Nothing Goes To Waste [Pokémon]

A Pokémon fan work, set long before the first trainers. Pokémon is the property of Nintendo, Creatures Inc. and GAME FREAK. No profit is made from this story. Bram cleans forty Magikarp before noon. Four copper a fish. Forty fish is rent. In Saltmoor nobody trains anything. You don't eat what pulls the cart, and you eat everything else — and Bram has spent twelve years learning which parts of which animal are worth the salt. Then a hunter brings down a Mankey from the ridge with a leg that healed crooked years ago, a body too fat for an animal that couldn't climb, and a belly full of berries that don't grow on that side of the hill. Somebody had been feeding it. For years. For nothing. Bram can't stop thinking about it. So he does what any butcher would do — he runs the experiment. He keeps back the worst fish of the day, two coppers of nothing, and drops it in the rain barrel out the back. He finds out what it eats. He finds out what makes it try. He is about to find out why nobody was ever supposed to.