Inkay was long believed to be a non-evolving pokemon, and consequently rarely trained. Its ability to daze opponents through ink was at times cultivated by trainers who had started training one before researching them adequately and did not want to abandon them, or who were more interested in unusual strategies than winning; it proved sorely outmatched even against many pokemon yet to fully evolve. Inkay were more typically seen in human company as scribes or writing utensils, for they could allow far higher words per minute than handwriting, and in the era before typewriters were the fastest means of written communication available.
Inkay's method of evolution is so bizarre and unusual that, despite the technical requirements existing for the millennia of writing in Kalos, Malamar was only discovered during Kalos' Enlightenment era. Upside-down writing had often been attempted over the years as a cipher or word game, and became something of a literary fad in this period, and writers, able to reach a wider market through mass copying, had become far less dependent on royal patronage. Some grew critical of Kalos' king, and faced nighttime raids from the secret police.
One particular critic of the government had moonlighted as a pokemon trainer, and his Inkay, although hardly an elite pokemon, was stronger than those sent to subdue him. In a single attack, this Inkay, still writing while on its head, defeated its first foe – and for the first time in Kalos's long history, an Inkay evolved . The police, baffled and wholly unequipped to deal with this newly discovered pokemon, were unable to catch up before the writer fled the country. He devoted himself to scientific study of its evolution, whose syllables he arranged as Malamar, and which he discovered could only evolve from Inkay when it triumphed while upside-down.