After five days, we had easily settled into the routine we ran on our first day in Grey Lake. We woke up, ate something, and trained.

In three days Cape learned Brick Break and moved on to Pin Missile. He also began to take lessons from Mesa to learn Rock Tomb.

Mesa, Cape, Cryogonal, and I watched a Conference battle between a Rhydon and a Rapidash one night since I wanted to show Mesa how he could use Rock Tomb in battle. Cape ended up liking what the Rhydon had shown and asked Mesa if he could teach him, to which the Baltoy agreed.

Mesa, for his part, was mastering his known moves and doing his second-level puzzle to grow his psychic energy.

He had learned a lot of moves in a short amount of time so now was the time to consolidate them. Mesa was practicing so hard that he would probably reach the beginning of the fourth level by the time we reached Violet City.

The only thing he would suffer from would be a lack of battle experience, but we could resolve that with battling sessions when we joined up with the kids of Project.

Jungle learned his powder moves and then swiftly moved towards trying to accomplish a successful Sunny Day.

He made some progress but became stuck on that front so I suggested that he train another move to switch things up, he sullenly agreed and was now alternating between trying to learn Sunny Day, Seed Bomb, and Acid Spray, the last one he liked way better than Poison Powder since he didn’t need to create powder, which was the part he found annoying.

Valley’s list of moves she wanted to learn included Encore, Tail Slap, Facade, Thunder Wave, Trailblaze, and Knock Off. She was focusing on the first three for now since for the others we would need more specialized training. I had to put my foot down to not let her “try” my solar charger to train Thunder Wave.

She, as always, spent time battling Cape, their fights were extremely one-sided but at least Valley was learning some good battling principles, one that was literally being beaten into her was to not try the same thing twice when it didn’t work the first time, which I found funny since that was the first lesson I taught Cape with the help from Alice and Spike.

Meanwhile, the hopefully future member of the team was breezing through ice moves. The Cryagonal learned Aurora Beam in one day, and Freeze-Dry in another. The winter climate really helped him learn fast. He was now dividing his time between learning Rain Dance and Ice Beam, which was an advanced move for his type.

In the afternoon, my pokemon decided to battle.

Mesa built a small arena near the camp, and every afternoon at least three spars took place there. Cape was in first place, undefeated against the others, then came Mesa, who only lost to Cape and sometimes Valley, then Valley, and finally Jungle, the Bulbasaur had not focused so much on fighting and was trying to catch up.

Cape, however, was not satisfied with his companions and began to roam around the lake, never too far and never alone, to challenge some wild pokemon. His most consistent partner was the Sealeo I saw the first time I took a stroll near Grey Lake with Jungle and Mesa.

Cape had actually wanted to challenge the Walrein, the boss of the group. But the ice pokemon just laughed Cape off, and I had to agree with him, as strong as Cape was he was not enough for a third-stage evolution.

Most people thought that evolution made a pokemon stronger, and that was somewhat true but people sometimes got it twisted, pokemon evolved because they became strong enough to evolve, not the contrary. And that Walrein certainly looked like it could throw down against some powerful mons in the Conference.

The Cryogonal chose to not participate in the spar so he stayed with me in camp while I read Brian’s journal, and copied the useful things I could pick up.

“Notes from Year Two” would be a treasure trove if only it wasn’t such a mess. Thirteen-year-old Brian wrote about anything and everything that grabbed his attention without order or logic, jumping from topic to topic, rambling about this and that.

One page might have musings about his battles for the day, and being two-year trainer battles meant that, most times, they had something interesting. The next page could have only two vague sentences about something he discovered while training his pokemon, most things were, of course, about dark types and dark-type moves.

He knew a lot of dark-type moves, how to train, and how to use them, I copied them all.

However, the two most interesting parts were, first, about the Gym Leaders, for all of his disorganization, kid Brian had pages and pages detailing the things he learned about the Gym Leaders. Of course, the leaders of nine years ago would not be the same. The only ones that still were active from that time were Pryce, Chuck, and Morty, all three were written about in the journal in detail, but all the new ones were not in the journal.

I knew that Bugsy became Gym Leader four years ago and I remember the news channels talking about Lance’s cousin Clair taking over the Blackthorn Gym from Sky Scar’s son six years ago. The rest I didn’t remember the circumstances, but, anyway, I wrote everything about every Gym Leader, even the old ones. Some stuff here was too, in general, useful, I could even train my pokemon with some of the stuff here.

