Chapter 13: "The Secret of the Demon Dog"

It took a while to get used to Scooby-Doo's speech impediment, but with the help of Kurama's quick translations, Scooby eventually managed to tell them the story of his life.

Kurama's deductions had been mostly on the money (but that was to be expected). Scooby was a low-level demon, which meant the ironically dog-eat-dog Demon World was no picnic for Scooby-Doo. His psionic abilities weren't good for fighting, best-used instead to brainwash weaklings into leaving him alone. When his powers failed to do that, they could confuse the senses of stronger demons long enough for Scooby to run away when the going got really tough. The bit with the hallway they'd witnessed? Yeah, Scooby had the art of bamboozlement mastered—but surviving wasn't living, at least as far as Scooby figured. He wanted comfort. Warmth. Happiness. And he wasn't going to find those things in Demon World.

So he left.

When he heard that one of the random portals to Human World had opened nearby, long before the barrier between worlds permanently came down thanks to Yusuke and company, he took advantage of the opportunity and hightailed it the hell out of dodge. Scooby ran to Human World, where humans as weak as or even weaker than Scooby lived, and he'd slunk about on the fringes of their society—observing and watching and waiting for a chance to integrate himself—until he realized something. Something big.

Scooby-Doo looked like one of the dogs of Human World.

And do you know what humans seem to love more than almost anything else in the whole entire Human World?

Yeah. That's right.

Dogs.

If Scooby walked down the street, people tried to feed him. Pet him. Give him a place to sleep. And if people didn't immediately offer him those things of their own accord, it was as easy (and as tasty) as pie to use his powers to make them want to give him Scooby whatever it was he wanted. And yeah, sure, there were dogcatchers who tried to round up strays out there, but they were easy to confuse and evade with a quick burst of psychic willpower.

Not that his life was all roses once he got to Human World and made his convenient discovery. It was hard to get humans to overlook the fact that he could talk, for instance, and some bits of his anatomy didn't quite match up with that of a dog (dog tails are not typically prehensile, a fact Scooby learned the hard way). People often ran away screaming when they realized he wasn't just a dog, but necessity is the mother of intention, and eventually Scooby learned to manipulate humans with enough practice. A constant field of psychic influence did the blend-in trick nicely.

Let's just say Scooby took the phase "Man's Best Friend" very, very literally once he figured out how to make everyone love him.

And that's when Scooby met Shaggy.

Meeting Shaggy had been an accident. Scooby had slipped up, letting his psychic field lapse long enough to give himself away, and he had been on the run from a particularly nasty research scientist when he crash-landed in Shaggy's basement, desperate for a place to hide. But he'd been too frazzled to use his powers to make Shaggy accept it when he started talking, and for a minute Scooby thought he'd have to go on the run again… but Shaggy didn't bat an eye. He just grinned, called Scooby "one groovy pupperoo," and offered him a slice of pizza, which Scooby dazedly—but happily—accepted.

Of course, Shaggy had been a bit more concerned about the whole this-dog-can-talk thing when his marijuana high started to wear off, but that wasn't the point. Shaggy was nice, and for just a little while, he had accepted Scooby-Doo—every last, weird part of him— without any kind of hesitation.

Scooby had never experienced that before. Never in his entire life had he been given such a warm welcome. Shaggy had offered food and a comfy bed without needing to be brainwashed, and to Scooby, that was…

That was…

There weren't any words to describe precisely what that was, nor what that meant to Scooby Doo.

And so, Scooby-Doo stayed.

And Shaggy—loving, wonderful, accepting, food-giving Shaggy—never gave him a reason to leave.

NOTE

Rather than subject you to many-hundred words of "Ran ren rye rent roo rhe Ruman Rorld," which would get SUPER OBNOXIOUS SUPER FAST, I just wrote this out in plain English. Hope that's chill. It gets the point across, at least.