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The code of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door treats moves in a modular way, whereby every move can technically be used by any entity, and flags are set to determine who can use which move. Of course, most moves are never intended to be used by most entities, but the game does not crash and sometimes reveals interesting interactions when flags are modified to let them be used this way.

Normally, Goombella can not use Tattle on Mario. However, if an enemy uses Tattle on him, we can see that Mario's image is a Goomba, the text is corrupted and Mario's location information does not exist. All of this is completely expected from an unintended interaction.

What is really of note here is that Mario's name actually appears correctly, and he is listed as entry 222 in the Tattle Log, but the Tattle Log in the game only has 124 entries. This suggests that the game assigns the numbers based on an internal list of entities, and that Mario is in the list further past the enemies Tattle can actually be used on.