Fanfic / Adorable Murderbeasts

All heroes have symbols

Adorable Murderbeasts is a Young Justice (2010) Self-Insert fic written by DesertChocolate (Who also wrote Hunters of Death, Through a Temple, and Saiyan in Brockton).

One day, Mahmoud Schahed finds himself on the outskirts of Metropolis with a bag, a flute, and six Pokeballs. He knows he's in a DC Comics universe, but not which one, and the important details thereof. One foiled bank robbery and a session with the Lasso of Truth later, he finds himself taking the name of Trainer Red, and assigned to the Team with Aqualad, Robin, Kid Flash, Superboy, and Miss Martian.

As such, this story is about the Self-Insert and his Pokemon, characters in their own right, becoming heroes in the Young Justice universe.

In June of 2020, DC decided to reboot the story (into Monsters of My Own), but not before writing a Distant Finale to serve as an epilogue for this version.

Also posted on Sufficient Velocity and Fanfiction

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• Adaptational Badass: Chesnaught is a strong Pokemon, but he's still just a Pokemon. It's been explicitly stated that since arriving in the DC Universe, he's become plugged into The Green, the elemental force behind all plants (with the subtle implication that other Grass-type Pokemon in the world would have this happen to them too if they journeyed to this world).
  • Oddly enough, Berry Bushes. In the games, you plant a berry, it grows in a few minutes, you pick the berries, the bush is gone, you go on your way. In this world, they seem to be a fusion of fruit-bearing bushes in our world and those in the Pokemon world, where they still grow fast, but have numbers of berries similar to those fruit-bearing bushes do in our world, yet grow the berries back at an accelerated rate. The bushes don't vanish after getting plucked, either- they just regrow the berries.
  • Thanks to Mahmoud pointing out that Gods Need Prayer Badly, five gods have joined the Justice League- Kane-milo-hai of the Hawaiian pantheon (father of Pele), Thor, God of Thunder from the Norse, Diana, Goddess of Hunters from the Romans, Hephaestus, God of Smiths from the Greeks, and Isis, Goddess of Magic from the Egyptians. Red even mentions that more might join, specifically mentioning the Hindu faith being interested in sending a deity.
• Anti-Magic: Because magic in this world translates to Fairy-typing, anything that is strong against Fairy-type Pokemon has a degree of immunity to magic. Heatran takes the cake, as while she's not fully immune, she's dual Steel-Fire type, which means she has a 4x resistance to Fairy. She's able to tank a lot of damage when Red has to fight Circe.
• Ascended Fanboy: It's A Self-Insert fic, it comes with the territory.
• Babies Ever After: In the Epilogue Red/Pele, Connor/M'gann and Wally/Artemis have children of their own. Chesnaught also has a son, and Slowbro a daughter. Red's youngest child Ted's first Pokemon is a Scorbunny that also happens to be the son of Gloria's Cinderace. Jon Kent and Damian Wayne are also around as well.
• Badass Normal: Although his Pokemon are officially his "Power", Red is training himself to be this level as to not be a burden to his Pokemon or a liability to the Team.
• Bag of Holding: Red's standard bag, based off the one from Pokémon X and Y, has every object on is capable of obtaining from the Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire games. In other words, dozens of Pokeballs of various types, hundreds of berries, TM and HM's, two separate types of bicycles, and dozens of items to be held by his team. He also uses it to hold his costume.
• Bait-and-Switch: Red lands his dragon just outside the Kent house. Soon enough, a flying, humanoid alien with fantastic powers appears, who, despite not being native, has come to love the Earth as his own home. It's Martian Manhunter.
• The Beastmaster: Effectively Red's "power", in Superhero terms.
  • Chesnaught: Mighty Glacier meets Green Thumb
  • Slowbro: Making a Splash with Psychic Powers
  • Heatran: Magma Man/Dishing Out Dirt and Playing with Fire, with a bit of An Ice Person with Hidden Power.
  • Chansey: Combat Medic
  • Jirachi: Psychic Powers and Extra-ore-dinary
  • Zapdos: Shock and Awe with a bit of Weather Manipulation, and a small amount of The Big Guy.
  • Latias: Psychic Powers, Super Speed, Flight, and a bit of a Sixth Ranger because of her role as being not part of his team in the Pokeballs.
• Berserk Button: Batman took exceptional offence to Mahamoud revealing that he and the other heroes are fictional characters in his universe, because he saw it as the loss of his parents being nothing but entertainment to an audience of uncaring voyeurs. It took Wonder Woman calling him out to make him realize he was taking his anger out on Mahamoud who had no control over any of it.
• Beware the Nice Ones: All of Red's Pokemon count as this (save Zapdos and Slowbro) but special attention should go to Chansey. While there are others in his team that are nice (Latias, Heatran, Jirachi among them), Chansey is explicitly the healer of the team. She is still fully capable of taking down an entire team of mercenaries on her own, and performing Seismic Toss.
