The Teller
King of Half-Truths
Alola! Since I kinda finished Rally Interpretation 2 and shuffled it into the Completed Fics section back when I'd finally caught up to the main series games, I thought I'd just make a new thread for new grunts that came with the new games. It also allows me to retitle the whole project into something that sounds a little more like an actual story title and not a homework assignment. For those unaware, the project is looking at what kind of person would want to willingly join an evil organization (a cult, a gang, a business), all done through the second person point of view, meaning that it is YOU who is telling the story. Though a few games with grunts have been skipped due to me not having played the games, most of the grunts have been covered in Rally Interpretation 2, so go check that out. Today's entry will be the hilarious Team Skull grunts, and I'm slowly working on the Aether Foundation employees. IF the US/UM grunts are vastly different, a la BW2's Neo Team Plasma grunts, then I'll cover those as well. And hey, as evidenced by the Snagem and Cipher entries, if a sidegame has grunts in it as well and I play it, I'll cover those too. So read on, and have fun!
(Team Skull)
You looked up at the shining sun, pouring rays of promised happiness down onto the denizens of Melemele Island with nary a cloud to obstruct it, through the store window. Today would be another perfect day, with perfect weather, a slight breeze and no chance of rain. How dare it. How dare the island mock you with its warm facade, as if reality was some Saturday morning cartoon from decades ago. The customers would see you as nothing more than an appendage to the cash register in front of you, and your boss would see you as a dispensable toy. How dare they. They, who would play the amnesia card. And the normies of Alola would continue on with their lives like what they did to you never happened. How dare they most of all!
Everybody knows the story. At the impressionable young age of ten, a child from a single-mother home is given his or her first Pokémon by the professor and told to set off on an incredible journey all across the land, catching and forming a close-knit team of Pokémon companions, delicately raising them, training them against other people's Pokémon to make them stronger, competing to earn the respect of a select few powerful trainers before taking on the best of the best, and ultimately becoming the region's most powerful trainer. It's a timeless story. Some say it's the oldest story. A true classic.
You were the main character once. The story was told to you countless times, each time a little differently. Sometimes the child was a boy, sometimes a girl; sometimes there was snow, sometimes sand; the boogeyman wanted more water, the boogeyman wanted high fashion. Each time the story was told, it was highly emphasized that you should stick to training your favorite Pokémon and treat them like members of the family, not just as tools for power. The notion was forcefully permeated into your brain via every aspect of culture: the toys, the cartoons, the video games, the stories, other children, other adults. And so you went on your journey with your faithful companion. You were told to partake in the Rite of the Island Challenge, to beat the Trial Captains, take on the Totem Pokémon, defeat the Kahunas, and become the Alola Champion.
You remember Bozo, your Popplio. Man, that should've been your first red flag. He thought he could beat anything. You remember no one else having a Popplio because everyone thought Rowlet and Litten were just inherently better. You chose Bozo because he was your favorite and you didn't care what other people thought. A good trainer trains their favorite Pokémon, nothing else. And sure, at first, trainers who chose Litten were in for a shock when you sent out Bozo and had it use Water Gun, as they were stunned in disbelief that anyone would willingly choose a Popplio as their starter Pokémon. But then those trainers started using Fomantis and Oricorios (the Pom-Pom style ones, of course) to cover their weakness, and you still had to contend with Rowlet trainers.
As you made your way across Melemele Island, you caught only the Pokémon you liked the most. You never caught anything you didn't want and you didn't breed your Pokémon for the sole intention of abandoning them for their perfect offspring (and then breed their offspring with their offspring so that you can abandon them all when you finally get a genetically perfect Pokémon). Your Pokémon weren't perfect. They weren't even all that good, now that you think about it. But they were yours that you chose out of all the Pokémon available to you. Citron (Grubbin), Royal (Crabrawler), Dogars (Salandit), you remember them all. You thought through the power of love and friendship, that you would conquer all.
