Expedition 2.8

October 2nd, 2022.

We had spent only another day or two in the Wildland area before departing back to the city, buying supplies and moving onto Route 302. The start of the route was the same mix of montane forest, but the pokémon were somewhat weaker and more controlled with the regular patrol of Rangers and trainers.

Training was pretty lax after the battle, but both Mirko and Jericho had increased their potential, breaking into Light Blue without a sweat while Llayda was working up into Deep Green and should catch up in another week. Being part of the Fast Growth Rate group meant her potential could increase rapidly up to a point.

Different pokémon were sorted into different groups when it came to how fast they learned and could grow their power. Different plateaus, different exponential factors when it came to learning, expanding their elemental power or simply physical growth as a whole.

At a very basic level, growth rate when it comes to experience and accumulation of Energy could be explained as something similar to the general rule of thumb of ten thousand hours of practice to obtain mastery in a subject. Medium Fast is considered the average, ten thousand hours (hypothetically) is needed to turn many Pokémon into a champion-level pokémon, a monster who could fight armies and crush cities with some spit and gumption.

Which is where it becomes easy to understand the sheer gap between elite trainers and common trainers. It's bitter work, months, years of life has to be dedicated to reach that stage of power, that stage of maturity and sheer martial prowess and ability. Most people, they basically took a year off of school to earn two to four badges and went home wiser and happier. Enough to get their pokémon to a 2-star, 3-star or 4-star level, and stronger than the average wild pokémon.

Most Elemental Trios were part of the Medium Slow group, letting them grow fast early on before tapering off to a rate slightly slower than Medium Fast group pokémon like Mirko, with Jericho being another member of the former.

Llayda was a Fast growth member, so when it came to accumulated power she’d grow slower but catch up past 1-star strength, and would only need say 8000 hours of training to become champion-level. Not literally, it was more an analogy, more a way of describing how it works than a perfect reflection of reality.

A dragonite in this metaphor would be a slow learner, taking more time to reach 8-star than other pokémon though their sheer power makes up for it. It’s a very complicated group categorization and I largely ignored it outside where it was helpful in training.

Anyways.

It had been a productive few days, Jericho had learned Toxic and was well on his way to adding Poison Jab into his moveset. Sludge Bomb was a future idea since as a nidoking his special Power was superior to his physical Strength once Hustle transformed into Sheer Force. I’d need to specifically see whether he could keep aspects of his abilities into his final form… I’ll have to look up some research on that won’t I?

Buneary had succeeded in learning Thunder Punch and Jump Kick while Return was… a work in progress. I had also noted another growth spurt, measuring her at about 64 centimeters tall including her ears which were leaning more as they used to, so they didn’t make up as much of her height as they had previously. Her mass was now a solid eight kilograms.

Jericho was pretty big too, about sixty centimeters at the shoulders and a meter at the head with a body mass of about thirty five kilograms. Which was a bit frightening, since the average nidorino weighed about 20 kilograms and roughly tripled in size during Evolution, starting off as a four foot seven midget and growing to six to seven feet tall over months or years. Once I found a Moon Stone, he’d be about 5’4 and grow into an eight foot giant massing some eight hundred pounds.

Luckily pokémon often face the same metabolic rules when it comes to growing larger, so he’s likely going to maybe double his calorie intake, six or seven thousand calories a day. Which is more like what a bear outside of preparing for winter would eat.

Route 302 was a fair bit shorter than 301, and had a lot more trainers so we did battle people from time to time… Akari ended up blitzing against a guy with six magikarps, though his ace was effectively a god among carp who could move faster than Mirko which was quite terrifying.

A fish flying at a hundred meters is a sight not meant for mortal eyes.

Route 302 had transitioned into moorland due to the highly acidic soils and the actions of certain endemic pokémon species. There were quite a few mareep and flaafy, hoothoot, more starly and staravia, along with plenty of grass-types keeping the soil acidic and the area relatively free of trees, and full of grasses and shrubs.

Llayda kept throwing herself against them, apparently trying to learn the very basics of Sap Sipper, since metabolizing grass-type energy was incredibly useful and would remove one of her weaknesses.

Akari looked haggard, and after dealing with the trouble magnet her togepi was I perfectly understood why. Ellis was pretty strong, with the highest realized potential of any of us with a solid movepool of Sweet Kiss, Life Dew, Fairy Wind, Psycho Shift and Metronome. The ability to randomly select a move from a potentially limitless pool was a nightmare, and she had used Hydro Cannon, Fire Blast and Hyper Beam on more than one occasion.

“So what happened this time?” I asked her and Akari dove deep into the trouble her togepi had gotten into.