The second interesting thing was how Brian wrote about dark types.

Most times he wrote like a regular trainer, detailing good and bad matchups, creating plans to deal with his disadvantages, and planning the order in which he would use them in battles, be it a Gym match, tournament match, or even normal on-the-road ones. But other times, he just went on writing about his feelings and what his “intuition” told him would work or not.

There were two times were he wrote five full pages of poetry about dark types, and by what he wrote, he must have been writing those deep into the night.

These poetries were at the same time pointless and fascinating. It's almost as if he wrote a lot of fluffy and pomp around some genial sentences that gave him clues to some big idea about dark-type pokemon.

After reading for some time I concluded that he wrote the poetry and, after that, he read them to glimpse concepts from what he wrote, almost as if these concepts were buried inside his mind and he used poetry like a form of meditation to take out what he only knew on his subconscious.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

That… Was very interesting.

I noted the poetry down and continued reading. I was able to read about two-thirds of the journal until day six.

-

On our sixth day at Grey Lake, I was reading Brian’s journal after lunch when Cryogonal floated up and looked to the other side of the lake. I felt all my pokemon get closer to me from where they were fighting in the arena.

I looked up as two men approached from the treeline on the other side of the lake. Both men were over twenty and dressed in winter training clothes. Both had pokemon at their side, one, the taller of the two, had a Primeape and the other a Wobbuffet.

They got closer to us and stopped just outside the range of the Cryogonal, which was the pokemon with the most range out of my team.

“Hi, can we help you?” I said

“Hello, kid.” shouted the taller of the two, he had black hair and red clothes. He was the one with the Primeape. “What are you doing here in this freezing lake?”

“Training my Cryogonal,” I gestured to the ice pokemon. “What about you two?”

“We've come to catch some ice pokemon.” The blonde one smiled, the Wobbuffet seemed amicable, but again all of them were. “You know, we were thinking of spending a couple of days training while we search for a strong ice pokemon.”

“Yeah.” The taller one said. “But you know how it goes, secret training and techniques, we don’t want rivals to see what we're doing, right? We were coming and going to see if you would be gone so we could use this space to train. But, you know, you’ve been here for almost a week…”

I would need to stall, if what Brian told me was true he might be some kilometers away so I would need to wait a bit.

“Well, I guess we spend enough time here, right team?” I said to my pokemon who nodded back. “Could you just go around to see the pokemon on the lake? We just need some time to eat something, pick up our things, and then we will be going.”

The blond bowed with a smile. “Thank you, junior. We expect to see you at the Conference.”

The other guy lightly rolled his eyes at the blond. They began to slowly walk away while chatting between themselves. I could see that they were acting since they were doing a really poor job at it.

I began to take out some Pokefood and put it in bowls for the pokemon. Then I began to make myself a sandwich while my pokemon took down my tent and put away everything. After ten minutes had passed the guys were back and this time they were not walking, they were rushing towards us and their faces didn’t look happy.

“Look, little shit.” The blond guy. “I don’t know…

A rush of air passed through all of us and we all fell to the ground, then we heard a big sound, as if something had hit the ground hard. I looked up at the same time as the two guys looked back.

A huge Corviknight, a steel type most commonly found in Galar, had hit the ground behind the trainers forming a crater. It was glaring at the two of them and their pokemon. The steel type slowly raised himself from the ground with its legs, which made him stand at about two times the blond guy. It seemed to enjoy the fear in the trainer’s body.

The two pokemon froze for one second but quickly made the dumb decision to jump on the Corviknight. The Primeape and the Wobbuffet glowed and leaped at the Corviknight. The bird pokemon extended a single wing and whipped it forward. A flash of black later and both pokemon were on the ground, fainted.

Their trainers ran to the side, towards the treeline, but a Weavile jumped from the Corviknight’s back and passed its leg under the two men who fell on the ground. They stopped trying to get up when the pokemon passed his claws close by their faces.

Claps began to resound from behind me, and when I turned there was Brian, as calm as he had been when we met in the forest. He glanced towards the two men on the ground and smiled.