Time and time again, trainers would thoroughly trounce you, and you started to notice a trend in your repeated defeats. Toxapex, Toucannon, Araquanid, Kommo-o, the same Pokémon over and over again. The same strategies. The same order. Even when you saw them coming from a mile away, you still couldn’t stop them from steamrolling you effortlessly.
Though you succeeded in the first couple of trials, you never made it past Akala Island. You only barely survived your encounters with the totem Pokémon (you have a scar on your stomach the totem Lurantis gave you to remind you of that fact), with the totem Wishiwashi forcing you to make several attempts over the course of several days. Olivia stopped your progress dead in its tracks. Even with Bozo, you couldn’t overpower her strong offense and amazing defense. What’s worse, when you tried to train against other trainers, you ran into that problem again, where everyone used the same Pokémon and soundly defeated you. You couldn’t get any stronger. You watched as each of these people, who treated the whole challenge as more like a short, amusing game to them than a serious task, walked up to Olivia and effortlessly handed her her own behind on a silver platter, and she had the GUTS to compliment them on “how hard they had trained” and “how naturally skilled they were” and “how they obviously put a lot of thought into their Pokémon selection and strategy.” You just sat there and thought, “What strategy?! What skill?! What sense of love for their Pokémon or originality?! Every trainer was a cookie-cutter, exact copy of each other! You basically fought the same trainer dozens of times in a row!”
Fed up with all the constant defeats and everybody lying to you and pinning the blame onto you, you gave up on your journey. You released Citron and Royal and Dogars back into the wild, telling them they tried their best, but they had to go home now, and took Bozo back to Melemele Island. There, you gave him away to some adoption center. You knew he wasn’t a wild Pokémon and wouldn’t survive out in the wild like the others. You had a tearful goodbye, and left.
You went back home a failure. To rub salt on the wound, everybody in your village knew you were a failure as well, as they’d often remind you. Your mother was extremely disappointed in you. She took you off to the side and asked why you didn’t love your Pokémon enough, why you didn’t train hard enough, why you didn’t want it hard enough. Your friends refused to associate with you anymore. Everybody gave you the stink eye, everywhere you went. They acted like you were somehow the first person ever to fail the trial challenge. You hated them all. You knew that most of them have never participated in the trial to begin with, and of those that did, most of them didn’t finish the challenge as well. Who were they to judge you and what you experienced?
You were forced to get a job as a cashier at some store since you had no other talents to work off of. You spent your whole life being told to be a trainer and you failed because you were given faulty information, set up for failure from the get-go, and now you’ve got nothing left. No one listened to you. They thought you’re lying when you talked about how the real world works, or they thought that you’re just whining and complaining because you lost and didn’t want to get better. And all throughout, they played dumb, like they never encouraged you to chase an impossible dream for their sick amusement in the first place.
Suddenly the doors busted open and, shaken from your thoughts, you snapped your head around to see a bunch of masked teenagers swagger their way in. They all had matching uniforms (that being a black tank top with a white X on it and skull caps), so you figured they must be part of a gang.
“Yo, yo, yo, put yo hands in the air like you just don’t care, cuz Team Skull’s here to bring the flair!” yelled one of them.
“What this numbskull means is that this is an old-fashioned stickup, and your Pokémon are our targets!” came another.
A bunch of Yungoos streamed through the open door and scurried up to everyone inside, threatening to bite them if they tried to release their Pokémon for battle. One came up to your leg and looked up at you, eyes filled with hunger, teeth bared and razor sharp.
“Greetings, cowarding public!” boomed a new voice.
From the door stepped in a new figure, a man only a little older than you are, with white hair, weird sunglasses, a golden necklace with some sort of pendant on it, and a white t-shirt and black jacket on. Followed closely behind him was a…colorful woman, with long, bi-colored, braided hair, white eye shadow, and a black tube top on, perhaps to show off just how chiseled her stomach was. Alongside her was a younger trainer, a boy really, with blond hair and a completely ripped outfit on, like he was raised in the wild or something. Was he feral? The main man continued to speak.
