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Normally, Keystones Mega-evolve your Pokémon.

Not Kau’s.

It’d light up, but it wouldn’t work. He swatted his wrist for the sixtieth time. He cursed at the Keystone, and promptly his Charizard defeated the sixtieth Pikipek in a row. From how fed up Charizard looked, you’d think he wanted to defeat Kau next.

“I just want to know the Kahuna that gave me this didn’t give me a dud,” Kau said. “Then we can head back to the P.C. in Hau’oli and grab some grub at the cafe. How’s that sound?”

Grub was normally a great incentive for Charizard. Charizard just snarled at him. His shiny round stomach snarled too, the way empty stomachs do. How could that sound good when they’d been battling these fucking plebs for three hours with no luck? Return was quickly becoming a worse candidate for “Next Move to Teach Charizard” than Frustration.

Kau looked out to the Sea of Melemele. It was his way of humbling himself without looking Charizard in the eyes. “We can’t reward ourselves with food for failure, buddy. You let something defeat you once and it defeats you forever.”

Another of his bullshit tautologies. Charizard wanted very badly to Fire Punch Kau in his skinny throat. But then Kau wouldn’t be able to eat, and why would he take them to the cafe if only for Charizard to eat? Selfish fuck.

The Dragon-type seethed from the ears. Kau clapped him on the shoulder and rubbed it briefly. Then he pointed to a rustling wall of tall grass, as a Makuhita emerged. “You good now? Alright. Use Bite!”

Bite? Charizard Leered Kau instead. The bags under his eyes were the color of coal. It was the most cold gaze a Fire-type had to offer. Bite’s a Dark-type move and Makuhita’s a Fighting-type you stupid little shit. I should Bite YOU. What was seeded in his mind as a joke germinated into a possibility. So many branches of possibilities.

Kau noticed the Fire-Dragon’s mouth watering. He smeared his hand down his face, painting heavy lines of irritation. “Let’s stay focused, alright? The sooner you Bite him the sooner you evolve, the sooner we eat.”

Wanting in on the commotion, Makuhita waddled into the open. It flexed its arms then teetered-toed from hip to hip, hopping on its feet. “Maku Maku!”

Charizard squinted critically. He stared down his nose at the yellow chode with a knotted trash-bag for a head then shot Kau a guttering glance. Would you sink your teeth into that fat blob of lard? I don’t think so, you hypocritical fuck. Rounding on Kau, he growled. He saw Kau’s composure collapse and then saw Kau stumble backward.

Kau had gotten used to Charizard’s moodiness. But this was something new. Something with eyes that burned like acid, eyes that boiled like blood. The trainer felt like a marionette, staggering away with uneasy, exaggerated tosses of his arms and legs. The smell of fear seeped into the air . . .

And Charizard smelled it, grinning terribly. It’s funny how years of friendship (or maybe just years of domestication was what it was) can slip away in a split-second. Like a strong gust tearing away the pages of a calendar. The dragon started slowly forward, the way a cat does so as not to startle off a rat. His trainer hesitated. The dragon pivoted quick as a Flash Fire, seizing him and lifting him by the back of the shirt. The human screamed, floundered, bounced in the dragon’s grasp like a babe in an exersaucer.

“Charizard! Buddy! What the f-fuck?” Feeling so powerless, so helpless, Kau couldn’t even graze the ground with his fingernails when he swiped at it. “Yo, you need to chill quick!”

But Char did not chill quick. Off toward Hau’oli the Fire-Dragon carried him. The Kahuna of Melemele would carry a loaf of bread in a similar manner. The thought of bread reminded Charizard of all the sweet breads he’d soon be making Kau buy at the cafe, and he watered at the mouth again.

Oh no he didn’t. He was not lugging him under the arm like a fucking sleeping-bag. Kau twisted the bill of his cap backward. Red did that when he meant business, and right now Kau was meaning business.

“Alright, big guy. You’re way too heated right now. Imma put you back in your Poké Ball for a few minutes so you can fucking cool off.”

