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The Walrein
Vicinal Dragging for the Truth
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Wailord Sus
Far out in the open ocean, a Wailord was approaching a large school of krill, mouth open eagerly. She made a sharp turn to the left to better align herself for the final run, and-
“Ahhhhh!” The Wailord screamed as she came face to face with a skeletal version of herself, hovering in the water column like a ghastly apparition.
“Hello, Wailord. Guess what I found on the bottom of the sea today?” a deep voice boomed. Wailord then realized that the skeleton wasn’t just floating there, but was being held in between the flippers of a massive (though not quite as much as her) blue and white Pokemon with red markings.
“L-lord Kyogre! You startled me! Wh- why are you carrying a Wailord skeleton?”
Kyogre eyed her sharply. “Ah, so this is a skeleton of your species! I have to say, those fin bones look awfully strange for a sea creature. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a humerus, an ulna, a radius, phalanges… just like a mammal paw would have. Why, it’s almost as if you’re some sort of land animal thinly disguised as a fish!”
“I- I don’t understand what you’re implying, lord,” Wailord said, as she nervously backswam a few feet away.
“The fact that you breathe air, the rumors I’ve been hearing about you fraternizing with a Skitty, those mysterious low-frequency calls you keep making to communicate with someone miles away, and now this bone thing. It’s all starting to add up, Wailord.” The red lines on Kyogre’s back were starting to softly glow with an ominous golden light. “Is there any reason to believe you aren’t just a spy for Groudon who’s been selling him all of my precious sea secrets?”
“Lord Kyogre, please! All of those things have perfectly reasonable explanations, I swear!” Wailord pleaded.
“I’m listening...”
“To start with, I don’t have a mammalian skeletal structure! No, the truth is that all the mammals have Wailordian skeletons! My species came up with the design first, and then they all copied it from me! Think about it – it’s well-established fact that life originated in the sea first, so naturally you’d expect that the landies would’ve just taken a lot of our ideas with them when they moved out.”
“Is that so? Why use such a complicated fin structure when just a few spines work so well for everyone else?”
“Well, uh, when you’re as large as I am, you really need that extra support in your flip- fins to push that water around! Need more than just a few measly spines to move this big bod!” Wailord made several vigorous flipper flaps to demonstrate.
Kyogre gave her a distinctly unimpressed look. “I see. And what about the air-breathing? Not a good look for a supposed ocean-dweller.”
“Oh, that? I breathe air so I can better spy for you, my lord! See, every now and then, I heave myself up onto the beach so I can take a look at what Groudon’s been up to! Gotta be able to survive out of water for those extended espionage missions!”
“Really. I assume you have some valuable intel from these ‘espionage missions’ for me, then?”
If it was possible for her to sweat, Wailord would’ve been doing so that moment. “Uh… well… I’ve noticed that Groudon’s been stockpiling a lot of sand on the shores! Just disgustingly huge amounts of it, stretching out in every direction! I shudder to think of what Groudon could be planning to do with it all. Who knows, maybe he’s going to turn it into vast quantities of glass to make giant aquarium tanks to imprison all of us in!”
“So you’ve discovered that beaches have sand on them. Anything else?”
“Umm… well, my lord, I don’t like pointing flip- fins at people, but I can’t help but notice that Krabby sure seem to go on land a lot for supposed ocean creatures. Very suspicious, my lord. I’d keep an eye on them if I were you.”
Kyogre snorted, water spraying out of his mouth with enough force that Wailord could feel it several yards away. “Ah, so when you go onto land, you’re valiantly spying on the enemy, but when Krabby do it, it’s suspicious?”
“That’s right, my lord! Just look at how differently the humans – Groudon’s foremost lackeys – treat us! When they spy me out on land, they try to shove me back into the water as soon as possible, but they take Krabby even further inland, doubtlessly so they can give reports to high-ranking officers deep in Groudon’s mountain fortresses.”
“Mmm-hmm. And what about those rumors regarding you and a certain pink, land-dwelling cat Pokemon?”