“In case some of you simpletons don’t already know, I’m big bad Guzma, the head honcho of Team Skull! And you lucky bunch get the honor of handing over your precious Pokémon to me!”
Some of the people in the store started murmuring to each other.
“Hey, hey, I said, hey! What’s there to discuss? You’ll just end up buying another Pokémon tomorrow anyways. What, it’s not like any of you have ever used them as your only defense against Trial Captains, ya soft sports! Ya antiquated Durants, always stuck in your tradition like mud. Ah, what do I care? Give us your Pokémon or we’ll have our Yungoos shave a few pounds off of ya!”
The people in the store slowly started handing over their Poké Balls to the various Skull grunts. No one tried to deny anything Guzma said. One of the grunts walked over to you.
“Your Pokémon or your legs, holmes.”
“What do I care if you rob anyone in this store? They all had it coming. Plus, I don’t have any Pokémon, bone brain.”
The grunt took an exaggerated step back.
“Say whaaaaaaaat?! You got some real cojones to be talking back like that!”
They turned to the stern woman.
“Hey Big Sis! Come over here and check this playah out!”
The woman walked over to you. You glared at her and didn’t take away eye contact for a second.
“Hmmph, what’s so special about this one, my dear, dimwitted younger brother?”
“Yo, man. Can you at least try to not insult my intelligence around hostages? It’s not my fault I dropped out of middle school to go on an Alola-wide adventure. Anyway, this here coocoo saying we right in stealing from all these plebes, and get this, they ain’t even got a Pokémon!”
She never took her eyes off you, but you could tell she’s listening to every word the guy was saying, and her mind was racing a mile a second. There was a brief pause.
“…are you some kind of numbskull or something?” she asked.
Before you could give her an answer that would likely get you killed, she turned around and walked back to Guzma.
“Boss, looks like we found ourselves another lost little Mareep,” she said, loud enough to be heard from everyone in the store.
All eyes were on you. Guzma walked over.
“Yeah, is that right?” he said, eyeing you, sizing you up. “I’m the Team Skull boss, and I’ve never been scared of nothing or nobody. Heck, I live my life making people scared of ME! And what I’m seeing here is a bonehead who ain’t scared of big bad Guzma. Let me take a guess, kid. You left home when you was little to become the Alola Champion. You tried to beat the Kahunas and failed. You tried to beat the Trial Captains and failed. You tried to beat other trainers and failed. Years passed and you didn’t get any stronger, and finally, you gave up and came crawling back home, only to be met with boos and jeers. Your only option was to work here for the rest of your sorry life, while others who didn’t take on the Rite of the Island Challenge got to have the good life and laugh at you behind your back. Maybe even in front of it. Am I getting close, kid?”
He lifted up your shirt and saw the scar on your stomach before you could slap his hand away. He grinned.
“Yeah, you’ve been burned by the world, kid. Just like the rest of us. You know what we about? What we REALLY about?”
You continued to stare at him, giving the best impression of you not caring that you could, though you’re unsure if it’s fooling this deceptively intelligent thug.
“Team Skull is out to topple the authority. We aim to turn this whole region on its head, and perch ourselves right on top when we do. They’ve had their stinking tradition for long enough. It’s time for a change. A change that benefits us, the outcasts and losers who were hurt and betrayed by everyone else in the system. It’s time we show them that we are NOT defeated. We’re just MAD.”
“We rounded up all the Pokémon,” said the boy. He hadn’t said a word this whole time, and you had quite frankly forgotten he was there.
“Mmm…thank you all for your participation!” Guzma shouted, turning to the crowd and stretching his hands out to them in a grand gesture. “Be sure to come back next week for a repeat performance! Boys, we out!”
The Yungoos scurried out the door, along with all the grunts. The woman and the boy eyed everyone before leaving after the grunts. Guzma turned to you.
“So what will it be, fellow reject? Ya ready to get some revenge on those losers who said you couldn’t do anything right?”
You glanced around the store, looking at all the pretty people. Not one of them seemed all that concerned about losing what was supposed to be their surrogate family member.