• Boisterous Bruiser: Chesnaught tends to rush into battle, and is also quite boastful.
• Contrived Coincidence: While flying away from Metropolis, Latias gets confused as to where she really is. So Mahmoud sets down outside the nearest farmstead below to gather both their bearings. As you have probably guessed by now, it's the Kent farm, a fact Mahmoud immediately realizes.
• Crossover Cameo: One of the technicians at Star Labs examining the Pokemon is John Henry Irons.
• Cuteness Proximity: Pele's reaction to seeing Heatran, a fellow volcanic being who is gentle and shy, is to find her very cute.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Red is making sure that STAR Labs is investigating the various items he brought with him to the YJ universe, reverse engineering them, and putting them out into the public eye. While they can't understand everything (due to the explicitly magical nature of some of the items or that AI were used to program others), Berries and Potions are shown to still work on a wide variety of things in this world.
• D-Cup Distress: After being transformed into a human by Mr. Mxyzptlk in one Omake chapter, poor Heatran suffers from this, not helped at all by the fact that her outfit is a Naked Apron, and gets her unwanted attention from Kid Flash.
• Distant Finale: In the Epilogue for the first version. Red is forty-seven years old, has married Pele, and they have three children together (Chesnaught and Slowbro have kids of their own). Pokemon have spread over Earth, and are in the hands of Heroes, Villains, and Law Enforcement (to the point that even Maggie Sawyer has a Blastoise), and even Heroes in their own right. Koriand'r has become Trainer Green instead of Starfire, and Slowbro and his daughter are Red Lanterns (Also Mew becoming a Star Sapphire). There have been many losses however. The memorial hall includes Wildcat, Kane-milo-hai, Dubbilex, Jay Garrick, Lance, Ethan, and (of all people) Steve Rogers. Red has also met Dial and Gohan.
• The Dreaded:
  • Zapdos gets this. Unlike the rest of Red's pokemon, it's viewed not as a person, but as a sentient force of nature with an utterly alien mindset, perfectly capable of turning lakes into steam and powering cities for years.
  • Slowbro. While not of the power level of Zapdos, the 'mon is still extremely powerful, and is always full of brimming rage. It's telling that in an omake chapter, Slowbro is the only one not turned into a human because "He said no."
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: While the page image of that trope uses Pokemon, when translated to the real world, it's a little more complicated because of overlapping type weaknesses and strengths. The most common one seen so far is that "Fairy" typing is translated directly to magic, such as those that gods or lords of Order and Chaos use. This makes Heatran (who is Steel and Fire type, both strong against Fairy) functionally immune to magic, while it leaves Chesnaught taking extra damage from Klarion the Witch Boy because of his Fighting type (weak against Fairy).
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Trainer Red is confused when meeting Death if she will take the form of the Islamic Angel of Death, one of the DC Universe's incarnations (including Death herself, Hades, or the Black Racer for an abridged list), or Darkrai, since all are possibilities. She confirms nothing.
• Genre Savvy: Red partially shoots down Batman's plan of letting Lex Luthor build a path to the Pokemon world (and letting Trainer Red turn Lex in to the authorities there) by pointing out that there's no guarantee that they'd come out anywhere he'd recognize- the Pokemon World is big and he only has knowledge of six different regions that are relatively small.
• Gentle Giant: Heatran, right up into Shrinking Violet.
• Gone Horribly Right: While making space for Red and his Pokemon, Heatran was allowed to make her own room... So she made a metal-reinforced chamber that nearly doubled the space underneath Mt. Justice, set off seismic sensors all over Happy Harbor, and got the attention of Pele, the Volcano goddess.
• Immune to Bullets: When Pokemon are brought into the real world, several of their attributes translate into new ways. So the super toughness of Chesnaught and the metallic nature of Heatran mean that the robbers' initial attempts at mowing down these two leave no appreciable damage.
• In Love with Your Carnage: Desolation winks at Pele and says she's looking forward to meeting Pele again, after they nearly wreck Happy Harbor in a fight.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Red insists on using "It" when referring to Zapdos. Not to demean it, but as a reminder that it doesn't think the same way as he or the other Pokemon. Every other Pokemon, though, he takes umbrage at the thought that people don't consider them people.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: After the first few chapters, something starts messing with Red's head, that makes him unable to remember things related to the show Young Justice. He knows that it exists, he knows there are fanfics of it that he read and enjoyed, but something removed all his memories of it. It doesn't seem to be a blanket covering of it, either- early on, he was able to reference a few stories he'd read (though this could be a case of Early-Installment Weirdness), and later on when he tries to bring up things from those same stories he gets only brief flashes of them before forgetting the information again.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: It's implied that when it comes to fighting, Pokemon are this trope. We don't get to see it extensively tested with the other 'mons, but Chesnaught starts to teach himself boxing while fighting Ted Grant, a world-class boxer.
