Story originally written as a response at r/WritingPrompts (u/PrimitivePrism)
Prompt:
The government is doing animal fusion experiments, and civilians have to take care of a special animal each. You have a Pufferfish Armadillo.
Response:
It didn’t take long for them to be considered Pokémon of sorts–after-all, we’d grown up pitting our virtual beasts against each other, or watching Ash Ketchum and co. do so on TV.
Of course, we didn’t coin them Pokémon, as the government didn’t distribute any pocket-sized housings, à la pokéballs, with which to store our pets as condensed energy signatures–though few people doubted they possessed at least an approximation of such technology. No, instead we coined them, rather unimaginatively, “Govermon.”
Today my Govermon, assigned to me by the newly constituted Department of Homeland Absurdity, is huffing and puffing and rolling around in agitation. It’s my legal responsibility to take care of it for the rest of its indeterminate natural life span.
“Bruce, would you chill?”
“Puffadillo!” it squeaks fretfully.
I haven’t yet accepted that it’s never going to accept the name Bruce, but I’m getting close.
“Okay, Puffadillo, calm down. Nothing’s going to hurt you.”
Outside a thunderous protest is taking place. The roads have been forced to close by the massive turnout, and thousands have been streaming past on the street all morning, bound for the city center. They hold huge signs reading things like GOVERmon Have The Right To self-GOVERnance! or Dolphipillar didn’t belong in water OR the trees! Now it’s DEAD! or The Government Gets Off On Fighting, But Govermon DON’T!
Their hearts seem in the right place, but it’s a discombobulated protest. They don’t have a clear mission or list of demands. In general, they’re all angry that Govermon were even created, unbeknownst to any ethics councils at the time–but now that the pets that have been foisted on us are here to stay, there are some that believe they shouldn’t be considered pets at all and instead have the right to self-determination, while others, probably the majority, are protesting around the incredibly widespread culture of Govermon fights.
Blame in on Pokemon, I guess. It wasn’t long before people started pitting their adopted fusion beasts against each other in brutal, sometimes confused and grimly hilarious, oft-lethal battles. There are whole websites dedicated to it, where the fights are streamed live with semi-professional settings reminiscent of underground cockfights, and anyone tuning in to stream from around the world can place bets on the blockchain using crypto.
Speaking of which…
“Puffadillo, let’s go. It’ll be quieter in your crate.”
Puffadillo regards me with his small beady eyes–luckily those of an armadillo rather than a pufferfish, the former being the cuter of the two in my opinion. His flattish, Squirtle-esque face, divided by the slowly opening and closing mouth of a pufferfish, seems momentarily confused as I drag his “Govercube” (i.e. a wooden crate) out from behind the sofa.
“Puffadillo!” it squeals again, with an air of uncertainty.
“Puff your way right over, bud.”
The way Puffadillo walks is weird, to put it lightly. It has the little feet of an armadillo, but lacks an armadillo’s claws at the end of them, possessing instead thin little flaps of nearly translucent skin with a morphology slightly like of that of fins, but which I’ve read is constituted entirely of mammalian flesh. This means that Puffadillo’s feet are like cute little pegs or stumps with flaps of pointless flesh adorning their ends that flop about when it walks, and overall it can’t really keep up much of a balancing act on its own legs. It opts instead to curl into a perfect ball, free from any bothersome tail, and roll blindly toward its destination.
Instead of its rolling act, Puffadillo now rises up on its back stumps and waves its fleshy front appendages at me. It’s belly, beautifully mottled with the skin patterns of certain Japanese pufferfish, is fully exposed. “Puffadilloooo!”
“I’m not picking you up. Into the crate.”
I wouldn’t mind scooping the little guy up, with that innocent face staring up at me and all, but I know for a fact that those skin flaps are far from harmless, as is most of the rest of its body. In fact, it’s potentially deadly.
Seeing that I’m not going to give, Puffadillo curls up up last, launching itself with his back flappy-stumps before reaching full circularity of form, and rolls forward directly into the box, like a well aimed bowling ball.
“Nice,” I say, tipping it up and closing the lid. I remember to lift with my legs as I pick it up and stumble awkwardly to the basement stairs.
The lights are on down there, of course, and the smell of cigarette smoke and fruity vape steam rises to greet me as I descend. The door shuts and locks automatically behind me. The laughter and conversations fill the space of the stairwell, but quiet a bit as my approach is heard.
“Ah, the man of the hour!”
“Guess so,” I chuckle, coming into the huge concrete-walled room–or huge at least for the basement of a private residence. Everyone else has been waiting for me to go up and coax my Govermon into the crate. “Camera’s on? We live?”
“We’re live.”
“What’s the audience?”
“Just over 10k.”
“Good enough.”
I set the crate down while my opponent strikes an idiotic pose for audience and makes a show of turning his baseball cap around backward. “All right Mr. Undefeated, let’s see what this Hufflepuff can do against my Iguanant.”
The shiny puke-green exoskeleton of his disgusting Iguana-Ant hybrid trundles forth on six scaly legs.
“His name,” I say defiantly, playing it up a bit for the cameras, “is Bruce.”
“Puffadillo!” my Govermon cries happily from inside the crate.
There’s a chorus of laughter from those gathered around the fighting space, and I can’t help the mild blush that rises to my cheeks.
“Puffadillo, yeah, fine.”
I lift the cover off the crate and tip it gently to it’s slide, allowing Puffadillo to roll out and unfurl in the center of the space. Iguanant, sensing within its insecto-reptilian cortex the desire for combat from the surrounding humans, continues to trundle forth, antennae waving madly.
“Puffadillo,” I say softly, “you know what to do.”
My loyal Govermon, too, senses the atmosphere of the room, and eyes its foe straight on. There is a whistling as it draws a great breath through its puffer-mouth. It’s armored plates separate as its body expands, and the spikes come out.
