The sun shined down on us as we walked through the old city. The colors were more muted here, more natural. The bright colors you might find in a modern city were limited to the other sections. Even the pokemon center wasn't the classic shade of red but a duller shade to fit in better. Mal floated next to me as we walked back. He hardly even had a scratch on him. He'd weave around lamp posts and tree branches as we made our way through the oldest section of the city. He got a few odd looks as he burnt off excess energy. My digital duck had the zoomies and I was too happy to make him go back into a ball.
I couldn't stop smiling.
We had won.
It might have just been a gym trainer but it was something a bit more serious than the youngsters, bug catcher and the few rookie trainers I had faced in the past few days. But much more than that it had felt like the battles I had been used to.
Maybe I was being a bit overconfident but the battle showed me that some of the same approaches to battling from my old world could actually work here. Playing online you got a wide array of opponents. People approached battling in different ways and that was often reflected in their teams. It was kind of like a scale of least complex to most.
At the bottom you had the young kids that would use a team of legendaries and shinies with names advertising shady websites that they got through wonder trade. Just pure power without the knowledge or skill to use it. They had learned the complicated rock, paper, scissors of types and just spammed the strongest move in any given situation.
Next you had people that used the team they had gone through the game with. Usually more balanced overall and more of a threat than the kids. They knew what a status move was and mostly just wanted to have fun. They might switch a few times to try and adapt to the situation at hand.
Then there were the theme teams, a bit stronger than the casual player. They usually had a general gameplan going into a battle and the theme often gave some synergy to their team. They had made something cool and wanted to show it off, sometimes they crossed over into the more competitive side.
Past all that you got the more competitively minded folks. The pokemon were bred for battle; the right nature, ability, egg moves, EV trained and with held items. They knew what a defensive and offensive core was. They often spent time testing things in simulators constantly. At this point the game was no longer just the rock, paper, scissors of types and moves. It was more like one giant shifting puzzle.
On your team was a win condition. You just had to recognize whatever it was and then lead the battle to that point. Different roadblocks would be thrown up in your way to that endgame state. It forced you to solve a complicated dance of changing matchups as the opponent also tried to set up their own win condition. The puzzle and sometimes the win condition would change as you learned more about the other team and lost pokemon. This was usually the point where people started thinking not only of the current matchup on the field but the matchup two or three turns ahead. Then both players started messing with that. The entire time that was going on they were also dealing with hazards, status moves, and abilities. Things got more complicated from there as they both tried to solve the puzzle first.
Pokemon was one of the most complicated games I had ever played and I loved it.
I felt like I had solved one of those puzzles again. The battle with Rod was a simpler one even with the added complexity of movement but I had solved it. I had known what my win condition was and drove the battle to it. I had even done it without being obvious about Mal's Conversion shenanigans.
I could do this.
I could actually do this.
I could be a proper trainer.
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An hour later found me in my room at the pokemon center with my team taken care of. Dunsparce slept in the sunlight from the window while Callie snacked on a Lum berry. Mal was somewhere inside my computer, he had almost finished bringing the simulator over.
Violet was hitting a bit of a lull in trainers and I had actually been able to get a room. The start of season rush had cleared somewhat, either trainers had gotten their badge or they moved on to train and try again later. Some of the locals had gotten theirs and the bragging rights they wanted. The lull wouldn't last though. Stragglers from Cherrygrove as well as a wave of trainers that had already gotten their first gym badge elsewhere would soon start to trickle in.
For now I started to take care of work I had been slacking on.
The blog had gotten a few more views in the past few days. About a hundred spread out over four posts, how many of those were actual people I had no idea. In my old world about forty percent of all web activity was just bots. Add in that some people might view a page multiple times and it was hard to actually tell. My first post had almost double the views of the third post. By my latest post the views had leveled off and seemed steady, it seemed like those people might stick around.
As for comments they had been very rare. Most of them were about the music on my first post and my latest about Violet City. But I had two new ones, and I couldn't help but smile at the first.