• The Multiverse: Red's existence proves that one exists. He even points out that there are tons of versions of both of the source universes for the story- there's the DC universe from the comics, the DCAU, the Crime Syndicate world, and more, while for Pokemon there's the world of the games, the anime, those of the OVA's, and the Mystery Dungeon series, for a very abridged list.
• Mythology Gag: When Red wants a secret name for Latias to identify with, he chooses Bianca.
  • An Omake where the Pokemon get turned human by Mister Mxyxptlk has Latias take Bianca's form as well.
  • The name that Mahmoud takes as his superhero code name is Trainer Red, referring to the original main character of the Pokemon games, In-Universe Memetic Badass Red.
• Noodle Incident: During an interlude were Red is talking to Death about some of her favourite universes to be Death'' in. Red brings up the Final Destination universe. Death, being surprised at what he tells her about it, vanishes for a second before reappearing again, claiming she 'took care of it'.
• No Endor Holocaust: Passingly, Red mentions a spate of strange incidents related to sleep and dreaming. The main reason he wanted to talk to Death was to inform her where her brother Dream had been imprisoned.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Jirachi ends up slamming a 350-pound man through a wall.
• Power Limiter: Red uses the Power Anklets, Bracers, and Macho Brace when training, which all work to double his workload and speed his training in order to make up for his lack of previous formal training.
• Pun: The episode in which Red undergoes Training from Hell is called "Denzel Washington Movie"
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Red considers this during the transport of Amazo's parts. For his own part, he actually allowed Star Labs to study the items in his pack. Turns out many of them are just as effective on humans.
  • The Berries from the Pokemon Earth thrives under controlled farming, and promises to be a valuable source of medicine.
  • One reason that Mahmoud discards the question "What would Batman Do" since Batman has a huge store of super technology, alien artifacts, and magical items locked away in the batcave and does nothing with them.
• Shout-Out: Seeing as how the story is a self-insert fic, and the author is quite active on the Sufficient Velocity and Spacebattles forums, there are a few shoutouts to other such stories, such as With This Ring, and A Subtle Knife.
• Sixth Ranger: Red is this literally, joining before Artemis. His Pokemon are also essentially a mini-team in and of themselves, and tend to be used as such by Batman and Aqualad.
• Summon Bigger Fish: At the end of his talk with the meeting of Gods, he asks Hades to contact Death, from the Sandman comics.
• The Kid with the Leash/Olympus Mons: One of Red's Pokemon is Zapdos, explicitly said to be more like a living force of nature than a creature. It's worth noting that Red considers Zapdos the most powerful Pokemon on the team, which has three other legendaries, one of whom is Jirachi (ordinarily considered a Reality Warper).
  • He also has Jirachi and Heatran on his team, and the Eon Flute calls Latias.
• Training from Hell: In order to hang with even the Rookie team, Red undertakes training from Ted Grant(Wildcat).
  • Keeping in mind how this training is set up. He wears two Power Anklets on his legs and two Power Bracers on his wrists, with the Macho Brace on his body (See Power Limiter above). Then he trains for six hours straight alongside Wildcat, with a Chansey healing him throughout to keep him healthy. In essence, he is constantly working alongside a peak human while breaking his body and healing it for six hours a day. Ouch.
• Violent Glaswegian: In an omake where the Pokemon are turned human, Chesnaught has a nigh-incomprehensible scottish accent and the first thing he does (after mentioning that having a human body isn't as bad as he thought) was to challenge Superboy to a fight to see if he's still as tough as he thinks.
  • In the epilogue, Gloria is her memetic foulmouthed self.
• Weaksauce Weakness: Wildcat calls out how silly it is that Chesnaught can punch through concrete walls and fight him on an even playing field, but a burning building is completely beyond him (because Chesnaught is a grass type and burning buildings... well, fire).
• What Would X Do?: When he finds himself in the world of Young Justice, he immediately asks himself what Batman would do. When that answer proves less than useful, he switches it to "What would Wonder Woman do?"