby receptacle. To learn more information, visit the Ālìduōsī Museum on Melemele Island near Plantation Point.

Neither species hibernates in Alola due to the warm temperatures. If the ariados is taken out of the Commonwealth during the winter or late fall, they may attempt to do so. This is a perfectly natural behavior. Consult a more specialized guide on insect hibernation for more details.

Illness

Insect diseases, especially parasitic diseases, are notably difficult to cure as much of modern medicine revolves around killing insects and other simple creatures. Due to their relationship to ālìduōsī, ariados diseases have some chance of being curable by at least one veterinarian in Alola’s larger cities. The most common symptoms of disease are red patches appearing behind the ariados’ stinger, the ariados obsessively scratching some portion of its body, refusing food for more than three days, defects in their slik, an abrupt change in fecal color or consistency without a corresponding change in diet, or an abrupt change in temperament. If an ariados in Alola attempts to hibernate by retreating for a long period into a secluded, dark area that is not their own web, that could also be a sign of illness.

Consult a veterinarian as soon as any of these symptoms are observed.

Evolution

Spinarak grow to their full size over the course of roughly eight months for males and ten for females. There are no particularly rapid growth spurts or other abrupt changes involved in the transition. The formal demarcation line between spinarak and ariados is when their back legs grow long enough to touch each other.

Ālìduōsī grow to full size from xiànqiú in roughly six months. The formal demarcation line of evolution is the same as it is for spinarak and ariados.

Battle

Ālìduōsī are far more valuable as livestock than battlers and no one has ever seriously used one in a major competitive circuit. When they must defend themselves from battles they use their hooked and somewhat pointed legs, especially the ones on their back, to defend themselves. They mostly avoid combat by staying inside of their tough, sticky webs.

Spinarak and ariados suffer in battling from being ambush predators. In the wild the success or failure of their hunts is usually determined before the prey even knows the predator is there. They are not particularly bulky and their mandible strength, and even the strength of their venom, is nothing special for a pokémon. Ariados have a very tiny niche in competitive battling as laying the strongest webs and being able to project them up to a meter or two when well trained. If ariados were fast enough to dodge hits and weave around the battlefield to reduce their opponent’s mobility, as galvantula can, they might be useful. The same would be true if they were bulky enough to move unimpeded regardless of what their opponent did to stop them. As neither is the case for ariados, their use on the circuits has been almost entirely confined to rising bug trainers who haven’t had the time, money or experience to train something better suited for competitive battling.

The headstone ariados has seen some usage in the few leagues where they are allowed. Their venom is one of the most painful and debilitating of any pokémon and they’re decently fast, which makes them an excellent wallbreaker against stall teams with bulky but weak pokémon. However, their venom’s potency has led to them being banned virtually everywhere. The notable exceptions are their native Johto and Kanto (where they are traditional), Australia (everyone carries at least three venom counters per team in the Uluru Conference and Pacific Invitational Tournament), and some of the less established or regulated leagues (kills are an accepted part of the game).

On the island challenge, where most opponents won’t hit quite so hard, ariados can still be useful. They are best used not as attackers in their own right but as web layers that create traps around the battlefield until they can no longer safely continue. Ariados silk is quite flammable unless chemically treated after production, but it is very durable and sticky. This makes it difficult for opponents to remove without a fire-type, and in a fair few arenas lighting the battlefield on fire creates more trouble than it’s worth. Of course, this will also slow down your own team members. But they can be trained to navigate around the silk lines. Your opponent will likely have no such training. Be mindful that this does not particularly hinder most birds or pokémon that would never land on the battlefield anyway. More than one bug trainer has made the mistake of laying down ariados webs just to find out that it makes it even easier for an opponent with a bird to sweep them.

Acquisition

Spinarak can be captured, adopted or purchased with a Class I license. They are most commonly found in the forests of Melemele around Route 1. They can also be found in Alolan Rainforests National Preserve on Akala Island and the areas around Malie City, including The Malie Gardens. Ariados can be captured, adpted or purchased with a Class II license and are found in the same locations as spinarak.

To obtain a xiànqiú and ālìduōsī, you must have a Class V license, specialized training and a permit which requires a federal background check and security clearance. They are treated as resources vital to national security and their ownership is heavily guarded as such. Their high classification is not due to the difficulty of caring for or taming them; kabutops are more difficult on both fronts and only require a Class IV license and a specialized permit for formerly extinct species.

Breeding

Two ariados that cross paths during breeding season (early spring) will engage in a courtship ritual consisting of a mock fight, displaying their webs to each other and the male presenting his prospective mate with food. Should his efforts be successful, the female will take him back to her nest and mate with him. She will later lay her eggs into a special cavity located just behind the legs on his back. As the spinarak are born they will emerge from their eggs slightly larger than a quarter in diameter. They will eat the lining of the cavity for nutrition and, eventually, the rest of their father’s body. Once there is almost nothing left to consume they will join their mother. Spinarak stay with their mother until they are roughly five months of age and roughly twenty-five centimeters long. At this point they will leave their nest and wander the canopies until they evolve and begin forming a more permanent web. The female ariados will usually die of natural causes shortly after her offspring set off on their own.

Ariados are often reluctant to breed in captivity. They will only do so if two ariados have been given large, permanent spaces to build webs in and are both well-fed. The process is much the same, including the cannibalism of the male. Female ariados will often refuse to have anything to do with their trainer while caring for their young beyond the acceptance of food. For these reasons, it is best to leave ariados breeding to wild populations and dedicated bug specialists used to dealing with gruesome deaths and moody insects.

Ālìduōsī breeding is a trade and state secret revealed by Gracidea Clothiers or the Untied States government on a need-to-know basis.

Subspecies

Aside from the Yangtze and Alolan ariados, only three other subspecies have been documented.

Two are native to central Japan. The Johtonian ariados more closely resembles the Yangtze ariados than the Alolan one in size and coloration. They are both poisonous and venomous and function primarily as ambush predators that eat anything unfortunate enough to collide with their relatively thin and translucent web. They do not sleep or rest on their web and prefer to wait in the nearby canopy to maximize the chances something accidentally sticks themselves in their trap.

The headstone ariados is a domestic breed created from the Johtonian ariados (itself created from feral Yangtze ariados). They have far more potent venom than any other subspecies but die shortly after stinging an opponent. The headstone ariados is the smallest of all subspecies, with females only growing up to 0.5 meters. They were bred and maintained by secretive clans of assassins to quietly dispatch enemies in a reliable and reliably painful manner. Spinarak are both rather easy to train and quite small, making it easy for them to infiltrate even highly guarded structures and sting their prey before crawling a short distance to die in a hidden place. There is an antivenom for the headstone ariados but the clan that domesticated them refused to give up the recipe, even under heavy international pressure following the death of the Kalosian Prime Minister to a headstone ariados sting on a visit to Saffron City.

An antivenom has since been independently created by researchers in Australia. With their preferred weapon suddenly blunted, the remnants of the headstone clans as well (as their modern successors, the Yakuza and Team Rocket) have begun selling headstone ariados to collectors, researchers and foreign governments for a hefty price.

The third subspecies is native to the forests of northeastern Australia. They are the descendants of another early attempt to breed the Yangtze Ariados on Pacific Islands, after substantial crossbreeding with local insect and spider species. The Queensland ariados are classified as dual bug- and ground- types and build their webs on the forest floor alongside an elaborate system of hidden pits and trapdoors. Unlike the Johtonian and Alolan ariados, they will happily eat any humans that fall into their traps. Their reluctance to go above the earth’s surface makes them difficult prey for birds, but native and introduced fire types such as pyrotreemata and heatmor are quite happy to burn their nests and eat them as they flee.
 
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Lopunny (Buneary)

Overview

Lopunny is a domesticated descendant of European diggersby. It is believed that they were first domesticated in what is now Germany and were, at least originally, much bulkier and not nearly as cute. But generations of selective breeding produced several different breeds of rabbit pokémon. Lopunny is by far the lithest of the diggersby descendants. They were selectively bred, originally by serfs and commoners for the quality of their fur and utility in defending the home.

Lopunny reliably shed and their fur is very warm when fashioned into a coat. Of course, in the old days few people bothered to work with the shed hair. Instead they were killed and eaten during harsh winters to provide both meat and pelts. Pokémon rights movements during The Enlightenment often targeted this practice both due to the death of a pokémon involved and, if only subconsciously, its association with the lower classes. This resulted in the passing of bans or restrictions upon lopunny care by several European monarchs and nobles (as well as the English parliament). The Kalosian Revolutionaries used the ban there as one of their arguments against the monarch at the time.

In a somewhat ironic twist lopunny were most popular with nobles and businessmen during the 19th century due to their use in pokémon battling (which was becoming a popular sport after the creation of the first mass-produced apricorn ball in 1791) as well as the quality of their fur. As the use of pelts taken from a live lopunny was banned, a handful of artisans began to experiment with making coats from shed fur. The result became a form of conspicuous consumption and a lopunny a symbol of wealth. The landed gentry of Europe largely scoffed at the coats as the vulgar business class showing off.

Then Hollywood happened.

Many early film stars were fond of wearing their coats both on and off-screen. And as the influence of American cinema grew, so did the popularity of the coats. And as the popularity of the coats grew, more farms started raising lopunny and serious effort was put into finding a way to mass produce lopunny fur coats. By the 1960s and 1970s lopunny coats and ownership became, in the Western world, a common fashion item. Outside of Europe and North America, they became an easy shorthand for association with Western media and ideals.

Lopunny almost never grow their proper winter coat in Alola, but the association has still made them popular among a strange mix of businessmen, youth and recent migrants from the mainland. As a result they can be easily obtained from pet shops and small feral herds descended from escaped or released pets. They are tame, pretty and surprisingly fierce in battle.

Of course, being the mascot of American media imperialism also leads to associations with military and economic imperialism. This makes their popularity in Alola, and most of the developing world, somewhat limited. The collapse of global communism has also made fewer people insistent upon flaunting their capitalist ideology. As such there are far fewer lopunny on Alola than there used to be.

Physiology

Buneary and lopunny are both classified as pure normal-types. The challenges to this designation are mostly from a taxonomical school that argues domestic breeds should retain the typing of their wild counterparts. Mega lopunny is recognized as a dual normal- and fighting-type. This designation also has some opposition from purists who argue that mega evolutions cannot undergo a type change, but this school of thought has substantially diminished in influence over the years as mega evolution becomes more widely studied.

Buneary are bipeds with two layers of fur. One is cream colored and very fluffy. This coats their bottom half as well as the tips of their ears. The other layer is dark brown and covers the majority of their upper half. They have two dots of cream colored fur over their eyes resembling eyebrows. The purpose of these is unknown. Buneary ears can reach lengths of up to one-half the rest of their body length. These ears do contain muscles, however they are nowhere as powerful as their equivalent stage in the diggersby line. For the most part they are used for emergency self-defense and balance with their arms and legs (or, more typically, their parents’ arms and legs) doing the heavy lifting. Because of the musculature of their ears their hearing is somewhat less adept than you might expect. It is still far greater than human hearing, but most canines can hear over a wider range of sounds as well as fainter or more distant ones.

Lopunny are more slender than their juvenile form and the positioning of their fur layers is less even and predictable. Lopunny usually have cream fur beneath the knee, around their arms and across most of their ears. The eyebrow spots on buneary become large crests by the ears that can be up to 20 centimeters long.

Lopunny have proportionally longer leg, arms and ears with stronger muscles in all of them. However, due to centuries of selective breeding and the inbreeding that accompanies it, they have somewhat fragile bones. Lopunny heal faster than most mammalian pokémon but their relative frailty means that they seldom pick fights and prefer to pull their punches whenever it is safe to do so (see Mega Evolution).

At various times in the year, buneary and lopunny have different fur layer configurations. During the winter and in colder climates they have more of the cream fur. In the summer they shed almost all of the cream fur and grow an entirely brown coat. In Alola lopunny tend to keep roughly the same configuration year-round (something similar to the one described above). They still shed once a year, typically in early spring, and have a very thin brown coat for roughly one week until the thicker brown parts come back. Their coat is back to normal within three weeks.

Lopunny grow up to 1.3 meters tall (with ears pointed straight down after the bend). They can weigh up to 70 pounds. They live up to eight years in captivity, although the life expectancy for feral lopunny is almost surely less. As of this edition’s publication, there have been no good studies on feral lopunny lifespan in the Alola region to back this up.

Behavior

Lopunny are herbivores and feral colonies tend to live in lightly forested areas near meadows. They use the trees for cover at night and leave to graze in the meadow during the day. One or more lopunny will always be standing sentry while the others eat to keep an eye and ear out for birds. When birds do try to take a lopunny they often discover how hard they can hit when their life is on the line and, should they survive, never attempt it again. The sentry duty appears to serve primarily to deter new migrants to Alola and to appease their nerves.

Lopunny are very nervous creatures in the wild and have been observed moving in and out of panic attacks every few hours when in a group of fewer than five lopunny. In captivity they seldom have this problem and actually have a reputation for being one of the gentlest and calmest of the small normal-types. Having either a permanent home with a roof to retreat to or much larger creatures looking after them probably helps on this front.

Lopunny sleep at night huddled together, even during the warmest summer nights. At least one is always awake. They sleep in shifts to relieve the night sentry. In captivity lopunny allowed to sleep near their trainer or larger pokémon tend to sleep through the night.

Like many other pokémon with fluffy white fur (ninetales, furfrou, cincinno) lopunny are somewhat obsessive with their grooming and can spend up to two hours a day maintaining their fur. They will allow trusted humans to groom them, although usually only in the form of petting or light brushing. A lopunny will almost never allow a torracat or incineroar to groom them although it has been observed in captivity. A wild incineroar lived with an adopted buneary (later lopunny) in Poni National Park for several years and the lopunny did allow his adopted parents to groom him. These are somewhat odd cases.

Husbandry

Lopunny are easy-going pets that mostly take care of themselves. They also enjoy being around their trainer for most of the day. This gives them a reputation as a very good pokémon for young children or inexperienced trainers, something the authors of this book generally agree with. There are still a few care guidelines to keep in mind.

As herbivores, lopunny require a mix of plants fed to them several times a day. The ideal diet for their health is a mix of oats and hay. These are most commonly sold in very large packs for farm pokémon but smaller lopunny-specific packs do exist in specialty pokémon supply stores or some larger Pokémon Centers. It is best to mix in some leafy green pokémon mixes. Lopunny adore clover and it can be a very effective treat or reward.

While a lopunny is shedding they should be provided with a safe, enclosed place and seldom disturbed. They seem to be self-conscious during this period and hate being seen by their trainer or other pokémon, especially by mammals with strict grooming regimens.

Lopunny very seldom bathe in water but may sometimes elect to do so. They should never be forced into this because, even if they have been bathed before, they may interpret it as a threat and lash out. An adult lopunny is strong enough to crack human bones if they aren’t holding back.

While it is less obvious than with a diggersby or raticate, lopunny still need to be provided with logs or other hard objects to gnaw on to keep their teeth in check. If their teeth are frequently visible when the lopunny is not eating, this should be taken as a sign that they need to gnaw. Lopunny should also periodically be given scratching posts for their nails. Otherwise they will scratch furniture.

Lopunny are intelligent enough to understand several words and verbal commands. While not strictly hierarchal in the wild they are rather easy to tame so long as a trainer is providing a safe place, cuddles and food. They can be trained to use a litter mat or box. They prefer to live inside full time but, provided they have a cage to retreat into, they can live in backyards.

Never grab a lopunny too quickly or wake up a sleeping lopunny by touch as they may lash out.

Lopunny are sometimes nervous around new carnivores or birds. Never leave them alone with even a very tame pokémon in these categories until they have been given a few weeks to acclimate to each other.

Lopunny sleep through most of the night and still take several hours worth of naps during the day. Buneary are more active but still somewhat lethargic. They prefer to sleep while cuddled against their trainer or a trusted, fluffy pokémon. If this is not possible, withdraw them into their pokeball.

Illness

The most common problem for pet lopunny, aside from overgrown teeth (which is quite easily prevented), are hairballs. Lopunny are unable to vomit up hair they consume while grooming and it can mat in their stomach and block up their digestive system. Medication or even surgery are usually needed to deal with this.

Battling lopunny often break their bones. They heal well enough that with a simple splint and either time inside of a healing machine or heal ball, or a long rest outside of one, the bone will usually be restored. It will break again more easily in the future. Lopunny should be retired from battling after a few serious breaks and allowed to live out the rest of their life as either a backyard or house pet. If this is not possible they should be put up for adoption.

Evolution

Buneary naturally grow up into lopunny over the course of roughly fifteen months. The formal demarcation line between buneary and lopunny is the growth of cream fur around their forepaws.

Mega Evolution

Mega lopunny are roughly the same height as normal lopunny and the few centimeters of growth observed can be attributed to changes in posture. Lopunny undergo relatively few physical changes at all when they evolve. The most notable change is the transformation of their ears from large, muscular pseudo-limbs into long whip-like instruments that are no longer either prehensile or useful for hearing. Lopunny lose their cream coat and gain a very thin brown- and black-patterned coat across their entire body.

The difference in speed and strength observed comes from psychological changes. Mega lopunny are unable to either feel pain or care about injuries, including self-inflicted ones. This gives them the ability to exert far more force than even a truly desperate baseline lopunny would. This makes them incredibly dangerous offensive opponents, but also some of the most fragile pokémon commonly used in the international battling scene. Mega evolution of a lopunny requires a Class V license and a one month cool down period with no battling whatsoever between uses in combat.

Battle

As mentioned above, mega lopunny are one of the best examples of the glass cannon archetype in competitive battling. They enjoy widespread use in the European, American, Australian and international circuits. In the United States they are one of the most useful mega evolutions that is not banned in most circuits and, even if they’re fragile, they breed and grow quickly enough to be considered replaceable. In battle they rely upon powerful kicks and strikes from their whip-like ears. They can outspeed some of the large dragons and beat all but the most powerful of physical walls into submission. However, one good hit is usually enough to take them out of the fight.

Normal lopunny enjoy far less usage. Their power and ease of care gives them some use among relatively new trainers but their fragility and frankly unexceptional power and speed prevents them from gaining widespread usage.

All of that is true. It’s also true that on the island challenge where hard hitters are comparatively rare until the (optional) Elite Four and Champion battles, lopunny’s fraility usually isn’t a massive problem. They are also easy to raise before and after starting the challenge and have become a common non-traditional starter. They are powerful enough to reach the fourth island trials without many difficulties, although the very last few steps might cause them some trouble.

Lopunny fight primarily through simple kicks. As normal-types they are capable of learning a fair few elemental attacks through TMs and special training, but their energy reserves aren’t really deep enough for their projectile attacks to do much more than sting. Their fighting style is basic and easy to teach, but it’s also quite effective against most opponents.

Very durable physical walls and most birds counter lopunny. A handful of pokémon that hit fast and very hard can also take them out in one hit, but these are somewhat rare on the island challenge.

