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"I said, its horn is turning colors!"
"I understand your concern," she repeated. "But the male nidoran's horn displays have been recorded since some of the earliest scientific documentation and are considered an integral part of the poison-type species line. Bright colors are common in many poisonous pokemon, such as swalot and seviper-"
"I didn't buy my son a seviper!"
"Yes. You bought him a poison-typed male nidoran, but the male nidoran's horns being capable of colorful glows has been true for hundreds of years before the first fairy-type nidorino was observed, and there is no evidence they are related." To what degree this reflects reality and to what degree it reflects a lot of people working hard to miss what was in front of their faces is a matter of opinion. There is a truly remarkable amount of wiggle room when you stick to the facts.
Also, good fucking luck trying to get any of the female nidoran to mate with males so feeble they can't manage a display. There was some newbie breeder off in Unova who thought they were going to get somewhere with a colorblind dam but, obviously, she still preferred brightly glowing horns displaying different shades even if she wasn't as discerning, and even putting aside the ethics, the nidorina colony queen has final say and would block mating with anyone that sickly, even if the one's her son. You'd have to remove every better son and grandson and nephew and possibly even great-grandson she had from her colony first to convince her it's that one son's eggs or her line ends entirely, and that's just asking her to take your arm off over it and then your head if you got near any of the eggs ever again. Nidorina are calm and thoughtful pokemon, reasonable pokemon, pokemon you can really work with, pokemon she'd trust with a human baby over a lot of humans even, but the idea that all adds up to placid, oh, people really will believe anything but what's in front of them.
There are nidoran who don't care about bright colors or what the nidorina queen in charge of the group says, and she'd wager he tried to buy from one of those lines first, only to discover they're illegal for kids to own and nobody will even breed them outside of those muscleheads in Galar. Not half as vicious as the scaremongering would tell you, but roamer-female and sneaker-male morphs don't care about taking orders, and their similarly temperamental offspring are completely inappropriate as starter pokemon. Not to mention the roamer-females don't lay twin eggs, and less than one in ten of the singleton eggs you get off a roamer-female will be male. In a given year, there simply aren't any males to be had no matter what he's willing to pay and who he's willing to bribe.
No, he's not going to find anything better, and so he's not going to return his kid's pokemon. She reminds him she's got one of the only poison-typed breeding nidoking around, and he demands to know if it also has a rainbow horn. Obviously, she doesn't say. That's implicit in the fact he's breedable, she doesn't say. The females select the mates you bigoted dipshit, she doesn't say. She says, "Your son's nidoran has the best pedigree you could buy. Almost all of his siblings kept their poison typing upon evolving into nidorino." Numerous people have even rolled the dice again to successfully get a still-poison nidoking off one of her nidoking's sons. Which is not to say the nidorino didn't pick up a fairy typing, but they largely didn't flip from poison to fairy.
Now, did his kid pick one of those... Well. Well, the kid picked the friendly showboater, love at first sight. Wonderful, outgoing little guy, perfect for a starter pokemon, brimming with energy, eager to please, beautifully bright colors and a nearly sparkling coat, bold enough not to mind leaving the colony for a new home but not overly pugnacious either...
She estimates it's possible the type won't flip. Ten percent odds, maybe.
People think they want the old model, good reliable traditional nidoran males, but the old ones were walking alarm systems and not much more. You only have to look at them objectively, setting aside all the bias about what some people expect a male pokemon "should" be, and you'd see trembling prey pokemon with fluttering ears longer than their bodies, constantly alert for the slightest sound. Nidorino wouldn't even evolve in the wild until their dam died, then if they were lucky they'd live long enough for that year's breeding season and a last shot at eggs before getting killed or just so worn out defending the colony they dropped dead. Breeders talk about tradition because it's a good line, but truth is, nobody but crazy people is interested in trying to actually breed all the way back to what nidoran used to be like, and nobody but crazy people thinks it'd be possible anyway. Colony-females overwhelmingly prefer males with fairy-correlated traits. You'd have to be cloning nidoran from ones tens of thousands of years ago at least to get ones from before the preference developed, and nobody would actually want the result, because humans prefer the fairy-correlated traits too for all some people won't admit it. The sweet spot for pets, battler or not, is in her opinion right on the dual-typed line, so that's what she aims for.
"But you won't guarantee that my son doesn't end up with a fairy pokemon if it evolves," he spits, like buying the other sex that still evolve into the same type they always did wasn't an option.
"I guarantee that I breed only from long-established poison lines from before any fairy nidorino were observed, or," she adds pointedly, "any of the behaviors observed among those fairy types."
Relevantly to the same kind of people who value tradition, wild nidoran males being interested in other nidoran males was first recorded entire decades after the overall type shift. It was also recorded in a lot of other pokemon around the same time, 95% of which weren't fairy typed. But if people want to pay her significantly more money over the heterosexuality of a pokemon, she is, legally, not making false claims to say there is no scientific evidence of anything to the contrary in her particular breeding lines. She is an accredited breeder, not an accredited zoologist.
"Ultimately, it's up to your son to follow best practice for evolving his pokemon into a poison-typed nidorino. Might I speak to him?"
She gets a swear, but the phone's passed along. A much more timid voice asks if there's anything wrong with his nidoran. "It's actually a great sign that he's started displaying already. It means he'll be a good battler." He'll also make for a good contest pokemon, which she's giving fifty-fifty odds for being where the kid ends up focusing. "You should encourage him to keep being bold and fearlessly lighting up for everybody to see. The more colors the better. Just keep the collar on," she assures the kid. It's studded, it's black, it's as unnecessarily macho as you can get without the risk of people's eyes getting poked out, it's got an everstone set in it. "A study proved that poison typed nidorino and nidoking had significantly more battle experience than the fairy typed ones." Now, could the data be taken to say that older trained pokemon, by and large, will have significantly more battle experience than wild ones at best a third of their age? That's not for her to say. If someone chooses to compare leppa berries to orans and publishes a paper about it, they certainly published that paper, and she certainly can't be faulted for sticking scrupulously to the proven facts of the matter. "Make sure you don't take it off until you've at least got several badges and think you and your pokemon are ready, then you can call me to consult, alright?" That's about what an eight year old can handle. That dads can't get rid of your pokemon and can go fuck themselves she'll explain when the kid calls her again in a couple years.