When Kau went for the Premier Ball on his belt, the stubborn obliviousness that’d masked Charizard’s face melted away completely. Burning in his eyes wasn’t just the anger of a Trainer-resistant Pokémon. It was the anger of a Pokémon who knew Mewdamn well he had the type advantage against Trainers.

Charizard straddled him hard. Bright lights blared in Kau’s vision, and Rotom static sirened in his ears. When these senses returned, Kau saw his Pokémon’s voracious jaws swallow the sight of sky and land . . .

Nuomf!

Sticky, slimy blackness fogged over his face. A feverish moan passed his lips. While a knot of dread tightened in his stomach, a hard lump formed behind his Throat Apple. It felt like he had an actual apple in his throat. Starting to hyperventilate, Kau wondered whether the apple, the increasingly stale air, or the painful ironic irony of being eaten by the Charizard he’d starved would kill him first.

Thrashing his arms and slapping his hands against Char’s hot cheeks and horns didn’t seem to discourage the Dragon-type. According to the powerful rumble and the quirk of the lips Kau noticed from the shifting shine of saliva, that only turned the dragon on. It reinforced the relationship. Prey fights pred.

It was a terrible protest.

It played right into the natural order of things, and the dragon loved playing with his food.

Shamelessly Kau bawled, begged, banged his hands against the neck of the beast. The beast grew hornier by the millisecond. He swayed his great muzzle to the rhythmic flailing of the human legs in his mouth, letting the human’s shoes kick off toward the sky jolt after jolt. It reminded Charizard of the Barboach he’d slurped out of Sootopolis City lake when he and Kau vacationed in Hoenn, except with two Barboaches. Or maybe . . . maybe a Magikarp with a forked tailfin. Charizard hummed heavily, gouts of saliva gushing into his mouth to lather up his clothed meal. His thick, drooling tongue lapped and lapped and smooshed that miserable face into the roof of his mouth time and again. No, Charizard couldn’t make out Kau’s words anymore. But neither did he care.

Draconic pleasure put his esophagus into musical motion. Great gasping convulsions of the human prey complemented hot tears. The little shit Force Palmed and Arm Thrusted for his life, fighting the Pokémon he’d raised from level five. Fighting the unfightable. Way better than that Makuhita could have done, Charizard thought, and way tastier . . . and fulfilling. He heard Kau whimper, “I was just—so frustrated—still AM frustrated—we’re in the same boat, buddy . . .” A horn sounded on the Melemele Sea, a steamboat departing Hau’oli City. “Let’s just, you’re tired, so let’s go to the cafe and talk . . . oh Legends, let’s do that, let’s talk . . .”

Charizard had to wince. Talk? How fast was the human losing oxygen, anyway?

No, he thought, there’s no going back, too late. If he spit Kau up now, it’d be just like what Kau said earlier. Once you’re defeated, you’ll keep being defeated. No, shaking his head more confidently now, no, I’ve been catering to you, holding on to you in hopes you’d evolve . . . but you’re not a Lance. . . . You’re a wannabe Lance. A current that crashes into an oceanside cliff, carves it how it wants without so much a care for the cliff because it can’t care. The current always receded but came back just as strong, or stronger. Only if you let it, though.

Fuck that.

He and Kau would never be Dragonite and Lance.

Charizard gulped, gulped again, gulped a third time. Internal flesh ushered the human down, embracing, compressing, contracting. Ahh—victory crackled through the throat of the dragon, his nostrils simmering, his belly-fires sparking and spitting. He put a paw to his stomach to feel it expand and shiver and warble. It swelled pregnantly, becoming a loosely-inflated, wafer-colored dome. On the inside, the human hammered his fists into the spongy stomach walls. Vibrations rippled out of where the dragon’s navel would be, would that he had one. He grunted and groaned lustfully. He jostled his gut, letting out a bold belch. “BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHWRWRRRWRRP.” A spout of flaming miasma left his filthy maw, his belly shrinking, retracting an inch on his prey.

During the belch, the trainer’s fists broke open. Instead of striking the stomach again, they slowly fell in resigned succession. The air hung hot and heavy around his head which slowly forfeited to the wall behind him. Better than resting on a pillow . . .

