CHAPTER 106

“Whew,” Denzel groaned as we entered the small, gated community. “We finally made it.”

“We made it one day earlier, may I add,” Cece said with a slight, pleased smile.

“Despite all of Pauline’s complaints and breaks,” I said.

“I haven’t traveled in a while, so I’m not used to being this active,” she hurriedly said.

“Justin looks fine,” I noticed.

He perked up. “I might not look the part, but I’m pretty endurant.”

There were a lot of trainers here, and from the whispers and conversations I was picking up, a lot of them were simply waiting for the price of potions to fall so that they could make it through Mount Coronet without risking their and their Pokemons’ lives. We immediately went for the Pokemon Center and decided to give our Pokemon to Nurse Joy for a small check-up despite them not being that hurt from their travels. After all, it was free, so why not? I practically had to dash to my room to avoid questions from other trainers. Some asked for battles too, which I felt better about, but I’d have to see if people were still interested when I got my team back.

I hurriedly opened my phone to check for messages in our group chat. I hadn’t seen Chase or Louis anywhere, but maybe they were here. There were a lot of people, so I easily could have missed them.

I sighed in relief when I saw a message from Chase telling us that he had made it to the outpost, but frowned when I read that it had been sent two days ago. Knowing him, he had wasted no time and entered Mount Coronet already, so it looked like we weren’t going to meet him again until we got to Hearthome. I chuckled a bit when I saw that Emilia had tried to converse with him, but he simply told her that he was busy and stopped answering her messages. To me, it was funny, but it had probably vexed Emilia since she wasn’t used to how Chase behaved.

Speaking of Emilia, she had safely landed in Hearthome days ago, which was good news. After sending a message, I learned that she hadn’t started setting up her coordinator career just yet, but she had bought a few TMs for her team, like Shadow Ball for both Beldum and Aipom, or Trailblaze for Rockruff. Obviously, it would take weeks for them to perfect the moves enough to use in contests, but it was good to see that she was making progress just like us. She was thinking of getting herself a fourth teammate as well, although she was still thinking about which. Now that she had given up traveling in the wild, she was going to buy the rest of her team one by one— which was what coordinators usually did anyway. The most successful ones tended to be swimming in money.

There were still no signs from Louis, and the fact that I didn’t know if it was because he hadn’t made it to the outpost yet or just didn’t feel like speaking to us worried me, but he needed his space, so I’d give it to him. It wasn’t like there was anything I’d be able to do from here anyway.

Plus, I had things to think about as well. My quest for a fire type wasn’t going very well. I had seen a lone Rolycoly wandering route 207, but I opted not to catch it at the time, since I had hoped that I’d come across something better.

Well, now we were about to enter Mount Coronet, and there were still no signs of Numel or Torkoal. I knew they were rare, but even with Fletchinder’s help, we couldn’t find any. Hopefully, the other side of Mount Coronet would prove more favorable, although with all the water that flowed through there, that was probably unlikely.

Maybe I’d have to make do with a Rolycoly…?

That’d be so unsatisfying.

After resting for around an hour, I took a quick shower, changed into fresh clothes, and decided to go see what the others were up to. I’d have to brave the packed Center’s corridors, but I had to start somewhere.

“Can I get an autograph?” A trainer asked.

“No, sorry…” I mumbled. I didn’t even know how to give an autograph. Would I just need to write my name? That was how I signed everything anyway, but wouldn’t that be unsatisfying to get? Denzel’s autograph was stylized and looked extremely nice. “Maybe another time.”

“Hey, can we battle? I have two badges!”

“I’d love to, but my Pokemon are getting looked at right now,” I said, instantly more open to dialogue. “Come see me in an hour or two, and I’ll probably say yes.”

It’d be good practice for Larvitar, who was desperate to catch up with the rest of the team. I wanted to give Tangrowth his first battle too. Although maybe using Tangrowth against a trainer with two badges was unfair? There were no rules about Pokemon battles needing to be fair, but just walking over an opponent wouldn’t be what I called fun.