Buneary fight in much the same way as lopunny but with less power (and faster healing). Their ears are proportionally stronger relative to their legs and arms which makes attacks utilizing them a decent option for early battles.

Acquisition

There are feral lopunny herds on Route 1 and in Poni Island National Park. Capture from both herds is permitted without restriction and requires a Class I license for buneary and a Class II license for lopunny.

It is easier to just adopt them from the many shelters that have excess buneary and lopunny or buy them from breeders who specialize in them. The licensing requirements for adoption and purchase are the same as those for capture. One caveat: many shelter lopunny are retired battlers. They can be useful for training other team members but they should not be used on the island challenge due to their fragile health.

Breeding

Lopunny mate during the late winter and females give birth to a litter of three to five buneary in the early spring. They will stick very closely to their parents for the next seven months and stay near them until or after their evolution. It is not particularly hard to breed lopunny in captivity. Put an unrelated male and a female together for long enough and they will mate. Don’t try and separate parents from children for six months as this is a good way to wind up with an upset lopunny, which usually means at least one broken bone in either you or the pokémon.

Subspecies

There are a handful of different breeds of domesticated diggersby, as well as diggersby themselves. The latter is technically considered a different pokémon rather than a subspecies or breed and will be excluded here. Most lopunny breeds vary primarily in the thickness and color of their hair, their body size or how slender or bulky they are. They possess few substantial dietary, typing or anatomical differences. Most are entirely used in agriculture for either fur or meat. Consult a specialist guide or a breeder (many breeders around Paniola raise lopunny as either their primary species or a secondary one) for more information.
 
Disclaimer: I got the update notification as an email for some reason, took a glance, ended up speed-reading the whole thing. Aaaand it's my policy to comment on every fic I read, even if it's just a small one. So here y'are.

This entry at least of The Alola Pokédex has the feeling of authenticity that I would hope for from such a project, and covers a broad range of topics in a way which is consistently useful to an amateur or professional pokémon trainer. I like that domestic care (provision for gnawing, grooming, diet, bathing) and battle utility (the entire glass cannon section) are both covered. I also enjoyed the mention of debate about the classification of type as normal, ground and/or fighting. It's one of the interpretations of the type system that I very much prefer.

Some 'gritty' elements, such as the comment about lopunny being 'expendable' jar me unpleasantly, but I liked the commentary about fur as a symbol of imperialism although it's similarly grim in implication. I quite like the inclusion of a genetic relationship to diggersby: being rabbits with massive muscular ears, the comparison is a fair one. I'm a little surprised that the playboy bunny aesthetic wasn't mentioned, as I was wondering "how will Persephone handle that" pretty much the whole time.

The technical quality of this entry is good, and it's an entertaining read. I didn't notice any syntactical 'crutches' or significantly awkward phrasing. As I mentioned before, I read the whole thing rather unexpectedly.

In any case, I enjoyed reading this and I'm sure I'll read the previous entries in the due course of time. Just have patience! I'll get more reviews in eventually.
 
Malamar (Inkay)

Overview

The ocean floor comprises roughly 70% of the Earth’s surface and humans have visited less than 1% of it in person and only surveyed roughly 5% of it with unmanned research vessels. What we know of its life comes entirely from these tiny glimpses of areas that are usually selected because they are geologically interesting. Most of what we know about life in the abyssalplelagic zone of the ocean comes from trawls which naturally select for slow and stationary creatures in and around the very bottom layer.

But we get a glimpse of what life is like far beneath the surface every single night. The largest migration on Earth (measured by both biomass and number of organisms) occurs not in the skies or on the plains, but in the sea.

Sunlight is the source of most of the ocean’s bioenergy, with the remainder coming from chemosynthesis around a small number of hydrothermal vents. Photosynthesis is only viable where there is light and light is only present in a small portion of the ocean’s volume. But light can mean death. The abundant phytoplankton lead to an equal if not larger number of zooplankton to feed on them, which are in turn fed upon by everything from minnows to ship-sized behemoths. And those creatures also have predators. The surface has almost all of the food, but it also has almost all of the predators. What, then is a small oceanic creature to do?

The answer for many is to live in the ocean’s suburbs, the zone just beneath the light, during the day. And at every sunset those creatures rise to feed on the resting organisms or phytoplankton at the surface. And every sunrise they slink back down to the depths as the residents wake up.

Malamar are a deep sea enigma that have never been captured or even seen alive in the depths and very seldom appear on the surface. The only proof of their existence comes from deep scars on surfacing wailord, bloated corpses washing up on beaches and inkay raised and evolved in captivity (as will be noted below, these captive-raised malamar are not particularly useful for research purposes).

By contrast, inkay are plentiful enough on the surface to be a reliable draw for tourists across their range. During the night, that is. Inkay are almost never seen during the day as they sleep down in the depths.

Malamar are more difficult to care for than any pokémon discussed before in this guidebook but they’re powerful hypnotists capable of dishing out some of the hardest hits of any predator. Trainers looking for a husbandry challenge with high rewards can hardly do better than training an inkay.

Physiology

All evolutionary stages of the line are currently classified by the Department of Agriculture as dual psychic- and dark-types. The dark typing is heavily disputed. The top contenders for a secondary typing are water due to their habitat and use of water pulses for propulsion, bug due to their anatomy, and flying due to their ability to levitate above the surface and use of air for propulsion. Malamar are exceptionally difficult for psychics to interface with, much less read or control. Proponents of the dark typing hold this as evidence of it. Opponents believe that either they are technically dark-type but another type fits much better so, due to the prevailing rule against triple typing, it should hold. The other argument against is that other creatures that are far different from humans are also extremely difficult to interface with and there are no serious pushes for them to receive typings. Extraterrestrial organisms such as ledian and minior, invertebrates such as reuniclus (assuming it is not also extraterrestrial in origin—consult a mainland pokédex or a guide on extraterrestrial pokémon for more information), and revived invertebrates such as kabutops and omastar are all very difficult to interface with and are not given a dark-typing.

Inkay are very similar to surface cephalopod pokémon such as octillery and tentacruel in physiology. Inkay’s body is composed of two core parts. The first is made up of a translucent, white, hat-like bulb on their head. Pink flesh is visible through the head containing four yellow dots spaced at equal intervals Two long tentacles that extend slightly beyond their lower tentacles reach down from the headpiece. The headpiece itself contains an elaborate system of chambers for water, air and other fluids and gasses that is used to raise inkay to the surface and lower them back down to the depths.

The rest of their body is colored a dark blue. It terminates in six short tentacles that have been described as looking like a skirt when they are held close together. Inkay have two complex eyes on their face with a small pink feature between them. This, contrary to popular belief, is not an inkay’s beak. They do not eat from it and instead use it to ward off predators who might attack the eyes and use it to push or suck in water to aid with horizontal movement. The inkay’s real beak is hidden amidst their tentacles. It is roughly half as long as the tentacles themselves. Near it are three valves they use for filtering water, releasing waste and propulsion. Inkay found near the surface typically reach up to

The tentacled portion of malamar is nearly identical, although it is somewhat larger and a darker of blue on the outside (the inner bits near the beak stay roughly the same shade). They also gain an additional two tentacles. Malamar’s headpiece grows far larger until it is roughly 1.5 times as long as the bottom tentacles fully extended. The inner pink flesh becomes a dark, nearly black, shade of purple and malamar gains two more lights, stacked in three rows of two. These lights are visible from any angle. Two ridges on the top of an inkay’s head grow into functional legs. It is unclear what the purpose of these legs are in the deep but they are used to balance on land on the surface. Malamar’s two arm tentacles grow to lengths exceeding the rest of their body combined and can be held down to form two more legs or arms when on land or extended towards their beak in the water to form powerful weapons for defense and offense. Their arms are tipped with axe-like blades sharp enough to seriously wound a wailord by either creating an infected cut or puncturing their air bladders.

Inkay and malamar light are used to create elaborate patterns. These are used for communication between members of the species, to calm down predators with hypnotic patterns or to transfix prey long enough to be slashed open and eaten. These light patterns work on most pokémon and animals, including humans. Most of malamar’s carapace is composed of tissue that forms their nervous system and they are highly intelligent creatures capable of figuring out complex puzzles in seconds. They also possess telekinetic capabilities. Whether or not they have pure telepathy or just use their light patterns for hypnosis (or if there’s a meaningful difference at all) is disputed.

Malamar are sexually dimorphic and their maximum size varies widely between captive and wild specimens. All measurements given below are from the tip of the carapace to the end of the last blue tentacle. Captive females grow up to 2 meters and captive males grow up to roughly 1.7 meters. Wild females can grow up to 8 meters and males can grow up to 6 meters. Captive malamar can live up to five years. Evidence suggests that wild malamar do not live much, if any, longer.

Behavior

It isn’t terribly clear what wild inkay are up to during their daily rest. They chafe at and can usually deconstruct or detach tracking devices and when injected their behavior appears to be altered considerably for a few days. On the surface they tend to swim in troupes of roughly twenty inkay. They form a grid where the closest inkay is roughly ten meters away from the next one. They move in close synchronization while flashing their lights to confuse and captivate predators and prey alike. Genetic testing suggests members of a troupe are all siblings.

Inkay are capable of levitating over the water and, apparently, surviving in moist air for up to five hours at a time. They are well known for the mid-air flips they constantly perform while moving. It is unclear whether or not these are accidental, intentional with a clear biological purpose, or just part of their naturally curious nature.

Linking the above paragraphs, inkay are intensely clever and often distracted by new and interesting environments or puzzles. This holds true for wild inkay who will sometimes put themselves in possible danger to investigate something of interest to them. They consider machines of interest and, given that their lights attract tourists to come up to troupes, they are often killed by boat propellers.

Inkay primarily hunt fish (both pokémon and non-pokémon). Wishiwashi are a favorite of theirs in Alola and they are one of the few natural predators of wishiwashi. They can get away with picking on individuals without facing the wrath of the collective because their lights make the level of coordination necessary to school nearly impossible.

No one knows exactly what depths malamar frequent or what their wild diet is. It is assumed from captive specimens that they eat large sea pokémon and non-pokémon fish but this has never been confirmed in the wild. Attempts to release captive malamar to observe their behavior in the wild tend to go poorly. They tear off mechanical trackers quickly, almost never return to their trainers, and malamar with inobtrusive trackers inside of them (that they don’t manage to get out anyway) appear to die shortly after release. The leading theory is that malamar are somewhat social creatures in the wild who teach vital skills to other malamar.

Wild malamar almost never surface. Captive malamar can and do stand on their main tentacles and the expanded carapace ridges and are capable of levitating a few centimeters off the ground and surviving in air for several hours. Notably, their air sacs and carapace ridges appear to be proportionally larger and stronger than their wild counterparts. It might be physiologically impossible for a wild malamar to stand, float or survive on land.

Husbandry

Inkay require a seafood diet. They aren’t very picky at all on what they eat and are fine with crustacean meat (crustaceans with the shells still attached double as a toy), fish, mussels and even the flesh of other cephalopods. There is some evidence that wild malamar engage in cannibalism but this has only been documented in very cramped aquariums or between very underfed malamar in captivity. Inkay prefer fresh seafood to pellets and mixes but will eat those in a pinch.

Inkay should be kept in saltwater about as often as they are kept outside of it. Some pokéballs can meet this requirement. Consult a specialty pokéball or fish supplies store for more details.

Inkay are incredibly intelligent creatures and will require either frequent access to toys or an equally intelligent playmate. They appear to be motivated by curiosity alone and the presence or absence of food at the end of the puzzle doesn’t seem to affect their willingness to solve it. On the flip side, inkay in aquaria are incredibly gifted escape artists and their nimble tentacles and telekinesis allow them to frequently break ut of supposedly unescapable cages. Inkay are capable of contorting their body to fit through any space bigger than their beak. In an aquarium in Kalos an inkay was filmed waiting for a security guard to pass by and then swimming through the filtration system into the adjacent fish tank, eating the fish inside and then moving back to her own tank when it was time for the next security sweep. They are capable of learning rules but they tend to see rules as a constraint that they want to get around for the pure joy of bypassing it without getting caught. This makes inkay impossible to tame and difficult to keep in line. The best solution is generally to continuously present them with new and interesting environments or highly intelligent playmates. Brionne are very good for this purpose, as are slowking and oranguru. The latter two have much less energy than an inkay which can sometimes become a problem.

Inkay are not particularly cuddly. When they do run their tentacles over a trainer it is often in either an attempt to steal something, to apologize if they get caught breaking the rules (they quickly learn that humans enjoy physical affection and will become more lenient when happy), or to figure out their trainer’s anatomy, which is an interesting puzzle.

Inkay are most active at night in and out of aquaria. In community tanks, especially those with large pokémon, inkay tend to seek shelter for the entire day and then come out at night.

Inkay can be housetrained but this is a rule they will often seek to break. Their waste is a stream of dark liquid.

Malamar are often best approached on a case by case basis or not raised at all for all but the most experienced of trainers and public aquariums. Inkay tend to have similar personalities to each other and relatively few personality quirks per inkay. Malamar are moody and wildly different from each other in temperament and behavior. They tend to hide during the day in public aquariums and then prey upon other tankmates at night even if food is very explicitly provided for them, except when they are given more food than they could possibly eat and it can only be accessed through a very challenging puzzle. They are also fiercely territorial over their preferred corner of the tank and will seldom leave it except to hunt. Curiously, captive malamar seem to ignore each other entirely even if they were in the same troupe in the wild and raised together in captivity.

Malamar are easily bored by humans and will often seek comeuppance against the people who control or restrict them. This usually takes the form of hypnosis. Inkay will almost never hypnotize a human unless they believe themselves to be at immediate risk. Malamar have no such compulsions. When training a malamar it is very important to have frequent therapy sessions, ideally with a telepath, and keep a diary several times a day on your emotional state and the subject of your thoughts. Malamar brainwashing tends to be accompanied by a general boost in mood, a detachment from other humans and pokémon and a mild obsession with obtaining fish. Some malamar trainers become obsessed with battles and competition; others abruptly come to resent them. Malamar training is really best left to public aquaria, psychics capable of recognizing telepathic assault, and trainers formidable enough to earn their malamar’s respect.

See Evolution for more details on what to do when your inkay approaches evolution.

Illness

The most common illness for inkay is that they dry out. This happens when their water sac runs low. This can be fixed if they are quickly submerged in salt water and allowed to stay there until they float out on their own. The symptoms for this include drastically lowered activity, apathetic attitude and a refusal to eat. A substantial increase or decrease in the frequency or volume of their waste releases should also be noted. For any symptom other than those with obvious causes, dehydration should be assumed.

If hydration does not solve the problem, consult a veterinarian.

Evolution

Inkay tend to evolve around their third birthday, although the amount of battling they partake in can move this back or forward. It is suspected that the actual catalyst for their evolution is reaching a threshold of telepathic activity across their lifetime.

Inkay tend to become lethargic and eat far more when they approach evolution. They will also all but stop releasing waste. This should be the point where trainers who do not want to deal with a malamar (or do not have the credentials to do so) should release them back into the ocean. Inkay in the wild evolve by swimming deep beneath the surface and never reemerging. In public aquariums they usually seek out either the deepest or most protected spot in the aquarium and stay absolutely still for days on end as they grow and change. The water pressure and available light both appear to affect the amount of time it takes to evolve and the size they grow to.

Trainers who wish to evolve their inkay and then keep the malamar, and have the proper licensing to do so, should work out an arrangement with a local zoo, aquarium or rehabilitation center to loan you a pressurized, dark or secluded space. Inkay should be provided as much food as they will eat during the runup to evolution. Malamar will often be very clumsy during their first couple of weeks after evolving, especially on land but they should never be laughed at. They tend to lash out when they believe their intelligence or agility is being insulted. And malamar have a rather formidable arsenal for lashing out with.

Battle

Malamar are most often used as an anti-metagame pick on competitive battling teams and their popularity waxes and wanes depending on what sort of threats are popular at any given time. In metagames (regional or international) dominated by psychic types malamar usually become quite popular. These scenes tend to attract psychic trainers who have an easier time raising malamar and they are also quite useful in countering most psychics. The same goes for metagames with large pools available as an arena pick as malamar are some of the best pokémon for taking down large water-types such as wailord and miltoic in the water.

Malamar are most easily countered by bug types that can break their concentration with sonic attacks and retaliate with powerful slashes that can tear through their skin and seriously injure them. Malamar and inkay are vulnerable to cuts but they can patch them up quite easily in saltwater given a few hours (or days for particularly severe wounds). Pokémon that can present puzzles or traps mid-fight can often confuse or distract them as they obsess over how to ‘solve’ the problem, something ordinarily best left to the trainer while the pokémon reacts to the immediate problems at hand.

Malamar are a mix of arena control and tech fighters. They are superb at twisting the battlefield around with attacks like trick room and setting traps for their opponent. They also have very sharp claws and can move quickly in short bursts by releasing air or water jets (this works triply well in the water). They function like a mix between primarina’s arena control and golisopod’s hit and run styles although they are not quite as good at either of them. Still, they are one of the few trapsetters that can keep up with and even knock out the glass cannons, nukes, or set up sweepers that usually counter them.

Only psychics should attempt to use a malamar on the island challenge.

Inkay fight rather differently to malamar. They rely more heavily on hypnosis as they don’t have many reliable ways to end the battle quickly. As such, they must use light patterns to pacify the opponent and levitation to avoid them. Tricks such as protect and trick room can prolong this phase of the fight. When the opponent is subdued they can be hit with a barrage of ranged or melee attacks without much fear of retaliation. Be mindful that if opponents are allowed to switch out this can disrupt the inkay’s hard work. Inkay are particularly useful against totems as the core of the battle is one very powerful pokémon that can stay on the field a long time. Provided that inkay can take a hit or two they are quite useful for draining the totem and setting them up for a harder hitter to take out.

Acquisition

Inkay are often found in Kala’e Bay in Bittern Peak Commonwealth Park. They can sometimes be seen off of Route 1, Route 2 or Hau’oli City. There are rare sightings of inkay around Fini Beach and the eastern shoreline of Poni Island. They require a Class III license to capture, adopt or purchase. They are somewhat rare in captivity, especially among trainers or suppliers who might be willing to part with them. It is easiest to simply capture an inkay.

Capture of a malamar is illegal due to the difficulty of finding one, the possibility that they are quite rare, the difficulty of taming one and the simple fact that no captured malamar has survived for longer than a week in captivity. Possession of a malamar requires a Class V license for the general population and a Class III license for psychics who earn a PsiTest score of 50 or higher.

Breeding

Malamar have never been bred in captivity. It is unknown how wild malamar reproduce.

Subspecies

There is some argument that, due to their size and physiological differences, wild malamar are not the same subspecies as captive malamar. The argument goes that there is a benthic inkay that never surfaces at all that evolves into deep sea malamar. The inkay that come to the surface are a different subspecies entirely and the malamar known in captivity are a subspecies that fares so poorly in the wild that they are almost never seen. The main argument against this idea is that there is no reason for inkay to undergo the costly process of evolution if they would almost certainly die afterwards. There are also only very minimal genetic differences between captive and wild malamar. As such it is generally accepted that there are no subspecies of malamar.
 
