PMD: Crux of the Self

What Comes Naturally

"Can't you open any wider?"

Von's jaw strained as he tried to stretch his mouth open for the curious Rockruff. She peered as best she could down his throat. Much like during a visit to the dentist, Von was never certain what he should be doing with his tongue, and so it lolled from the side of his mouth. His neck tilted upwards at such an angle to let as much of the morning sunlight in as they could allow. Do Pokemon have dental plans? He asked himself, Wait, do I even have teeth anymore? The lips of his lizardlike form were rigid and inflexible, though he still possessed sharp ridges that jutted from them in the semblance of sharp teeth. It was a relief, he admitted to himself, to no longer worry about his lack of health insurance.

"Unless it's- there!" Rockruff happily pranced from forepaw to forepaw. "I think I can see a vent on the roof of your mouth when you breathe out!"

Von happily let his jaws snap shut. The oral exam was his idea to begin with, but he only grew more and more self-conscious the longer it went. "A vent?" he asked, before he let his tongue probe over his palate. With the newfound dexterity of his tongue, he was eventually able to find what she was talking about- an exit point, he assumed, for spraying poison from his mouth. "So how does it work?"

"That's something you'll have to figure out on your own. That, or ask one of your own kind."

Von opened and shut his jaws as he scanned the trees of the cape outside of the burrow. He selected the trunk of a pine tree, took aim, and opened wide. Nothing happened.

"You and Ren both have abilities, right? How did you learn?"

"Our families, of course. Well- my pack taught me, at least." She glanced at the burrow beneath the magnolia tree, pensive. "He left home early, so I'm not actually sure."

Maybe my poison typing is hereditary. Von closed his eyes and concentrated inwards as he tried his best to gain awareness of the subconscious actions his new body took. As disorienting as it was to even think about being inhuman, he wanted to be able to defend himself. There were new muscles to grow accustomed to, just as he was forced to relearn how to walk the day before. His tail still felt like an unnatural extension of his spine.

His body felt small, far too small. He felt claustrophobic within his own skin, as if he had been compressed into a space no human should ever belong inside. His arms and legs still bent wrong. He felt so small and vulnerable. He missed having fingers and opposable thumbs. He wanted his old face and his old identity back, not the bestial and alien features that had been somehow forced upon him by the fate that dragged him here. Anger simmered in his core. Pangs of guilt he couldn't stifle lanced through his chest. The existential fear that loomed at the forefront of his thoughts ever since he had become an animal more and more threatened to engulf him the more he tried to focus and attune to his new shape.

Von opened his eyes and found his breathing had become erratic, and his claws sunk into the soil. He was shaking.

"Are you okay?" Rockruff's voice pulled his attention from his mounting panic attack, and he was grateful for it.

"I'm fine," he croaked, and he was made aware of how dry his throat had become. "Just trying to focus."

Rockruff didn't appear convinced, but she sat down in the beach grass of the cape.

Von gulped down a lungful of air. It tasted too strongly of the sea, but it was an external nausea- preferable to the internal, he supposed. A vent in the roof of my mouth. Is it really as simple as flexing a muscle?

Deep breaths. Deep concentration. No more letting his thoughts stray- no matter how easy it is, no matter how eagerly his worries nibble away at him. This body isn't his, and its differences immeasurable. His human mind somehow fit within the skull of a lizard a mere sliver of the size of his former self. Subconscious processes continued to send signals to make his heart beat, to make his stomach process food, to make his lungs filter oxygen into his blood.