Curiosity [Pokemon]

[Isaac A Drake]

Author's Note: This is a remaster of my popular on FF.net and AO3 story, 'Curiosity'. Begun in 2020. It was ~60K words at the time that I wrapped the arc I stopped writing on and thus 'threadmarks' are remastered Arcs not remastered chapters.

Chapters 1-5 Gradutation

I had been wondering, my entire sixteen odd years of life in Kanto, what version of the Pokemon world I was in. I knew it was more expansive than the games of course, but I'd never had major confirmation on what world changing plots were going on. The answer came as I was studying for my Advanced Class exams from Pokémon Tech just outside of my new life's home of Saffron City.

I looked out of my window to see a horde of the Beginner Class students hurrying over to the small arena favored by the stronger underclassmen for study and training. I clasped my hands together over my head and stretched, looking over to my starter, a currently slumbering nidorina, who my parents in this life had never really understood why I picked.

"Want to go see what the noise is all about, Cleo? I know you've been annoyed at me staying cooped up in here to study for this biology exam," I spoke at a normal volume, knowing her sensitive ears would pick up everything I said.

Indeed, her ears twitched twice as she blinked herself awake and nodded back at me, slowly pushing herself up onto her legs and extending backwards in a quick stretch. I had vague dreamlike memories of having rabbits on Earth, and she reminded me of them. Well, perhaps if I had had the rabbit from Monty Python as a pet at least. She padded over to the door and headbutted it impatiently as I stood up with a laugh.

"Hold your rapidash there, little lady! I've got to toss my shoes on!"

Quickly I readied myself for a little jaunt, casually tossing on my pokeball belt and pulling on a pair of boots that were basically Kanto's versions of Dr Martens, though I'd opted for a work pair not a fashion pair like many of the other trust fund brats that I went to school with.

Of course, in this life, I was also one of those trust fund brats. While initially my father had just been a normal researcher for Silph Co, right after I started boarding school here at the Tech he'd been tapped to help with the fossil revival project in Cinnabar. Needless to say he'd very quickly become a big deal, and unfortunately my mother in this world was completely different from the mother of my previous life and had eaten the attention all up. The only upside of the lifestyle they'd thrown themselves headfirst into was that I occasionally got to talk with actual serious scientists at the parties they threw or attended when I was on breaks from school.

In fact, after I'd had a go or two at the Indigo League Conference I fully planned on trying to join Professor Cerise's institute. I'd met him at a party last year and the man had seriously impressed me with his early phases of his Poke-Energy Radar, which I knew he may eventually be able to use to hunt down legendary pokemon!

My musings were cut short by Cleo and I's arrival in the small arena where almost the entire Beginner Class was watching one of their top students, in fact one I had recognized and taken a bit under my wing earlier in the year, battle someone that I definitely recognized. Ash Ketchum.

It was weird seeing him so young and feeling like I not only knew him but knew what he could become. Orange Island, Battle Frontier, and Alola Champion. Wielder of a demon of a pikachu as well as such monsters as Charizard, Sceptile, Dragonite, and Lucario. And here he was, struggling slightly against a cubone with a pikachu that had yet to learn any of its signature moves, still relying almost exclusively on Thundershock and Quick Attack. I snorted at the embarrassing loss Giselle suffered when Cubone's own Bonemerang was dodged, and he knocked himself out on the rebound.

As she expressed her surprise at her loss I couldn't resist and stepped in to interfere.

"Giselle, now what has your friendly upperclassman told you about trained pokemon versus wild pokemon in the databases?"

She winced and turned around to face me, "That trained pokemon have a higher likelihood of atypical strategies and movesets..." she grumbled, "But it's ridiculous! This kid is a total dunce, why should I have expected-"

"Battle tactics?" I supplied. "Yes!" She shouted and Cleo at my side chuffed in amused exasperation.

Realizing how ridiculous she sounded Giselle blushed and hung her head. "Hey!" A dramatically overenthusiastic voice chimed in, "Who are you?" I sighed, right, Kanto-Ash was...a cliché dumbass anime protagonist.

"I'm one of the Advanced Class students, Isaac Beech, nice to meet you, Ash was it?" His eyes bugged out, "Wait! They said if you pass the Advanced Class it counts as like...five badges!" "Six, Ash!" Misty chimed in.