I snapped out of my thoughts when I saw Cecilia walking down the hall with Pauline.

“Hey guys,” I smiled. “Whatcha doing? Can I join?”

“No, you’ve already got Justin,” Pauline huffed.

“Hm?” I let out, raising an eyebrow.

“What she means is that we’ve obviously noticed how you’ve taken Justin under your wing,” Cece specified. “So Pauline’s asked me to help her.”

“You didn’t even ask to help me out, Grace,” she complained.

“What? I just wanted to help Justin because you’ve never had a problem with getting motivated by battling,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Whatever,” she sighed. “I won’t give you shit for it, since Cece stepped up.”

“Well, you guys have fun then,” I said. “Where are Denzel and Justin?”

“In his room,” Pauline rolled her eyes. “He’s doing ‘a few things’ before going out to do his usual information gathering. Justin must be out there somewhere. I haven’t seen him in a bit.”

“Well, guess I’ll go see Denzel, then,” I shrugged. “Do you want to meet up later—”

We were interrupted by a group of trainers that had followed me there, and Pauline started berating them to no end. I gave Cece a quick nod, which she returned and kept walking to Denzel’s room, which was a floor above everyone else’s for some reason. I remembered to knock this time in case he was streaming, but he quickly opened the door and let me in, meaning that he wasn’t.

“Hiya,” he said. “Need something?”

“Sheesh, you’re stingy,” I grumbled.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know, I’m just playing,” I said. “Wanted to know what you were up to.”

“I was linking my Trainer ID to my video channel so that people can start donating,” he explained. “Gotta strike when the iron’s hot.”

I gasped when I saw the first donation coming in. “Holy crap, you just got fifty Pokedollars from someone!”

Denzel almost squealed in joy and scrambled back to his Poketch. “Holy fuck, already? Look, there’s another ten Pokedollar one!”

The donations were relatively small, but together, they’d add up really quickly. Obviously, they’d slow when our popularity faded, but right now, he’d be rolling in money soon enough.

I smiled, feeling happy for him. “If you can keep building off of this momentum, then—”

“Then I might be able to ride this wave for a long time,” he breathed out in excitement. “I can’t believe I’m making money by doing… effectively nothing. All I’ve done is one livestream, which Emilia and Pauline obviously found shitty.”

“We’ve been through a lot, you deserve it.”

“Yeah… I need to— I need to get myself a laptop or something, like Craig. If I’m going to be spending a lot of time online, this little Poketch screen is going to make my eyes tired all the time.”

“You can just get a cheap one,” I said. “I might get one too, honestly. I need an application that makes spreadsheets.”

“S—spreadsheets?”

“Yeah, so I can measure my Pokemons’ improvement over time,” I explained. “I’ve wanted to do it since Floaroma, but I guess the opportunity never came up, and doing it on paper seems like a pain.”

“You’re such a nerd,” he laughed.

“Does it matter if it brings results?”

“I guess not,” he shrugged. “Anyway, it’s been… an hour and a half. I’m gonna try to see if my Pokemon are good to go so I can try to stream a training session for my channel. Wanna come with?”

“To your recording? Absolutely, as long as I’m not in it!”

“Obviously not! I’d get embarrassed with someone there, I meant to pick up your Pokemon too!”

“Ah, bummer,” I said playfully. “But fine. And yeah, our Pokemon are probably good, since I saw Cece and Pauline go get theirs. Plus, I’ve got some stuff to try out with my team too.”

Namely, experimenting with new moves and as I said previously, maybe a battle or two. Entering the lobby, I winced when I saw two trainers get carried on a stretcher. Their bodies were covered in burns, and their skin was practically melted off.

A reality check, if there ever was one. Just like in Eterna Forest, people died here. Even if we had been through Mount Coronet once, we needed to take this seriously.

