Personal Field Guide 1
August 24th, 2022
Tohoku region, Ishigama
Mirko the Buneary
So, if you’re reading this you’re gonna be listening to my rambling notes on the World of Pokémon. So I’m creating a personal field journal, just writing down my observations and thoughts on the native life forms of this Reality. Learning as much as I can about Pokémon as a tree of life.
This’ll be divided into different sections, one’s focused on my team and any other Pokémon I catch for the lab, and others on pokémon and things that aren’t. Just little things I pick up here and there, as well as other things related to pokémon as part of a living, breathing world.
So let’s start nice and simple with my Starter, Mirko. Oryctolagus orectoaurus or the common modern name of Buneary and the classic name Mimirol.
A classic lagomorph, a rather large taxonomic order with dozens of species and subspecies including micromon, regional variants and ‘Domestics’. If anyone from home is reading this, members of Lagomorpha include the whismur line (Lauda volumna), the nidoran line (Arma toxa), the indeedee line (Rosala gracia), audino (Rosala stetha), the igglybuff line (Melutens mollens), the azurill line (Oleocauda aqua), the scorbunny line (Lepus calcitrus) and the bunnelby line (Lepus structus).
Perhaps a bit too much detail? Either way I’ll start with a basic overview of what I’ve learned about the Buneary line as a species.
Overview
The buneary line cladistically can in fact be considered a rabbit despite their colloquial classification as hares. This is due to the fact that pokémon genetics and biology are orders of magnitude more flexible than any orders of life outside the horizontal gene transfer in microorganisms. A global ring species on a scale unimaginable on Earth, and not with common ancestors last shared hundreds of millions of years ago. The sturddlefish hybrid being the only exception, with the parent species having split 184 million years ago.
So what does this have to do with buneary?
Based on genetic analysis, paleontological and archeological findings, it’s believed the ancestor of the buneary line was far more rabbit-like when humans first encountered the species, at least as far back as ten million years ago. And, yes humans, or at least their ancestors go back farther than our own species, ‘modern’ humans emerged around two million years ago while the earliest hominids go back to about twenty seven million years ago.
These rabbit ancestors were quick, social and extremely adaptive, a cosmopolitan species across the Old World. Until around four million years ago, due to a change in climate in the vast steppes the early buneary had to breed with the diggersby line to maintain their genetic diversity, along with several species within the Field and Human-like egg groups. This gave them access to a whole new plethora of body plans and potential adaptations to utilize.
Candidates species include mienfoo, the chimchar line, or pokémon classified in Similis like tyrogue or meditite, with one theory involving potentially interspecies exchanges with early humans. Though strangely enough no one has offered up the idea of them breeding with a third lagomorph species with Fighting type genes, and their evolution merely being convergent with humans.
Regardless within a million years, the buneary line’s ancestors became unrecognizable, converging on a humanoid body type built for raw speed and power versus the endurance running of humans, with bipedalism improving their locomotor performance, increasing their field of vision, and the use of their limbs for combat, manipulation, digging or sexual display.
These primal buneary were normal-fighting types, and were able to spread and dominate across the continent until about two hundred thousand years ago, ‘degrading’ as a species, and becoming less social as they dropped from the peak of their power, with stronger selection for the genes passed down by diggersby, allowing them to develop incredibly powerful muscles in their ears.
In more modern times, it became increasingly common to use the shed fur of lopunny to develop warm and soft coats, and Domestic rabbit breeds were used and are used as a source of meat and pelts. Still getting used to the differences, Domestics are effectively just animals with weak powers and their existence is a bit of a nightmare for my brain. Maybe I should move to describing my Buneary yeah?
Description
Mirko is about 1.15 times the average height for a Buneary at 56 centimeters in height and six kilograms in mass, around the same scale as an English Lop.
Mirko has a large spherical head, which accounts for about a quarter of her mass, and twenty eight teeth, two main incisors top and bottom, two peg teeth converging on canines used for grabbing food and slicing it, and lets them slice into flesh to get their needed protein for their muscle mass. So pretty cool. Her twenty two premolars and molars chew up anything that gets past her incisors.
Her eyes are spaced slightly farther than say a human, and she shares a few traits with crows that I’ve tested with some volunteering on her part. She has hybrid vision, the mobility of her eyes lending her some crazy abilities. Her eyes can move apart to give her a view of 320° or even come down literally to her little snout and triangular nose with one hundred million scent cells. It makes them very sensitive to perfumes, chemicals and dust, and makes them easily distracted.
Pretty neat, she’s got trichromatic vision too, which diggersby lacks, so definitely a big change in lifestyle. For the rest of her head, as stated she’s got a pretty standard bunny nose, though larger than other lagomorphs, built for high speed movement. Her ears are about a third the length of her body, and add a whole 18 centimeters of height when unfurled. So she’s about 36 centimeters tall?
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
No ear touching. Seeing her break rocks the size of my head with a single curl up was a good measure of strength. I can’t give an exact number for that, just rough measurements. The rock was about 9000 cubic centimeters, and broke into pieces. Fragmentation of rock is about 8 joules/cc, so maybe 72,000 joules?
Could be wrong though, the issue is the corresponding physics, she runs at 36 meters a second, or around 3500 joules, she’s got nowhere near the mass to hit as hard as she does. Has to be aura shenanigans, augmenting her strength the same way it does everything else on this planet, who are at least twenty to forty times tougher than my humanity.