Joey had found my blog and he had gotten a second Rattata, an Alolan one. I typed up a reply congratulating him and outlined a basic FEAR strategy. I hadn't actually seen the strategy mentioned in my browsing of the pokenet. In the games however Joey ended up with a very similar moveset for his Raticate. I'm sure someone had to have come up with it before in this world. The other option was that Joey came up with it himself. I held back a chuckle. That would be kind of funny and rather impressive. If Youngster Joey was just so skilled with Rattata's he discovered the Fucking Evil Annoying Rodent strat by himself.
The other comment was Chaz pointing out he had been right about Unovans having good music and thanking me for the contest music I had sent him. I guess I really was perpetuating some sort of stereotype now. The music files from the blog did have a fair amount of downloads. The first one even had more downloads than I had views on the post by a fair margin. That actually felt pretty good. The music was a key part of the games and it was nice to spread it into the world it was made for.
If Mr. P thought this travel blog was gonna work to help groom me into some sort of an agent for the cult he was very mistaken. It was more like I was sending out messages into the void that was the pokenet. If I was lucky I might be able to fill up a bus with the amount of readers I actually had. This was never going to be anything like his travel show at this rate.
Although I suspected the blog served another purpose. I was pretty much giving out weekly updates about my progress to the cult, who I assumed were also most of my readers. As long as they did something about Cyrus and let me continue on my Journey they could keep reading. A blog was a small price to pay for that.
Once again I met my foe the blank page. Our struggle began anew as I stared at my laptop screen…
An email took me out of the staring contest. My showdown with Falkner had been scheduled for Saturday at four. That seemed a bit late in the day for it. Saturday also meant I would be here in Violet even longer. I had the rest of today, tomorrow and the day after to kill before I'd get to face him. I sighed, I was kind of itching to get moving after being in Violet the past few days. On the other hand, I could get some more training done and I still wanted to check out the Sprout tower and Earl's trainer school. Sleeping in an actual bed again was also nice.
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But…
I was so close to the Ruins of Alph. I had to visit them, I just needed to get my hands on a radio and some way to record.
I shook my head.
The Ruins were not going anywhere. They'd been there for some fifteen hundred years and would still be there in a few days. I'd be able to hear the Song of the Unown. The Unown would be the closest I would ever get to hearing the real thing. I could also get a recording of Ho-Oh's cries. Now that was something I think the cult would enjoy. Keeping them at least somewhat happy seemed like a good idea. Maybe offer it up as a reward along with the location of the Lost Bell if they did deal with Cyrus?
Was trying to manipulate a cult a bad idea?
Yet, I would be trying to manipulate them for some pretty good reasons.There was still Lysandre and a bunch of other threats that had to be dealt with. Maybe I could have them rescue N from his indoctrination by Ghestis. They needed someone pure of heart after all. If I had messed up Silver and the Protagonist's path to being pure of heart then N was one hell of a back up.
Wait…
Was I really considering having a cult of phoenix worshiping shrine maidens kidnap the boy king of a team based off of the Knights Templar and the Catholic Church? Would that start some sort of religious war? I'm pretty sure Team Plasma straight up crucified the gym leaders in the manga.
I… I might want to rethink that.
The attachment of the email caught my attention. It was a video of my match. I sent a copy to Mr. P as I watched. It was actually pretty good. The Rotom had kept a good track of things and most stuff was in frame. It would zoom in as moves landed and I watched over the ones that hit Mal closely. Whenever Mal changed types his eyes would often glow a different color. That tell was still there and we hadn't been able to get rid of it yet. It didn't seem obvious what exactly we were doing but sooner or later someone would figure it out.
I nodded, that would work for an entry. A recap of the battle and some of my thought process. Maybe I could talk about Natu as well? That had been the biggest challenge of the battle.
Eventually hours later with the sun already set the entry was done and posted.
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The next day we were back on the training fields.