“Nothing but outrageous lies and slander, my lord!” Wailord declared, punctuating her exclamation with a furious pump of her tail. “I wouldn’t give any land creature the time of day, much less get into a relationship with one of them! Why, I refuse to even talk to Shellder just because they sit on the seafloor all the time, and sitting on a solid surface makes them too much like land creatures for my taste!”
“Very well. I assume you also have an explanation for those strange low-frequency utterances, then?”
“Well… look around you, my lord. Do you see any other Wailord around here?”
Kyogre briefly glanced about. “No.”
“Exactly! See, because we’re so large, us Wailord really have to spread out to find food, so we need a way to communicate with each other at long distances. We considered using cell phones, but then we realized that, although the phone companies would like to have us believe that the whole system runs through satellites sitting in nice, neutral outer space, the reality is that most calls go through cell towers sitting on land. And I’ve definitely never seen a cell tower underwater.
However, because sound travels much faster in water than in air, the land-dwellers' ears are way too slow to hear anything we’re singing to each other, so our communications are totally secure.”
“Hmm...” Kyogre hmmed. “I suppose that does make some sense… I have to say Wailord, all of your answers seemed kind of shaky, but I guess you did at least have explanations for all your sus qualities. Hmmmm…” Wailord waited nervously as Kyogre continued to ponder, slowly swimming back and forth in front of her. “...All right, you’re off the hook. For now. I think I’m gonna go check out that Relicanth guy next. His fins look pretty weird, and he doesn’t have the excuse of being huge like you are.”
“Yes! Thank you for your trust in me, my lord!” Wailord cheered. “Now, if there’s nothing else you need from me, I do believe I have some krill to eat.” Kygore grunted dismissively, which Wailord took as her cue to turn and swim away.
Then Kyogre’s voice rang across the water, and Wailord froze. “Wait. What’s that thing wrapped around your midsection?” Looking at her from behind, Kyogre could now see a thin, almost transparent wire encircling the center of Wailord’s body. It appeared to be tied to a similar line stretched taut deep into the water below, beyond Kyogre’s sight.
“Oh, there’s something- Wow, I totally didn’t notice that!” Wailord said, feeling at the line with her flippers. “Must be a bit of human fishing line I got tangled up in somehow. No worries, I’ll get it off later.”
“Here, let me help you with that,” Kygore said, approaching her.
“Um, don’t feel like you need to spend your time on little old me, my lord! Really, it’s nothing I can’t take care of myself-”
Kyogre opened his mouth and shot a blade of sharpened water at the line trailing beneath Wailord, severing it. The instant the cord broke, Wailord shot straight upwards, rapidly ascending through the water column until she breached the surface with a massive splash.
Then, to Kyogre’s continued shock, she kept going, rising higher and higher into the air until her lighter-than-air blimp body came to rest floating just beneath a thick bank of clouds thousands of feet up. A draconic green head poked out of a cloud.
“Agent Wailord! You’re reporting in early. Did you discover any urgent sea secrets?” Rayquaza asked.
“Abort, abort! I’ve been compromised!” Wailord said, shaking her fins frantically. “The heavier-than-water decoy skeletons were a bad idea!”
Beneath her, Kyogre swam to the surface of the water, and yelled at Rayquaza with enough force to be heard a mile away. “Rayquaza! You’ve been spying on me!?”
Rayquaza sighed and descended to talk with Kyogre at a more reasonable distance. “Look, Kyogre, I have a careful balance of power to maintain here. Ever since Groudon started spying on you, I also had to if I didn’t want to fall behind!”
“You should’ve started spying on him, then!” Kyogre spluttered.
“Oh, I have been, don’t worry.” Rayquaza cupped a clawed hand to their mouth and spoke to Kyogre in a conspiratorial hush. “I’ve discovered that some of Groudon’s ‘rocks’ are actually just highly-compacted sand, which means he has a huge amount of it combined with his beach stockpiles. Makes you wonder what he’s intending to do with it all. Maybe he’s planning on melting it into glass and making a huge number of telescopes to steal all my sky secrets, who knows!”
“I know that Groudon has a lot of sand! So what? I also have tons and tons of sand!”
“Whoa, really? Wailord, why didn’t you tell me about this!? We’ve a got a sand gap on our hands here!”