I turned to look at her, wow Misty was young at twelve. I thought back to the mega gyarados she would have one day and almost shivered. "That's even more!" Well, Ash was right, six WAS more than five, "Hey! Who's that pokemon?" I almost fell flat on my ass as Ash did the cliché pokedex scan of Cleo.

"Nidorina, the Poison Pin Pokemon," The robotic voice began, "The female's horn develops slowly, thus it prefers physical attacks such as biting and scratching. When resting deep in its burrow, its thorns always retract. This is proof that it is relaxed,".

Is it weird to feel calmed by a robotic voice you'd previously only heard in an anime that you only really interacted with in your dreams? Before I could muse too long I learned that there was one difference between this world and the anime.

Apparently Team Rocket wasn't entirely incompetent. There was no warning motto before a smokescreen, a burst of earth, and a flash of a Quick Attack appeared. It was only our training over the last three years that saved the pokeballs on the belts of the underclassmen. Cleo immediately intercepted the speeding pokemon with a Double Kick, it ended up being Team Rocket's Meowth, who let out a grunt of pain as he was sent skidding along the arena floor a good dozen feet.

Senses sharpening for battle I palmed two pokeballs and released them. In twin bursts of light, my own cubone, Estella, and a sparkling light blue Alolan sandshrew, Brinker, appeared for battle. We can reflect on my obvious homesickness by naming all my pokemon after literary characters from my dreams of Earth later. Right now, I had some criminals to school.

Or I thought I did. Ash and Misty, it appeared, had the art of taking care of Team Rocket down to a science. Before I could even give commands or Brock could run down from the stands all the way both Ekans and Koffing had been blasted back into the criminals' arms by Pikachu and Starmie respectively. As I was blinking in shock the two criminals collected their three pokemon and skedaddled.

"Uh...should we call Officer Jenny or?" I was honestly unsure at this point.

Ash shrugged, "I dunno, they always seem to get away from the Jennys. It's really annoying!"

And then Ash spotted my pokemon I had yet to return, "WHOA!" Oof I could hear the caps in that one, "I've never seen a sandshrew like that before!"

Ah, right, Ash had fought AJ's already at this point, "Brinker here is from the Alola region, over there sandshrew adapted to the area around a really snowy mountain and are ice and steel typed! I caught him on a ski trip with my parents last year!"

This floored Ash, and honestly regional-variant pokemon were still a relatively new field. As previously there'd been hot debate about whether they should simply be entirely different species or not.

"There's a special Alolan raichu, too!" I remarked to Ash, knowing Pikachu would never willingly evolv-well actually if his meeting with Surge went differently Pikachu could possibly not go that route. Interesting idea but not one I will push to bring about.

"Can I battle it?" Ash bit out finally, taking me a bit aback if I am honest, "Pikachu's a bit tired but maybe Butterfree could have a go?"

Oh no, that earnest face, I just couldn't say no to it. "Alright, kid," I turned to my pokemon, "Cleo and Estella you go keep Giselle some company, I've got a tutoring session it appears!"

"Hey!" Oh yeah the yelling was going to get annoying, "What do ya mean tutoring? I've got two badges!"

"Then you're on par with the Beginners I regularly tutor!" I grinned with a sickly sweet facetious smile, "But it's impressive at your age nonetheless! Now, Brinker, to arms!"

With a nod Brinker rolled out onto the field in a ball before popping back out onto his hind legs.

"Go, Butterfree!" Ash called out summoning the first pokemon he ever caught. Oh I really hoped he didn't let him go this time around, that was really heart-wrenching for me as a child. Er...my first time as a child?

"You get first move, Ash, I think the theme of this lesson is going to be what I call the Aggressive Defense!" Ash looked confused at my declaration, but the kids of the Beginners Class were on the edge of their seats. I was one of the more approachable upperclassmen and truly enjoyed teaching so I tended to give demonstrations pretty regularly where I actually explained why and what I was doing for my strategies. I also had a tendency towards entertaining flamboyance which I am certain helped.

"Well, whatever! If you're going to be on the defense Butterfree has this in the bag!"

"Careful, Ash!" Brock cautioned from the sidelines, "I'm sure he knows what he's doing!"

I tossed Brock a grin, "Don't ruin all the fun, Gym Leader!" I joked, "Well, Ash? What has your butterfree got beating between those wings?"

"A Sleep Powder!" Ash commanded and the little guy, well alright a butterfree is the size of a pretty decent eagle back on Earth so not so little, sped forth with his wings abuzz and a sparkling powder flying off towards Brinker.

