literature

Inkling to Lucario TF

Deviation Actions

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Literature Text

The sun shone bright on the Arowana Mall in Inkopolis City, currently closed for business (and looking like a work of modern art) while two teams of Inklings used it for a Turf War match. Their game was interrupted as the public televisions flickered to life with a live sportcast.

"Hold onto your tentacles!"

"It's Inkopolis News time!"

The program's two idol hosts waved to the camera, catching the attention of the competitors.

"Some special news-"

"There's going to be a Splatfest soon!"

A Splatfest? The combination concert and massive tournament was always a massive hit; most of the players were now paused, to better hear the loudspeakers.

All the better to ambush them.

As an Inkling of cyan coloration casually leaned against her Krak-on Roller, ears perked up, another squid erupted out of a neglected puddle of yellow ink, pulling together into a humanoid form in the blink of an eye.

"Where did you-" the cyan girl sputtered, before her opponent nailed her between the eyes with a yellow inkball. With a splat!, she disintegrated, leaving a near-incorporeal wisp to float back to her team's spawn point, grumbling.

The yellow girl, an Inkling by the name of Rui, blew a puff of imaginary smoke off the barrel of her Luna Blaster. She turned to a friend who was emerging from the same inkspot. "And that, Maria, is why you never let down your guard- Maria!"

To her consternation, Maria was also craning her ear to catch the news, and paid for it by being sniped by an alert E-Liter on the other team.

"You have to be squidding me." Rui scoffed, as she fled to the cover of an alleyway.

Her teammate superjumped back to her position a few moments later, this time as "Mario"; Rui rolled her eyes. As the humanoid forms that Inklings took in public were, after all, shapeshifted from their squid bodies, they could control the details of their guise- tweaking their eye colors, skin tones, or even gender at will. Nonetheless, competitors were expected to maintain a fixed identity during battles; even if the rules weren't really enforced outside of Ranked contests, Rui wished Mario wouldn't risk the ire of Judd, the feline referee who called every match.

Meanwhile, the broadcast had finally reached the pertinent part.

"Time to reveal the theme!"

"Wait for iiitttt..."

"A throwback to ancient mythology, which Pokémon is the very best?"

"Lucario vs. Zoroark!"

"Lucario is the best of course. It's so honorable!"

"Pfft, it's no match for the sneakiness of a Zoroark!"

As the hosts argued between themselves, excited chatterings filled the battlefield.

"So, what, it's dogs vs dogs now?"

"That blue ink looks so pretty!"

"Come on, Team Zoroark gets black ink! How often do you see that?!"

Rui didn't have any hesitation for this one; Lucario had been a favorite of hers ever since she had seen some ancient Pokémon art on a field trip to the museum of human history.

Mario sidled up to Rui as she walked back into the fray.

"So, you planning on anything special for this Splatfest?" he asked, intrigued.

"Well, I've had all of thirty seconds to plan!" she teased. "But I think I could pull off a Lucario..."

"Ooh, I hope to see it!" he gushed.

Rui did like to rock the Splatfest theme. Often she'd put together a themed costume, like when she dressed as Santa for the North Pole team. But most memorable were the times that she went above and beyond, and would actually take a non-"human" form. It wasn't a very common ability; most Inklings considered it sufficient to figure out how to take the typical humanoid form, but Rui practiced regularly to improve her range.

"After that Grasshopper Splatfest, Lucario should be easy!" she assured him. "But maybe we should focus on the match for now?"

"Good point-" he said, before being splatted again by an Inkzooka.

Rui dodged the blast, but had to catch her balance as she teetered on the ledge; the pool of water below was just as bad for Inklings as a cyclone of enemy ink would be.

She melted into the ink, to try and sneak around behind the enemy.

* * *

A week later, the sun set on Saltspray Rig as fireworks went off in the distance, signaling the start of the first match of Splatfest.

Rui perched in the light blue ink of the Team Lucario spawnpoint, ready to take the form she had rehearsed over the past few days. She focused on psyching herself up into the right mental state, picturing a Lucario's steadfastness, its patience, its determination...

Its Aura.

On cue, she rose out of the ink with the rest of her team. Twisting two tentacles around each other for support, she formed a long-than-usual left leg, with black skin, and paid special attention to shaping a canine paw at its end instead of a more traditional foot. She repeated the process for her right leg, then formed "shorts" by slacking out skin folds from her thighs with a team colored blue.

Properly, her torso should have been a yellow hue, but for this event she lacked the ink color to accomplish that. She settled for a white chest; it was a moot concern anyways, since the mandatory Splatfest Tee uniform covered it up. Using a blue tentacle for each arm, she altered their tips into black, dexterous paws.

It had taken her the most time to perfect the head; shaping it into a jackal snout took some concentration, and the mask pattern was fairly complex too. Mercifully, Inklings had naturally pointy ears, so all she had to do was ride them higher on her head than usual for the desired look. Capping off her morph, she used her remaining four tentacles to form the black feelers on the back of her head.

Quickly checking over her body, she found her work satisfactory, and struck a confident pose.

"Nice!" "Cool!" Her teammates cheered. Maria in particular gave Rui a thumbs-up. "You nailed it!"

"Well, you weren't able to get the fur..." a boy pointed out, observing her still-smooth skin. "But that's pedantic!" he hastily reassured.

