#putting this on this blog for Horror even though i advetised the fic on main lmao

[glitchyred]

Hi so Baby Hotline (aka the Bad Egg/PokeSpe Horror fic for those who have been following me longer) has gotten a lot more attention/praise than I was expecting LMFAO but people are starting to ask how the Bad Egg works. I did have a lore dump about it in the rough draft (it was written in the format of an email a researcher was writing) but ultimately scrapped it because it felt too clunky and I also realized that even if I offhandedly mentioned Gold surviving people still might not think he would've like recovered, so I decided to stick with Silver's POV through the ending

HOWEVER since people are interested here's a giant infodump about some of the lore I came up with, warning it will be long and also include gross alien anatomy/parasite stuff as well as descriptions of dead animals (pokemon), and of course massive warning for Horror. Viewer discretion advised and all that

So the first question on a lot people's minds is probably "where did they come from", which uhh. Doesn't really have an answer! Silver's assessment of the situation, "someone somewhere is fucking with something" is about as clear as it gets. These things are being created because something is going horribly wrong and the universe might be collapsing a little tiny bit. The Bad Eggs are hardly the only sign of this that exists (if I write sequels you'll see what I mean) but they are the most immediately alarming because they 1. Are very good at killing things and 2. Reproduce quickly. Who exactly is causing their appearance is a story for another day (aka I haven't gotten there yet LMAO)

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... okay, so fair warning in advance, you will really need suspension of disbelief on this one. It's hard making glitch Pokémon "make sense" when glitches are pretty much just code not being able to make sense of itself. Additionally this will probably be pretty "why you shouldn't explain The Horrors"-y but I think the implications of this thing are terrifying enough on their own for it to be okay to ruin the reader's imagination a bit. It's all optional info anyways

Initially, as mentioned in the fic, these seemed to only affect wild egg-laying Pokémon, and began to randomly pop up throughout Japan, with the most condensed populations in Hoenn and Kanto. Bird-like Pokémon in these areas were seemingly dropping like flies and locals would report living specimens acting strangely, like they were disoriented or hallucinating. Dead ones would be found with wounds littering their legs and undersides with a majority of their blood drained.

It took researchers a while to figure out what was happening here, for a variety of reasons. Mainly, nobody really thought to check if the eggs Themselves were you know. Blood-sucking parasites because who would think that initially. They just seemed like duds, and researchers were chalking everything up to some other form of undiscovered parasite that they couldn't find any evidence of. It wasn't until someone (with alarming difficulty) managed to cut one of the "dud" eggs in half (after noticing they couldnt be cracked), revealing the whole thing to be a living organism with a stomach where the baby should be, that scientists went "Oh. Oh no."

While scientists were figuring that out, they figured they had no reason to worry about this happening to capitve-bred Eggs. "Eggs" (capital E) aren't the same thing as "eggs". While there's a lot of scientific theories about them, the best explanation anyone has for how they actually work is Johto myths about them being literal gifts from gods delivered by Celebi which is. Amusingly enough probably accurate, because it's Pokémon. So when Elm's colleague found an unhatchable Egg and one of the people working with it fell ill after staying with it a few days, nobody had any reason to assume it was much more than a coincidence. And then the events of Baby Hotline happened.

As for how these things work, their anatomy is very . Alien JDJQJDJ

They're very, very overly literal versions of the term "brood parasite" (a bird that lays its eggs in the nests of other birds species, leaving them to feed its chick(s)). They pretend to be eggs (or Eggs) to feed on a host's blood so they can reproduce. For the first day or so a Bad Egg is in a nest, it puts out a pheromone that makes it incredibly appealing to nearby Pokémon. This usually makes the mother of the brood pay special attention to it, but can also cause egg-eating Pokémon to fall victim to its bullshit. Once the egg has chosen a host and fed for the first time, it shifts gears into the opposite - it willingly repulses other Pokémon away, preventing anything else from attempting to harm its now-vulnerable host. (This doesn't work out great for Eggy because a Trainer's Pokémon tend to you know. Defend them from things they find threatening)

Bad Eggs are capable of breaking and manipulating their own shell, which is significantly thicker than an actual Egg's. Using Struggle, their only move, they can slice small wounds into their host's skin. On and under the surface of their shells is a thin layer of toxin they basically inject into their host's body during this process - on the surface, its pretty much Just an anticoagulant with some muscle relaxing properties, making feeding easier and keeping the host complacent, and it's even fairly mild. However, it stays in the host's body for a good while, meaning repeated feedings inject more and more of this stuff in them, eventually resulting in more side effects - excessive fatigue, headaches, nausea, and eventually delirium and hallucinations. Victims usually don't actually die from blood loss alone, but from the compounded effects of the venom along with eventual dehydration/starvation.

Once the shell is fully broken, it reveals what's functionally its "mouth" - it looks exactly like the shell and takes up the whole "body", but instead of hard and smooth, it's soft and absorbent. Underneath that layer is the egg's very gross alien anatomy; to skim over that, it's got some very primitive vocal chords it uses to (somewhat poorly) imitate the sounds of a baby bird, and some muscles for rocking itself more effectively. All three of those layers are extremely difficult to cause physically damage to and heal quickly if any harm is successfully enacted. The rest of its body from there is just Stomach. It feeds as much as it can until it's host dies, so it's stomach can actually expand if necessary (hence it endlessly getting heavier). It can regrow the shell at any time to maintain appearances, but usually stops doing this by the time the host is too far gone to care.

Fortunately for their victims, if the host at any point gets dragged away from the Egg for extended periods of time, the Egg is basically powerless and the host can usually recover. Physically, anyway, because they're probably Super traumatized after that experience.

I've mentioned a few times that these things reproduce. The problem is that nobody knows how this happens, given nobody has seen actual evidence of it happening, just that it Does. Shortly after the host dies or leaves, the Egg goes dormant for about half an hour before suddenly returning to the state it was in before it ever had a host. It's stomach empties completely, and about a week later, with little more warning, there's more reports of Bad Eggs and dead birds - and given that when Elm returns to confiscate and dispose of Eggy it seems like the reproduction process already occurred, there's... probably going to be some dead Humans in the not-too-far future , too.

And thats about it on the Bad Egg lore like comment and subscribe happy November 1st I'm focusing on other things nowJDJQJSJWJJE