"A solid defense against powder moves is a fast moving wind of any kind. You don't always need a flying move to generate it either! Rapid Spin!"

Brinker curled up into a ball and began spinning, well...rapidly, causing a small vortex that picked up sand, dust, and the Sleep Powder and swirling it around him and right back up into the air.

"Rapid Spin is useful for dispersing many persistent effects on the battlefield!" I lectured.

"Fine! Butterfree use Whirlwind!" Without my command Brinker took off from the Rapid Spin into a Rollout, not actually targeting the opponent however, just evading the attack.

"The move also raises your speed, though not as much as a proper Agility," Ash's face was turning red with a mix of embarrassment and frustration. Good, in the anime Ash always learned the most from his defeats. So perhaps this lesson here could kickstart his tactical thinking that only really began to shine around the Battle Frontier.

"Confusion!" Ash finally called out a more direct attack and I grinned, the second I had said 'aggressive defense' earlier Brinker had known what was going to happen. He popped out of the Rollout and his icy blue plates began to glow a light lavender just before the Confusion hit. They flared a darker purple and Ash looked like he had been struck by his pokemon's own move for all he anticipated what was going to happen next.

"Mirror Coat, students," I explained, "Can take an indirect or 'Special' attack and reflect it back at the attacker...doubled." Ash paled at my words, but it was too late, the energy burst back forth from my sandshrew and slammed into the butterfly pokemon, sending it hurtling backwards and to the ground. The two-badge trainer returned his pokemon morosely.

"Hey," I said as I began to walk over and Brinker rolled up to my side, "You did great! Starting out the battle with a status inducing move was exactly what I would have done with a butterfree! I feel almost certain I'll be seeing you at the Indigo Plateau this year when I compete!"

This surprised all the surrounding students; my declaration that I planned to compete this year, the same year I passed my Advanced Exams, was essentially a declaration of war upon the staff at the school.
Because you see, once you pass your Advanced Exams you self-study and get tutoring until you win a gym circuit style match against five staff members. That's how you graduate. Technically you could jump right into the challenges from finishing your Advanced Exams, though it wasn't recommended. Most students took two more years and graduated at around eighteen. I had just said I wanted to graduate before this year's conference. That was in just under eight months, I'd be seventeen.

I had no illusions that I was going to be a Lance, a Leon, or an Ash though. I'd be content being good enough to have a research gym like Blaine or Roark after doing a few conferences and a fellowship with Professor Cerise. And that meant I had to make a show of it.

"Wow!" Ash exclaimed, not understanding the full implications of that, "Then I'll be beating you in a rematch!"

I chuckled, "Well I look forward to watching you try,".

My sincerity bled heavily into that sentence and as they walked off to continue towards Vermilion City I saw both Brock and Misty looking back at me in curiosity.

A few weeks later I was contemplating how mostly I really just wanted to learn and explore this entire crazy, beautiful, dangerous planet. The day Estella evolved into a marowak was definitely one of those days.
I had been training hard since passing my Advanced Exams, and the teachers definitely had not been going easy on me. First of all, if I graduated the same year I passed the Advanced Exams they didn't get another year of tuition out of my parents. Secondly, if I did graduate early by defeating them but biffed it in the conference then it looked really really bad on the school. So, if I did graduate early they needed me to be in top form.

Which was fine, I was no stranger to hard work in either life. But my graduation advisor, Mr Pringle, and yes he did look weirdly like the snack can guy, was assigning me some pretty crazy training exercise gauntlets versus many of the school's general training pokemon.

Knowing my team was mostly ground-types he'd sent me out to the pond to get absolutely hammered by the poliwhirl and seadra living in it, demanding my pokemon withstand the assault for ten-minutes each by only using their defensive moves and not dodging. It was on minute eight, when I was sure Estella was about to faint when a Bubblebeam made it through her spinning Thick Club that she evolved.

Suddenly twirling the club with new vigor she passed with flying colors. I quickly scooped two of her favorite flavor of pokeblocks out of my bag and walked over to give her a hug and a treat.

"That was amazing, girl! I am so proud of you!"

The bone keeper pokemon let out a pleased noise in the back of her throat as she stood up straight and accepted the treats. My goal was to get all my pokemon to at least their second stages before finishing my staff challenges, so this was a great step in that direction.

