As a result I ignored the matter of shadow pokemon as well as shady criminal group and familiarized myself with Pyrite town. It looked just as bad as I had been told as the buildings looked like someone had welded scrap metal together and left it to rust. The street was covered in red dirt and grime and besides the few stone buildings everything looked broken down. Even the pokemart looked like a single solid hit would cause it to fall over. Like you would expect from such a place the inhabitants were rather free in how they acted.-

In the open square of the town there was even trainers just hanging out to battle in the middle of the area for fun. Lawless was not exactly accurate to describe the town but it was more along the line of lacking laws instead. That sounded similar but the difference was that these people did follow the rules for the most part but just that the rules themselves were rather lacking. The funny thing was that I got challenged to a battle on the grounds that I felt like a strong trainer.-

The look on the peoples faces when I casually reached into my pocket and tossed Hades keystone onto the ground was hilarious. To them it looked like I had reacted to a battle challenge by tossing a random rock onto the area of the battle. That changed however when Hades smoky form surged out of the keystone menacingly with it's many eyes all staring down the opponents pokemon. Needless to say nobody wanted to challenge me to a battle after Hades chewed through that persons whole team like it was oatmeal. Assuming that everyone here was roughly the same level I couldn't blame them as none of them were even ace trainers and in front of a true blue elite like Hades helplessness was to be expected.-

The highlight of my visit to the town however was watching Wes and Rui following what was obviously a grunt of the shady organization to the building they were operating out of from the colosseum. It was like watching cockroaches scatter as the duo tore through the forces in the building like a force of nature. I would have been blind not to immediately figure out who Miror B was out of all this group. -

He was a dark skinned tall and lean man with a massive afro that was white on one side and red on the other. His outfit was this ungodly gaudy golden thing with stars on it and yellow leather suede shoes. His appearance alone tempted me to take him out but I resisted that righteous urge since I was on vacation and that would very much ruin it. It was amusing to see the looks on Wes and Rui's faces when they came out of the building and just saw me leaning against the wall across the way with a smirk.-

"What are you doing here?" Rui asked curiously. "Originally just came to familiarize myself with the town and look for any juicy information. I noticed you two carving a path through that building before sending that abomination Miror B packing. If I wasn't on vacation and you two obviously having it handled I probably would have cleared them out myself, probably would have left a lot of dead bodies in the process though." I said casually. "You would have killed them!?" Rui exclaimed in horror but Wes didn't seem surprised at all.-

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Don't act so surprised, I am a league paid cleaner whose job is to deal with people like that when I come across them. Naturally the best way to get rid of an infestation like that is to exterminate all the members. Like I said though I'm on vacation and you two clearly have it handled so I probably won't be dropping any bodies unless the organization comes to bother me personally." I said calmly and noticed that while Rui was conflicted by what I said Wes clearly agreed with me. This spoke of experience in this regard and made me a little curious about his past but I didn't pry.

"Anyways I'll be heading to Agate village tomorrow to chase a lead on what I came to this region to figure out but feel free to drop by my home since it's all set up, I've already instructed Gaia to let you through." I said before releasing Rune and Tank and flying back to the Hub. There was no point in me checking out the colosseum since the most recent tournament had finished today and I doubted there was another set to begin right afterwards. I also had no reason to stick around town either as I had accomplished my objectives for this visit.-

'Lets see, I've gotten a contact in Phenac, Pyrite and Gateon and scouted those areas out so that just leaves Agate village and Mt. Battle. Once those are completed I'll have the first part of this chain quest completed.' I thought as we flew above the desert rapidly. It wasn't particularly strange that it was taking me so little time to complete this stage of the chain quest since this was all prep work for the harder shit no doubt coming later. This was all standard entrenchment protocol, set up a base camp, scout the local settlements-

Set up a reliable information network with at least one set of ears in each settlement and obtain a reliable method of communication. This was the rough outline of the steps literally any long term project in another area follows more or less. After these steps came the more specific tasks such as surveying for ancient ruins or getting an accurate read off on the factions in the region. You may be asking why I am not simply just x-raying the ground constantly and the answer is simply that that method was inefficient and time consuming to do.-

Sure at the end I'd have a vastly superior understanding of the underground of the region but you need to understand that I am merely one dude and this was a whole ass region with many kilometers of land to cover fully. If I were to follow that path I'd be here for decades at the minimum. If there was some amazing payday at the end of that I might be okay with that since I have a lifespan of about two hundred or so years thanks to my race as a high human.-

This meant that a decade was no longer an expensive one tenth of my total lifespan but a more acceptable one twentieth. Basically a decade for a normal human was only worth five years to me. This meant that long term projects were not life long projects for me unlike for a normal human. Ironically this meant that I was also better suited to being a researcher as I could conduct research for much longer without age becoming an issue. Anyways the point I was making was that while I could spend so long here combing the region I'd prefer to take the much faster route of hunting for nuggets of information from myths, near forgotten history and rumors.