Unlike in the games where pokemon only showed up in certain places depending on their species this was reality and many species of pokemon could be found in places that suited them but was far from where they would be found in the game. Vulpix in this case tended to live anywhere that was decently cold or oddly enough very hot. Iron town for example was built near one of the "hot" spots of the Hoenn region that was a fiery and scorched place from the regular up flow of lava. This thankfully was a known location where a skulk of Vulpix and Ninetales lived.-

I set off from the town in the direction of this hot spot while also making sure to release both Gaia and Vulcan when far enough from it not to be fined. We got some stares from the town patrols on the perimeter of the tall strong fences of the town. As much as people would prefer it to be otherwise it wasn't all sunshine when living in a world of pokemon as sometimes an asshole will do something to piss off the nearby pokemon and as a result cause a break.-

Breaks were what happened when the nearby pokemon gathered together and decided to attack the nearest human settlement for whatever reason. More often than not it was the humans fault they happened as someone would steal an egg from the most powerful tribe nearby or steal an item or simply go on a killing spree for a specific pokemon species and fuck up the balance of the ecosystem. Whatever the case they were very bad news most of the time as very seldom do the pokemon comprising the break want to talk about the issue first before choosing violence.-

That was where these fences came in as they were very resistant to pokemon attacks in order to allow the residents to bunker down or flee from a break. Anyways we traveled to the north east of the town and I noticed the temperature and environment slowly start to shift. The air went from very warm and humid to swelteringly hot and dry while the plants pretty much vanished as the ground turned to hard black volcanic stone with cracks that spewed intense skin meltingly hot currents of air. Both Tank and myself were very uncomfortable in such an environment while Gaia and Vulcan were right at home.-

I was thankful that I remembered to keep a few empty potion bottles around to fill with water at this point as the spray nozzle made it easy to mist up Tank and I to stay cool. I might have fairly high resistance to heat but I wasn't a pokemon so heat in the one hundred and beyond range was miserable for me. Tank wasn't much better as he was both a bug type weak to fire as well as usually found in a forest where the temps were pretty low.-

To save him from unnecessary suffering I placed him in his pokeball at this point and headed further into the area. It didn't take me long to find traces of the Vulpix and Ninetales in the area as they left behind fur on some of the sharp rocks that they seemed to like brushing themselves against to comb out the shed fur on them. My first meeting with a Vulpix in this area didn't go so great as I stumbled upon a couple in mid "Act" and didn't need to understand pokespeech to know I got cursed out vividly.-

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Vulpix were actually fairly normal looking as far as appearance was concerned as they basically were medium breed dog sized foxes with dark rust colored fur and a puffy crest of fur on the top of their heads. The interesting thing about the species was that they had two way to evolve into a Ninetales. The first was through a fire stone which was very straight forward and thus didn't need any explanation. The second however was very hard to pull off for the species as they don't get the long lifespans until after they evolved.-

See depending on their strength and skill a Vulpix will have between one and eight different tails. The very powerful ones have eight and if they push themselves even further they gain the ninth tail and evolve. The difference between the two different evolutions was like night and day as a stone evolution had an innate weakness unless a grade five or six stone was used in which case they were stronger. But in the effort evolution the resulting Ninetales was head and shoulders more powerful in all regards than a stone evolved one. The reason for this was the multiplicative effect of evolution on ones strength or traits.-

See a Ninetales evolved from a effort based method was already as powerful as a standard stone evolved Ninetales BEFORE it evolved. This means that after evolving that power basically triples which makes that method way superior. I myself was rather unwilling to try and evolve a Vulpix with this method due to how excruciatingly slow it was to accomplish. I'm talking nearly two decades of back breaking training to accomplish slow. The upsides were simply not worth it in my opinion as I'd rather just buy a grade five or six stone and get similar results in a fraction of the time.-

The currently known most powerful Ninetales was a very special case in which it was trained to the absolute limit but used an everstone to not evolve after getting it's ninth tail. Instead it and it's trainer waited for a grade six firestone to enter the market before using the stone AND the effort to evolve. The resulting Ninetales was the only one known to actually directly step into the realm of pseudo legendary power after evolving. To put that into perspective EVERY pseudo legendary is rated at grade eight danger level once fully evolved and that's without training.-

That same Ninetales was considered one of the guardian pokemon of Johto these days and was at the peak of champion rank power publicly. I had a suspicion that it was actually more powerful than that but the pokemon league didn't want people to know that such power was obtainable. Got sorta off topic there for a moment but anyways I finally found a newborn Vulpix after a lot of searching and started the grueling process of bribing the thing until it let me catch it without a fight.-

As it turned out learning a move from Vulcan was all the bribery required for the small one tailed fire type. The move it learned was sunny day because I honestly think every grass and fire type needs to know this move. For grass types this plus synthesis and solar beam is a kick ass combination that covers buffs , attacks and healing in a nice neat manner. For fire types it was because the move boosts all fire type moves which is kinda the whole point of having one in my opinion. Don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with a fire type knowing other move types but a fire type will almost always be better at their own typing.