“Er, it didn’t seem very important compared to all the other resource gaps we have with the ocean,” Wailord said. “They’ve got more rocks than the sky, more salt, more water, more plants, more animals, more of everything, really.”
“Unacceptable!” Rayquaza roared. “Look, Kyogre, maybe we can cut a deal here. I’ll stop spying on you in exchange for regular sand shipments. Wailord can lower some buckets into the sea for you to fill up.”
“Fine,” Kyogre snapped. “Not like I really needed it all anyways.”
“Great! Us legendaries of fluid-based realms have to stick together, you know!”
“Aren’t you always telling Groudon that you air-breathing legendaries have to stick together?” Nevertheless, Kyogre extended a flipper for Rayquaza to shake. After working out some further details, the two departed to attend to other business.
Wailord looked around. She was alone. With a flick of her fore-flipper, she extended a switchblade strapped to its underside and cut through a second, even harder to notice cord wrapped around her, and quickly began to rise into the sky. Soon, she exited the planet’s atmosphere entirely, coming to a halt in outer space. A blue and red head poked out from behind an orbiting asteroid.
“Agent Wailord! You’re here just on time!” Deoxys said telepathically.
“All is going according to plan, my lord,” Wailord thought back. “Rayquaza has been convinced that they need to stop Groudon from building telescopes to protect their ‘sky secrets’, preventing Groudon from ever learning about our space secrets. Kyogre had no objection to my characterization of outer space as ‘neutral’ territory, nor did he disagree with my assertion that the humans were Groudon’s foremost agents.”
“Yes, yes, good,” Deoxys hissed. “Soon, we will be unstoppable-”
In a flash of light, Mew teleported alongside the two. A big poofy pom-pom was attached to her tail with three smaller yellow pom-poms extending out from it on toothpicks, and she was wearing an earband with large tufted ears over her regular ears.
“Hi Wailord! Just checking in to see if Kyogre bought my Skitty disguise,” Mew telepathized cheerfully. “Also, did you learn anything more about what Deoxys is up to? Hey, why are you waving your flippers like that-”
THE END
Far out in the open ocean, a Wailord was approaching a large school of krill, mouth open eagerly. She made a sharp turn to the left to better align herself for the final run, and-
“Ahhhhh!” The Wailord screamed as she came face to face with a skeletal version of herself, hovering in the water column like a ghastly apparition.
“Hello, Wailord. Guess what I found on the bottom of the sea today?” a deep voice boomed. Wailord then realized that the skeleton wasn’t just floating there, but was being held in between the flippers of a massive (though not quite as much as her) blue and white Pokemon with red markings.
“L-lord Kyogre! You startled me! Wh- why are you carrying a Wailord skeleton?”
Kyogre eyed her sharply. “Ah, so this is a skeleton of your species! I have to say, those fin bones look awfully strange for a sea creature. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a humerus, an ulna, a radius, phalanges… just like a mammal paw would have. Why, it’s almost as if you’re some sort of land animal thinly disguised as a fish!”
“I- I don’t understand what you’re implying, lord,” Wailord said, as she nervously backswam a few feet away.
“The fact that you breathe air, the rumors I’ve been hearing about you fraternizing with a Skitty, those mysterious low-frequency calls you keep making to communicate with someone miles away, and now this bone thing. It’s all starting to add up, Wailord.” The red lines on Kyogre’s back were starting to softly glow with an ominous golden light. “Is there any reason to believe you aren’t just a spy for Groudon who’s been selling him all of my precious sea secrets?”
“Lord Kyogre, please! All of those things have perfectly reasonable explanations, I swear!” Wailord pleaded.
“I’m listening...”
“To start with, I don’t have a mammalian skeletal structure! No, the truth is that all the mammals have Wailordian skeletons! My species came up with the design first, and then they all copied it from me! Think about it – it’s well-established fact that life originated in the sea first, so naturally you’d expect that the landies would’ve just taken a lot of our ideas with them when they moved out.”
“Is that so? Why use such a complicated fin structure when just a few spines work so well for everyone else?”