After the conference I planned to travel to the four winds collecting pokemon to create a solid final team for myself, but for now I was restricted to Kanto and Johto pokemon, and getting lucky with Brinker last year on vacation.

I returned Estella for some rest, she'd been my last pokemon to go through the exercise, and Cleo came over and let out a pleased chuff.

"It's very exciting, Cleo!" I replied back, "Now we just need...well the two hardest will be Brinker and Alberich," I sighed, "An Ice Stone will be hard to get and it's just really difficult to get a rhyhorn to evolve."

Sitting down with a sigh I released my quagsire, Huck, to play in the pond with the other water-types. Cleo, spikes retracted thankfully, gently bumped her shoulder into mine as she tended to do when I was stressing out about things.

I scratched her in her favorite spot behind the ears, "I know girl, I might be aiming too high in wanting Alberich to evolve in time for the conference. Especially when I need to focus on finding that stone and getting Alexei to evolve, he'll need to be a proper piloswine to keep up with anything after the qualifiers, his movement is just far too limited as a swinub."

I retracted my hand to rub my face, "Should I take dad up on his offer of the fossil pokemon?" I questioned Cleo, "What I really want is an aerodactyl, but the most he's offering is an omanyte or a kabuto, I'm not sure I could train them up in time and I am not sure even if he came through with an aerodactyl I could get one to listen to me in time!"

The problem with aerodactyl, that they could tell from the two they had revived at this point, was that it was a surly and vicious pokemon that only respected the utmost of strength. And that was why the only properly tamed one of those two was owned by Elite Four Lance. Though from the rumors that was soon to be Champion Lance. The previous champion had stepped down a few years back and the Kanto Elite Four had been both taking challengers as well as doing matches against each other to see if any of them could defeat the entire rest of the Elite Four. Lance was consistently unable to beat Lorelei, Lorelei couldn't beat Bruno, and Agatha was so close to retiring she wasn't really trying but Bruno could still never best her (or admittedly anyone except Lorelai, Lance tended to trash him four out of five matches).

Watching those exhibition matches were jaw droppers let me tell you. Just last month had been the third Bruno versus Agatha rematch and her second to last pokemon, one of her two gengar, had been forced to pull a Destiny Bond to defeat Bruno's hitmonchan after it had surprised her by having learned Bullet Punch in the interim time between their last match and had used the move to block every single Sludge Bomb and Toxic tossed his way.

But Lance had apparently finally gotten his gyarados to figure out both Thunder Wave and Dragon Dance, as he had demonstrated in a challenge by one of last year's top eight trainers from the conference who had finally worked the courage up for an Elite Four challenge. It might finally be what Lance needed to punch through Lorelei's lapras.

But regardless, I needed to focus on my team, I currently owned seven pokemon. Cleo, my loyal starter, was not going to be evolving into a nidoqueen any time soon, as I was not Ash Ketchum I didn't think I'd be finding a Moon Stone quickly and she needed a lot more growth before she evolved as nidoqueen was a plateauing evolution as some referred to evolutions that limited overall growth potential in return for a giant boost in initial power. These evolutions are really only ones you want to go through once you've gotten every last drop you can out of the previous stage.

My second pokemon ever, Estella, the recently evolved marowak, had been found when I joined my dad on a fossil hunt, a poor orphan of marowak poachers like so many of her species over the centuries. Her potential was now very important to explore, as with her ability Rock Head the only naturally learned move to take advantage of it was Double Edge, a long way off, so she'd need lots of special attention in developing her moveset from here. Marowak were not naturally flexible fighters from a type coverage perspective. And then I had a moment of realization, she was not an Alolan Marowak, which meant no Flare Blitz...which meant...I quickly pulled out a slightly outdated pokedex, I wasn't a personal trainer of Professor Oak so my 'dex was a year behind the ones he gave out.

"Well...shit..." I bit out. The only other recoil move that a normal Kantonian marowak got was Submission. For some strange reason no one had ever managed to teach a marowak Head Smash or Head Charge, and though I was going to double check once I got back to my computer in my dorm, I was fairly sure a bunch of people had probably tried.

Well, I really only wanted those moves as finishers anyways, I supposed. Estella was a quicker fighter than the kind of bruiser that relied on those kinds of moves anyways. So scribbling in my notebook I quickly wrote 'Submission' and 'Thunder or Fire Punch' on her planning page.