Anyways back to her ears, they’re dense with muscle, and bio-hydraulic structures used to rapidly pump in blood, and augment their stiffness. Her hearing is excellent, and I ran some tests with her permission. Her hearing range runs between 96Hz-49,000Hz, and she can pick up sounds from as far as five kilometers away. We’ve been practicing on using her hearing more effectively, monitoring and catching sound from attacks without even needing to look at them.
Very interesting physiology… which lets me move onto her coat of integument, a combination of soft brown down and fluffy tan fur that provides warmth in the colder weather of northern Nihoh.
I’ve also learned their fluff serves a vital function as a vital conductor of sunlight and other natural aural elements, allowing more efficient channeling of weather alteration moves and beam attacks. Buneary fluff is thus a vital material for meteorology and Pokémonology focused on the reverse engineering of select special abilities.
Another interesting physical trait of the buneary line is the marked presence of ectoplasm, the ephemera of Ghosts. Normally it’s just inert, but during Mega Evolution it activates into a chaotic swirl of power that allows their Normal and Fighting type moves the ability to strike against ghostly matter. As mentioned, primal buneary and lopunny had this variation of Scrappy but lost it due to as of yet unknown reasons.
Pretty neat.
That leaves her legs, with a leg-to-height ratio of around 0.52 or a leg length of 18.72 centimeters, which is hidden under their dense coating of feather-like fluff. Mirko’s legs are full of incredibly dense and powerful muscles with immense tensile strength, a Double Kick from her could shatter boulders and bend steel, and she can easily leap over a building. Physiologically, buneary and especially lopunny are optimized for sprinting and jumping at incredible speeds and heights.
Based on some anatomical scans and my perusal of lagomorph biology books, their anatomy is a sort of cross between that of an ostrich (a creature similar to a doduo) and humans. They have a greater concentration of mass at the top of the leg like an ostrich, but leg anatomy more comparable to humans, and ligaments which act as a ‘joint corset’ to guide their stride like ostriches and doduo. Her foot anatomy is analogous to humans, absorbing shock and possessing a comparable number of muscles, tendons and nerve endings.
The main difference lies in a reduced number of toes, with three performing a locomotor function while the fourth serves as an anchor for spring tissue which stores energy when she lifts and bends her trailing leg. As her leg moves forward, the spring tissue locks and remains compressed until the foot hits the ground. This allows her to do work during the aerial part of her cycle. On all its own? In a human, it would let Usain Bolt run at 50mph without any of this world’s native physics breaking.
It’s insane and amazing, and while most of her biology is simply standard rabbit turned bipedal and made out of metaphysical energy there’s some real gems to geek over!
She’s pretty normal in many respects, which makes sense, a good amount of their powers rely less on conventional biology and more on metaphysical energy manipulation. Though I have noticed some pokédex scans pick up… weird patterns of bio-energy, kinda reminds me of kooky stuff like the meridian system, or nadi, channels and nodes of the subtle body where supposed ‘metaphysical’ energy flows. I also notice her energy seems to follow that same pattern? Is that a thing here, one that counts as a new field?
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Sophia Laven knew she had struck gold when she had decided to take the Faller, to take Brandon under her wing and demand her as a sponsored trainer despite the pressure from the International Police to have some more bait for them.
Fucking cunts.
Tedesco and Looker were nice enough but she didn't much trust the politics involved both internationally and locally. The ‘union’ was closer to a loose confederation, a treaty drafted after the war under shared common interests between the independent states, an intergovernmental organization for handling laws, defense pacts, Pokémon League regulations, and a forum for disputes.
It was closer to what her new student had described as the European Union or the early years of the ‘America’ she came from versus the singular state of Japan in her world. Which to Sophia made sense, without pokémon, establishing a monopoly of force was far easier when individuals couldn't raise teams of monsters to bring down empires.
The Galarian Empire was a good example of that when their colonies threw off the shackles of the people ‘uplifting’ their lowly cultures, along with the earlier and more sickly Paldean Empire when they lost control of Norte and Sur Mezo and several other colonial territories.
The world had suffered a major upheaval in the last sixty years, the instability preceding and following the war, regaining contact between regions had been a work of years, so much knowledge had been lost and so few of her own generation even know of it.
Her generation were those born directly in the aftermath, and she had heard the stories of those dark times. A maelstrom of devastation and death, and it had left its mark on the political sphere, the squabbles within the League and the greater regional governments.
The creation of the Global Trade System was just one of the things keeping the world from falling apart again, and that was a frightening thing for some. It was why the International Association of Pokémon Leagues had been reformed and expanded from an organization merely local to Nihoh into one that spanned the globe.
Never again.
She wanted that poor girl as far away from politics as possible, so to the public she was some nobody, a Mezo-descended immigrant who had caught her eye as a viable trainer. And her insights and outside perspective was going to take her far alongside her hyperfocus and passion for pokémon in so many different fields.
Her incidental insight into aura took the cake though, aura was a difficult subject in the field. It was hard to observe, and only recent innovations when it came to Infinity Energy and poké-scope technology derived from it had yielded good results and they weren’t perfect. Their only insight into there being a system for channeling aura came with studies using lucario subjects to trace the lines where aura bursts out into scars while Mega Evolved. Most experts in the field thought the patterns merely corresponded to the electromagnetic fields emitted by pokémon and had no influence in the shaping of aura into TE.
It wasn’t necessarily a new theory, but not everyone talked about such things openly anymore, and Sophia was hoping to see how someone with little preconceived notions of how things should be could go in this world.
She was going to rub it into the face of her himbo of a cousin along with his Charizard back in Galar!