His words were but whispers now. Dreamlike. Everything dreamlike. “Big buddy, I wasn’t . . . wasn’t mad at you . . .” His eyelids lost the struggle to stay open. “Was just . . . frustrated.”

Another part of him refused to believe it had happened, like when the Keystone first didn’t work. All the while, another voice was exploring it, cutting away at him, perpetuating the truth. For how long has he felt like this? . . . When did it start? . . . He’d never know. He slipped further into the dragon’s digestive fluids that welcomed him with excited burbles and gurgles.

Charizard gave his belly a soft pat, a parting gesture to his trainer. He almost felt sad, but part of that sadness was only because feeling that little shit struggle had given him an adrenaline rush. The adrenaline rush of turning your trainer to pudge. The adrenaline rush he’d never experience ever again.

He let another juicy belch break through the sounds of grass rustling and Wingulls off the coast. It tasted more like Kau than Kau tasted like Kau going down. Humans must melt quicker than clothing, the dragon thought, grinning like an idiot.

He trudged toward a log against an uprise on the outskirts of Route 2. A couple of trainers who’d been coming from Hau’oli City saw the wild Fire-Dragon and screamed, fleeing back to the safety of the streets. Char watched them; laughed; sat his ass down. When he did, his belly burbled and he groaned.

He clapped it, outing a couple of mean, fiery belches. “HURRRRLLP . . .” “HWRRROOOAAWRRP! . . .” They opened his maw wide as a reclining chair, producing fat clouds of black smoke.

Kau’s tank top, Alolan shorts and shoes soon followed suit with his flesh; that is to say, they crisped and seared away. Blots of flesh expanded over his deteriorating skin exterior. Mass and more mass faded onto Charizard, who grew an inch every quarter of an hour, and grew exceptionally huge and rotund around his middle. His fat gut was as hard and as solid as a bongo. He could probably do a better Belly Drum than the father of that Makuhita Kau had ordered him to Bite.

A Snorlax surrounded by Sudowoodo would not have made a better road block. Trainers who’d planned to travel instead stayed inside the city. Not even the city police dared to interfere. Say whaaat?

Charizard’s tail swished lazily as he digested his meal. The last of the human’s flesh faded into bones, leaving but a crimson titanium Pokédex, a couple of Pokéballs, a Charizardite X and the Keystone floating inside the soup of stomach acids. A few minutes after that, Charizard did a finale:

“GGLLLLRLRRLRLLLRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-A-A-A-A-A-LLULP! Hrnnngngh!”

He felt strange. He looked over himself and felt stranger. Stronger. He had grown from six-foot-two to eight-foot-two. He moaned aloud, not simply because he had grown but because new knowledge sparked in his mind. Foreign sounds rolled off his tongue:

“Kuh . . .” “Kau . . .” “Kau . . . you were delicious, man . . .”

The sound of his own voice made him laugh. “Well how about,” a sneaky burp interrupted him, “how about that? I sound . . . I sound . . .” Like a sexy hunk, he thought. And none of Kau’s other Pokémon ever learned to speak like a human. That made him not just the strongest, but the smartest of them all. That gave him orange predator privilege.

A Flamethrower belch rumbled out of him like a jackhammer, rattling the trainer’s undigested items around. Then the dragon’s belly began to glow: the bond that had been insufficient to activate the Keystone (Kau and Charizard’s) was replaced by a new one: Charizard and Charizard’s.

Apparently he had a stronger bond with himself than he’d had with Kau.

A joyous roar came from the Dragon-type. A sphere of light encased him before shattering into millions of brilliant fractals, like the pod of a Metapod leaving chrysalis. In front of the log, Mega Charizard X stood.

The nine-foot, black-and-blue Mega roared so loud, his breath made a cone of smeared light. A huge dome stomach he carried at his middle, like a marching drummer’s drum.