"Right, minor hiccup, next up..." I turned to the page of my third pokemon, Alberich the rhyhorn. He was an interesting case as I may very well end up at the conference before he became a rhydon. They evolved at very high levels in the game and I had confirmed that while levels were considered in this world with the same kind of unreliable science as IQs were on Earth, the idea that rhyhorn generally took a while to evolve was consistent with that.

He also had Rock Head, so the goal was to get him to learn Take Down by the time the conference came around. Which would mean he'd hopefully know Drill Run by that point as well. I scratched at the light scruff on my chin, honestly anything interesting technical machine or training-wise for him needed to wait until evolution and access to bipedalism. Maybe Payback for a mix of coverage and a surprise against agile opponents.

Flipping the page again I landed on Huck, my dopey quagsire currently playing in the pond. Other than maybe perfecting Dig there wasn't much he needed. A quagsire's natural attacking moves were generally decent, he'd just learned Aqua Tail, and Yawn was ridiculous combined with his defensive abilities. I simply circled my previous note about Dig a few more times.

I was able to skip Alexei's page, as I'd just been discussing evolving the stubborn swinub with Cleo, though I did chuckle at an old note bemoaning my party's need for more special attackers instead of physical ones. It was true, but unless I wanted to branch really far from my comfort zone of the "earthen elements" as I called the rock, ground, and steel-typings I felt most in tune with, my options were limited until I left Kanto.

Well, I could always go with a magneton, I thought to myself grimacing. I had impressions of loving magneton and magnezone in the video games, but I had actually met one in this life at the Silph Co building a few times and...they were extremely creepy and offputting in person.

Needless to say, a claydol was high on the 'acquire on world tour' list. Honestly unless I got really specific with hunting down fossils it looked like my special attackers list would be limited to Cleo, the future claydol, and Huck once I got my hands on a bunch of technical machines.

Because my next page had Brinker, also a physical attacker, and the final page had my problem child. Artagnan, a scyther I had caught on a family funded Safari Zone trip for my birthday this year, was another physical attacker. And a huge pain in my ass.

He refused to cooperate, always thinking his natural instincts were better than my own learned and practiced tactics. As I initially learned his full capabilities he had occasionally been correct on that matter, none of my other pokemon were exceptionally swift in the way he was. Even Estella was more of a quick counterattacker than a speed demon the way Artagnan was.

But eventually I'd clocked his capabilities and regardless of losing to Cleo and even Alberich and Brinker in the majority of our sparring matches he refused to try and learn from me. Once he learned Agility he seemed to think that the only strategy he needed functionally boiled down to 'gotta go fast' and trying to anime swordsman slash all opponents.

Needless to say without some technical machine or move tutoring to back his attacks up with more than Slash and Fury Cutter it was rather embarrassing against rock and steel types. Which again, I specialized in. It would be a pain to get a Metal Coat admittedly, but I desperately wanted a scizor.

So I was going to spend the next six months or so banging my head against this brick wall if I had to. I continued scribbling plans and notes into my journal, even ignoring Cleo getting up and roaming around a bit until I heard a loud throat clearing behind me.

I craned my neck back until I saw who it was, "What do you want, Thomas?" The kid just screamed anime background character with his almost-a-bowl-cut-but-kindashaggy brown hair and dumb polo shirts. And he was obsessed with psychic pokemon as being the "strongest type" but could only seem to get his hands on pokemon that were secondarily psychic at best.

He had a starmie, an eggsecute, a psyduck, and a lickitung he had somehow managed to teach Curse and Amnesia to go along with the normally learned Disable as a part of his 'psychic-ish' obsession.

"Just making sure you're ready to get trounced at the tournament with us and the Ninja Academy kids next month after I pick up some wicked powerful pokemon at the SS Anne's launch party!"

My blood ran cold. I had just had final confirmation that I was definitely in the anime-world. Not a video game world with some anime bits to fill it in. Not the comics (which thank...Arceus I suppose, that would have killed me before now). But the anime or at least mostly the anime. And back in my room was an envelope from my parents I had received a week before Ash's arrival. With a ticket to an SS Anne cruise.

"Yes, now fuck off so I can finish my training!" I growled out as I popped to my feet.

"It's been two weeks since you passed your exams, even with your insane schedule for getting into the conference this year I thought you didn't plan to challenge anyone for at least another two months?" Anya, one of my few classmates that could be called something close to a friend, questioned me.

