Pokémon Center.
In a plain booth by the window, Baimu sat with May and Wally, chatting over drinks as they waited.
The conversation kept coming back to Giant Steelix.
A Pokémon so much larger than others of its kind—large enough to seem like something else entirely—was rare anywhere in the world. Wally had done a quick online search on Bruno's Steelix and found that even it fell short of Baimu's in length.
"How did he get so big?"
Wally was curious. "Is it his age?"
In the Pokémon World, apart from a few exceptional individuals, the closer a Pokémon's body was to inorganic matter, the longer it could generally live.
A Pokémon like Steelix, which spent its life deep underground, could live for a thousand years without trouble.
Baimu shook his head. "No way."
Steelix wasn't a dragon from a fantasy novel that kept growing bigger with age.
Besides, judging by the pair of fanglike chiseling teeth on his lower jaw, Giant Steelix might not even have reached the "hundred years" the Pokédex gave as the condition for Onix to evolve naturally into Steelix.
Of course.
He might be older than both of Baimu's lives put together, but he had spent his years in the mountains with other Pokémon, acting on instinct and rarely encountering anyone else. His experience might not even match a grade schooler's.
Otherwise, how would a Pokémon hunter have caught him?
"If he were mine, I wouldn't even know how to take care of a Pokémon that big." May imagined Giant Steelix as her own Pokémon and couldn't help shivering.
Baimu laughed. "The same way you'd take care of any Pokémon. He's just a little bigger. Your Venusaur isn't exactly small, and you take care of her just fine, don't you?"
"She's way smaller..."
May muttered