I saw The Alola Pokédex had an inkay chapter up on the Serebii writecord and I simply had to read it, being the squid enthusiast I am. Let's go!

Malamar are a deep sea enigma that have never been captured or even seen alive in the depths and very seldom appear on the surface. The only proof of their existence comes from deep scars on surfacing wailord, bloated corpses washing up on beaches and inkay raised and evolved in captivity (as will be noted below, these captive-raised malamar are not particularly useful for research purposes).

Love how this takes after the real life giant and colossal squids. That, their size and their aggressive nature really sell the deep-sea-horror aspect.

Opponents believe that either they are technically dark-type but another type fits much better so, due to the prevailing rule against triple typing, it should hold.

I know the no-triple-types rule is naturally straight from the game canon, but is there an in-universe explanation for it? From the entries I've read, it seems a third type would be really accurate for some, and it's not totally clear why they're not accepted.

The first is made up of a translucent, white, hat-like bulb on their head. Pink flesh is visible through the head containing four yellow dots spaced at equal intervals Two long tentacles that extend slightly beyond their lower tentacles reach down from the headpiece.

Missing period in there. Also, is there a specific reason "bulb" is used rather than "mantle"? The latter just seems more squid-specific.

The rest of their body is colored a dark blue.

*puts on artist hat* "Dark blue" is not really how I'd describe the color in inkay, in either official art or the models, it's closer to azure if I had to be more specific than "blue". Are the inkay of this interpretation actually differing in color to the official sources, or do we just have different opinions on what to call the color we see? It's just that "dark" blue makes me think of kyogre rather than omanyte, which I'd say inkay is closer to. *takes off artist hat*

This, contrary to popular belief, is not an inkay’s beak. They do not eat from it and instead use it to ward off predators who might attack the eyes and use it to push or suck in water to aid with horizontal movement. The inkay’s real beak is hidden amidst their tentacles.

Yes! Inkay's beak being in front of its tentacles bothered me as well, even if I thought it was at least an improvement on the funnel-mouth octillery had. How I dealt with it was just imagine that, beneath the surface, the tentacles still reached above it... somehow. Good thing I'm not the one writing this entry.

Inkay found near the surface typically reach up to

The tentacled portion of malamar is nearly identical,

First sentence cuts off in the middle.

Whether or not they have pure telepathy or just use their light patterns for hypnosis (or if there’s a meaningful difference at all) is disputed.

I was going to say this seemed like an easy thing to test with a lights-covering vest, but then I remembered how nasty malamar could get. They probably wouldn't cooperate with such an experiment.

They consider machines of interest and, given that their lights attract tourists to come up to troupes, they are often killed by boat propellers.

8a4.jpg

NOOO MY BABIES

On the flip side, inkay in aquaria are incredibly gifted escape artists and their nimble tentacles and telekinesis allow them to frequently break ut of supposedly unescapable cages.

*out. My text editor seems to prefer "inescapable" as well.

Also TIL that plural of aquarium. Somehow had never seen it used before and never thought of it.

Overall, lots of personality in this little mon and its freaky bigger form! A treat of a chapter for a squid lover such as myself.
 
Content Notice: Suicide

Zoroark (Zorua)


Overview

Contrary to popular belief, the mythologies and folklores of Native American tribes varied substantially from one another. Yet all of them, from the Mississippians to the Dakota to the Aztecs, held close variations on one story. Sometimes a child would abruptly stop talking in the night. As they grew up they would slowly start talking again, albeit with less skill and frequency than they had before. Some would display magical abilities. Some European cultures also had a variant of the changeling tale. The difference is, the stories from North America had a very real basis.

Zoroark are most well known for their illusions. And there is scientific interest in those. Specifically, all subspecies of zoroark have the same outcome (illusions) but approach it in very different ways (telepathy, hydrokinesis, pyrokinesis). This would ordinarily suggest an extreme case of convergent evolution, but all three living subspecies are closely related.

What makes them of particular interest to scientists is their intelligence. Zoroark are not the most intelligent pokémon. Nor are they the only ones capable of communicating in speech (primarina, chatot and even some slowking can). Zoroark are interesting because of their ease of blending into human society and their desire to do so. Human children are often one of the first illusions a zorua learns to cast, even in the wild, and adult zoroark have been observed creating and maintaining a human identity for years. The changeling stories of North America have been documented somewhat frequently in the modern era in zoroark’s remaining habitats. They break into residences, steal children and leave behind a zorua of their own. More than one zoroark has told researchers and police officers that this is to give their child a better shot at learning human behaviors.

It is unclear what exactly happens to the kidnapped children. While it has long and widely been believed that the zoroark simply ate the babies, this may be untrue. Human children showing up on doorsteps or living alone (but healthily) in the wild are also common occurrences in zoroark habitats. The prevailing theories at present are that zoroark keep abducted children in their nest to teach human forms and behaviors to their other pups, or that they drop humans off elsewhere in an attempt to reduce the hostility towards them.

For understandable reasons, zoroark were both hunted and worshipped in pre-Columbian North America. Sometimes the same culture did both. European settlers were unnerved by the zoroark, especially after some infiltrated their expeditions and came back to Europe with them. Witch hunts in the early United States were ostensibly aimed at getting rid of supposed zoroarks. The success rate of these hunts was low enough to suggest other factors were more heavily influencing the target selections. There is at least one case where the minister spearheading a witch hunt that killed twenty young women was himself revealed to be a zoroark upon his death.

The colonists were far more successful at driving zoroark extinct in the wild. Currently there are only two wild populations of zoroark in North America: one on the Olympic Peninsula and surrounding portions of British Columbia and Washington and the other near the California-Mexico border.

Two of the three globally common subspecies, the Olympic and montane zoroark, are classified as having “significant populations” in Alola by the Department of Agriculture. However, montane zorua are not reliably available to travelers so they are relegated to the subspecies section of this entry. The rest will focus upon the Olympic zorua.

Physiology

Both zorua and zoroark are classified as pure dark types by the Department of Agriculture. This ruling is highly contested. Now is perhaps the best time to bring up the history of the dark typing. In the earliest attempts to group pokémon by typing, dark signified that the pokémon had a connection to satanic magic. The ruling has been controversial in the modern era and in the rest of the world for understandable reasons. However, the dark type has not been abolished both due to tradition and because it appears that there was something to the initial theory. While most scientists no longer view them as satanic, dark-types tend to have some general traits: they have the ablity to manipulate shadows, above average intelligence, a resistance to telepathy, and either some degree of malice towards humanity or shocking brutality. Zoroark fit all four categories.

Among researchers that acknowledge the dark-typing, it is almost universally recognized that zoroark are primarily dark types. The dominant dispute revolves around whether or not they should also be water, flying, psychic, fairy or normal types as well. Zoroark are hydrokinetic to a very limited degree. They use this to manipulate the air, which could suggest a water or flying type. This trick has a cursory resemblance to low level telekinesis and they are highly intelligent, which could support a psychic typing. Fairy-types are ordinarily tricksters and, in the old days, were viewed as ‘holy’ pokémon. Zoroark have an extensive mythology tied to them and can be very friendly, even familial, to humans. They are undeniably tricksters. Normal implies versatility and a mastery of several elements. The authors of this guidebook take no particular position on the typing of the Olympic zoroark or zorua.

Zorua fur is primarily either grey or black, depending upon the individual. They have a typical quadrupedal vulpine build. The fur on their paws is red and they possess several red markings on their forehead. The skin of their eyelids is also red. Zorua have an unruly tuft of fur on top of their head that is red at the tips.

Zoroark are primarily bipedal. Their limbs are long and slender and their muscles are relatively undeveloped. Their claws are much longer and sharper than that of zorua and are colored blood red. Their fur is rather short across their entire body, except on their upper chest. Zoroark are most easily identifiable (when they aren’t casting an illusion) by their mane. The mane of a fully grown zoroark is almost always bigger in volume than the rest of their body combined. It is bright red in color with black tufts and streaks throughout it. They generally keep an object, usually a pearl from a shellder, clamperl or spoink with a hole with the middle carved out, around the middle of their main to keep their hair in some semblance of order. Their fur is coated in oils that they can control with their hydrokinesis so it doesn’t encumber them as much as its bulk would suggest.

Zoroark can grow up to 1.7 meters and 80 kilograms in size, with males being somewhat larger than females on average. Zoroark live up to 60 years in captivity. Their wild lifespan is not well studied.

Behavior

Olympic zoroark primarily cast their illusions through small-scale hydrokinesis. They use airborne water droplets to manipulate the air. This allows them to create and suppress sounds, bend light and even move small objects and create tactile illusions. They can alter their secretions to create scent illusions. A particularly skilled zoroark can create an entire body out of faux-forcefields made of air and water, speak and look like a human and even smell like one. While the bulk of the mane might seem like an obvious challenge for presenting as a human, zoroark can remove their bead and telekinetically weave the hairs around their body in a pinch.

The only real way to disrupt a zoroark’s illusions is to hit their body with enough force, usually little more than a particularly hard punch, that will break the surface tension of the projection and force them to spend time and energy to put it back together. There are other methods to bypass illusions as well. Longtime or skilled zoroark trainers can frequently identify zoroark from tells that they have difficulty explaining. Ultraviolet and infrared scanners, as well as thermal scanners, can usually bypass the illusion as they are targeted towards traditional human senses. As a note of caution, at least one zoroark has been able to beat all three of the above methods at different times (never simultaneously).

Zorua tend to be far less skilled at illusions and have a variety of simple tells from an inability to mimic voices or suppress their own to pixelated glitches to forgetting to cover up their tail. They are also almost never skilled enough to replicate the scent of another creature.

Zoroark use their illusions for a variety of purposes. In addition to infiltrating human society, they also use them to conceal their den and pups, imitate a harmless prey species to lure in a predator, imitate a very large predator to scare away a mid-sized one, or for mating displays (see Breeding). Zorua generally use their illusions to either replicate very well-known species or confuse their opponent enough that their attacks might miss and let them get away to safety.

It is difficult to research wild zoroark as they are difficult to track and very sensitive about being followed to their dens. It is believed that the Olympic zoroark lives in groups of one to five adults and their young. Members frequently join and leave the pack and it is not believed that they have a particularly tight-knit social structure. Juvenile-only packs with an occasional unrelated adult providing protection or supervision are also somewhat common, particularly in areas outside of the Olympic peninsula where there are simply very few adults that live exclusively in the wild. This is the dominant model of zorua packs on Melemele and Akala, although there are semi-permanent adults in the Poni Island pack(s).

Zoroark and zorua are primarily ambush predators, although they will also go to the shores to hunt for shellfish meat and pearls. Slowpoke are a frequent target of theirs as they don’t mind getting wet, resist psychic attacks and find that they taste quite good.

Zoroark are nocturnal in the wild, although zoroark imitating humans will almost always adjust to diurnal life.

Husbandry

Zoroark present a unique challenge among all of the pokémon in Alola. Some species have comparable intelligence to humans, such as primarina, and others often insist that they are superior via actions or telepathy (ninetales, metagross, slowking). Zoroark are unique in their desire to be human. They will frequently take on the appearance of their trainer (or a gender flipped version of their trainer) at first and slowly make adjustments to their preferred human form. They resent pokéballs and any sign of subjugation and will snap at their trainers, literally and metaphorically, if they get the impression that they are not viewed as equals. They will only leave their human form for combat purposes or for illness or injury (see Illness). Their main goal when dealing with humans is not to obtain food or protection but to learn more about human appearances and behaviors. If they believe their trainer to be sufficiently kind they will often elect to stay with them when they decide their education is complete. Otherwise they will usually take their trainer’s valuables and slink off into a crowd, never to be seen again.

Zorua will sometimes tolerate portable dog beds. Zoroark will not and demand a sleeping mat, cot, or something else equivalent to what their trainer has. Similarly, zorua will be willing to eat typical canine mixes or leftovers. Zoroark will become spiteful if they don’t have regular access to human food. Their digestive systems are similar enough to a human’s that they can survive on a typical human diet with a little more protein. Zoroark can be reasoned with on finances to a degree but they will still demand a measure of equality in even the worst situations.

Unlike every other canine in the Alola region (Silvally excluded), zoroark love water. They can bathe themselves with hydrokinesis or their tongue but they prefer to have access to baths or showers. Rules will need to be set early on with regards to their water usage or else their trainer can find themselves facing a substantial water bill.

Zoroark require scratching posts from time to time. Only very young or spiteful zorua will scratch up furniture. Adults will simply slink off to a forest to slash some tree bark if they are not provided with a scratching post.

The most important lessons for handling a zoroark are those you should have in kindergarten: be respectful, share your toys, be willing to help others. Trainers who follow those rules often develop deep, even familial, relationships with their zoroark. This can help keep them sane and grounded on the trails of Alola and in the parts of life’s journey that follow.

Illness

Zoroark can contract rabies and should be vaccinated within two weeks of capture or six weeks of birth.

Most zoroark illnesses and injuries affect their illusions in some way. Not all instances of a zoroark dropping their illusion are due to suffering. Sometimes zoroark drop their illusions for battle, for intimidation or for no clear reason at all. Zorua usually sleep with their illusion down and will often spend time in their default appearance around trainers they trust.

However, if a zorua spends more than three days without casting an illusion or a zoroark goes for more than one, they may be sick or injured. Ask the pokémon to create a human illusion to talk, or at least to write if they are capable of it. If they can’t or won’t, take them to a veterinarian. If they will take a human form, ask them earnestly and repeatedly if anything is wrong. Even if they insist that everything is fine, it might still be for the best to take them to a veterinarian for a cursory check. Zoroark are very good at spotting lies so don’t try to conceal the real purpose of the visit from them.

Evolution

Zorua reach their full size around sixteen years of age. However, they can appear to grow much faster in captivity. Zorua with a devoted trainer become more skilled with human illusions and usually decide to match their trainer’s approximate age. This in turn forces them to think in more mature thought patterns, which has been shown to promote actual rapid brain development which is followed by physical development. Premature evolution has not been shown to have an adverse effect on lifespan and should not be encouraged or discouraged. Zoroark’s manes continue to grow in length and volume until their death.

The formal demarcation line between zorua and zoroark is the selection of their first bead.

Battle

Zoroark are a niche pick in competitive battling for their mindgames. Even in leagues that announce each party’s full team beforehand it can be difficult to know which pokémon is a zoroark. While this isn’t terribly effective at the levels where one hit from almost any pokémon can knock out a zoroark’s illusion, if not the zoroark itself, it is a useful tool in leagues that allow for counterswitching. A common tactic is initiating a switch against an opponent’s fighting-weak pokémon while having your zoroark pose as a humanoid fighting type. This forces the opponent to gamble by either sending in a psychic type and risking a matchup against a zoroark or staying in and risking a beatdown from a fighting-type. A similar tactic applies to having your zoroark imitate a poison-type when fighting an opponent with at least one fairy, forcing them to decide whether or not to risk their fairy against what might be a real poison-type for the chance of annihilating a zoroark and gaining momentum.

Island challenge grand trials don’t force either side to declare their pokémon beforehand, just the number they are bringing to battle. This gives zoroark a few rounds of confusion and setup against an opponent before the kahuna figures out the trick. Elite Four battles require declaring in advance (and allow both sides to freely switch) which makes the best zoroark tactics akin to the ones mentioned above. However, it should be noted that most opponents in the island challenge use monotype teams. This makes the utility of baiting out a pokemon less useful because the opponent will either have no fairy or psychic types (or bugs) to bait out, or will have so many that crushing one is useless.

Beyond illusions, zoroark have sharp claws and surprisingly potent shadow manipulation. They can also abuse illusion “glitches” to disorient opponents for a split second. This allows them to either begin or disrupt a combo, get in for a melee hit or get out of range of a melee fighter. Their signature tactic is using shadows to trip up opponents as they move and force them to hit the ground with their own force. As zoroark are rather light on musculature and natural defenses, this is probably their best way of safely dealing damage. They can also be taught a number of elemental tricks and disruption tactics to maximize their efficacy.

Acquisition

There are zorua packs around Route 5 and in the Route 1 Holy Site. Captures from the former are currently prohibited. Captures from the latter are presently allowed without restriction (beyond the requisite trainer rank) as zorua are viewed as an invasive species and a public safety risk. Capture, adoption or purchase of a zorua requires a Class I license.

Zorua are also found in the pack(s) in Poni Island National Park. There are enough zoroark that they sometimes split off into groups of an individual or pair and their children or multiple individuals and their children. The population is also small enough that they have been observed congregating in one group. Capture of zorua and zoroark is presently allowed in unlimited numbers with the requisite trainer rank.

Zoroark require a Class III license to purchase, adopt or capture.

Breeding

Zoroark are incredibly private about all stages of reproduction. What is known is that they have a very long courtship period (sometimes lasting years before procreation) and that a pair will typically only have one litter of six to twelve pups. Zoroark pregnancies last seven months. Pregnant zoroarks will often be hesitant to create illusions, presumably due to the energy illusion formation requires. Male zoroarks will stay very close to their pregnant mates.

Both parents stay very close to their pups until they reach their full size. If one parent dies before the pups are fully grown the surviving parent will seek out another zoroark to assist in childrearing. If both die in the same incident the remaining zorua will band together into a pack. Sometimes another zoroark will take over parental duties, or at least begin to drop by every so often to check on their welfare and provide instruction. It is believed that both zorua packs in Alola were formed by orphaned litters that did not gain a steady parental figure but did find another zoura litter to merge with and the pack continued to adopt any stray zorua they found.

Mated pairs usually split up when their children leave. Sometimes they will pursue a long-term homosexual partnership. Sometimes they will find an orphaned pack and assist in raising it or they will join a multi-zoroark group. Zoroark have also been observed finding a member of another species and entering into either a romantic or platonic partnership with them.

Zoroark will lay out their own boundaries and desires for privacy during reproduction and childrearing to their trainer. Sometimes they will wish to leave their trainer to find a mate and raise children. They should be allowed to do so. If forbidden from leaving, they will leave anyway but steal or destroy several of their trainer’s possessions on the way out. A zoroark that amicably parts from their trainer will often return when their pups are fully grown. Occasionally a zoroark will tolerate or even desire raising their pups in captivity. They will lay out their needs for this as well, although it typically amounts to a dark, safe and permanent home.

Zorua cubs should not engage in anything more than a playfight until they reach two full years of age.

Subspecies

There are six living subspecies of zoroark with the possibility of a seventh in either the past or the present. The first is the Olympic zoroark discussed above.

The second is the montane zoroark. While there has not been a stable colony of zoroark in the wild since at least the 1920ss, they continue to thrive in captivity. Mormon theology teaches that God gave the montane zoroark to the church as a gift. They proceeded to round up almost all of the zoroark in the Rocky Mountains and tame them. They currently run a breeding program for the montane zoroark that contains nearly all of the members of the subspecies in the world. These zoroark are used to protect their churches, leadership and missionaries around the world. Cynics also attribute the public and private miracles of the church to zoroark illusions.

