#Sinnoh back at it again with the tags that make me go absolutely feral like a deranged woodland creature

[oneluckydragon]

@s1nn0hh Being greeted with this today was like getting drenched with ice cold water and then doing twenty backflips. ISTG!! I ADORE YOU SINNOH!!!

"What do you remember of being human, Echo?" The question is out of the blue and unexpected. But Sora offers a patient smile and tilts her head in curiosity, just enough that one of her ears flops over. It's endearing, if anything.

But Echo wishes she hadn't asked.

"Not much. Distinct memories are cloudy." A tired tone says softly, a pained recollection in her eyes and an acrid haze in her soul that endures, endures, and endures, "But I remember the discomfort more than anything. My body always did feel wrong back then. Misshapen. Condensed. Like it was too small for everything buried underneath, and that ache went so deeply some days that it would make my skin crawl. I hated that part the most."

At that, Sora's expression falls. She looks inexplicably sad, as if she'd hoped for a different response, a gentler one despite knowing the harsh truth about the dark future and the struggles Echo must have suffered. "But you had Grovyle, right? I'm sure he took care of you."

"He did, Sora, of course he did." A sigh, a flick of an ear and claws clenched tightly into the churned earth pressed under her paws. "I doubt I deserved his attention, though. I was too busy being angry at the world to give any care back."

In my lore, Echo does not look fully human during their time in the dark future. Since they were Darkrai before becoming human, and as a result of Palkia's reckless shattering of the Dimensional Portal which distorted both time and space, Echo's transformation was broken and accidental. They ended up looking pretty messed up and definitely (not) human. A lot of their characteristics as Darkrai carried over but rather morphed into something else.

And Grovyle, growing up in a world where humans have been extinct for longer than any living pokémon has been alive, has no concept of what a "true" human looks like. The only thing he knows is descriptions of humans from glyphs and texts in old ruins. Thus, he mistakes Echo for an actual human. And Echo, not knowing what a human looks like themselves due to amnesia, accepts this identification with nothing better to use.