We went to pick up our two teams and went our separate ways, looking to find an isolated part of the outpost to train at. It was harder than for the Eterna Forest’s outposts, since this one just had so many more people, but after around ten minutes of searching, I finally found a relatively good area. On the way there, I walked across one of the few stores, which was depressingly almost devoid of first year trainers, since stuff was still so expensive, but I also walked past the mountain’s entrance, and apparently, trainers needed a ticket to be allowed in Mount Coronet just like for Eterna Forest. After asking one of the rangers standing guard there. He explained that the Eterna outpost system had been implemented throughout every outpost in the region for two reasons. First, there was the fact that trainers actually sitting through a class to learn about threats was great at reducing the casualty rate, so the Ranger Organization petitioned to the League to make the system permanent and region-wide, which they accepted without a fuss. The second reason was that surprisingly, trainers themselves had pushed for the system while we had been away from civilization, especially the first years. As the years progressed on, trainers dying was still common place, but it was becoming less and less normalized in society, and routes were becoming safer and safer. Statistics about trainer deaths from Cynthia’s time would appear ludicrous to us today, for example.

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Either way, it looked like another class for us. Even though we had already gone through Mount Coronet once, I would pay attention. Who knew if there were some crazy Pokemon here that we hadn’t encountered up north and didn’t know how to deal with?

I released my entire team, who all gave me their respective greetings, and set them to work. Electabuzz still needed to work on Discharge, not because he was struggling with the move, but because how fast he needed to get the electricity out of his body if he was going to deal with Cecilia’s Fletchinder. He was also going to babysit Larvitar at the same time, and he would start gently battling her.

“Make sure to take it easy on her, okay?” I whispered in his ear so that Larvitar couldn’t hear. She was very easy to upset, and I didn’t want her to start stomping all over. “Let her win and stuff.”

“Ele,” he nodded after a few protests.

Now that Larvitar had mastered Stomping Tantrum and Smack Down, I was going to have her work on Bite, which meant that she could take it easy today. Frillish still needed to perfect Shadow Ball, so that would be more of the same. Who I really wanted to work with today were Tangrowth and Togetic.

The grass type was still struggling with Knock Off, mostly because he didn’t know how to infuse the dark type energy that came with the move, and I couldn’t blame him. He wasn’t a dark type, so it wouldn’t come naturally to him. Sunny Day was the same, but that was an incredibly difficult move, so I hadn’t expected to make much progress on it at all. Power Whip, though, he had learned ridiculously easily. When it came to hitting and grabbing stuff, angel couldn’t be beaten, and he already could use the move consistently, although it was extremely fast, so he still struggled to aim it at his targets. By the time we got to Hearthome, I expected that to be fixed.

The most important thing I wanted to do, though, was tinker with the move Wish.

“Angel,” I said, nodding toward him.

He immediately detached his arm, which wriggled and withered on the ground like a dying worm, and then prevented it from growing back.

“Princess, try using Wish,” I said.

Togetic nodded fiercely and shut her eyes tightly, and after twenty seconds, a bright light shot up into the sky from her head. Tangrowth then waddled to where Togetic had just been to wait. To a certain extent, she had mastered Wish already, but there was a big problem. Wish was the form a Pokemon’s ultimate desire took, and it healed the user or someone around the attack, albeit with a delay. For Togetic, we had found that Wish could be used relatively easily, but it was always weaker than it should have been because she could only use it effectively under severe amounts of emotional stress— when a member of the family was in actual danger. Two days ago, a boulder collapsed on Larvitar after she used Stomping Tantrum too close to one of the mountain’s cliffs. Unbeknownst to Togetic, the rock type’s scales had protected her from most of the damage, but she seriously thought that her sister had been mortally wounded for at least twenty seconds and had burst into tears. That was the first time she had used a proper Wish, and Larvitar’s superficial wounds were healed perfectly. The light had been brighter, and instead of five minutes, it had only taken one minute to come back down from the sky.

That meant that there was a mental block that we needed to work past. A five minute delay meant that the move was practically useless in battle. Sure, it didn’t take that much out of her, although it was slow to charge up, but Wish needed to be used with intent. Predicting how a battle would look one minute in the future was incredibly difficult, but five? That was impossible at my current skill level. I didn’t want to just randomly have Togetic use the move and hope it was useful when it landed. That wasn’t how I rolled. I wanted my plans to be iron tight. Plus, the strategy would be easily exploitable by any smart opponents, especially since using the move left Togetic open to any attacks.