Montane zoroark are powerful telepaths that create illusions by hacking the brain of their targets and altering their sensory processing. This makes their illusions the most powerful; it also means that they are sometimes unable to affect all nearby minds at once. The sheer versatility of their power and ability to completely block the senses of opponents makes them by far the most powerful zoroark subspecies, as is seen whenever the church allows one of its members to use one in battle. The remaining montane zoroark are owned by the Smithsonian Institute. Once in a while they will display montane zorua at the National Zoo; zoroark would never consent to this. There are persistent rumors that other branches of the United States government may possess montane zoroarks, but this has never been proven. Montane zorua are very similar in appearance to the Olympic zorua, if a bit lighter in coloration and with bright purple eyes instead of pale blue.

Desert zoroark used to range from Texas to central Mexico and from the Gulf to the Pacific. At present they are confined to a handful to a patchwork of habitats in Mexico and a handful of National Parks and reservations in the American Southwest. The Aztec, Navajo and Hopi revered the desert zoroark and the lands under their control house most of the remaining desert zoroark population. Unfortunately, the Aztec territories in Mexico are ever-shifting and ever-shrinking, putting the zoroark population there at risk. It is the policy of the Mexican government to kill every zoroark they become aware of. Until 1903, this was also the official policy of the United States government. The unwillingness of some Native American leaders to hand over the zoroark on their lands was the pretext for a number of wars.

Desert zoroark create their illusions in a similar manner to Olympic zoroark, suggesting that they may be the most closely related of the subspecies. It would be impractical to use water in the air to create their illusions given their habitat. Instead, they create tiny heat waves to shape the air around them. While their tactile illusions are entirely unconvincing, they learn visual and auditory illusions much faster than their Olympic counterparts and don’t need to spend much time redeveloping an illusory body after their old one is destroyed. They are classified as dual dark- and fire-types and can create more powerful heat waves in battle than the ones they use for illusions.

The swamp zoroark is nearly extinct in the wild. They are the largest of the subspecies and tend to be dark green in color with light purple stripes across their body. Their manes are also the smallest proportionally and stop growing when they reach physical maturity. Unlike other zoroark subspecies, they have webbed paws and spend most of their time in the water and, when they do go on land, they walk on all fours. Because of this and the factors below, it is believed that they are the ancestor of the other zoroark species.

Swamp zoroark do not create particularly detailed illusions. Instead, they emit gasses that cause hallucinations and feelings of panic in their target. Long-term exposure results in blindness and even death. These gasses are used for hunting and defense. At present, there are believed to be fewer than 80 swamp zoroark and zorua in the wild. Most of these live in and around Everglades National Park, with the remainder split between the bayous of Louisiana and Congaree National Park in South Carolina.

The remaining two zoroark subspecies are extinct in the wild. However, wild populations occasionally pop up around the world. This suggests that they have simply abandoned the forests and plains of North American entirely to integrate into human society.

The first of these subspecies is the plains zoroark. They have thick dark brown fur in the winter and a lighter coat of grey fur in the summer. Their mane is more like a cape extending from the bottom of their head than a ponytail and they don't use beads. Plains zoroark are powerful telekinetics who create and craft forcefields into a body. They then warp the light and sound around their forcefields through an unknown method to complete the illusion. Plains zoroark have the most durable illusions of all zoroark and they can form them rather quickly. However, they are among the least intelligent of the subspecies and take some time to learn the voices and social norms of other species.

Forest zorua were the most common subspecies at the time of European first contact. They ranged from Quebec and Ontario to the southern tip of the Appalachians and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. Forest zorua are proper shapeshifters rather than illusionists and morph their form until they physically become their illusion. Like ditto, it is entirely unclear how they do this. However, forest zorua suffer from one core weakness: they must concentrate hard to maintain their illusory form. Lapses in concentration, usually including sleep, will often cause their illusion to begin to break down. While some particularly clever zoroark can maintain their illusions for up to 72 hours, even through full nights of sleep, a heavy enough blow will cause them to almost instantly revert. As such, there is some speculation that forest zoroark do not shapeshift so much as use an attack akin to substitute. Unfortuantely, captive forest zoroark tend to commit suicide or refuse to eat, much less cooperate with experimenters. It may never be known how, exactly, the forest zoroark’s illusions really work.
 
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Furfrou

Overview

Furfrou has a reputation as perhaps the most regal and snobby of the world’s canines, and certainly of the world’s domestic canines. But the truth is that furfrou are, charitably, one the most energetic of the domestic canines. Less charitably, they are perhaps the least intelligent. So how did a high energy, low attention span dog that would rather be sloppily licking their trainer than sitting beside their throne become synonymous with poise and nobility?

As usual, there’s an extensive and messy history behind the breed.

Furfrou was the only canine to be domesticated in Europe. (Fenniken was domesticated in the Sahara around 1500 C.E. and would not become popular in Europe until the 1700s.) Furfrou was also one of the earliest domestic pokémon of any sort available in Europe. Between their long fur and potential for herding and protecting other livestock, they were quickly adopted by farmers across the continent. Foreign visitors during the early Kalosian Empire viewed furfrou as synonymous with the European method of agriculture.

There was a slight problem with furfrou, though: they are not the patient herders that stoutland and arcanine are. Instead they easily get distracted by birds, flowers, people, wild pokémon or the sun and stop watching the herd or walk away altogether before coming back at night with their tail between their legs. Farmers initially tried rectifying this by adopting a larger court of furfrou to watch both each other and the livestock, but they frequently only distracted each other. As soon as arcanine were imported to Europe in the late stages of the Kalosian Empire, furfrou were only retained as livestock for their fur or as protectors of children. The widespread domestication of lopunny slowly led to their decline in even those roles.

Enter Empress Apolline. Born a common farmer, she was conscripted into the Imperial Army during The Winter Legions’ Mutiny. Her tactical brilliance and skill with taming pokémon led to her rising quickly up the ranks and, after the death of the emperor at the Battle of Cylage placed one of the rebels next in the line of succession, the Lumiose Guard raised her to the throne. She carried the war within the year and her compassion and cunning during the post-war era lead to peace in Kalos for another 140 years. She also had fond memories of her family’s furfrou and brought several into the court in order to train senior military leaders and nobles in pokémon husbandry.

Over generations and dynasties, the furfrou stayed as a symbol of Kalos in general, and the monarchy in particular. The elaborate styling of frufrou’s coats was perfected during this period. Previously furfrou shaving had been a mundane semiannual task to obtain fur and improve the furfrou’s mobility; now it was (and mostly still is) a form of conspicuous consumption and class status.

It can be expensive to obtain a purebred furfrou in Alola (or almost anywhere else), but mutts are somewhat common in the wild and shelters as most trainers and families view them as too high maintenance and the wealthy would prefer a purebred. However, fufrou make excellent pets for anyone who wants a high energy dog or a chance to practice advanced grooming techniques.

Physiology

Furfrou are classified as normal-types by the Department of Agriculture, as they lack the criteria for any other typing. The ruling is not controversial.

Furfrou are rather typical, if lean, canine pokémon. Their only main distinctions are their long, shaggy white fur and their somewhat delicate facial structure. Most purebred furfrou have a very long and narrow snout compared to other canines. This is impractical and forces them to greatly slow down while eating and avoid injury to their heads. It is a product of selective breeding for purely aesthetic purposes.

Furfrou’s fur is not actually as thick as that of cincinno or lopunny. However, it is somewhat curly and grows very quickly. This leads to it fluffing out more than most other pokémon’s fur. They can grow a full coat of fur up to 40 centimeters long in six months and the fur can extend a ways away from their body, leading to them looking more like a mareep than a ninetales.

Unusually for canines with long coats, they do not have summer and winter coats that they shed with the seasons change. Instead, furfrou fur reaches its terminal length and stays that long until it is groomed. Feral furfrou thus almost always have the maximum coat length. In their original range in Northern Europe this was seldom a problem, but in Alola this can be a serious health concern as, like most canines, furfrou have no better means of heat release than simple panting.

Purebred furfrou grow up to 1.2 meters in height (measured at the head) and can weigh between 25 and 40 kilograms, depending upon how long their fur is at the time. Mutts are usually somewhat larger. Purebreds live around seven years in captivity; mutts usually live between 10 and 15. Neither typically survives long in the wild, especially in Alola.

Behavior

As mentioned above, furfrou are very energetic and playful. They are also quite social and, when stressed, will seek out the nearest furfrou, other canine, fluffy pokémon or human and stick very close to them. They frequently rub against fences or trees for reasons that are not well understood. In colder climes or when recently shorn, furfrou are known to run for several hours a day and sleep most of the rest of the time.

Feral furfrou mostly prefer to scavenge or beg around human settlements rather than actually hunting. This is partially because they have one of the weakest senses of smell of all canine pokémon and their vision isn’t much better. Hunting in crowded urban areas by hearing alone is rather difficult for them and most of them aren’t used to battling or hunting in captivity.

When they must hunt, furfrou tend to be ambush predators staying motionless in one place until something they think they can kill crosses their path. Unfortunately for them, furfrou are both conspicuous and impatient. They frequently move around and blow their cover, jump at things that are not edible (or even living), play with their potential prey rather than eating it, or forget what they were doing and wander off.

Husbandry

Furfrou eat standard canine food mixes and are capable of eating most common human foods. They are notorious beggers and their diet should be monitored. However, they are also active enough that they seldom get particularly fat.

Speaking of their activity, furfrou require several walks a day. It is best to do these in long walks around sunrise and sunset, with a shorter walk in the late morning and early afternoon (or both). Even furfrou without much fur can overheat in the late afternoon sun during the summer.

Furfrou are incredibly social in captivity and will require either another dog to keep them company or near-constant proximity. When awake they will demand scratches, walks, food or playtime. If these are denied they will attempt to cuddle their trainer with full body tackles, steal whatever is distracting their human or (curiously) grab onto their trainer’s leg and start licking it continuously, sometimes for up to an hour.

Unless under strict veterinary observation, furfrou should have their fur trimmed once every three months. Most groomers are more than capable of giving them basic cuts. Advanced cut groomers are somewhat rare in Alola as eevee, stoutland, rockruff, growlithe and vulpix are far more popular pets, but they can be found in Hau’oli and Malie. There is some debate as to whether elaborate styles are uncomfortable for furfrou. It appears to vary depending upon the style and dog and furfrou should be monitored closely after they receive a new styled trim to gauge their comfort with it.

Illness

Purebred furfrou suffer from a number of health problems. Snout injuries and cancers are the most common, but almost any illness or injury a dog can suffer is a risk for a purebred. They should receive veterinary checkups once every six months, ideally after grooming sessions. Mutts tend to have fewer health problems.

One particular challenge for furfrou is that their habit of rubbing against anything and everything in their territory often leads to skin infections. These can be very difficult to spot given the coverage and bulk of their fur. Furfrou should be thoroughly petted often to check for skin wounds; the dog will not mind this.

Like all canines, furfrou can carry rabies and should be vaccinated. This is usually done shortly after birth so it won’t be a problem for anyone but breeders.

Evolution

Juvenile furfrou look like smaller versions of adult furfrou, albeit they are often a little less fluffy. Furfrou typically reach maturity and their adult size around one year of age.

Battle

Furfrou’s lack of size and elemental attacks, as well as their frankly middling speed, means that they are almost never the dog of choice for competitive battlers. The one exception to this is in the Kalos league, where many trainers who have access to the private tutors, TMs, money to travel extensively and training supplies that help them succeed also tend to have furfrou.

This does not mean that furfrou are unusable on the island challenge, although they do suffer severe competiton from the many other dog breeds in Alola (arcanine, eevee, vulpix, lycanroc, manectric, stoutland, lucario, zoroark, houndoom, granbull). However, they are fast enough and their fur coat durable enough that they can dominate many early challenges and still get a hit or two off in the later ones. Other pokémon will need to pick up the slack towards the end, but furfrou users are playing an even longer game. Furfrou are high maintenance but energetic and lovable pets that can live for years after the island challenge is over.

In battle, it is best to keep things simple. While furfrou can learn several projectile attacks through TMs, they do not have the energy reserves to utilize them effectively. Instead they should rely upon tackles and full-body melee attacks combined with a few basic tricks such as roar, protect and double team if the TMs can be found or afforded. They are countered by ghosts, steel and rock types, powerful physical walls and most birds. Anything they can hit successfully (at least, when most opponents are using common juvenile pokémon) will likely take significant enough damage to make up for their long list of counters.

Purebred furfrou should be withdrawn after taking serious hits or multiple weak ones to avoid significant injury. A good rule of thumb is that if a purebred’s coat is in disarray, it’s time to end the round.

Acquisition

Furfrou can be adopted, captured or purchased with a Class I license. A few feral furfrou can be found around Hau’oli City, especially in the winter. It is far easier to simply adopt one from the shelters in the city. There are also furfrou breeders on Ula’Ula and Melemele.

Breeding

Furfrou courtship, mating, pregnancy and child rearing are all quite typical for canines. This makes them a good starter pokémon for getting into the breeding of more difficult dogs such as ninetales, zoroark, eevee and granbull. Furfrou have been known to mate with every other canine species on Alola, although some crossbreedings are more difficult than others. Most furfrou hybrids are reproductively viable.

Furfrou pregnancies last roughly two months and they have litters of four to six puppies.

Subspecies

None known.
 
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Yoooo post-awards feedback time. I know we've talked in private about a few of the mentioned issues beforehand, so just take them as a reminder to look into em now that editing's allowed again. Anyway, here's the judging post I wrote for The Alola Pokedex.

The Alola Pokedex

Writing Style & Technical

The Alola Pokedex is written in a semi-formal, objective style, a style fitting for and expected of a factual nature guidebook. I can’t remember any instances where the language would have strayed from this, so I can confidently say the style is maintained.

The prose avoids repetition by utilizing varying phrasing and vocabulary, making it quite smooth to read. There are a few typos, misspellings and grammar errors along the way, but they don’t get in the way of understanding or appear often enough to become distracting, save for one single instance I can recall.

Plot & Characterization

Due to The Alola Pokedex being a guidebook like mentioned before, it has no story or characters to be judged nor should it. Moving on.

Setting

The setting of The Alola Pokedex is mentioned to be the same as another story by the author, which to an outsider says nothing, but it can be pieced together well enough from the text. TAP takes place in a hybrid of the Earth we live on and the Pokémon world, meaning both real-life locations and the game regions exist. As the title of the story suggests, the Pokémon mentioned are primarily approached from an Alolan perspective, putting focus on their Alolan subspecies if others exist. Real life animals and plants are mentioned to exist in this world, though not much focus is put on them.

Each chapter focuses on a different evolution line, giving different kinds of information on each of their stages. This information is divided into sections, much like in a Wikipedia article: Overview, Physiology, Behavior, Husbandry, Illness, Evolution, Battle, Acquisition, Breeding and my personal favorite, Subspecies.

For a mon’s physiology, TAP dives far deeper than your average Bulbapedia article. For example, the grass type and leaves of the Rowlet line are explained with symbiotic, photosynthesizing bacteria, and their shape is mentioned to vary with individuals. How a mon lives, hunts, behaves and reproduces in the wild, how it should be fed and cared for in captivity, how it should be used in battles, what licenses are required for their keeping - all of these are covered. Some qualities are extrapolated from Dex entries, some are taken from real life animals, some I couldn’t find a specific reason for but they still fit in. The subspecies can range from being like real life subspecies, where behavior and physiology changes only little, to basically being fan-made regional variants.

However, turning fantasy monsters into realistic animals (or coming up with any kinds of non-existent animals in general) is obviously not always going to go smoothly. In TAP, most of the parts that hurt the immersion suffer from inconsistent inner logic or overlooking ecological problems that would arise from the written creature’s behavior. Some of these problems may result only from misunderstanding, but then the issue at hand would be miscommunication or lack of clarity. As an added note, I was also not a fan of the political references in one chapter - subjectively because I don’t like seeing real life politics in my Pokémon fanfiction, and more objectively because I didn’t feel like it made much sense or reflected the situation accurately, both of which are a detriment to the realism that’s the main draw of TAP.

Still, I’d say a large majority of the material given is without those problems, about 90% if I had to force a number. If you read The Alola Pokedex hoping to see Pokémon integrated into nature and society with realism as a goal, you won’t be disappointed. TAP is essentially those pieces of realistic Pokémon fanart we all know, but in written form.
 
Raichu (Pichu, Pikachu, Hodad)

Overview

It is somewhat difficult to explain pikachu’s global popularity. Until the late twentieth century they were only common in central Japan and Alola with small invasive colonies elsewhere. They are not the most popular pokémon among Japan’s trainers. Worldwide, relatively few many casual trainers used them before the 1990s and (to be completely honest) relatively few use them today. They are virtually absent from the competitive battling scene beyond the occasional use of hodad as a bird counter.

By all accounts, pikachu owes its popularity to one trainer who used a pikachu medically incapable of evolution (see Illness) and the subsequent anime and video games made about his improbable rise through the underground and officially sanctioned battling scenes of metropolitan Saffron. How the story and media caught on just as much, if not more so, outside of Japan than in it is a discussion for another book in another field.

Pikachu’s cuteness and (perceived) power led to its rise as a popular pet worldwide, even to the point of largely supplanting the popularity of related electric types such as emolga, dedenne, togedemaru, plusle and minun, and pachirisu. However, whatever the Satoshi-inspired anime and games say, most pikachu inevitably grow up. And many people find raichu to be not quite as cute as their adolescent stage. Additionally, pichu have relatively little control over their electric sacs and can be dangerous to have around very young children, in addition to being a frequent literal and metaphorical pain for their trainer.

This is not to say that the pikachu line are bad pets, exactly. They are cute, loyal, friendly and (once they evolve for the first time) almost entirely safe. But they do not work for every trainer and those prizing cuteness in their electric-types above all else might be better served by a togedemaru, emolga or dedenne, which have the advantage of not growing into a larger and less cute form.

There are also misconceptions about the Alolan or Tapu raichu (referred to in this guide by their traditional name: hodad). Normal raichu are not absent from or even uncommon in Alola. Most pikachu here evolve into raichu. Additionally, hodad does not appear to be a raichu subspecies. They are both branching evolutions of pikachu like slowbro and slowking are to slowpoke. Indigenous Alolans did not and do not worship hodad; they worship Tapu Koko and believe that hodad are blessed by the land spirit. However, this veneration was only particularly common on Melemele; the residents of other islands had their own sacred emissaries.

Physiology

Plusle, pikachu and raichu are classified as pure electric-types by the Department of Agriculture. This is not a controversial ruling. Hodad is classified as a dual electric- and psychic-type. There is some dispute as to whether they should have a third fairy-typing. However, as they fit the criteria for their two primary typings far better and third typings are presently disallowed, it is unlikely that hodad’s official typing changes unless the basic rules of official typings change as well.