Dunsparce and Callie sparred with each other as I worked with Mal. There really wasn't much more I could do for the two of them with the time I had. Dunsparce was a few levels away from Ancient Power. She would probably have it by the time we reached Bugsy. As for Callie her only real option for range besides Fling would have been Swift which would need a TM for it to be ready for Falkner. I had avoided TMs so far. Their cost had been what kept me away but looking at Mal I was starting to come around to the idea of them.
Mal hovered, his eyes shining a light blue. The air condensed around him and a thin layer of frost often formed over him. It quickly melted in the sun and dripped onto the ground below. We were banging our heads against the wall that was Ice Beam again. We had been trying to learn this move for over a month now. We even had Bubba Mr.P's Slowbro demonstrate it countless times for us. Our practice had lapsed a bit when we were on the road but even with the past few days of training we still hadn't gotten it.
"Gon!" with a cry Mal released the energy he had been building.
A gentle breeze blew and a few snowflakes formed before quickly melting. Each attempt brought what seemed to be more snowflakes into existence. Mal could get to this point consistently as long as he was Ice Type but he still couldn't seem to focus the Ice Type energy into a beam.
"We're getting closer buddy. Keep it up! Try focusing the energy like you do with Thundershock."
Mal nodded as he started to focus again. I turned back to my notebook and recorded the attempt. I had plenty of time to theorize and record data with this ongoing project of ours.
He had to be getting close to figuring out Ice Beam. Either that or I had been approaching the whole inner energy stuff that pokemon had completely wrong. I had tried to cheese Mal learning Ice Beam by having him learn it as an Ice type. It was my hope that if it worked then he could learn other moves using similar methods.
It was all based around the theory that the energy within pokemon was aligned to their types. This was a fairly common and widespread view of typing in my old world and this one. That typing was not only a physical property of the pokemon but a property of their personal internal energy as well.
Something not as well known was that Pokemon had Infinity Energy within them. It was what allowed all the funky physics of this world to work. So given that they had essentially infinite energy the biggest limit on pokemon had to be how much of that energy they could output at any given time. In other words pokemon had an endless ocean of energy but only a faucet for it all to go through.
STAB: Same Type Attack Bonus seemed to fit with those two concepts rather nicely.
Moves that matched a Pokemon's type were stronger. They seemed able to output more power into moves that matched their type. That faucet of energy opened at full blast. Moves that did not match their type were weaker. Assuming that their internal energy was typed then they would have to convert it somehow. It was like forcing that flow from the facet through a filter. They likely lost energy somewhere in this process and that would explain why off-type moves were weaker. That was a rather big assumption but it seemed like it could fit.
In my mind the process of using an off type move probably looked something like this. The pokemon pulled on their internal energy, converted into the correct type, manipulated the energy and then the move was used.
That conversion step seemed like it would be the hardest part of the process and so we were trying to skip it. If the internal energy of pokemon did match their type then with Mal as an ice type the energy should already be converted. He wouldn't have to expend effort trying to convert Normal energy into Ice type. All his stamina and concentration would go into actually trying to use the move.
We seemed... to be getting closer, but I could be wrong. All of this was just a theory at the end of the day. Pokeworld didn't have an answer to how exactly the types worked and the mechanics of pokemon's internal energy. At least not one that was public. It wasn't like I could look up terms like Infinty Energy on the pokenet.
Still I felt a connection to types and my current theory was better than Lonnie's explanation for it all. Pokemon worked through 'The power of God and Anime' according to him.
Actually now that I thought of it he actually had a name for that 'power of God'. He called it Azoth which is also what he called Infinity Energy. The word was special somehow? Something about how it was the beginning and end of alphabets? A and Z, Alpha and Omega, Alef and Tav, but Tav was a TH sound for some weird reason. The only Azoth I could recall in the games was Project Azoth in the Hoenn remakes. Team Aqua and Magma wanted to return the world back to the beginning. I couldn't quite recall his rant about it all.
But what did any of that have to do with some sort of 'power of God'?