After five minutes, Wish illuminated the sky and came back down, healing around half of Tangrowth’s arm.

“You can grow it back,” I nodded toward angel. “Good try, princess.”

Togetic gave me a disappointed nod, and I petted her to try to cheer her up. Within a minute, the rest of Tangrowth’s arm was back. I had him practice a few Power Whips against boulders Togetic raised with Ancient Power until his arm-vines were almost completely shaved off.

Right, that was another drawback of the move. It was so powerful that it destroyed his vines too, although it didn’t actually hurt him, and as he grew stronger, I expected that side effect to wane.

“Give me another Wish,” I told Togetic. She sent the bright light into the sky again. “Okay, would you be fine if angel hit you a little?” I asked her.

“Toge,” she nodded, and Tangrowth hit her with a weakened Vine Whip, dealing barely any damage.

“Now, angel, take a few steps to the right… a little more— there you go. Togetic, you float a little to the left— stop there, that’s perfect!”

I had them spaced at the exact same distance away from the Wish. I wanted to see who exactly would receive the move if both Pokemon were at a similar distance, and then if one was further away, or if one was more hurt than the other, and it was all because I wanted to know exactly how to use the move in a double battle. Five minutes later, the Wish came down and immediately entered Togetic’s body, healing her slight bruise.

“Seems like it prioritizes the move’s user if you’re at a similar distance,” I pondered. “Let’s try again with the same setup, but this time, Togetic isn’t wounded, but Tangrowth is.”

Due to the move’s delay, all of the experiments took around an hour, and what I found out was very interesting. The move was actually extremely predictable, which was good news. It being random would be the worst-case scenario.

First, it seemed that regardless of how wounded both Pokemon were, Wish would always prioritize healing the move’s user unless Togetic stood comically far away. The limit I found was that after one hundred feet, it would go to Tangrowth and heal him instead. Now, if Togetic was completely fine and Tangrowth was wounded, the move would always go and heal Tangrowth even as long as he was within the one-hundred feet radius. If I swapped out Togetic for someone else, then the Pokemon the closest to Wish would get healed, unless they were also unwounded, in which case it would go to the wounded Pokemon.

It sounded hard, but it was actually pretty easy to remember. Togetic was exhausted by now, so I rewarded her with some Oran Berries and gave her some well deserved rest in her Pokeball. Tangrowth was still raring to go, since the sun was still out, but I opted to recall him anyway, since I wasn’t about to walk around with him and attract even more attention unless I was going to use him in battle. I was amused to see that Larvitar was laughing heartily and celebrating when she saw me arrive.

“Larvitar! Tar! Tar!” She screamed, pointing at Electabuzz, who was rolling around the ground and crying out in pain. He had bruises all over his body, but I knew they were only surface-level wounds. He was pretending.

“You won against honey?” I gasped, feigning surprise. “Aw, good job! You’re the best!” I said, crouching and caressing her cheek. I discreetly winked at Electabuzz, who smiled and gave me a thumbs-up.

He was such a good big brother to her.

I recalled the rest of the team and walked back toward the Center, but I was surprised when I caught a glimpse of Justin battling another trainer.

“What are you doing? Stop playing around and fight an actual battle!” His opponent angrily screamed. He had a Dwebble that was just standing around and waiting.

Must be using Sandile, I mused. But had he succeeded in perfecting the strategy we had worked on?

I smiled when I saw the ground liquefy under the bug type and spin around like a whirlpool. Sandile was still nowhere to be seen, but he had gotten good enough with his Sand Tomb to hurt his opponents without coming even close to the surface. Dwebble’s trainer ordered it to Withdraw, but it was only delaying the inevitable. He fainted soon after, and the trainer angrily recalled his Pokemon and stomped off my way after hurling a few insults at Justin.

