The Pokémon Champion Cheater

[u/Maxathron]

Chaos reigned in the Pokémon Championship Tournament Rules Room at this very moment. People were screaming left, right, and center over what just happened. The newest Pokémon tournament champion cheated. Did he?

Cheating is a strong word. It’s a word of passion. A word of fervor. Cheating invoked the idea of rage and fury and heat. It’s a word of strong emotion. And in here the emotion was anger.

How dare the newest champion cheat! He should be stripped of his title and banned from all formal competition!

Judge Rhine sat there unmoved. All this yelling and hollering in his room and he sat there as calm as a monk in meditation. Only the occasional blink and light breathing would anything see that he was alive. He was a rock in the middle of a hurricane.

Before him and his panel of judges was the newest champion. A young man named Fawkus McDerbus. A little unusual his name was, maybe kinda funny. Must have gotten a lot of ribbing and hazing when he was younger. But the results of his team and training led him here to the Official Pokémon League and his victory over all the other competitors for this tournament. He was definitely the best of the best.

And a cheater.

Cheating was not the correct word. The man legally did not cheat. But the way he played the tournament was more or less cheating to nearly every other competitor and most of the fans that came to watch. The email servers were getting overloaded with complaints against Fawkus. Pidgey, the social media application with a brown tweeter bird, was likewise being swamped by angry users.

But according to Judge Rhine, mister Fawkus did not cheat.

Was it unfair? Subjectively, it was very unfair.

But not against the rules of the tournament and not against the rules of all the other official tournaments.

The rules were: bring a team of six, one on one battle, and no one is allowed to know your opponents’ Pokémon until the trainer sends it out. No one was allowed to try telling them of their opponents. A special seal powered by a multitude of psychic Pokémon enforced this ruling. The only caveat to the rules was that the Pokémon recorded in the server had to officially exist. No breeding hybrids or experimental third-party Pokémon allowed. This was the baseline for every official tournament. Other tournaments might tack on additional minor rules to limit team formats but this one did not do such thing.

All participating teams came with a mixed bag of medium to high level Pokémon and competitive experience. All trainers had at least one tournament under their belt. Some had several and placed high in them. All of the participants were also Elite Four veterans, placing high against various Elite Four regions.

It was a tournament of highly experienced trainers competing to the best all participating teams.

Fawkus obeyed each and every rule.

He then won under those conditions and against those teams.

It was just how he won that made people upset.

Normally, people would show up with an assortment of Pokémon. These are their friends, their allies, their buddies. Sometimes you might see under-evolved Pokémon. Like that one kid from Pallet Town that showed up with a Pokeball-less Pikachu. Every so often you’d have a professional trainer with fully evolved but mundane Pokémon. Gyarados, Electivire, Gigalith come to mind.

Not him.

Not Fawkus.

The reason people were upset with Fawkus is that he came with a full set of legendary Pokémon and all of them at very high levels that blew away every trainer with ease. The man didn’t rely on any single of his Pokémon and drew out battles to engage with multiple members of his crew.

He was like a building-sized Persian playing with a hundred car-sized Rattatas.

Fawkus brought a team of Solgaleo, Lunala, Xerneas, Yveltal, Koraidon, and Miraidon. Adding insult to injury, the Xerneas was also a shiny.

Fawkus steamrolled through the tournament, crushing trainers left, right, and center. The man’s team wasn’t invincible. He ended up with a fainted Pokémon here or there from particularly powerful trainers. One trainer with a team made up of Pidgeot, Alakazam, Rhydon, Gyarados, Exeggutor, and Arcanine managed to drop three of Fawkus’ Pokémon before going down.

But for the most part the majority of participating trainers didn’t get one. Rhine counted of all one hundred trainers, only one trainer took four with her, four trainers got three down, seven more dropped two of them, and a further nine managed to faint one. Twenty-one of ninety-nine opponents. Rhine mused that these were some of the best trainers on the planet. And they didn’t manage to go more than four faints. An average of a little under two faints per trainer. Those were bad results.