“…fine, let’s go,” you said, playing cool and nonchalant.
“Yeah, skullhead! We about to have some real fun,” Guzma replied.
Irksome though it may be, you found Team Skull’s whole choice of dialect to be surprisingly charming. You may warm up to it after awhile.
“B-but you can’t just take my cashier like that!” came a feeble voice belonging to your former boss.
You turned around and said “F*** off” before turning around again and walking out the door and into the perfect day, with perfect weather, with a slight breeze and no chance of rain.
(Team Skull)
You looked up at the shining sun, pouring rays of promised happiness down onto the denizens of Melemele Island with nary a cloud to obstruct it, through the store window. Today would be another perfect day, with perfect weather, a slight breeze and no chance of rain. How dare it. How dare the island mock you with its warm facade, as if reality was some Saturday morning cartoon from decades ago. The customers would see you as nothing more than an appendage to the cash register in front of you, and your boss would see you as a dispensable toy. How dare they. They, who would play the amnesia card. And the normies of Alola would continue on with their lives like what they did to you never happened. How dare they most of all!
Everybody knows the story. At the impressionable young age of ten, a child from a single-mother home is given his or her first Pokémon by the professor and told to set off on an incredible journey all across the land, catching and forming a close-knit team of Pokémon companions, delicately raising them, training them against other people's Pokémon to make them stronger, competing to earn the respect of a select few powerful trainers before taking on the best of the best, and ultimately becoming the region's most powerful trainer. It's a timeless story. Some say it's the oldest story. A true classic.
You were the main character once. The story was told to you countless times, each time a little differently. Sometimes the child was a boy, sometimes a girl; sometimes there was snow, sometimes sand; the boogeyman wanted more water, the boogeyman wanted high fashion. Each time the story was told, it was highly emphasized that you should stick to training your favorite Pokémon and treat them like members of the family, not just as tools for power. The notion was forcefully permeated into your brain via every aspect of culture: the toys, the cartoons, the video games, the stories, other children, other adults. And so you went on your journey with your faithful companion. You were told to partake in the Rite of the Island Challenge, to beat the Trial Captains, take on the Totem Pokémon, defeat the Kahunas, and become the Alola Champion.
You remember Bozo, your Popplio. Man, that should've been your first red flag. He thought he could beat anything. You remember no one else having a Popplio because everyone thought Rowlet and Litten were just inherently better. You chose Bozo because he was your favorite and you didn't care what other people thought. A good trainer trains their favorite Pokémon, nothing else. And sure, at first, trainers who chose Litten were in for a shock when you sent out Bozo and had it use Water Gun, as they were stunned in disbelief that anyone would willingly choose a Popplio as their starter Pokémon. But then those trainers started using Fomantis and Oricorios (the Pom-Pom style ones, of course) to cover their weakness, and you still had to contend with Rowlet trainers.
As you made your way across Melemele Island, you caught only the Pokémon you liked the most. You never caught anything you didn't want and you didn't breed your Pokémon for the sole intention of abandoning them for their perfect offspring (and then breed their offspring with their offspring so that you can abandon them all when you finally get a genetically perfect Pokémon). Your Pokémon weren't perfect. They weren't even all that good, now that you think about it. But they were yours that you chose out of all the Pokémon available to you. Citron (Grubbin), Royal (Crabrawler), Dogars (Salandit), you remember them all. You thought through the power of love and friendship, that you would conquer all.
Time and time again, trainers would thoroughly trounce you, and you started to notice a trend in your repeated defeats. Toxapex, Toucannon, Araquanid, Kommo-o, the same Pokémon over and over again. The same strategies. The same order. Even when you saw them coming from a mile away, you still couldn’t stop them from steamrolling you effortlessly.