Ellis had used Teleport through the random lottery of Metronome, and had almost gotten eaten by a victreebel that Akari ended up capturing and was going to send it off to be traded off through the Pokémon Center. They handled both requests and job board offers along with the general trading aspects of being a pokémon trainer.

Which was something I had asked about because trading at the bare minimum sentient beings was a bit of a weird thing… Apparently it was actually a system created by pokémon in tandem with the Joy family and general Pokémon Center network as a sort of… international adoption agency, operating as a legal entity designed to guarantee the rights of pokémon within the system.

They incentivize people to trade at the Center due to both their fairness and the general accessibility of the ubiquitous buildings, and their buyers will get charged a fee to make up for the cost of taking care of a pokémon, home/trainer studies, and various legal document services and so on.

The system was designed and developed by a zoroark, and has remained effectively unaltered outside the addition of technology and psychics protecting both it and the sanctity and security of the GST as a whole. Which made sense since their line is some of the few species known to build villages and what could be considered human-like societies. Something not dissimilar to the villages of the Mystery Dungeon series.

The fact they apparently have radios, electronics and video games was something I ignored for my sanity.

“It shouldn’t be much longer right?” I asked Akari as I looked at the very distant lights of the capital city. This area had dozens of Route-adjacent towns and villages feeding into the capital of Suika. We had passed through one only an hour ago.

“Soon,” Akari sounded surlier than usual and I wondered what was bothering her.

----------------------------------------

Kozukata City was far larger in person, a city of more than a quarter of a million souls and it in a way reminded me of home, even if it was far smaller than San Diego. We had arrived at the Pokémon Center, one of a dozen across the city and checked in for free since the Circuit had certainly started.

We had healed up, rested up with a quick movie that our pokémon picked out staffed only by pokémon and thus incomprehensible to my human ears. It was a romance between a zoroark and a ninetales that apparently brought Happy to tears.

It was actually quite cute even if I couldn’t understand it. The break also gave me time to decompress and think back to various… odd moments over the last two weeks. The strange headache and visions triggered by my first exposure to Evolution, the building sensation and connection I had felt for a fleeting moment against Liu. I had read up on what the pokédex and the online community called the Empowered in whispered words and on shady forums.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Various people developed esoteric abilities that involved… aura, metaphysical energy that was the source of sentience, of reality itself. ‘Hypothetically.’

Aura Adepts were practically a myth, but there was an obvious connection between superhuman feats and the strongest or most skilled trainers, using the raw life force of all things. Aura could be Typed… so psychics could be considered adepts in the wave of the psychic-type. There were various forms of magic which differed from raw aura manipulation by drawing on different sources, and in different ways.

Witches, sorcerers, and wizards, temple elders, monks, shrine maidens, spiritualists, and channelers and more. There were supposedly even sages and priests who channeled a fragment of a Legendary’s power as a Divine.

There were those who were called Warriors, the Children of Viridian, who could link their minds and emotions with pokémon as a whole. Another myth that had faded to obscurity over the years.

Magic was a commonly debated topic in the greater field of pokémon, a sort of culture clash between the old and the new, between the old rituals and magics of ancient times and the modern science and engineering of the current age. Spells were an easy thing, just a pinch of belief, a cup of sincerity and a liter of preparation made spells possible.

Throwing salt over the non-dominant shoulder could ward off the more malicious members of the ghosts, fey rituals could bind fairy-types and gain their trust and consent. If you bowed to a variant of golduck they’d leave you alone and not haunt you, little things like that that were often explained away as pokémon abilities and esoteric feats or just cultural quirks of the species.

Mawile were deceivers, powerful fey predators with a powerful glamor covering their form. Intimidate was an expression of their magic, their cute exterior lowered an opponent’s guard while their jaw invoked terror that attacked the strength of a pokémon.

So catching them required certain rituals to tame their impulses, to make them not… safe or passive but to gain their trust and their compassion.

Regardless, my research told me whatever I was feeling was real, a real effect, and not a product of my mind. The question then was how could I develop whatever this was?

Well I had gotten a rather good partner to help with that task in Akari, after asking her about aura. Which was why she had dragged me out into a minor forest in the city, and told me to touch grass.

More accurate, she said I needed a connection with nature for the conversation we were going to have.

“I was wondering when you were going to ask about this for a while,” was the first thing she said as she sat down on the soft grass, crossing one leg over the other. “You know I come from an old clan, and you’ve probably noticed how well I communicate with my pokémon.”

I coughed. “Umm… I kinda just forgot about that and only thought about how you looked like someone out of Princess Mononoke.” This was your brain on autism and depression, children! Terrible memory and terrible ability to sort out anything involving long term planning.

Akari looked at me with deep disappointment. “I’m going to ignore that, and ask what you think aura is?”