“Well, uh, when you’re as large as I am, you really need that extra support in your flip- fins to push that water around! Need more than just a few measly spines to move this big bod!” Wailord made several vigorous flipper flaps to demonstrate.
Kyogre gave her a distinctly unimpressed look. “I see. And what about the air-breathing? Not a good look for a supposed ocean-dweller.”
“Oh, that? I breathe air so I can better spy for you, my lord! See, every now and then, I heave myself up onto the beach so I can take a look at what Groudon’s been up to! Gotta be able to survive out of water for those extended espionage missions!”
“Really. I assume you have some valuable intel from these ‘espionage missions’ for me, then?”
If it was possible for her to sweat, Wailord would’ve been doing so that moment. “Uh… well… I’ve noticed that Groudon’s been stockpiling a lot of sand on the shores! Just disgustingly huge amounts of it, stretching out in every direction! I shudder to think of what Groudon could be planning to do with it all. Who knows, maybe he’s going to turn it into vast quantities of glass to make giant aquarium tanks to imprison all of us in!”
“So you’ve discovered that beaches have sand on them. Anything else?”
“Umm… well, my lord, I don’t like pointing flip- fins at people, but I can’t help but notice that Krabby sure seem to go on land a lot for supposed ocean creatures. Very suspicious, my lord. I’d keep an eye on them if I were you.”
Kyogre snorted, water spraying out of his mouth with enough force that Wailord could feel it several yards away. “Ah, so when you go onto land, you’re valiantly spying on the enemy, but when Krabby do it, it’s suspicious?”
“That’s right, my lord! Just look at how differently the humans – Groudon’s foremost lackeys – treat us! When they spy me out on land, they try to shove me back into the water as soon as possible, but they take Krabby even further inland, doubtlessly so they can give reports to high-ranking officers deep in Groudon’s mountain fortresses.”
“Mmm-hmm. And what about those rumors regarding you and a certain pink, land-dwelling cat Pokemon?”
“Nothing but outrageous lies and slander, my lord!” Wailord declared, punctuating her exclamation with a furious pump of her tail. “I wouldn’t give any land creature the time of day, much less get into a relationship with one of them! Why, I refuse to even talk to Shellder just because they sit on the seafloor all the time, and sitting on a solid surface makes them too much like land creatures for my taste!”
“Very well. I assume you also have an explanation for those strange low-frequency utterances, then?”
“Well… look around you, my lord. Do you see any other Wailord around here?”
Kyogre briefly glanced about. “No.”
“Exactly! See, because we’re so large, us Wailord really have to spread out to find food, so we need a way to communicate with each other at long distances. We considered using cell phones, but then we realized that, although the phone companies would like to have us believe that the whole system runs through satellites sitting in nice, neutral outer space, the reality is that most calls go through cell towers sitting on land. And I’ve definitely never seen a cell tower underwater.
However, because sound travels much faster in water than in air, the land-dwellers' ears are way too slow to hear anything we’re singing to each other, so our communications are totally secure.”
“Hmm...” Kyogre hmmed. “I suppose that does make some sense… I have to say Wailord, all of your answers seemed kind of shaky, but I guess you did at least have explanations for all your sus qualities. Hmmmm…” Wailord waited nervously as Kyogre continued to ponder, slowly swimming back and forth in front of her. “...All right, you’re off the hook. For now. I think I’m gonna go check out that Relicanth guy next. His fins look pretty weird, and he doesn’t have the excuse of being huge like you are.”
“Yes! Thank you for your trust in me, my lord!” Wailord cheered. “Now, if there’s nothing else you need from me, I do believe I have some krill to eat.” Kygore grunted dismissively, which Wailord took as her cue to turn and swim away.
Then Kyogre’s voice rang across the water, and Wailord froze. “Wait. What’s that thing wrapped around your midsection?” Looking at her from behind, Kyogre could now see a thin, almost transparent wire encircling the center of Wailord’s body. It appeared to be tied to a similar line stretched taut deep into the water below, beyond Kyogre’s sight.
“Oh, there’s something- Wow, I totally didn’t notice that!” Wailord said, feeling at the line with her flippers. “Must be a bit of human fishing line I got tangled up in somehow. No worries, I’ll get it off later.”