Though you succeeded in the first couple of trials, you never made it past Akala Island. You only barely survived your encounters with the totem Pokémon (you have a scar on your stomach the totem Lurantis gave you to remind you of that fact), with the totem Wishiwashi forcing you to make several attempts over the course of several days. Olivia stopped your progress dead in its tracks. Even with Bozo, you couldn’t overpower her strong offense and amazing defense. What’s worse, when you tried to train against other trainers, you ran into that problem again, where everyone used the same Pokémon and soundly defeated you. You couldn’t get any stronger. You watched as each of these people, who treated the whole challenge as more like a short, amusing game to them than a serious task, walked up to Olivia and effortlessly handed her her own behind on a silver platter, and she had the GUTS to compliment them on “how hard they had trained” and “how naturally skilled they were” and “how they obviously put a lot of thought into their Pokémon selection and strategy.” You just sat there and thought, “What strategy?! What skill?! What sense of love for their Pokémon or originality?! Every trainer was a cookie-cutter, exact copy of each other! You basically fought the same trainer dozens of times in a row!”
Fed up with all the constant defeats and everybody lying to you and pinning the blame onto you, you gave up on your journey. You released Citron and Royal and Dogars back into the wild, telling them they tried their best, but they had to go home now, and took Bozo back to Melemele Island. There, you gave him away to some adoption center. You knew he wasn’t a wild Pokémon and wouldn’t survive out in the wild like the others. You had a tearful goodbye, and left.
You went back home a failure. To rub salt on the wound, everybody in your village knew you were a failure as well, as they’d often remind you. Your mother was extremely disappointed in you. She took you off to the side and asked why you didn’t love your Pokémon enough, why you didn’t train hard enough, why you didn’t want it hard enough. Your friends refused to associate with you anymore. Everybody gave you the stink eye, everywhere you went. They acted like you were somehow the first person ever to fail the trial challenge. You hated them all. You knew that most of them have never participated in the trial to begin with, and of those that did, most of them didn’t finish the challenge as well. Who were they to judge you and what you experienced?
You were forced to get a job as a cashier at some store since you had no other talents to work off of. You spent your whole life being told to be a trainer and you failed because you were given faulty information, set up for failure from the get-go, and now you’ve got nothing left. No one listened to you. They thought you’re lying when you talked about how the real world works, or they thought that you’re just whining and complaining because you lost and didn’t want to get better. And all throughout, they played dumb, like they never encouraged you to chase an impossible dream for their sick amusement in the first place.
Suddenly the doors busted open and, shaken from your thoughts, you snapped your head around to see a bunch of masked teenagers swagger their way in. They all had matching uniforms (that being a black tank top with a white X on it and skull caps), so you figured they must be part of a gang.
“Yo, yo, yo, put yo hands in the air like you just don’t care, cuz Team Skull’s here to bring the flair!” yelled one of them.
“What this numbskull means is that this is an old-fashioned stickup, and your Pokémon are our targets!” came another.
A bunch of Yungoos streamed through the open door and scurried up to everyone inside, threatening to bite them if they tried to release their Pokémon for battle. One came up to your leg and looked up at you, eyes filled with hunger, teeth bared and razor sharp.
“Greetings, cowarding public!” boomed a new voice.
From the door stepped in a new figure, a man only a little older than you are, with white hair, weird sunglasses, a golden necklace with some sort of pendant on it, and a white t-shirt and black jacket on. Followed closely behind him was a…colorful woman, with long, bi-colored, braided hair, white eye shadow, and a black tube top on, perhaps to show off just how chiseled her stomach was. Alongside her was a younger trainer, a boy really, with blond hair and a completely ripped outfit on, like he was raised in the wild or something. Was he feral? The main man continued to speak.
“In case some of you simpletons don’t already know, I’m big bad Guzma, the head honcho of Team Skull! And you lucky bunch get the honor of handing over your precious Pokémon to me!”
Some of the people in the store started murmuring to each other.
“Hey, hey, I said, hey! What’s there to discuss? You’ll just end up buying another Pokémon tomorrow anyways. What, it’s not like any of you have ever used them as your only defense against Trial Captains, ya soft sports! Ya antiquated Durants, always stuck in your tradition like mud. Ah, what do I care? Give us your Pokémon or we’ll have our Yungoos shave a few pounds off of ya!”