The roar shook the Poké Balls open, and Kau’s other Pokémon materialized from flashing forks of lightning: Chinchou and Ursaring. The two instantly felt cramped and compact, groaning at the stuffy hot atmosphere. They shoved against one another in the uncomfortable sliminess but, no matter how much they did, the walls of flesh sank in on them. As hot, sweaty flashes of stress climbed up their bodies they panicked and pushed and shoved and used Struggle. Chinchou rubbed its antennae together, firing a Thundershock at the walls, and Ursaring slugged them with an onslaught of Brick Breaks.

Belly swelling to be a diameter bigger than the average trainer’s height, Charizard let loose a lewd huff and moan. His arms made straight, parallel lines as he groped the sides of that perfectly spherical midriff-of-blue. Therapeutic jolts sent his stomach walls into involuntary contractions that had the ebon-and-blue Mega whinnying deeply. Then the kicks—the kicks, oh!—or whatever the fuck the bear was doing, was better than The Place Where Pokémon Go When They Die. Charizard didn’t even know dead Pokémon. He just knew. “Aaah, yeeeeeaurse! Digest already! Digest, you illiterate little shits! Ughhh!” Charizard leaned over his belly, glomping it tightly for a sustained wet belch: “HEhHRRUUuUuUUR-R-R-RAAaP!” It compressed his solid gut by three inches.

Charizard laughed dryly. The idea he could faint and absorb his former trainer’s entire team with just his burps and juggernaut digestive system exhilarated him. His breathed his excitement to a couple of weaker shocks and kicks, and said, “Still got some Power Points in you? Well my Belch has L—UrRRrRAAAAAAAACHH!—limitless Po—uRRrrRr—wer Points, heh, and no berries needed to replenish it. Here, let me show you!”

HrRRaHAAaARRRRrrrrRRrlK!
(Chinchou’s HP went into the red, Ursaring’s into the yellow.)
UrllRlgrlrlglrRuuRAAAAAA-A-AP!
(Chinchou fainted. Ursaring went into the red.)
BLrlrlRlrlrlRRuuRRUruruUUuuURRAAA-A-A-A-aAaAlWwrLwrrurlrLRlRurRRrrlllAAAAUGH!

That was the nail in the coffin for Ursaring.

Car alarms fired off on the outskirts of Hau’oli. The police officers who’d been lined up all pretty, swatting their batons against their hands, turned white as milk and dived into their police cars and took off. Water-types in the Melemele Sea hid in kelp and caves as quick as they could, soft quakes boiling the sea all around them.

The only regret Charizard had about that filthy, disgusting, deplorable belch was that the internal massages immediately stopped. The one-and-a-half-ton anchor of dead weight his stomach now carried and gurgled away would have to satisfy him with just its hefty presence. The way-beyond-beer-belly dragon nodded and let out an opaque, low-blow of a belch.

Soaked in juices were the Keystone, the Pokédex, and the open Poké Balls littering the grass. Charizard lifted the Keystone Kau had had fitted on his wrist and squeezed it onto his smallest talon. He wiggled the talon, grinning. The Pokédex, he looked inside. Kau’s emergency fund of 3,000 Poké had been hidden in the recess of the touchscreen. The dragon’s eyes gleamed. Guess what hungry dragons did with 3,000 Poké?

When the moon was fat and full and everyone in Hau’oli City had gone to sleep, the black-and-blue Charizard tromped to the Pokémon Center. The sliding doors opened. Two gigantic black paws shook the building, lifting the heads of the nurse and the mart and the cafe owner. Faces went as white as Reshiram’s. Nurse Joy fainted, which was unfortunate, because Nurse Joy couldn’t nurse Nurse Joy, nor could Nurse Joy nurse non-Nurse Joys until a non-Nurse Joy nursed Nurse Joy.

Quakes rumbled the P.C. as Charizard stepped to the counter of the cafe. He smashed all 3,000 of the Poké onto the counter. “Bagels, danishes, sandwiches, strudels. Everything you’ve got, bub. Don’t keep an educated Charizard tapping his feet, capiche?”

Sharp as a Jolteon’s collar, the dragon’s grin went ear to ear. The cafe owner fainted.

Those were the most delicious words he had ever said. This was the most delicious day he had ever had.