“Here, let me help you with that,” Kygore said, approaching her.
“Um, don’t feel like you need to spend your time on little old me, my lord! Really, it’s nothing I can’t take care of myself-”
Kyogre opened his mouth and shot a blade of sharpened water at the line trailing beneath Wailord, severing it. The instant the cord broke, Wailord shot straight upwards, rapidly ascending through the water column until she breached the surface with a massive splash.
Then, to Kyogre’s continued shock, she kept going, rising higher and higher into the air until her lighter-than-air blimp body came to rest floating just beneath a thick bank of clouds thousands of feet up. A draconic green head poked out of a cloud.
“Agent Wailord! You’re reporting in early. Did you discover any urgent sea secrets?” Rayquaza asked.
“Abort, abort! I’ve been compromised!” Wailord said, shaking her fins frantically. “The heavier-than-water decoy skeletons were a bad idea!”
Beneath her, Kyogre swam to the surface of the water, and yelled at Rayquaza with enough force to be heard a mile away. “Rayquaza! You’ve been spying on me!?”
Rayquaza sighed and descended to talk with Kyogre at a more reasonable distance. “Look, Kyogre, I have a careful balance of power to maintain here. Ever since Groudon started spying on you, I also had to if I didn’t want to fall behind!”
“You should’ve started spying on him, then!” Kyogre spluttered.
“Oh, I have been, don’t worry.” Rayquaza cupped a clawed hand to their mouth and spoke to Kyogre in a conspiratorial hush. “I’ve discovered that some of Groudon’s ‘rocks’ are actually just highly-compacted sand, which means he has a huge amount of it combined with his beach stockpiles. Makes you wonder what he’s intending to do with it all. Maybe he’s planning on melting it into glass and making a huge number of telescopes to steal all my sky secrets, who knows!”
“I know that Groudon has a lot of sand! So what? I also have tons and tons of sand!”
“Whoa, really? Wailord, why didn’t you tell me about this!? We’ve a got a sand gap on our hands here!”
“Er, it didn’t seem very important compared to all the other resource gaps we have with the ocean,” Wailord said. “They’ve got more rocks than the sky, more salt, more water, more plants, more animals, more of everything, really.”
“Unacceptable!” Rayquaza roared. “Look, Kyogre, maybe we can cut a deal here. I’ll stop spying on you in exchange for regular sand shipments. Wailord can lower some buckets into the sea for you to fill up.”
“Fine,” Kyogre snapped. “Not like I really needed it all anyways.”
“Great! Us legendaries of fluid-based realms have to stick together, you know!”
“Aren’t you always telling Groudon that you air-breathing legendaries have to stick together?” Nevertheless, Kyogre extended a flipper for Rayquaza to shake. After working out some further details, the two departed to attend to other business.
Wailord looked around. She was alone. With a flick of her fore-flipper, she extended a switchblade strapped to its underside and cut through a second, even harder to notice cord wrapped around her, and quickly began to rise into the sky. Soon, she exited the planet’s atmosphere entirely, coming to a halt in outer space. A blue and red head poked out from behind an orbiting asteroid.
“Agent Wailord! You’re here just on time!” Deoxys said telepathically.
“All is going according to plan, my lord,” Wailord thought back. “Rayquaza has been convinced that they need to stop Groudon from building telescopes to protect their ‘sky secrets’, preventing Groudon from ever learning about our space secrets. Kyogre had no objection to my characterization of outer space as ‘neutral’ territory, nor did he disagree with my assertion that the humans were Groudon’s foremost agents.”
“Yes, yes, good,” Deoxys hissed. “Soon, we will be unstoppable-”
In a flash of light, Mew teleported alongside the two. A big poofy pom-pom was attached to her tail with three smaller yellow pom-poms extending out from it on toothpicks, and she was wearing an earband with large tufted ears over her regular ears.
“Hi Wailord! Just checking in to see if Kyogre bought my Skitty disguise,” Mew telepathized cheerfully. “Also, did you learn anything more about what Deoxys is up to? Hey, why are you waving your flippers like that-”
THE END
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