Pichu as well as, pikachu and raichu, are predominately quadrupedal but can stand up on their hind legs if needed. Pichu are pale yellow in color, except for the fringes of their ears (black), two circles on their cheeks (pink), their tail (black), and a jagged band of fur around their neck (black). They are perhaps most easily distinguished from pikachu based on their size and the prominence of their feet. Pichu’s electric sacs are not fully developed. This makes them prone to weak discharge when startled; they can be startled by their own involuntary discharges, leading to a feedback loop of release that leaves the pichu severely drained. Their electric sacs are also not developed enough to store large amounts of electricity, meaning that their total discharges still don’t release as much power as the average raichu’s thundershock attacks.

Pikachu are generally bulkier than pichu with less prominent limbs and a proportionally larger torso. Their electric sacs darken to a bright red color and their tail becomes longer, more jagged and coated in yellow fur. Their ears are also proportionally longer and only colored black at the very tips. Pikachu’s electric sacs are nearly as large as those of a raichu, allowing them to hold about as much electricity. However, their release processes are less sophisticated and they have less experience using them, leading to frequent situations where they discharge too much at once and either hurt themselves or run out of energy quickly in a battle. However, as Satoshi’s pikachu demonstrated, their somewhat unregulated thunderbolts can be the strongest of any common electric-type.

It has been said that raichu resemble pichu far more closely than pikachu. They are proportionally longer, their ears are fringed in darker (brown) fur, and their feet are quite prominent, especially when compared to the stubby legs of pikachu. They are darker in color than their juvenile forms, except for a cream-colored oval on their belly. This makes them appear counter-shaded, which is unusual for a purely terrestrial organism. This has led to some speculation that the ancestors of raichu could either swim or fly. The circles on raichu’s cheeks (which, contrary to popular belief, are not the exterior of their electricity pouches but rather just ornamental markings) are pale yellow in color.

Perhaps the most interesting element of raichu’s physiology is the existence of a long brown “cord” between their tail proper and the rest of their body. Most trainers can’t believe that a tail so thin can hold up the bulky lightning-bolt-shaped tip. This disbelief is supported by reality; raichu can’t hold up their tail with muscles alone. Instead they use sophisticated electromagnetic currents to move their tail around and channel their lightning bolts. This gives them much more accuracy, range, speed and physical power than pikachu, as they can use their electricity to supply kinetic energy to their own body.

This is far more visible in hodad. They have even larger tails with equally thin cords leading to them. Hodad often balance the rest of their body on top of their tail and fly through the air on them. This gives them the appearance of surfing. Beyond that, hodad are generally of a lighter color than raichu, with the brown fur on their paws replaced with white fur and their eyes literally bright blue (that is, their eyes emit light of their own and glow in the dark). Their ears are also rounded and appear to contain a spiral pattern, although this is actually just a result of their magnetic field acting upon their fur. Hodads’ ears are also bright yellow in coloration.

There is some dispute as to whether or not hodad utilize actual telekinesis or just manipulate themselves and other objects with electromagnetic fields. Hodad can be taught to use a variety of other mind-affecting attacks that give them the marking of a psychic-type. They are also quite adept at communicating with human psychics. Since telepathy and telekinesis usually go together in pokémon, it is speculated that they augment their natural electromagnetic abilities with telekinesis.

Despite common misconceptions, no member of the pikachu evolutionary line feeds upon electricity; they are all vegetarians. They prefer berries but can also eat leaves, bark and stems. Pikachu and raichu prefer to cook their food and will often use their electricity to scorch plants (especially unfamiliar ones) before eating them. Hodad feed almost exclusively upon berries and use their levitation to rise up berry trees and then dart to the next grove. They do not scorch their food.

The misconception that pikachu subsist on electricity has a clear origin: lightning strikes near pikachu colonies. A lot. Almost every time there is a storm, the skies above the forests that pikachu and raichu inhabit will be almost constantly lit up. They also flock to the areas around power plants and other crucial parts of the electric grid. All stages of the evolutionary line (save hodad) become tired when they have not been exposed to lightning or raw electricity in some time. After a long withdrawal period they will resume their normal activity levels, but they will not use electricity until they are recharged. Unlike most electric types, it does not appear as if they can generate their own power and must rely upon lightning strikes or leeching from the electric grid (or shocks from other pokémon) to maintain their defensive and offensive capabilities.

Hodad, however, do appear to generate their own electricity. They are still frequently struck by lightning and briefly become hyperactive after they are hit. It is unclear how their generation works as their internal anatomy is very similar to raichu and none of the differences appear to explain this ability.

Raichu grow up to 0.8 meters when standing upright, tail not included. They can weigh up to 25 kilograms. Hodad grow up to 0.7 meters and can weigh up to 22 kilograms. Raichu typically live for about seven years in both captivity and the wild. Hodad can live up to thirty years.

Behavior

Pichu are almost entirely dependent upon their evolved forms in the wild. They typically stay inside of their underground nests until they approach their first evolution, so it is difficult to observe their wild behaviors. In captivity and when they begin to leave their nest, pichu are incredibly curious pokémon prone to gleefully exploring their surroundings and being fascinated by individual objects, particularly human-made ones, for hours. Or until they accidentally shock it and become upset, triggering a feedback loop and often damaging the target of their affections. They are primarily nocturnal.

Pikachu spend most of their time either sleeping or foraging. They live in large groups of twenty to thirty individuals (including pichu and raichu) but mostly forage alone. They are skilled climbers and move from tree to tree without leaving the canopy for most of the day. They are also skilled burrowers who dig shallow tunnel networks that they sleep in during the night. It is not that pikachu aren’t curious, rather, they simply devote very little time in a day to anything that isn’t survival. When they encounter a new potential nest or food source they can spend up to an hour exploring it before either committing to taking the nest over, cooking the food or wandering away. One of pikachu’s most interesting behaviors is their tendencies to shock weakened pikachu to restore the depleted pokémon’s electricity sacs. They will sometimes even do this to pikachu in other colonies they encounter on their foraging journeys.

Raichu spend most of their day around the colony’s nest guarding against potential predators. They are not strictly diurnal or nocturnal; the raichu in a colony tend to sleep in shifts so that at least one is awake at all times. When they feel a nest is unsafe or wish to introduce their pichu to the outside world, they have the ability to warp their magnetic field to stick pichu against their backs and render them nearly incapable of escape.

Hodad do not live in the same colony as pikachu and pichu. Instead they move between the territory of different colonies as they please. They tend to live in pairs. Rather than burrowing, they sleep in the canopy. Like pikachu, hodad are primarily diurnal (although it is also not uncommon to see them active at night, especially if there’s a storm). They do not rear their own pichu and instead drop them off in a nearby pikachu colony. In exchange, they provide protection for all colonies in their range should they be seriously threatened. If they are unable to protect a colony, they will drop their carefree attitude in a heartbeat to avenge them. It was this attribute that gave them their semi-mythical status in Alolan folklore. Chiefs who built structures in the wrong territory or dared to hunt pikachu would often wind up killed by a thunderbolt on a clear day, as if struck down by Tapu Koko herself. This vigorous defense of pikachu territory is one of the reasons for sheer size of the Route 1 Holy Site.

Husbandry

Pichu are nearly as demanding as an actual human infant or toddler. If the parent raichu are available, it is best to simply leave their care largely in their hands (see Breeding). However, because many pichu in captivity are obtained as eggs or from hodad, who refuse to care for their own offspring, many trainers will find themselves in the position of having to raise a pichu on their own.

The first major challenge is that very young pichu require raichu milk to survive. This can be purchased at some specialty breeder supply stores in Alola’s large cities. Travel should not be attempted with a very young pichu as a constant supply of milk is needed and even brief disruptions can lead to starvation. As they grow older, pichu become more willing to eat mashed up fruit and, eventually, some crushed leaves. Pichu at this age should not be shocked because a pichu with electricity means shocks for their human caretakers as well as frequent fires as they begin to explore their environment.

Young pichu should be stored in a room either without electrical outlets or with well covered and insulated ones. Their room should contain no sharp or heavy objects and should contain enclosed and soft spaces for them to retreat to when scared. This will occur very often, as pichu are scared of nearly everything until they approach evolution. They should also be given toys such as exercise wheels and objects dangling from string. Like all stages of the pikachu line, they will require something to gnaw on as well, lest they begin to burrow out of the door or walls. To be safe, pichu should never be put into a pokéball until they reach three months of age, and then the ball should be only sparingly used.

Pikachu require far less constant care. However, they are very social pokémon who tend to resent pokéballs and anything else they see as separating them from their trainer. Pikachu love most machines; the machines tend not to love pikachu back. Keep them away from any electronics that haven’t been specifically made to resist electric types, such as consumer pokédexes. Pikachu will need somewhat frequent electric charges. Access to a simple electrical outlet can usually do the trick, although pikachu chargers are available for sale at most Pokémon Centers these days. Their efficacy seems to vary depending upon the exact model and individual pikachu.

Pikachu, raichu and hodad will all eat as much as they can. This will often prove to be more than their metabolisms can handle. Feed them a quantity roughly equal to one fifth of their body weight each day. They will beg for more food after battles, but they do not need food so much as a good charge. They will still exploit their humans’ ignorance about that if they can. Pichu should be fed whenever they cry. If they do not accept the food, move on to other potential problems (minor injury, dirty litter, broken toys).

Pikachu enjoy frequent battles and exercise as well as enrichment in the form of new toys to experiment and play with or new locations to explore. If you do not want a pikachu to attempt to burrow in a home, provide them with some sort of enclosed area they can retreat to. Like all stages of the evolutionary line, they can be housebroken.

Raichu are more sedentary than pikachu. However, they require more electricity and the same amount of food to maintain their fields. Some raichu are fine with pokéballs; most are not. In general, they are less social than pikachu and more content spending time alone or with another pokémon. Their electrical field makes them poor housepets as they have a habit of accidentally frying devices in their home. Traveling trainers with a raichu can find themselves burning through several cell phones a year.

Hodad are even rougher on electronic devices due to the increased strength of their field. They are also generally more active and social than raichu and require time on their own to fly. Otherwise they will get very energetic and start accidentally discharging electricity like a pichu. It is believed that flight is how they release excess energy, something that is constantly a problem for them as they generate their own supply. Hodad have a notorious sweet tooth and can be easily bribed and trained with their favorite type of berry. They prefer to sleep cuddled against either their trainer or a fluffy pokémon, preferably an electric type. Most fluffy pokémon hate getting their fur messed up by static electricity, so hodad trainers should just accept that they’re going to wake up most mornings next to a drooling pokémon and with their hair sticking every which way. For this reason, short haircuts and cheap pajamas are recommended for hodad trainers.

Illness

Some pikachu have problems with their electricity sacks that make the process of evolution medically inadvisable. There is a surgical procedure that can prevent them from undergoing it. Pikachu so altered typically live for five years, which is only a little longer than they would have otherwise lasted. The main reason this surgery is actually performed in practice is to ensure that the pokémon stays as a cute and relatively powerful pikachu forever. As such, there are an increasing number of veterinarians and surgeons who will not perform the procedure at all.

Most health problems any member of the evolutionary line will have are related to their electric sacs. Most of these problems are also temporary and work themselves out again after a good charge or discharge. If a pokémon continues to have unusual difficulty with their electricity (such as accidental releases for pikachu, raichu or hodad, painful discharges or shying away from electronics or other electric-types) for more than two days, consult a veterinarian.

As a final note, as they age some raichu and hodad experience senility and a partial loss of hearing. This is very common among related species and should be accepted. However, this often leads to raichu being unable to easily distinguish verbal commands. A raichu older than seven years should never be ordered to use thunder wave if the trainer isn’t fine with them using thunderbolt instead.

Evolution

Pichu and pikachu evolve in brief periods of four to six days. The exact catalyst for evolution is unknown, but the leading theory at present is that it is tied to their total lifetime exposure to electricity. Usually this evolution occurs between four and six months of age for pichu and three to five years of age for raichu. Exposure to thunder stones can almost immediately trigger an evolution in a pikachu. However, this amount of electricity can be dangerous or even fatal for a pichu and no effort should be made to force their evolution. Shortly before evolution, the pokémon becomes very hyperactive and begins to eat anything it possibly can. Then it goes sluggish for a few days of very rapid growth. They will prefer to retreat into their burrow for the duration of this process in the wild and some equivalent structure should be provided in captivity. Evolution might generate electricity; in any case, the pokémon will be incredibly charged immediately after completing the process and will be nearly as energetic as they were before evolution (if a lot clumsier as they adjust to their new body).

Hodad evolution is different. Sometimes, particularly on melemele, a thunderstone with a spiral pattern carved into one surface will appear. A pikachu exposed to these stones will immediately begin a flash evolution into hodad. These stones can also be broken up into pieces that can serve as impromptu z-crystal to allow for a massive, temporary increase in the power of a hodad’s electromagnetic field.

Battle

Pikachu have a small niche in competitive battling given the sheer power they can unleash. Once. Maybe twice. If the attack is blocked, dodged or the pikachu is knocked out before they can execute it, they won’t deal any damage at all in the fight. Given pikachu’s size and relative frailty, they are not durable enough to take almost any hit from a pokémon on the competitive circuits at all.

Hodad holds a more substantial role, if only barely so. Flying electric-types are understandably popular for their ability to not only strike birds with powerful weakness-targeting moves, but to keep up with them in their home turf. Unfortunately for hodad, vikavolt exists and is both faster and more powerful. Hodad holds some niche advantages, though. Hodad also have better offensive and defensive movepools with attacks such as focus blast, encore, magic coat and reflect. Birds are also less likely to know bug buzz, shadow ball or dark pulse than they are to know heat wave. But even on their good days, hodad aren’t capable of firing off thunderbolts half as powerful as a vikavolt’s. And vikavolt have the added perk of not frying their trainer’s cell phone.

Raichu are neither fast nor powerful enough to earn a substantial role in competitive battling. Some recent trainers have used them early in their careers. They usually obtained one after being misled by video games or television and the trainer was then unwilling or unable to convince a veterinarian to render their pikachu incapable of evolution.

This is not to say that either raichu or hodad is bad for casual battling or the island challenge. To start with, raichu and hodad are much easier to obtain, evolve and train than vikavolt. And their thunderbolts are more than capable of keeping pace with even the later totem pokémon and grand trials. It should be noted that raichu is not particularly bulky and hodad is even frailer. For the most part they should be used as ranged nukes that can hold their own up close if necessary but are better served getting in hits from a distance and keeping their opponent at bay. Moves such as double team and protect are a hodad or raichu’s best friend.

Pikachu are also frail, but they are quite capable of taking the average hits of the first two islands’ trials. By the time the third island comes around, it may be time to evolve them. Otherwise they battle much like their evolutions, although early on it might be practical to mix in physical moves such as iron tail, quick attack or slam as their opponents will also be relatively frail and they can’t keep up thunderbolts for long without exhausting themselves.

Pichu should be battled with sparingly and against weak opponents only, and even then they should only be battled with at all after they reach three months of age. It is best to leave them to nursery room fights against other very young pokémon.

Acquisition

All stages of the pikachu line are often found around Hau’oli City and in the Route 1 Holy Site.

Raising a pichu from an egg without a raichu requires a Class IV license. Raising a pichu from an egg with a raichu requires only a Class II license, or a Class I license if you have a female raichu. (The disparity is due to the difficulty of obtaining milk without a female raichu.) Hodad will not raise a pichu and thus do not discount the license requirement. Pichu should never be captured inside of their nest as this is against commonwealth law. But a fine is the least of your worries if you disturb a pichu nest, as hodad tend to aggressively avenge those transgressions. Pichu out of a nest can be captured with a Class II license. Pichu over three months of age can also be adopted or purchased with a Class II license.

Pikachu can be adopted, purchased or captured with a Class I license. However, pikachu can only be captured inside of the Route 1 Holy Site after defeating at least one of the Melemele trials. Even then, only one pikachu capture per trainer is allowed. The restrictions in Hau’oli City itself are far laxer. Both pichu and raichu are commonly available from breeders.

Raichu and hodad may not be captured from the wild in Alola. However, many trainers abandon them to shelters after they lose their first cell phone. This makes them rather easy to adopt. Both require a Class III license to adopt or purchase.

Breeding

Female raichu mate with a male in their colony about once a year. After a five week pregnancy, they lay two eggs. The eggs hatch after another three weeks. Raichu carefully guard all pichu in their nest, regardless of parentage. They do not allow them to leave the nest at all until they reach about three months of age, and even then they are often only allowed to leave when magnetically glued to a raichu’s back. They are only allowed to explore on their own after another two to four weeks.

Hodad pairs sometimes never mate. (They also frequently form homosexual pairs that, regardless of whether they mate or not, cannot reproduce). Sometimes hodad pairs mate and reproduce up to three times a year. Hodad pregnancy is very similar to raichu pregnancy. After their eggs are laid, the male hodad will seek out a nearby pikachu colony and drop the eggs off there. Hodad don’t seem to have any preference as to which colony they drop eggs off at. Some pairs will drop theirs off at the same colony every time, and others will drop them off at a different colony each time. There does not appear to be any clear driving factor behind their selection.

Subspecies

Some pikachu colonies have different coloration, fur patterns, tail patterns, or fur thickness than others. These are viewed as normal variations within a subspecies rather than separate subspecies altogether. There is some dispute as to whether or not Alolan pikachu constitute a different subspecies as their fur is generally lighter and thinner, but at present this split is not widely accepted within the scientific community as they are otherwise very similar to Japanese pikachu. Additionally, pikachu imported from Japan (or anywhere else) can evolve into hodad.
 
Grubbin (Charjabug, Vikavolt)

Overview

Most pokémon species in this book were introduced to the islands by humans. Broadly speaking, they came in three waves: the initial Polynesian settlers, Japanese and Chinese expeditions between 800 C.E. and 1100 C.E., and European explorers and colonizers after 1750 C.E.

However, a handful of species (particularly migratory birds and aquatic pokémon) were living on Alola before humans first arrived on its shores. Some of those species are found nowhere else in the world. Grubbin is one example. And out of all of the truly Alolan pokémon, it is by far the most well-known and feared outside of the islands.

It has been mentioned several times before in this book that flying pokémon hold a metagame defining and constraining role in competitive battling. Because of this, any team without a reliable bird counter or several bird checks is doomed to failure. And vikavolt might be the best bird counter there is. Vikavolt pack some of the strongest thunderbolts of any pokémon, they can keep up with most birds in both speed and agility in the air, and they are natural predators of birds in the wild. Some of the most prominent birds in the international metagame, such as skarmory and talonflame, live in Alola and vikavolt have learned how to defend themselves against and even hunt them.

Vikavolt are the reason that the most powerful bug specialists feel the need to take a pilgrimage to Alola. They are also the reason that Alola draws some of the world’s most prominent trainers flock to the Battle Tree Invitational Tournament year in and year out. Vikavolt may not be the single most metagame defining pokémon on the international scene right now. But, their relatively recent rise to prominence and their small native range means that if a trainer wants one, there’s really only one place to get them.