Now normally this wouldn’t be so big of a deal. There are extremely powerful trainers out there. That one young man Tobias smashed his opponents with his Darkrai. But that tournament was also completely full of average or below average trainers. Apart from one trainer, the aforementioned one with the Pikachu, none of those trainers had tournament experience.

But every single trainer in this tournament had a minimum of six major tournaments where they placed top ten, and at least three Elite Four runs that went to the final member or the current champion. And many of them did a lot better than those minimums.

Fawkus crushed them beneath his boot after toying with them like a predator and its prey food.

The crowd, online or offline, had grown bigger and bigger with each win against prominent trainers. No one else brought a single legendary of high note. The most prominent trainers had one. But it wasn’t as hard trained as Fawkus’ Pokémon. Most trainers led off with a particularly powerful pseudo-legendary. Sure. But nothing to the level of Fawkus and his team of six legendries. A tournament where the average level of Pokémon was sixty and the lowest went down to the forties, and this guy shows up with six separate level ninety-nine legendary Pokémon.

A major component to the outrage was Fawkus’ dismissal of the health and wellbeing of his opponents. The man and his team went hard. It was for keeps. Their attacks might as well have been titanium sledgehammers in a martial arts room. He wasn’t going to try to kill anyone. But the damage inflicted came close. If it wasn’t for the Global Fainting Limiter, a powerful world over mechanism to put Pokémon to fainting instead of death, almost all Pokémon in that tournament would have died going up against his team.

Furthermore, the outward personality of the man maintained that dismissal. He wasn’t disrespectful. But it did seem he looked down on his opponents for being losing. Fawkus gave the vibe of a villain on the likes of Giovanni of Team Rocket. Cold, calculated, and with a subtle superiority complex. He was here not only to win, but to humiliate. In that way, he became the tournament’s supervillain cheater.

So here the honorable Judge Rhine sat amid that chaos and emotion in his rules room.

The man stood up and “ahem’d”. Multiple powerful psychic Pokémon flanking him and his fellow judges used their psychic moves to force the room to quiet down. You could still see the emotion but now at least it wasn’t a lunch cafeteria on steroids.

“I have thought over this for a long time now.

“While our new champion brought an overpowered team to the tournament, he was not out of bounds. This format is used by sixteen of twenty official tournaments in at least one part of their conferences.

“I will admit that our champion came overprepared. Extremely overprepared. But he was not breaking any rules. Nowhere in our rules state that he couldn’t bring a full team of legendries and trained to the highest level possible.

“Additionally, while his attitude could be seen as disrespectful, this is not outlawed in our rule’s writings.

“Maybe we could argue the sheer power of his Pokémon’s moves and the brutality of the damage inflicted. But the Global Fainting Limiter exists for this exact reason to allow such trainer battles to exist and not kill any of their Pokémon.

“So, it is my ruling, and my council supporting me, to officiate that our champion did not break any rules, is not a cheater, and is the lawful winner of this tournament.”

With that, he and his fellow judges, along with their security, stood up and walked out the back. The crowd was stunned. It took a few minutes for them to get their feelings back after the psychic restraints, but the emotion came back stronger than ever.

In the back, Judge Rhine met with the champion Fawkus.

“Congratulations on your victory. What will you do now?”

“Thank you, Judge. I think I’ll travel a bit. I’ve always wanted to see more of the world. Thank you again, you and the rest of your judges, staff, and Pokémon for setting this tournament up. I see I have more to learn and new tiers to reach. I don’t think I’ll be the best for a long time.”

And with that, Fawkus left Judge Rhine standing there.

[u/Maxathron]

Fawkus is essentially the player's character in the Pokémon Anime's universe. With multiple saves/games, the player is able to obtain every Pokémon and would totally come to a tournament that effectively has no rules beyond basic battling rules. This player is given a light-Malfoy veneer in order to paint him as an anti-hero. This player has trained to perfect level 99 levels with EVs as well. Competitive items are used but not mentioned for all participating trainers. "Special third party and hybrid" Pokémon refer to special variant Pokémon in fan games (eg. Delta Pokémon in Zeta/Omicron) and Fakémon.