“Hey,” I said, stepping in front of him. “If you keep that mentality, you’ll never improve.”

“What the hell do you even know— oh, Grace Pastel… um, yeah, whatever. Stalling is just annoying.”

“There’s always an answer to everything,” I shrugged. “Anyway, feel free to go. Just don’t trash talk after losing, it makes you look real petty.”

The boy said nothing and just left, and then I walked toward Justin with a big smile.

“Grace! You were watching?” He said embarrassingly.

“Only caught the tail end,” I said. “But good job.”

He nodded, scratching his cheek. “Now I’ve just got to find a way to do the same thing with Growlithe and Lombre.”

“I thought you were waiting for TMs?”

“I want to try to see if I can figure out something before that,” he said.

“Seems like a fun challenge,” I smiled. “Anyway, let’s find the others and discuss when we’re leaving. Plus, there’s that class we have to sit through.”

“Wait, again?”

We found Denzel first, who looked half-dead and was practically shambling through the Pokemon Center.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothin’. Just some issue with my viewers.”

“You can’t say that and not tell us what the issue in question is,” I said.

“They seem a lot more interested in my team’s… romance drama than in my actual training. There are shippers, Grace. Fucking shippers that root for different members of my team to start dating Sylveon.”

I burst out laughing, and even Justin was shifting in place and chuckling.

“It’s not funny! That’s not what I want!”

“You might get more viewers that way,” I laughed.

“I agree,” Justin nodded. “Why not make the best of a… strange situation?”

“Seriously? I hate you both.”

We quickly found Cece and Pauline after that, who were both very amused at Denzel’s predicament. After telling the group that we needed to take another three hour class, we decided to just hurry up and get it over with right away, even though we hadn’t decided when to go through the mountain yet. The ranger teaching us looked a lot more meek and unassuming than the one that had been in the Eterna Forest outpost, but that wasn’t a reason to underestimate him. Rangers were people who were exposed to wild Pokemon more than anyone else— even trainers— so the older they got, the more they tended to scar, and that was if they lived long enough.

This ranger looked to be in his early fifties, and his face was spotless.

“My name is Malcolm Brockhouse, veteran ranger of thirty-five years,” he sighed. “I’ll be your instructor for this class. Even if this isn’t your first time going through Mount Coronet, I recommend paying attention.”

He paused, gauging our reactions, and I grabbed my pencil to write anything of note.

“On average, it will take you six days to go through the mountain, but fret not. Rangers heavily patrol the caves, and we’ve been trying to make it as safe as possible. Unfortunately, however, there is a short lapse of approximately two days in the middle of the path that is less patrolled, and therefore, extremely dangerous. If you do not have at least two badges, I recommend turning back and coming later. There is no point in rushing. If you don’t have two badges at this point of the year, you won’t be making it to the Conference anyway.”

I heard grumbles echo throughout the room, but deep down, everyone knew he was telling the truth.

“I can’t force you to do anything, though, so without further ado, let us get started.”

Instructor Brockhouse went over what he believed were the biggest threats first, and I sighed in relief when they were Pokemon we had already faced. Of course, an Onix or a Rhydon would still be a big threat, but at least we had some idea of how to fight them. He then continued, going over the smaller threats like Geodude and Machop, but that was mostly it. Obviously, he also gave a first-aid class refresher to the class, along with recommending certain crucial caving supplies that we had somehow missed, like helmet lights. It was true that having a hand free and protecting our heads from any falling rocks would be a great advantage, and I eyed the rest of the group, letting them know that we should buy them immediately after class.

“One more thing before I let you go,” instructor Brockhouse said. “There’s been reports of a dangerous Pokemon lurking in the mountain. It isn’t native to Sinnoh, nor does it actually live here, but it somehow got into Mount Coronet, and all descriptions we’ve gotten from trainers returning with burns point to it being one thing.”

He paused to draw a Pokemon on the blackboard, and I stood at the edge of my seat. Trainers coming back with burns. Fire type. A bipedal, turtle-like Pokemon with a spiny shell and a snout-like nose.

“A Turtonator.”