This hasn’t been entirely good for vikavolt. Their juvenile forms are easy pickings for scyther, volcarona, pinsir and heracross. While the latter isn’t even a carnivore, they have no desire to compete with the highly aggressive vikavolt for territory and resources. And while vikavolt are almost uniquely built to take on the migratory birds that flock to Alolan shores each year, they are somewhat physically frail and other powerful bugs can sometimes lure them into a trap and take them out. Even before their meteoric rise on the competitive scene, grubbin were essentially extinct on Poni and declining on Akala due to competition from other bugs.

Thankfully, it is much easier to obtain a grubbin or charjabug as an island challenger than as a member of the general public. Please note that there are still restrictions in place on quickly trading or selling grubbin, and more than one trainer has run afoul of the law while trying to make a quick buck on the grubbin market.

Physiology

Grubbin are classified as pure bug types by the Department of Agriculture. Charjabug and vikavolt are classified as dual bug- and electric-types. There is some dispute as to whether or not grubbin should have an additional ground-typing, but as they are neither terrakinetic nor built to thrive in sandstorms or deserts, the ruling is quite likely to stand.

Grubbin are small bug-types with four distinct body segments. The latter three are light grey in color with occasional yellow spots. These segments contain most of grubbin’s organs as well as their legs, two per each hind segment. The front segment is the largest and orange in color, with a yellow ‘visor’ shielding their mouth and the base of their mandibles from aerial attack. While they appear to have large ringed eyes, these are simply ornamental. Grubbin are entirely blind, something they make up for with lateral lines that allow them to sense the electric signals in the living organisms around them. Their mandibles extend from the front of their head. The mandibles usually contain yellow and orange stripes. The exact width and number of the stripes is unique to each grubbin. Right above their mouth, grubbin have another orifice for the release and withdrawal of silk lines. While silk production isn’t uncommon among young bugs, grubbin use it in an interesting way. They release the silk at high speed to snare potential predators, rivals or prey and slowly pull them towards the grubbin’s powerful mandibles, where they can be killed or battered further.

Charjabug look quite different from grubbin at a glance, leading early European explorers to determine that the charjabug and vikavolt on Ula’Ula and Poni were a different species altogether than the grubbin on Melemele and Akala. To start with, they are uncannily geometric. Their body is an almost perfect rectangular prism with only short, stubby legs and mandibles protruding from it. Most of their body is green, except for one face of their body which contains their face. The face is broken into a grid of nine perfect squares. The bottom two squares in the middle column are grey and contain jagged lines—the mouth. The remaining squares in the middle row are a reflective blue. The mandibles, tiny yellow pegs, stick out of the remaining green squares on the bottom. The blue tiles contain the charjabug’s eyes behind them. At least, they do for older charjabug. Newly evolved charjabug haven’t finished growing eyes yet and still rely heavily on their lateral lines for navigation.

Charjabug are also known for being a sort of natural battery. (Although, contrary to popular belief, the manmade battery was not inspired by charjabug.) They slowly absorb energy throughout their life and can release it for either self defense or to assist a vikavolt. The main reason that charjabug can live on the surface undisturbed is that killing one will, at an unpredictable time after their death, set off an explosion of all the remaining electricity in their body. This will often take out their killer.

Vikavolt are about as different from charjabug as the latter are from grubbin. They resemble a large beetle. Unlike other large beetle pokémon such as pinsir and heracross, they are not bipeds and are most comfortable in the air. The upper portion of vikavolt’s shell is dark blue. A portion of this shell covers the head. The rest is retractable and covers the wings. The rest of vikavolt’s shell is black. Unlike grubbin and charjabug, they have four long, spindly legs rather than six stubby ones.

Vikavolt are most easily recognizable by their head and mandibles. Their head contains two bright yellow triangles that cover up their eyes. Right beneath their eyes they have an orange mouth which, like charjabug, opens horizontally rather than vertically. Their mandibles begin with horizontal green and yellow-striped spikes facing away from their head. Then they extend up to 0.6 meters away from their mouth. The interior of the mandibles are typically green and contain a number of small spikes. The exterior is bright yellow. These are not used for grappling or eating prey (they can actually be swerved aside to let vikavolt get their mouth to their food). Instead, they are used for amplifying and releasing powerful thunderbolts.

Vikavolt are capable of reaching flight speeds up to fifty meters per second for very brief periods and pivoting a full 360 degrees in less than two seconds while moving at max speed. Their thunderbolts contain wattage and amperage approaching that of actual lightning and, at max charge, they can fire off up to a dozen before they absolutely need to rest. This is accomplished based on a few power saving or recharging tricks. First, vikavolt slightly charge themselves with every wingbeat (even if it’s not enough to recoup the energy loss of flight). They also reabsorb some of the ambient energy left in the air after firing off a bolt, which is the primary reason why wild vikavolt often wait up to a minute between attacks.

However, vikavolt do not generate their own electricity automatically like some pokémon can. They need to eat. Grubbin are primarily herbivorous, although they will also scavenge kills or take out small bugs or birds from time to time. Charjabug don’t move or eat much, preferring to keep their metabolism low to minimize the time until evolution. When they do eat, they tend to eat the remains of vikavolt kills or slowly work through a tree, as trees are immobile and large enough to last several charjabug through evolution. Vikavolt are primarily carnivorous, although they have sometimes been observed in the wild and in captivity seeking out flowers, fruit or nectar. Their preferred prey are birds.

There is a common belief in Alola that vikavolt are venting the impotent rage towards birds they had as a grubbin. This is mostly unsupported by evidence. Grubbin have relatively few predators as they spend almost their entire life underground (see Behavior), and the predators they do have tend to be dedicated insectivores or burrowers. Trumbeak occasionally prey upon grubbin, as do skarmory and fearow. But vikavolt only prey upon trumbeak when there are no larger birds to eat and, while they do hunt skarmory and fearow, they prefer larger migratory birds such as braviary, tropius and mandibuzz. Most large migratory birds do not hunt grubbin and only kill vikavolt in self-defense.

Given the prominence of both psy-sensitive trainers and vikavolt on the competitive battling scene, there have been multiple papers published on the psychic lives of vikavolt. Most, but not all, psychics have concluded that vikavolt see birds with the detached gaze of a predator rather than the rage of a warrior out for vengeance.

However, after humans began to capture grubbin in large numbers, vikavolt have begun to attack adult humans in some portions of their range without provocation. This lends some credence to the idea that vikavolt hunt out of revenge. They do not eat killed humans and do not hunt children.

Grubbin grow up to 0.4 meters in length (including the mandible) and 5 kilograms in mass. Vikavolt grow up to 1.7 meters (including the mandible) in length and 25 kilograms in mass. Grubbin can live for four years in the wild and eight in captivity. Vikavolt live an average of nine years in the wild and twelve in captivity.

Behavior

Grubbin mostly live one to three meters beneath the surface their entire life, or until they evolve. They move from root system to root system and leave tunnels behind them. Unlike the other burrowing pokémon discussed thus far, grubbin live mostly solitary lives. Their tunnels are not a home, just a relic of where they’ve been. They almost never backtrack. When grubbin are unable to obtain enough food or water underground they will sometimes come to the surface to eat and drink. Once they find rain, stagnant water or a root system, they will disappear back underground.

Charjabug, like metapod, have very little behavior to speak of. Sometimes they will move to avoid a slow-moving natural disaster such as rising waters or lava flows. Occasionally they will crawl over to and up a tree for shelter or food. Otherwise, they stay still and absorb the ambient electricity that caused them to evolve in the first place.

Vikavolt behavior is somewhat more interesting. They stay in the air virtually all of the time, pausing only for a quick rest each night for three to five hours. They rest in brush or dense canopies during this period, and it is the only time they are truly vulnerable. But because vikavolt are light sleepers and their primarily black and blue color scheme is difficult to see at night, this is a difficult weakness to exploit in practice.

Perhaps the most interesting of vikavolt’s behaviors is their relationship with charjabug. While they seldom interact with other vikavolt, they are prone to picking up a charjabug with their legs. The adolescent form appears to function as a battery, giving vikavolt the power to cast more thunderbolts and a shorter recharge time between attacks. However, the charjabug weighs them down and they sometimes leave them behind when chasing very fast prey or fleeing from predators. They almost always come back for their dropped charjabug. When their claimed charjabug evolves, the vikavolt keeps close watch over them and protects them from predators as they grow. If the vikavolt are of opposite sexes, they will form a lifelong mated pair. Otherwise, they will split when one is fully grown and both will find a new charjabug. Mated pairs seldom use charjabug as batteries and discard them immediately after battle when they do use one.

Outside of hunting and resting, vikavolt tend to aimlessly fly around their territory. The exact purpose of this is unclear. Proposed theories for these flights include warning off other vikavolt, searching for new bird nests or just killing time.

Husbandry

The three insect pokémon covered thus far in the guide (butterfree, ledian and ariados) are wonderful starting bugs. They aren’t aggressive towards humans, they grow up and die rather quickly, and they are each quite social. Vikavolt are almost none of these things. Trainers with no prior experience raising bug-types may find their grubbin, charjabug or vikavolt difficult to understand, and thus difficult to tame and care for. However, they are also not the most difficult bugs in the Alola region and they give fair warning before attacking their trainer. The most common complaint from trainers is actually that they are quite boring.

Grubbin primarily eat roots in the wild. This is easy enough to replicate in captivity by providing them with root vegetables. They should be fed three to five times a day. Grubbin will not eat if they are full or drink if they are not thirsty. Their vegetables should always be relatively fresh. If this is not feasible, other fruits and vegetables can be provided to them. Grubbin should be given a water cup at every meal.

Charjabug, for the most part, do not eat. They should be ‘fed’ through frequent access to a thunder stone, generator or electronic devices. Once every two to three days they should be offered tree bark, sticks, grass, or leaves and a cup of water. If they eat the food, get them a lettuce-based plant mix to eat until they no longer show an interest in food. If they drink the water, they should be provided with a cup of water once or twice a day until they stop drinking.

Vikavolt are almost entirely carnivorous. They aren’t particularly picky on what they eat, but they seem to be able to taste the difference in meats. They prefer poultry. If their food is not cooked in advance they will zap it themselves. They should be fed frequently and in relatively large quantities. Like their juvenile forms, they will simply stop eating when they are full. Once the vikavolt has been in captivity (and fully grown) for a few weeks, their trainer should be able to work out how much and how frequently they need fed. Vikavolt require water far more consistently than their juvenile stages and should be provided cups of water more frequently than they are given food.

Grubbin will want to burrow. This makes them happy, but also makes them difficult to keep track of or retrieve. Breeders and trainers raising grubbin in permanent homes might wish to invest in a concrete or metal bin or pool filled with sand or soil. Sticks or vegetables should be frequently mixed in for enrichment and the sand should be sifted through or replaced roughly once a week to remove droppings. A water bin should be placed on top of the sediment. In general, grubbin are entirely fine with their pokéballs so long as they are regularly fed.

Charjabug also do not mind their pokéballs. Or much of anything. They should not be left in overly hot or dry environments for too long and should be left out of their pokéball for at least two hours a day. Of course, there’s still a compelling reason to spend more time with grubbin and charjabug than is strictly required. And that reason has a predatory drive, wicked lightning bolts and flight faster than highway speed limits.

Vikavolt are mostly apathetic towards humans they do not know. They will accept offerings of cooked food (not raw food initially), but food alone will not make them warm up very quickly to a human. Usually they’ll just take an early chance to zip away if their trainer has done the bare minimum to care for them in the past. Spending frequent time around grubbin and charjabug, helping the former battle and providing enriching environments for them, keeping them in luxury or friend balls and generally making a show of being protective of them will all help earn a measure of trust. Vikavolt will usually stay around a familiar human until they finish growing. This period is absolutely critical for earning a vikavolt’s full trust, and even friendship.

Growing vikavolt should be protected from harm at all costs. They enjoy chasing toys such as paper airplanes, laser pointers or RC helicopters around to practice their lightning bolts and flight. Providing a pokémon that can teach a vikavolt new moves is also useful. Some young vikavolt have shown a fondness for batteries that they can hold in their legs like a charjabug. If all of these factors and others (food quality, environment, sleeping places, access to trainer) are met, a vikavolt will usually choose to stay with their trainer. For life.

Fully grown vikavolt require far less sustained attention. They should be allowed to explore during the day whenever possible and trained to recognize a whistle so they know where to come back to at night. So long as high quality food is provided to them, they will seldom make a nuisance of themselves by hunting local wildlife. Vikavolt also require frequent battle or they will start acting up or terrorizing the local birds, even if they don’t actually eat them. Vikavolt will demand either a place indoors or inside of a tent to sleep near their trainer at night. Outside of healing and (short) discipline, a vikavolt’s pokéball should be used sparingly.

Beyond proximity while they sleep, vikavolt will demonstrate few conventional displays of affection. They are not social pokémon in the wild and even mated pairs only nest together.

Illness

Sometimes vikavolt or grubbin get parasites. These are usually not curable, but also usually not ife threatening. Infections can usually be prevented by only giving them fresh food. Parasite infections are usually marked by somewhat abrupt shifts in their dietary habits, either towards eating far more food than usual or towards eating less.

Most other symptoms are a sign of hunger and can be easily solved by giving the pokémon food.

Evolution

Most grubbin, especially on Akala and Melemele, do not evolve.

Grubbin only evolve when they have been exposed to a persistent and powerful electromagnetic field. At that point they go to the surface, find some place hidden and secure, and slowly begin to grow and change into a charjabug. The process usually takes one to three days to complete. The main body of a charjabug is essentially a cocoon that the body of a vikavolt slowly forms within. Once enough energy has been absorbed, the nervous system’s center switches from a network lining the shell’s walls to inside of the vikavolt body. Then the vikavolt wakes up, breaks out of the charjabug and takes to the sky.

At this point, the new vikavolt is usually less than 0.4 meters long. They grow to their full size over the course of ten to twenty weeks, depending upon the availability of food. These new vikavolt primarily hunt insects at first before moving up to small mammals, small birds and, once they approach full size, larger birds. They spend almost all of their time seeking out new prey, with only an hour or two a night spent sleeping.

In captivity, it is best to spend some time with a grubbin before trying to evolve them. This helps gain their trust once they evolve into vikavolt. The exact time needed depends upon your experience with insects, but for a novice trainer two months is recommended. At this point, the easiest way to quickly evolve grubbin and charjabug is acquiring either another electric-type such as pikachu or magnemite, or obtaining a thunder stone. Thunder stones can be a little expensive, but vikavolt don’t need to deplete the stone to evolve (they just absorb the energy it would be radiating anyway). Because of this, the stone can be resold after evolution is completed.

Battle

Despite all of the attention paid to them in recent years, vikavolt usage is still confined to one basic strategy with some slight variations: release a powerful thunderbolt, stall for a little while, release another thunderbolt, continue until defeated. This applies at both professional and amateur levels. Vikavolt have a few offensive options to compliment their electric attacks (bug buzz, hyper beam, hidden power, energy ball, signal beam, air slash) as well as a few options for stalling (dig, volt switch and u-turn, toxic, roost, protect, light screen, substitute).

Some trainers have attempted to use them in a primarily defensive role using their powerful attacks, high speed and decent utility movepool to function as a cleaner and defensive flier on a quick stall team. They have some potential in this role, especially for quick-stall teams that need a dedicated bird killer, but it should be noted that vikavolt are not particularly durable and their recharge period leaves them vulnerable to counter-attacks. This makes them an awkward fit in stall teams of any flavor. In general, vikavolt function best in a mostly offensive role as a bird killer and ranged cannon on balance or offensive teams that need something to pave the way for a melee sweeper.

Charjabug should be battled with sparingly, as using up their electricity supply delays their evolution. Like galvantula, charjabug silk conducts electricity. The default charjabug strategy is to bind opponents and then shock them until they faint or are withdrawn.

Grubbin combat was briefly alluded to above. Their best tactic is to use their silk to set up a melee fight and then use their powerful mandibles to finish the battle quickly. Grubbin have very limited electrical reserves so, even if they can learn some electric attacks, it’s better to use non-elemental styles in practice. Avoiding the use of electricity also hastens their evolution.

Acquisition

Grubbin are found in the wild within the Blush Mountain and Route 1 Holy Sites. In these areas, they may only be captured by trainers on the island challenge who have either registered to participate in the challenge or completed a trial or grand trial within the last three months. There is a limit of one grubbin (or charjabug or vikavolt) per trainer between both sites. Trainers may only sell their grubbin, charjabug or vikavolt from these areas if they complete all four grand trials. Otherwise they must be donated to the Alolan government or released. Grubbin are far less threatened on Akala and found throughout the southern portion of the island. There are substantially fewer restrictions on the capture and use of grubbin captured on Akala. On all islands, they require a Class I license to purchase, adopt or capture.

Charjabug and vikavolt are almost exclusively found in the wild within the Blush Mountain Holy Site on Ula’Ula. They are subject to the same restrictions on sale and capture as grubbin. Grubbin and charjabug require a Class I license to purchase, adopt or capture. Vikavolt require a Class III license to purchase and adopt, or a Class IV license to capture.

Grubbin are generally only found on the surface during particularly dry periods. Digging into the ground to remove one is illegal within the boundaries of both the Blush Mountain and Route 1 Holy Sites. On Akala it is usually legal, although the owner of the property should be consulted first.

Charjabug can be found on the ground or attached to trees on Blush Mountain. Vikavolt are generally found in the skies of the area. While it may seem like an obvious choice to capture a vikavolt rather than a charjabug, it is definitely not. Charjabug are far easier to find, capture and tame than vikavolt. In fact, it is recommended that only experienced bug specialists attempt to tame a wild vikavolt as they are very powerful, somewhat prone to violence and slow to trust humans. However, the Ula’Ula Kahuna does not currently prohibit their capture within Holy Sites.

Breeding

Female grubbin reproduce asexually in the early spring. They lay a batch of roughly one hundred eggs in their tunnel and promptly abandon them. The eggs hatch roughly two weeks later. Newly hatched grubbin are only about three millimeters long when born. Their survival rates are very, very low as they are eaten by some common insects and animals when very young and most burrowing pokémon when they grow older. There are currently commonwealth-run programs to breed and raise grubbin in captivity and reintroduce them to the wild when they are large enough to have fewer predators.

Mated pairs of vikavolt also reproduce in the early spring. Vikavolt do not have a proper courtship ritual as their mated pairs are determined upon one party’s evolution, rather than when both are already grown vikavolt. Their mating, however, does have a set ritual. The vikavolt both climb up to roughly a kilometer above the ocean (the highest they ever fly), latch on to each other, and stop beating their wings. They break away from each other right before impact with the water’s surface and, if necessary, climb back up to repeat the process. The male vikavolt digs a hole in the earth and the female lays two to three thousand eggs in it. Then the male covers the eggs and stirs up the air over the hole to blend the topsoil together and cover up the nest’s existence. Then both parents leave. They never return to check on their young.

Subspecies

None known.
 
A bonus entry for Dreams That You Dreamed by @AceTrainer14

Code:
Downloading from the Alola Pokedex, Online Appendix . . .