“Good job, Scott,” Brian said. Zoroark appeared at the side of the men with a rope and began to tie them up. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“No, but I was a little shaken when they were coming in my direction.” I glared at him.

“Well, Corvi made his best time to reach you.” When Zoroark dragged the two tied men towards Brian he clapped his hands like he got a present on Christmas. “The goods were delivered, now I just need to… Get down.”

Cape was a second slower than Brian. He grabbed me by my waist and pulled me back just as a Hitmonchan exploded from the tree line and tried to jab Brian.

That jab would have destroyed Brian if it wasn’t for a green shield popping in front of him.

Both attacks collided and I saw both the attack and the barrier being distorted by the force of the collision. It seemed as if gravity was trying to snap back the point where both smashed together. The green Protect emitted a groaning sound and the Hitmonchan winced hard.

As soon as the force from the punch ended the shield went down and a Crabhammer from a Crawdaunt would have smashed the fighting type’s head clean into the ground if he hadn’t put a guard up in the last second.

The Crawdaunt had just come into existence beside the Hitmonchan.

As it was the Hitmonchan was just slammed back. Its feet slid down on the ground, opening large trails in the snow.

“Thanks, Umbreon,” Brian said. it was important to notice that while Brian had screamed he had not seemed concerned for himself at all, In fact, he didn’t even stumble from the shockwave that the Hitmonchan’s Mega Punch caused as it met the Umbreon’s Protect. “Now, who is trying to meddle in official Government business? And more importantly, my business.”

While he was talking, Zoroark appeared beside me and, in a move faster than I could see, clicked in all my pokeballs. All my pokemon, including Cryogonal, appeared shocked as they were recalled to their pokeball.

A man walked out from the forest, where the Hitmonchan had jumped from.

He wore a business suit, and had slick black hair and dark glasses, on his belt there were several Ultraballs, just not as much as Brian’s. When he got closer he seemed surprised and he took off his glasses as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

“Brian?” He then laughed. “My friend, how many years has it been? I didn’t even know you were in Johto again.”

I looked over at Brian. I couldn’t see his face and he was in complete silence. The man who called out for him seemed content to wait and my anxiety spiked, maybe they were buddies.

Then a maniac laugh began.

It started slow, like a whisper, but soon it grew and then began to build up and up until it seemed like it wasn’t going to stop. I couldn't see Brian’s face but I could see his mouth wide open as he laughed. I noticed that Zoroark at my side flinched at the sound.

The Weavile, Umbreon, and Crawdaunt gathered around Brian just as the ultraballs on Brian’s belt opened.

Red lights jumped from them and assembled around Brian. The first one out was a bulky and flaming Houndoom with even more curved horns than normal, then a floating, grinning Sableye, a big Skuntank, an enormous Slaking, and a Bisharp with crossed arms.

“Guys, remember when I complained about this mission?” Brian’s voice was drowned in amusement. His pokemon glanced at the man and most seemed to smile as wide as Brian. “I take back everything I said, the legendaries are at our side if this mission is leading us to Roger. And you Basil, I'm going to break you until you can only open your mouth, and then I will only want to hear a single thing from you, Rocket scum.”

The man, Basil, seemed to become a little more serious as his posture leaned forward, like a predator about to charge.

“You talk a lot, Brian. Let's see if you can finally handle that big mouth that you’ve always had.”

From the forest behind him appeared his pokemon.

A raging Primeape, a wall of muscles in the form of a Machamp, A spinning Hitmontop and a twisting Hitmonlee, A jumping Breloom, and a laughing Toxicroak joined the Hitmoncham who maintained his guard up in front of the man called Basil.

Finally, a Hariyama jumped forward and smashed into the ground in front of the group, he glared at the Slaking as he smashed a fist into the ground.

By my side stood Corviknight and Zoroark while both groups looked at each other.

Weavile, Houndoom, Umbreon, Crawdaunt, Sableye, Cacturn, Slaking, Skuntank, and Bisharp on one side.

Hitmonchan, Primeape, Machamp, Hitmontop, Hitmonlee, Hariyama, Breloom, and Toxicroak on the other.

I looked from one group to another. One was a group of aggressive dark types who followed a maniac dark type master, the other was apparently a Rocket, a possible master, who had no qualms about squashing a human with a Mach Punch.

Where the hell did I end up in!?