The people in the store slowly started handing over their Poké Balls to the various Skull grunts. No one tried to deny anything Guzma said. One of the grunts walked over to you.
“Your Pokémon or your legs, holmes.”
“What do I care if you rob anyone in this store? They all had it coming. Plus, I don’t have any Pokémon, bone brain.”
The grunt took an exaggerated step back.
“Say whaaaaaaaat?! You got some real cojones to be talking back like that!”
They turned to the stern woman.
“Hey Big Sis! Come over here and check this playah out!”
The woman walked over to you. You glared at her and didn’t take away eye contact for a second.
“Hmmph, what’s so special about this one, my dear, dimwitted younger brother?”
“Yo, man. Can you at least try to not insult my intelligence around hostages? It’s not my fault I dropped out of middle school to go on an Alola-wide adventure. Anyway, this here coocoo saying we right in stealing from all these plebes, and get this, they ain’t even got a Pokémon!”
She never took her eyes off you, but you could tell she’s listening to every word the guy was saying, and her mind was racing a mile a second. There was a brief pause.
“…are you some kind of numbskull or something?” she asked.
Before you could give her an answer that would likely get you killed, she turned around and walked back to Guzma.
“Boss, looks like we found ourselves another lost little Mareep,” she said, loud enough to be heard from everyone in the store.
All eyes were on you. Guzma walked over.
“Yeah, is that right?” he said, eyeing you, sizing you up. “I’m the Team Skull boss, and I’ve never been scared of nothing or nobody. Heck, I live my life making people scared of ME! And what I’m seeing here is a bonehead who ain’t scared of big bad Guzma. Let me take a guess, kid. You left home when you was little to become the Alola Champion. You tried to beat the Kahunas and failed. You tried to beat the Trial Captains and failed. You tried to beat other trainers and failed. Years passed and you didn’t get any stronger, and finally, you gave up and came crawling back home, only to be met with boos and jeers. Your only option was to work here for the rest of your sorry life, while others who didn’t take on the Rite of the Island Challenge got to have the good life and laugh at you behind your back. Maybe even in front of it. Am I getting close, kid?”
He lifted up your shirt and saw the scar on your stomach before you could slap his hand away. He grinned.
“Yeah, you’ve been burned by the world, kid. Just like the rest of us. You know what we about? What we REALLY about?”
You continued to stare at him, giving the best impression of you not caring that you could, though you’re unsure if it’s fooling this deceptively intelligent thug.
“Team Skull is out to topple the authority. We aim to turn this whole region on its head, and perch ourselves right on top when we do. They’ve had their stinking tradition for long enough. It’s time for a change. A change that benefits us, the outcasts and losers who were hurt and betrayed by everyone else in the system. It’s time we show them that we are NOT defeated. We’re just MAD.”
“We rounded up all the Pokémon,” said the boy. He hadn’t said a word this whole time, and you had quite frankly forgotten he was there.
“Mmm…thank you all for your participation!” Guzma shouted, turning to the crowd and stretching his hands out to them in a grand gesture. “Be sure to come back next week for a repeat performance! Boys, we out!”
The Yungoos scurried out the door, along with all the grunts. The woman and the boy eyed everyone before leaving after the grunts. Guzma turned to you.
“So what will it be, fellow reject? Ya ready to get some revenge on those losers who said you couldn’t do anything right?”
You glanced around the store, looking at all the pretty people. Not one of them seemed all that concerned about losing what was supposed to be their surrogate family member.
“…fine, let’s go,” you said, playing cool and nonchalant.
“Yeah, skullhead! We about to have some real fun,” Guzma replied.
Irksome though it may be, you found Team Skull’s whole choice of dialect to be surprisingly charming. You may warm up to it after awhile.
“B-but you can’t just take my cashier like that!” came a feeble voice belonging to your former boss.
You turned around and said “F*** off” before turning around again and walking out the door and into the perfect day, with perfect weather, with a slight breeze and no chance of rain.