Rhyperior (Rhyhorn, Rhydon, Rhyfernal)


Overview

The existence of pokémon on the bottom of the seafloor was confirmed in the 18th Century by the crew of the H.M.S. Challenger. In the 20th Century, NASA confirmed the existence of pokémon life in the exosphere and on the moon. It is looking like the next frontier in pokémon science will be the study of pokémon life in the mantle, or at least deep in the Earth’s crust.

There is a somewhat odd grouping of pokémon who mostly live around volcanoes. Camerupt and torkoal are two well known examples. However, both pokémon are quite capable of living outside of volcanic areas and often migrate from mountain to mountain with periods of activity. The more interesting pokémon are those that cannot long survive outside of fires and lava flows.

Slugma is the classic example of such a pokémon. Almost every active volcanic range on the continental crust (and some on the oceanic) has slugma living there. Yet, they are utterly incapable of moving between volcanoes in any form. Until the 21st Century, scientists had no good theory on how they were so widespread despite having no clear means of spreading. And then rhyfernal appeared in Alola.

Rhyperior are found on every continent except Antarctica. It was known for some time that rhydon had two branching evolutions and that the less common one was associated with fire and volcanoes. However, very little was known about that evolution, rhyfernal, and there was debate as to whether or not they were a separate species altogether. Then, despite there being no documented rhydon on alola at the time, a half dozen rhyfernal appeared around lava flows on Ula’Ula. Then the population laid eggs. And rhyhorn hatched from them. Now there is an apparently natural rhyhorn population on Ula’Ula, thousands of kilometers away from their nearest natural range.

The logical explanation, however wild it may seem, is that rhyfernal travel far beneath the Earth’s surface from volcano to volcano. It is possible that they spend almost all of their lives in the mantle and only come to the surface to reproduce. Notably, the stones harvested from one of the dead rhyfernal that surfaced on Ula’Ula were very similar in composition to the Earth’s mantle.

It is unclear what life in a world of tremendous heat and pressure would look like. Both rhyfernal and slugma are essentially just sentient clumps of lava held together by unknown forces, although the former has rocky organs in the interior and a rocky armor on their exterior. Other pokémon known to live or travel deep in the Earth include carbink and steelix, both very durable Pokémon.

Beyond their relationship to the world below, rhydon are always popular on the competitive battling scene and rhyhorn are one of the most popular pokémon in zoos worldwide. The recent classification of rhyperior as a native Alolan species has dramatically lowered the barriers for the importation and ownership of the pokémon on the islands. While the wild population is still protected, trainers with a high enough license and enough money can get their hands on an imported rhyhorn.

Elsewhere in the world, rhyperior habitat has slowly been shrinking. Rhyhorn and rhyperior in particular often become a nuisance to local communities. And, given their very slow maturation rates, one bad season can keep rhyperior out of an area for centuries even with no further barriers to reentry.

Physiology

Rhyhorn, rhydon and rhyperior are all classified as dual rock- and ground-types by the Department of Agriculture for their and mineral exteriors and low level terrakinesis. The ground-typing is somewhat controversial as their terrakinesis is not substantially more common or powerful than it is in most rock-types as a whole. However, because at least one member of their evolutionary line lives almost exclusively underground, the typing has become less controversial in recent years.

Rhyfernal is classified as a dual rock- and fire-type. A secondary ghost-typing instead of rock is being actively considered, but the final decision is on hold pending the release of the full study Department of the Interior study on rhyfernal.

Rhyhorn are large quadrupeds with short stubby legs and big, triangular heads with small eyes. Their most interesting feature is the (usually) slate grey plate armor that surrounds their body. It is composed of over three dozen separate plates which interlock at odd angles throughout the body to form a series of spines and ridges. While rhyhorn’s joints are not directly covered, at least one protruding ridge usually extends above every major joint. Rhyhorn armor is very similar in composition to granite, although the exact makeup (and color) varies depending upon the most common rocks in the rhyhorn’s habitat. Beneath the armor, rhyhorn skin is not substantially more durable than that of a human.

Rhydon, by contrast, have very tough and thick skin that can heal almost all surface-level injuries within a few days. They have much less plate armor coverage than their juvenile form. They use the lessened burden to be much more maneuverable than rhyhorn, even if they aren’t as fast in a direct charge. Rhydon are almost always bipedal, although they will drop to all fours against some short but tough opponents.

For whatever reason, rhydon have more variable colors in both their armor and their skin than rhyhorn. However, their armor and most of their skin usually remains slate grey. The exceptions are a patch of skin on their belly and their (now more prominent) horn, both of which are usually some shade of light brown or yellow, although red, dark brown and even pale blue and green shades have been documented.

Their limbs are still relatively short, but their hindlegs are now much thicker and stronger than they were as a rhyhorn. All of their limbs grow three short, sharp and hard claws. Rhydon have a much larger tail than rhyhorn to help them balance. This tail can grow up to two-thirds as long as the rest of their body and is quite bulky and muscular. In addition to balance, tail swings are their primary means of defense in the wild.

Rhyperior remain bipedal, but in many other ways they resemble rhyhorn more than rhydon. They are very bulky, almost round creatures. Almost every square inch of their body, except for one small region right beneath their head, is covered in plate armor. Unlike rhyhorn, almost all of their body is covered in a single skin-like sheet of stone rather than a network of interlocking plates. That armor also has other rock ridges and plates protruding from it to make rhyperior all but invulnerable. Their tail is thinner and shorter than a rhydon’s. It also has a large club on the end. A rhyperior’s horn is about two to three times longer than it was as a rhydon.

Rhyperior’s most significant physical change is in their arms. The organic parts of rhyperior arms are rather long and slender, especially when compared to rhydon. But they have some of the most extensive mineral armor on the entire body surrounding them. They have two large spears sticking back from the elbow, giving them a means of covering the arm joints and defending against attacks from behind. They also have a hole in their palm with powerful muscles lining it. This serves as a cannon, allowing them to launch small stones or even geodude large distances at high speeds.

The number of defensive mechanisms rhyperior have is somewhat puzzling. Rhyhorn have very few predators anywhere in their vast range. In some more mountainous areas, they may deal with vanilluxe, tyranitar and metagross. On the plains the occasional grass-type such as tangrowth might try to pick on a weak rhyhorn, or one that has become separated from their wreck. But these are all risky fights for the assailant. Rhydon have no natural predators. And yet, at some point macroevolution guided rhydon towards regrowing much of their armor as they age. This makes them too slow to protect the weaker members of their wreck from fast predators such as metagross, vanilluxe and tangrowth. And rhydon deal with tyranitar about as well as rhyperior do. The reason for the regrowth of armor as a rhydon ages and evolves is currently unknown.

Rhyhorn, rhydon and rhyperior are primarily herbivorous and graze on grasses and shrubs. They have been observed eating rocks, but it is unclear if this is for the minerals to reinforce their shell or whether they gain actual energy from the consumption.

If rhyfernal did not lay eggs that became rhyhorn, they almost certainly would not be classified as related. The other stages of the evolutionary line are conventional mammals beneath their armor. Rhyfernal appear to be almost entirely inorganic. They have a similar silhouette to rhydon and, shortly after evolution, they might look nearly identical except for glowing eyes and scorch marks across their body. As they grow older and experience battle, rhyfernal gain a brittle outer shell of an obsidian-like mineral. They also have several ‘organs’ of similar composition inside of them. A rhyfernal that forgoes battle for long enough begins to develop a thicker shell and even several erratically placed horn-like growths on their face. They don’t regrow eyes after the first time their head is shattered.

Between their shell and organs, rhyfernal are filled with ‘blood.’ This fluid is a substance chemically similar to basalt lava. It appears to have small complex mineral structures reminiscent of cells floating inside of it. Their blood is kept viscous at a temperate between 500 and 700 degrees Celsius. When their shell is damaged, rhyfernal sometimes activate an explosion inside of them that blast off portions of the shell and a shower of extremely hot blood at whatever harmed them. This blast material can move at supersonic speeds and reach distances of over 20 meters. After detonation, rhyfernal will seek out minerals to eat.

Until they were observed reproducing, it was not believed that rhyfernal were alive in any real sense. Instead, the leading theory was that they were a strange sort of ghost pokémon that possessed the corpse of a rhydon that had burned to death. Their may still be some truth to this: some channelers and mediums can connect with rhyfernal, and the species strongly dislikes shadow-based and spectral attacks. It is entirely possible that rhyfernal may technically be a different species from rhyperior, albeit one that relies upon the same physical body. The only real precedent for this, shedinja, is treated as part of the same species as ninjask.

Rhyperior can live for over 250 years. They can reach heights of 2.5 meters and weigh over 3500 kilograms.

Estimates of rhyfernal life expectancy in the wild range from two to five years after emergence. In captivity, they have only been kept alive for three years after evolution before succumbing to hypothermia (see Illness). Five of the six rhyfernal that emerged on Ula’Ula roughly a decade ago are dead. It is entirely unclear how long they had been alive before they surfaced. Rhyfernal have been documented reaching heights slightly over two meters. The largest rhyfernal corpse ever weighed had a mass of 2400 kilograms; it is understandably difficult to weigh a live rhyfernal.

Behavior

Rhyperior social structures vary slightly between subspecies (see Subspecies). Montane rhyperior wrecks tend to contain either one mated pair of rhyperior, a sibling group of rhyhorn, or a small group of rhydon. Sometimes rhydon live alone. In grassland habitats where food is abundant, wrecks can be much larger. The largest one ever observed in the wild was an American rhyhorn wreck containing 41 rhyhorn, 11 rhydon and 3 rhyperior. Wrecks of around 25 individuals are far more common, though.

Despite their large social groups, rhyperior hierarchies are very loose. Young children respect adults. Beyond that, no single member appears to take orders from any other member. Fights between members of a wreck are quite common. If the fight escalates, the other wreck members form a ring around the main two parties. They battle and the loser leaves, sometimes taking pokémon that were close to them along.

Rhyhorn are known for their lack of intelligence. This stereotype is more or less accurate. They have nasty tempers but tend to forget grudges very quickly. Some research suggests they often forget the reason they started charging before they hit their target. As such, most disputes that escalate enough to warrant a wreck-sanctioned fight are between rhydon and rhyperior. Very young rhyhorn are somewhat curious; after a few years of age, they essentially only perform vital life functions and occasional charges at things that upset or intrigue them.

Rhydon are somewhat more intelligent than their juvenile forms. They are also less aggressive and tend to thump their tail against the ground and roar before attacking. Some wild rhydon have been observed making crude pyramids out of boulders. Captive rhydon given rectangular blocks have also been documented stacking them, unstacking them, and then stacking them again for days on end before they lose interest. When they were subsequently given blocks of differing shapes, they regained interest and played with them until no new blocks had been introduced within five to eight days. This may be a way to explore the capabilities of their arms after decades of being quadrupedal rhyhorn.

Rhyhorn generally only charge at predators, attackers or creatures they are unfamiliar with (and thus suspect could be predators). Rhyperior are far more aggressive. In fact, rhyperior have been known to load stones into their cannons and fire directly into flocks of birds. This apparently serves as target practice. Older rhyperior sometimes attack and kill other herbivores sharing the same range or destroy man-made structures in their habitat. Or natural structures in their habitat: rhyperior have been observed snapping trees and repeatedly charging into cliffs in the wild with no apparent provocation.

Rhyfernal spend almost all of their available time sleeping inside of fires or lava. Their ranges are restricted to the areas immediately around active volcanoes because of this. They seldom rise up to the surface, preferring to live a little deeper down in warmer areas with higher pressure. When they do surface, they seldom interact with organic life. Instead they briefly survey the area and go back down within the hour. Their body temperatures are simply unsustainable on the surface for long (see Illness). The Ula’Ula colony have sometimes killed potential predators for their rhyhorn offspring while on the surface or engaged in some very brief cuddling with their young once they had grown enough armor to withstand their parents’ heat.

Husbandry

Rhyhorn and rhydon captivity has a centuries long history on multiple continents. They have been used for war, sport, companionship and transportation. Most of these rhyhorn were captive bred by noble houses that passed down the same rhyhorn for generations. For a variety of reasons, they make very poor pets for individual trainers.

To start with, a newly born rhyhorn can live for centuries. Rhyhorn, rhydon and rhyperior are neither terribly social nor intelligent. They are not fun to cuddle with. They require large open spaces and either near-constant human affection or other members of their species to socialize with. They can eat up to 15% of their considerable body weight a week. Your heirs will probably not want your rhyhorn. They will probably not want to deal with the hassle of finding a trainer, zoo or safari park willing to take the pokémon. Rhyhorn husbandry is really best left to the professionals. But, if you are an experienced pokémon trainer who wants to take the risk (or are a trainer who has inherited one and has no desire to give it away), a single trainer can make it work.

A rhyhorn more than a decade or two old will require either several acres of or must be let out of their pokéball during frequent, long distance walks. Once a rhyhorn reaches a height of roughly one meter at the withers they can carry a human and barely notice the added weight. But their hard, ridge-riddled body means that even the best saddles will not make the riding experience comfortable.

Rhyhorn, rhydon and rhyperior should be allowed to graze on their own if adequate land is available. If not, they should be fed a mix of grasses, hay and roots with occasional leaves mixed in. They should be fed roughly 2.5% of their body weight a day until they reach the age of ten, at which point they can be fed 2%. If the pokémon is frequently used in battle, add roughly 0.3% per day to their food.

All three stages drink water, but most subspecies can go up to two weeks without drinking if they need to. Do not push their limits. Instead, fill their water trough every three to five days.

Rhyhorn, rhydon and rhyperior also require stones to eat to replenish their armor. Their favorites are slate, shale and granite. They will also eat sandstone, limestone and basalt. Large quartz crystals and geodes fascinate them and a rhyhorn will often spend a few days protecting and examining their new toy before they get bored and wander off.

As mentioned in behavior, rhydon can use some large bulky objects of varying shapes as toys. They should be given enrichment once a month. Enrichment can either be toys added to their habitat, rotation to a new paddock or supervised exploration of a new area. Rhyhorn do not want toys and will often just destroy any that they are given. Rhyperior enrichment should be handled on a case by case basis; some can be quite clever and playful, most will just smash anything in their enclosure at the first opportunity.

It is easiest to contain rhyhorn by digging water-filled moats over two meters deep around almost the entirety of their enclosure (although this does not work for the Japanese cave rhyhorn, see Subspecies). Barring that, rhyhorn can typically be contained by bland solid metal, stone or wood walls at least two meters high. Walls with slats are a bad choice as rhyhorn can see things that upset them on the other side, charge through the fence and then wander off. Electric fences are useless at deterring them.

Rhydon are best held in place by the promise of food and trust in their trainer. Frequent enrichment and a lifelong bond with humans help. If that cannot be arranged, moats around the entire enclosure will usually do the trick.

Rhyperior containment is so difficult that currently only the San Diego Safari Park, the Lumiose Zoological Park and the National Zoo of Chile exhibit them. The former relies upon providing them with so much space that they seldom run against the boundaries (which are moats over four meters deep). The latter two have very old and calm rhyperior that have continuously been held in zoos since they were rhyhorn.

A handful of professional trainers, often from old families with long histories of rhydon training, keep one on their team. They say that the channeled violence of frequent battle keeps them docile outside of fights and training. Many countries refuse to allow trainers to release rhyperior to the wild given the public safety risk they propose. Others only allow it in very remote or protected areas. The difficulty of caring for a rhyperior, lack of trainers or zoos willing to take a rhyperior in, and the inability to easily release them leads to most rhyperior being euthanized shortly after evolution.

Rhyfernal captivity is a new field and should not be attempted by anyone but zoos and scientists looking for a massive challenge. The obstacles to caring for them include a very poor understanding of their diet, a need to constantly maintain a pool of liquid rock without melting the rest of the enclosure, and the difficulty of building heatproof the barriers that can also take an explosion or direct charge. It is impossible for humans to enter the rhyfernal’s exhibit under any circumstances, and they tend to break the drones some zoos have used to care for them remotely.

If a trainer’s rhydon evolves into rhyfernal (see Evolution) and the pokémon returns, they will require a very expensive magma ball that the pokémon will only be able to leave for less than an hour at a time. They will likely be under constant stress from their environment and will be entirely unable to get physically close to their trainer due to the heat radiating off of them. Additionally, scientists have very little idea what rhyfernal need to survive. At best, the creature will be kept alive but in emotional and physical pain for several years. If a rhyfernal returns after evolution, it is best for everyone involved to tell them to go back to their volcano.

Rhyhorn don’t tend to mind pokéballs as long as their exercise, food, water, and socialization needs are met. Rhydon are a little more skeptical but occasional use, especially when they are hurt, is almost always tolerated. Rhyperior tend to hate pokéballs, but rhyperior that have been raised with them (or at least apricorn balls) since birth tend to at least tolerate them when used sparingly by a human they trust.

Illness

Rhyhorn often struggle with health issues between their skin and their armor. Sometimes their armor cuts or pinches their body and it is difficult for them to do anything about it. Occasionally their skin will get infected. These problems are generally accompanied by symptoms such as lethargy, pained groans (especially while moving), and trying to ram one part of their body against other objects to get the armor off.

Most issues of this nature require surgery to temporarily remove a portion of the rhyhorn’s armor. Outside of Alola, this can generally only be performed by large mammal specialists in major cities. The popularity of rockruff in Alola means that far more veterinarians are willing to perform the surgery. This makes it much cheaper and easier to schedule than in almost any other part of the United States.

Rhyfernal blood is mostly composed of molten stone. If the blood ever cools too much, the rhyfernal literally starts to turn into a statue. When a rhyfernal makes pained noises or tries to bury into the ground, it should be immediately withdrawn into a magma ball. The same goes for a rhyfernal that has just partially exploded and exposed their bloodstream to air. These ‘blood clots’ are usually incurable and fatal.

Evolution

Rhyhorn development is slow and mostly consists of gradual transformations. In the wild rhyhorn typically reach their full size between 70 and 100 years old and are considered evolved between 90 and 120 years old. The formal demarcation line between rhyhorn and rhydon is their first time standing on their hind legs for more than one hour. Rhyperior have a more abrupt evolution, usually around 180 years old. They dig deep into the Earth and evolve beneath the surface under high pressure (however, they get nowhere close to leaving the crust). Roughly five weeks later they emerge in the exact same spot, evolved. They will not evolve in even simulated high heat and pressure environments in captivity and must dig to evolve.

Like many pokémon, both of these evolutions can occur much sooner than they naturally would in captivity than in the wild with few adverse effects. If a pokémon battles a lot or is under constant environmental stress, they undergo metamorphoses faster. The exact mechanism that triggers this in hundreds of different pokémon species across the world is unknown at this time.

Rhydon that live near volcanoes will often break away from their wreck and move towards the volcano when it is time for them to evolve. They will climb most of the way up the peak and then begin to dig down into it until they hit magma (if there is lava on the surface they will wade through it and then dig into the source). At some point most of their flesh burns away and they are left with armor, magma and a handful of pseudo-cells and organs that are silicon-based rather than organic. They will emerge two to three months later. Sometimes they will seek out their wreck like newly emerged rhyperior do. Captive rhyfernal may seek out their old trainer. They usually will not do either and will simply live alone near the volcano they evolved under until they die or are captured and taken away.