Rui's giddy smile was broken for a second, as a strange numbness descended upon her. Like there was something she was supposed to be feeling, but wasn't. She couldn't think of anything amiss, though, so she tried to push it out of her mind.

"Let's remind Team Zoroark that Fighting types have the upper hand!" she asserted, regaining her groove. She drew her trusty Luna Blaster, and placed a paw on top of the barrel as she fired a test shot. "Aura Sphere!"

And as the music began to play, she charged into action, a laughing team behind her.

* * *

The sun had set an hour ago, and the final round of Splatfest had come to its close. Now the competitors were free to goof-off, having some casual, untracked Turf Wars as they waited on the results.

Rui had just escaped a hairy shootout by jumping to a beakon somebody had left in the back of the battlefield, mainly used for storage when the rig was in normal operation. She tied catching her breath, to shake off the nagging numb feeling, only to notice a rocket had pursued her.

As she dodged, the Inkstrike hit a nearby pile of crates, causing one to fall off the stack and spill a few ingots of a silvery metal onto the deck.

Rui paused, unsure if athletes were supposed to clean up collateral messes from Turf War matches. Bending down, she picked up one of the ingots.

Turning over a few times, she noticed the ingot was quickly losing its shape. Was it one of those metals like mercury or gallium that body temperature could melt?

She decided it would be best if she put it back. But as she tried to let go...

It's sticking to my hands! she realized.

Sure enough, the metal was rapidly liquefying. But rather than drip onto the ground, it instead started seeping into her hands, becoming one with her ink body. Her fingers began to shrink into pawlike stubs, as the cool metal pooled under her palms.

She naturally feared for a moment that the metal was poison, as her now-paws tingled with a combination coldness and electric feeling. Suddenly, a metallic spike burst through the backhand of each of her paws. Tapping one of them experimentally, she realized that the metal composing them had somehow solidified into a much harder, steel-like material. A late addition to her costume?

No... something much more fundamental had changed. The spikes weren't the only solid part of her hands now... they had grown honest-to-goodness bones.

And as the icy feeling spread up her arms, metal bones grew along after it, sucking more of the strange ingots from the box for material. A pair of shoulderblades emerged, then sent feelers across the back of her neck to meet each other in the middle.

A chill ran down her back as spine segments popped into existence, inducting her as a new vertebrate; with each vertebra came a rippling feeling as ribs threaded around her torso. The feeling lingered at her tailbone a moment, before exploding! She quickly materialized a pelvis before the changes swirled down her legs, depositing a femur in each before forking into the lower legs' tibia and fibula. In parallel, her spine slowly extended into her tail.

Once her hindpaws' bones fanned out, the changes paused, as if to allow her to gather her strength. She felt much heavier now- she doubted her Inkling legs could have supported this much weight. But with her new skeleton, she felt... solid.

Suddenly, she felt another energy surge arise in every part of her body that had transformed thus far. The chill rushed upwards, converging on her head. She involuntarily kicked her neck back as her spine stretched up and encased her brain in a skull, which then swept down her muzzle to join with her gritted teeth. She might have then noticed her color vision diminish somewhat, but she was distracted by the fuzzy new sense she was getting to replace it. The numb feeling from before was now satiated as she started to feel a blurry Aura picture of her surroundings.

The energy surge then redirected, and rushed back to her heart. A brief shredding feeling washed out over her skin, as a wave of fur emitted from a spike that burst out of her chest- capping off her transformation into a true Lucario.

Breathing heavily, she ran her hand along her arm experimentally. The metallic hairs were a little rough, but with their sensations, she could now pick up a clear Aura image of the battlefield.

It was as if she had a permanent Echolocator ability now- she detected an Inkling girl from the other team rounding the corner of the crates.

Lacking time to reach for her Luna Blaster, she panicked and instinctively cupped her paws in front of her. A chill pulsed down her arms as a glowing blue Aura Sphere manifested in her palms. She threw it at the corner just in time to meet her opponent's face...

"What the h-"

...and immediately splatted her into a mess of ink, her spirit darting back to Team Zoroark's spawn point to regroup.

Rui stared at her paws, amazed at the power she had just exhibited... before realizing the Inkling had dropped a Splat Bomb at her feet just before taking her attack.

She braced, prepared to herself feel an unpleasant splat as the bomb exploded at point-blank range-

-only to cover her with harmless ink. Apparently she really was a Lucario now... not an ink-based lifeform threatened by color.

I'm not a fair fight anymore... she thought, in a haze from the rapid firing of events.

She stumbled towards the edge of the rig, figuring it'd be best to not attract attention from the battlers right now.

Reaching the water, she hesitated, before dipping a toe into the sea experimentally. Delighted at the sensation, she sat down, immersing her legs in the ocean for the first time in her life.

She relaxed for several minutes, savoring the night breeze against her fur. The moonlight glinting off her spikes. The excited aura of the other kids playing behind her.

But eventually she had to think. The sheer solidity of her form had a permanence she had never felt before. She had come farther than any Inkling she'd heard of in mastering the art of shapeshifting... it would be painfully ironic if her accomplishment had also barred her from ever changing again.

Well, sure, she could probably put her new abilities to good use; she was already starting to distinguish the ink colors from Aura alone, so she might be able to give Judd some competition. Or else help keep the peace in Octo Valley.

She shook her head. She had backup plans now. Maybe she would need to use them. Or maybe she would be able to shed the Lucario form once she better understood the Aura power that had summoned it.

For now, though, there was an ocean to splash in.
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