“The raw energy of life itself?” She just smiled toothily. “The source of the many wondrous abilities and powers of pokémon and people alike, it surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the universe together?”

“That’s what other people think, something you’ll look up in a book and old myths. Not something you discover for yourself, in battle, in quiet contemplation or however you do things.” Akari floundered a bit, and I took a moment to think.

Aura was… it was like dust wasn’t it? It was so terribly, terribly small, a part of a greater whole, whether it was dust bunnies in your closet or the dust that one day formed into planets and stars and galaxies.

The fundamental building block of creation…

“Potential, energy, infinite possibilities, an emergent property of the universe.” I answered.

“Better, aura works better when you have a personal understanding of it,” she flexed her arms, muscles tensing like steel. “Most people can use it instinctively to some extent, it’s why our bodies are as strong as they are.”

I had noticed that very quickly, I had seen people walk off attacks that would absolutely pulp organs on people from Earth. They weren’t indestructible, but they were tough enough to deal with weak first stage pokémon. Intent also played a role of course, pokémon held back from lethal blows during battle, so actually killing someone was hard in an official battle. Injury was another thing entirely of course.

“It also applies to basic spells and rituals, but you’re not always drawing on your aura so much as the aura of the World,” Akari explained carefully, like she thought we could be overheard. “It’s how magic works, drawing on the underlying forces of the universe and appealing to them.”

“Interesting. The Shirogane Clan, they know about aura, taught it to you?” I asked carefully and Akari nodded.

“My mom married into the clan after she had a falling out with her family outside her sister. Johanna Berlitz,” well that explained some things. “Having a former champion as your cousin isn’t always very helpful. Dawn’s nice though.” Akari sighed. “Being a descendant of a legendary Hero, and a family line as old as the regions themselves is a fucking shitty situation.”

I winced. “I can imagine the pressure.”

She palmed her face with a heavy sigh. “Right where was I?” She snapped her fingers and continued. “I’m half-Celestic, so like the Draconids and the People of the Water we have a lot of old traditions that survived the ages, and I was a precocious little brat that loved nature and pokémon with all her heart. The bond between human and pokémon changes you, especially when you’re young.” She gently felt the markings on her cheeks, almost reverent. “I’m good with aura, when it comes to using it to connect with pokémon, to understand what they’re saying. I know what different kinds of aura feel like, the elements held within, though I haven’t figured out the more superhero stuff like pulling off a move.”

That wasn’t unexpected, and made sense to me. “Have you tried out magic before?”

Her blush told me a story. “I tried out a spell a witch was working on and got mind swapped with a geodude for an hour.”

A giggle escaped my lips, and I slapped my hand over my mouth. “Sorry.”

Akari cracked a grin. “It was pretty hilarious in hindsight,” she admitted. “Aura is complicated stuff, that you’ve noticed it this quick means you’re pretty good at sensing it. Kinda like Natsuo, that kid has a gift for seeing aura I can’t really compare with even if I can break him like a twig. Maybe it’s a talent or because your world can’t express aura, but it is something I can teach you?”

“Why?”

“Because we’re friends and because it’s one of the reasons I decided to go on this journey, we used to teach what we knew to outsiders but stopped about a century ago. Though… there was that one tradition that kept going for a while…” She turned pink.

“What tradition?” I blurted out.

“Husband and or wife-stealing?” She twirled a lock of her blue hair, not meeting my eyes.

“Oh yeah, old timey outdated traditions, it’s a thing in some old cultures back home.” The story of Persephone and Hades was a very obvious example of course. “I can see that being used to bring new blood to reinvigorate old traditions of aura.”

Akari gave me an unreadable look, and I cocked my head. What was she thinking?

“I’m going to teach you what I can do using aura, and see if that will help push my own skills with it further too. But… you’ll have to get a lot stronger, a fundamental aspect of aura is the symbiotic bond between human and pokémon, your aura strengthens theirs and theirs strengthens yours.” I nodded in agreement.

Pokéball technology itself relied on aura, they stored it and intensified the connection, drawing on the energy to both fuel and carve it’s strange mechanisms.

As a sponsored trainee of Laven, I had some access to how they worked and even how they were manufactured.

“So how do we start?”

“What do you know about meditation?” Akari started and I felt my face scrunch up.

“I know my attention span sucks and sitting still while doing nothing is impossible.” I was honest about myself here, I knew my limitations.

“Then how good are you at using your imagination and daydreaming instead?” Her coy smile said enough, and I grinned back.

“Now that is one hundred percent within my ability.”

She cracked her knuckles and gestured to my belt where my three friends rested. “Then let’s bring out some friends and get to work.”

I couldn’t help but be excited, I couldn’t wait to write all of this down.