Battle

Rhydon is one of the dominant forces on the global competitive battling scene. They are durable enough to take all but the heaviest of hits and keep going. While rhydon are not fast, they can summon relatively powerful earthquake attacks with training and their tail swipes can hit with forces well over 100,000 Newtons. This makes them one of the quintessential physical tanks in competitive battling.

They compete for their role most directly against aggron, golem, steelix and tyranitar, all but the last of which also have a large global range in the modern area. The former three are all more durable but less powerful than rhydon. Aggron have a better temperament but they can be more expensive to care for. Steelix post-evolution can also be very moody and might reject their trainer. Golem are relatively cheap to feed and don’t require as much space as rhydon do, but they are very mean and known to reject commands altogether in battle. Tyranitar are usually regarded as better than rhydon in almost every way (better movepool, better speed, better durability, better temperament, just a little less power). However, they are difficult to obtain and, like steelix, sometimes reject their old trainer after evolution.

Rhydon struggle against powerful water-types, grass-types or anything strong enough to shatter their armor. While their skin is hard to burst and their internal organs are well protected, sufficiently sharp claws can still draw blood and cause distracting pain.

Unlike most slow, grounded pokémon, rhydon win most of their matchups against birds. Their stone edges have decent range and rank among some of the strongest of any pokémon. And simple physics means that any bird generating the kind of projectile force needed to hurt a rhydon is probably knocking itself out of the air from the recoil. Fliers with great physical bulk, powerful melee attacks and enough speed to dodge tail swipes, or birds with powerful ranged grass- or water-type attacks can still break a rhydon.

Zoning tactics, that is, staying far away from rhydon and lobbing projectiles at them, are also not usually effective. Rhydon earthquakes will usually do more damage to their opponent than their opponent will do to them with projectiles. Extreme type advantage somewhat offsets this, but it’s usually still a risky endeavor.

The best way to deal with a rhydon is either to run a rain team or to pack a check such as gliscor, skarmory, venusaur, tangrowth, swampert, machamp, conkeldurr, metagross or kabutops. Rhydon has no true counters and can steamroll unprepared teams, but their potential usefulness is limited from game-breaking to merely top-tier by the sheer number of popular checks they have.

Rhyperior is arguably better than rhydon on the competitive scene. Their loss of speed is offset by devastating projectile attacks from their cannon, even greater bulk, and a sight boost in power over their adolescent form. There are simply very few trainers with a rhyperior. They join metagross and abysscull on the list of pokémon that would define the global metagame if more than handful of high-level trainers had one. They battle in much the same way as rhydon, although they prefer full body tackles to tail swings. Their cannon also gives them some additional anti-bird options and a way to take out pokémon that insist on playing a zoning game against them.

If you have a rhydon or rhyperior that’s fully trained and obeys your orders, you’re probably halfway to the big leagues already. But if you do come into the possession of one as an amateur, their competitive battling tactics work wonders on the island challenge. Rhyhorn are best used with a mix of devastating charges, seismic attacks and the occasional rock slide or stone edge. They can remain viable throughout the entire league challenge without evolving.

A few academic and trade journal articles have been written on rhyfernal battle strategy. Two professional battlers have temporarily wielded one. For now, they are essentially a novelty pick on the battling scene due to the difficulty of capturing, caring for and training one. They are also quite fragile and can easily die in battle if their shell is worn down or they blast away too much of their body. Golem and electrode are far more practical as explosion users, which seems to be the main use of rhyfernal in the metagame at present.

Acquisition

All subspecies of rhyhorn and rhydon can be purchased or adopted with a Class IV license. At present, capture from the wild population is illegal. Rhyperior and rhyfernal require a Class V license to purchase, adopt or possess. Trainers without a Class V license whose rhydon evolve will be unable to keep their pokémon.

At present the rhyfernal and rhyhorn population on Ula’Ula live in the sparsely populated eastern mountains and interior desert. Trainers are strongly encouraged to observe them from a distance, if they must observe them at all.

Breeding

When two rhyperior living in different wrecks encounter each other, they engage in battle. These fights can sometimes take up to thirty hours to complete due to the sheer bulk of both combatants. If the pokémon are of different sexes, the winner of the battle may choose to reproduce with the loser. Curiously, both sexes of rhyperior have the ability to carry eggs to development after mating. The loser of the fight almost always carries the eggs.

After a roughly two-year pregnancy, the pregnant rhyperior delivers about ten bowling-ball-sized eggs. The rhyperior will abandon their wreck and stay with the eggs until they hatch roughly one month later, almost never eating or drinking during the duration. They may then seek out their old wreck with their young in tow or try to find a different one.

Rhyperior eggs are very tough and require the parent to break them open when they hear the young begin to move inside. Because of their durability, rhyperior make almost no attempt to bury or conceal the eggs. The presence of a very protective rhyperior nearby also deters other pokémon from attempting to break into and eat them.

In captivity, rhyperior breeding requires introducing two rhyperior with very little prior contact with each other and being able to weather the property damage that tends to come with an all-out rhyperior fight. The young tend to survive to birth and adulthood far more frequently in captivity than in the wild, if only because the rhyperior can be fed while they guard the eggs and the entire wreck will probably be staying in the same general area to also keep an eye on them.

Do not attempt to incubate rhyperior eggs away from the parent or take very young rhyhorn out of eyesight. Rhyperior always care more about their babies than their trainer.

It is entirely unclear how rhyfernal reproduce since they don’t appear to be organic life and yet they lay eggs that produce carbon-based young. They do reproduce, and that’s all that can be said about the matter for now.

Subspecies

Generally speaking, the default rhyperior mentioned in this entry is a montane rhyperior. There are over a dozen recognized rhyperior subspecies and this guide has simply attempted to cover the things that are generally true for all of them.

There are a variety of plains species that have evolved away from the mountains. They can broadly be grouped into desert and grassland rhyperior subspecies. The plains subspecies, such as the American, Tanzanian and Pampas rhyperior tend to be larger, more docile and more social than their montane and desert cousins.

Desert rhyperior such as the Arabian, Gobi, Uluru and Mojave subspecies, tend to be the smallest. Their wrecks almost never contain more than six individuals. They have the thinnest armor of all subspecies and shy away from fights whenever possible. Some Arabian rhyperior have been observed killing and eating other pokémon in times of prolonged drought.

All subspecies are otherwise quite similar in anatomy and behavior, and they have similar care requirements and battle strategies. Grassland rhyhorn are the most common in captivity. The American rhyhorn in particular is the cheapest and most available in Alola. They are mid-sized rhyhorn, just a little larger than the montane rhyhorn covered in the rest of this entry. Their armor is a little thicker than average and is relatively smooth. Sometimes they will partially burrow into the ground and become rather inactive during the winter. Captive born American rhyhorn are among the friendliest and are probably the best subspecies to start with.

The next most common subspecies in captivity is the European rhyhorn. They are quite fast and agile compared to the other subspecies and are a little more intelligent than the average. This makes them well suited for battle and able to obey commands and recognize people more easily than montane or American rhyperior. However, European rhyhorn also require far more socialization than most subspecies. They are the most common rhyhorn and rhydon adopted by trainers who have already started their professional pokémon journey.

The Tanzanian rhyhorn is the largest subspecies in the world, which makes them popular with collectors. They have experienced considerable decline in the wild because of this. Tanzanian rhyhorn are generally apathetic towards humans and require a very large amount of food. As such, they are not recommended.

The Japanese cave rhyhorn has also experienced a boost in demand after the Malie Safari Park began exhibiting them. They are some of the least intelligent and strongest rhyhorn of them all, which makes them a very bad fit for all but the most experienced of trainers. They also require burrowing spaces, ponds and rivers, and large, natural-looking shelters. Cave rhyhorn are quite water resistant and have even been known to ford rivers by holding their breath and walking along the bottom. This gives them a measure of popularity on the competitive battling scene, but also means that moats are not an effective containment device. Even moats with very steep walls will fail as the rhyhorn will simply use seismic attacks until the barriers collapse enough to be walked up or dug through.
 
Back for a quickfire round of thoughts that happened to occur to me:

Pokémon rights movements during The Enlightenment

Interesting idea to push the idea of "animal rights" back that far. But I can see the point. It's a kind of radical, intellectual concept that fits the zeitgeist of the period. It would also explain why the idea of pokémon rights in the modern world is so firmly entrenched.

abyssalplelagic

Typo

require either several acres of or

And a missing word, I believe.

The Zoroark section reminds me of a kind of blend of Jacobean witchcraft paranoia and vampire folklore. It sort of begs the question of why anyone would go to such lengths to try and battle with a Zoroark ... it occurs to me you've created what would be huge fanfic-bait were it to turn up in the official media. Though I can't help but think the quickest solution to the Zoroark problem is to start throwing Poké Balls at people and watch what happens.

I get by this point that you're being silly with entries as often as you're trying to be thoughtful, so I won't harp on about how such a ditzy thing as Furfrou could have evolved in the first place.

I wondered whether you'd been looking at dragonflies when writing Vikavolt, because I started to think this is possibly what they'd end up like if they could fry sparrows with electricity
 
@Beth Pavell
I imagine that the first drafts of the industrial pokeball were being made around the Enlightenment. Pokemon were no longer something that had to be feared, allowing a sort of... respect to happen. And it just seemed like it would happen then, if ever.

Will fix typos.

Furfrou are ditzy because otherwise the entry would've been very boring.

Vikavolt are based more on dragonflies than anything, yeah. Beetles don't tend to fly as much as vikavolt do, which made the comparison not great.

Re:Why anyone would train a zoroark. Because zoroark/zorua are cool and kids do dumb stuff sometimes? And, yeah, the pokeball and social security numbers really messed with zoroark. The short answer for why the governments kind of let it happen is that doing anything about it would irritate the zoroark in their spy agencies.

Thank you for reviewing.

Sudowoodo (Bonsly)

Overview

Most pokémon are physiologically similar to some non-pokémon form of life. So far this guide as discussed mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, arachnids, and cephalopods. Even some extraterrestrial lifeforms resemble these basic archetypes.

Some pokémon, especially the ones strongly linked to humans or human society, don’t resemble any known non-pokémon organism. Many of these are inanimate objects brought to life by some supernatural force. Others are truly manmade pokémon. And a final group have completely unknown physiologies and origins. Sudowoodo is one such pokémon.

While it superficially resembles a tree and is capable of something akin to photosynthesis, sudowoodo is emphatically not a plant. It is part of a group known as ‘mineral pokémon.’ Pokémon in this class tend to be chemosynthetic and inorganic, that is, they are not based on carbon like all non-pokémon life on Earth. Sudowoodo, in particular, is a silicon-based creature.

It isn’t presently known how mineral pokémon evolved, or if they undergo macroevolution at all. The most widely accepted theory at present is based on physiologically similar automaton pokémon such as porygon-z and golurk: at some point, every mineral pokémon may have had a creator and they have simply been self-replicating ever since. Alternatively, they may have been formed from chemical reactions deep in the Earth akin to the ones that created muk on the surface. The latter theory has yet to gain traction for the simple reason that all chemically formed pokémon known at present are mostly liquid, while almost all mineral pokémon have very dry interiors.

Despite its bizarre physiology, sudowoodo is actually a rather easy pokémon to train and care for. This makes it quite popular among older trainers who want companionship and purpose but are unable to keep up with an active pokémon. The reason there are wild sudowoodo in Alola is the multitude of heirs who released their deceased parent’s sudowoodo rather than continuing to care for it. At present their population is quite small on Melemele and mostly focused around a cluster retirement homes in the Route 1 Holy Site. Their population has grown larger and more rapidly on Akala.

Sudowoodo have not been a priority for the DNR. They barely impact the environment at all, don’t prey on local species and actually provide an ecological benefit by stirring up and enriching the soil. There have even been talks about deliberately introducing them to Ula’Ula.

Physiology

Both bonsly and sudowoodo are classified as pure rock types by the Department of Agriculture. Neither ruling is disputed.

Bonsly are dark brown in color across their body unless otherwise noted. They have two short legs supporting a roughly conical body. There is a rim roughly a quarter of the way up their body. There is also a hole with a retractable covering on the bottom. Bonsly have three yellow spots forming a triangular face. The bottom two spots contain the bonsly’s eyes.

They have a mouth placed right below their eyes. The mouth is thin and horizontal. It also does not connect to their digestive or respiratory tracts and is entirely used for vocalization. They produce sounds by vibrating small crystals inside of their mouth that superficially resemble growing teeth.

At the top of their body, bonsly have three stems that branch off from each other. Each stem has a green sphere at the end. While these resemble leaves at first glance, they are actually complicated and mostly hollow crystalline lattices. They do appear to serve some function akin to photosynthesis, using the energy of sunlight to break up the compounds they use for the chemosynthetic reactions that actually power their body.

Sudowoodo are taller and leaner than their juvenile form. The core of their body is a trunk-like rectangle that’s surprisingly flexible for being similar to stone in composition. The bottom two-thirds of their trunk is littered in seemingly random patterns of yellow dots. At about the two-thirds mark, two arms branch out on opposite sides of the trunk. These arms each have a trio of green orbs at the end. Above their arms, sudowoodo have two eyes and a mouth that are quite similar to those of bonsly. They have another stem that branches out into two other, orbless stems on top of their body.

In Alola, the typical sudowoodo grows to heights of around one meter and masses a little over 30 kilograms. They can live for forty to sixty years in captivity and ten to thirty years in the wild.

All forms of sudowoodo are chemosynthetic. They absorb minerals from the ground and break them down through a complex series of chemical reactions to produce energy and new material for their body. Sudowoodo and bonsly store long coiled tendrils within their main body. These tendrils are covered in small crystals structures that allow them to sense and pull minerals out of the ground. They release their tendrils from a small hole on the bottom of their body.

Sudowoodo tendrils can reach lengths of up to six meters long and they can deploy nearly a dozen at a time. They absorb any silica they can find in the soil, along with trace metals and some salts. They excrete water with unneeded chemicals. Sudowoodo hate water and only need very small quantities of it. Adults can drain it through their root cavity. Bonsly cannot and must release it through their eyes in the form of tears. Too much water can be fatal for all stages, although it tends to only kill bonsly in captivity.

Behavior

Both stages prefer to find a shaded grove of low trees and stand motionless. They deploy their roots and simply soak in sunlight and minerals until they are disturbed. Sudowoodo have almost no predators because their body is mostly rock. The few pokémon that do eat rocks tend to just eat the ones that won’t run away from them. Because of this, sudowoodo tend to only move to avoid rain.

Sudowoodo breathe through pores on their skin. Those pores can let rain in. An adult can usually drain water faster than they take it in, provided that they find some shelter like a cliff or a dense forest. Rain is quite often fatal for bonsly. Sudowoodo parents are constantly vigilant for rain and will usually move their babies to shelter if there are clouds outside. In Alola, most sudowoodo stay very close to caves or abandoned buildings during the rainy season.

Husbandry

Sudowoodo are very simple to care for. They require soil and sunshine and both are usually quite easy to find. If a sudowoodo is raised entirely indoors or is confined to a small space of earth for a long period they will require supplements. Sun lamps can be purchased in virtually all Pokémon Centers. Traveling trainers stuck in prolonged rainstorms can usually talk the presiding nurse into letting them use the dartrix photosynthesis room. The birds usually enjoy having an interesting new perch; the sudowoodo tends to stay motionless. It is unknown if this is out of fear or instinct.

Fertilizer designed specifically for sudowoodo and bonsly can be purchased at most specialty pokémon or botany supply stores. A sudowoodo raised permanently indoors should be given a circular pool at least half a meter deep and two meters wide filled with fertilized soil. Sudowoodo raised outside should always have a place to retreat to in the event of a sudden rainstorm.

Sudowoodo and bonsly are perfectly fine being stored in pokéballs so long as they are allowed to filter soil at least six hours a day and receive at least 20 hours of sunlight a week.

Bonsly become very stressed if they are separated from their parent or trainer for more than an hour, especially if they are outside. Until they evolve their trainer should make every effort to stay nearby while the bonsly is outside of their pokéball. Bonsly are not good at filtering water out of the soil they consume, so a trainer should generally carry around roughly two kilograms of fertilized soil and a small pool in case a rainstorm permeates the soil.

Illness

If a bonsly cries for more than a few minutes a day, try giving them a new pan of soil and spending more time with them for the next week. If they do not stop crying for more than ten minutes a day when given dry soil and socialization, consult a veterinarian.

If a sudowoodo becomes unusually active or inactive, you should also consult a veterinarian. It is difficult to cure most diseases mineral pokémon suffer from, but seeking medical care in a timely fashion can usually resolve most basic problems.

Evolution

Bonsly reach their adult size in roughly two years. The formal demarcation line between bonsly and sudowoodo is the bonsly’s rim becoming less than one centimeter thick at its thinnest.

Battle

Sudowoodo currently have no presence in competitive battling. They are outclassed in their role as fast rock-types by several fossil pokémon. Even before fossil pokémon became common on the competitive scene, they still only had a very small niche in some regional circuits.

Sudowoodo are surprisingly agile and powerful combatants. Conversely, they are quite frail for a mineral pokémon. They function mainly as a melee fighter with enough bulk to take a hit or two. This puts them in the role of the typical fighting-type in battle.

For their size and age, bonsly are quite strong and durable. Their main use in battle is to trade powerful physical moves, mixed in with tears to throw opponents off guard if the tide turns against the bonsly.

Both sudowoodo and bonsly are quite good for the first two islands, struggle on the third and are very much outclassed by the fourth island’s trials. However, a clever trainer commanding a sudowoodo with enough training can still make the pokémon pull its weight.

Acquisition

Bonsly can be purchased, captured or adopted with a Class II license. They can be caught in the Route 1 Holy Site and throughout northern Akala. As a note of caution, a wild bonsly will usually have a parent sudowoodo nearby ready to defend their young if you get to close. Alternatively, they can be adopted from several shelters on Melemele and Akala. The shelters in eastern Hau’oli often have them on hand. Additionally, botany supply stores will often have bonsly for sale.

Sudowoodo can be purchased, captured or adopted with a Class I license. They can be caught in most of the same places bonsly can be found. They are less common in shelters and very few stores sell adult sudowoodo. Because they are considerably less difficult to care for than bonsly, trainers on an island challenge are advised to simply seek out and capture a wild sudowoodo.

Breeding

During the late wet season, sudowoodo living nearby may seek each other out. Sudowoodo do not have distinct sexes until they mate, at which point (seemingly at random) one will begin to adopt male anatomy and the other will adopt female reproductive organs. This transformation usually takes two to three weeks. When the process is complete, the sudowoodo mate. The female lays four to six eggs about the size of a golf ball a week later. The male will bury the eggs and the parents will guard them in shifts until they hatch roughly three weeks later. Parents will stay with their children for roughly another year, at which point all members of the family will go their separate ways.

Subspecies

None known.
 
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