"Estella's evolution got me fired up, I guess!" I replied, giving an evasive half-truth of an answer. I'd sound crazy if I said I had foreknowledge that the SS Anne was going to be attacked in two weeks by Team Rocket and since I was gonna be there I needed to test myself out against some stronger opponents. Somehow I doubted I'd be lucky enough to only fight Jessie and James or some even more generic grunts.

"Hmm...you've never been this rash before, and seriously is that going to be your trainer outfit at the conference? You're going to wear a Stetson now?"

"Hey!" I protested, "Stetsons are cool!"

She looked even more annoyed at me when I laughed at my own multiversal meta reference, luckily the Pokémon world tolerates a lot of eccentricity.

"Whatever, just get out there and show my mom you are serious about this I guess."

Yep, the reason why I was friends with Anya was because a lot of the other kids did not want to be friends with the daughter of one of their teachers for the right reasons. And now I was about to do a number on her mother's normal-type themed team.

Shaking my head at her surly departure I finished securing my pokeballs to my belt and exited the dressing rooms of the main school arena.

"Alright everyone in the audience, this is Isaac Beech challenging in his first staff battle against Mrs. Temple. The battle will have the staff member using three pokemon and the challenger can switch out their own pokemon from their full team to simulate a gym challenge," Frank, the announcer, was thoroughly bored of ninety-percent of the battles he saw at this school.

I couldn't exactly disagree with him either. While Pokémon were highly intelligent it seemed like the ability to truly connect with them and accelerate their training on any level higher than pets or to help with pest control was actually quite rare. Obviously in the games and shows most people you see have that ability, but when you're living in the world it becomes quickly apparent that communication with them was a rare skill, and the ability to motivate and control them even rarer.

Mrs. Temple was a short woman who walked the line between curvy and pudgy, but dressed for all the world like a Mary Poppins knock-off she turned it into something that demanded respect at the very least in the classroom.

"Oh wow," The announcer said out loud as Mrs. Temple released a magnificent specimen of a tauros, "Does Mrs. Temple know something we don't? She's starting with the big guns!"

Sure Frank, now you're interested, I griped to myself internally as I licked my lips in nervousness. Tauros was her strongest pokemon and an extremely flexible battler. Similar to Ash's future acquisition actually. Furthermore while it didn't know Earthquake it definitely knew Iron Tail which meant...

"You wanted a real fight buddy, well you're getting it! Get out here, Artagnan!" My moody scyther took to the field with a menacing flourish of his blades.

Truthfully I was hoping to have him do some damage to the tauros but also get taken down a peg or two in the process.

"Agility!" I called out, deciding that was the best way to get some damage in and hopefully help Artagnan to sync up with my own wishes and style.

"Smash the bug, darling!" Mrs Temple called out to her pokemon. The tauros complied easily, his massive form burst up into the sky and his hooves created shattering impact craters where he landed with a vicious Stomp, barely missing the speeding Artagnan. I whistled audibly, that was powerful.

"We're going death by a thousand cuts here!" I called out to my pokemon, and as it was one of his favorite strategies against bulky opponents he complied easily. Darting around the battlefield like a vicious mite he hit the tauros with Fury Cutter after Fury Cutter, slowly building momentum and power by attempting to his similar points in quick succession.

"Swat it!" The teacher called out, and with a snort the bull's tails glinted silver and a meteoric Iron Tail snapped out and slammed into Artagnan's thorax as he went past for another slice. I thought for a moment he'd keep his balance as he went skidding backwards, but a piece of debris from the earlier Stomp caught his foot and he went spinning ass over tea-kettle into the wall.

"Can you still fight, Arty?" I called out, and the scyther chittered angrily as he stood up and nodded. He could take maybe one more hit, and now I knew I needed to drive the point home.

"Keep your distance with your speed and use Air Slash!" I commanded, knowing it went against his instincts. Either he'd listen and we'd get a few more good hits in or… He blitzed in with a Slash only to smack straight into a raised Rock Tomb.

I returned him, "Thanks for teaching Arty a lesson, Mrs. Temple. He'll remember that one, to arms, Brinker!" I summoned out the pokemon that was likely my most flexible fighter. Brinker had a combination of speed and disorientation based moves and the ability to tank anything south of a Fighting or Fire type hit. And needless to say, disorientation would work great here.

"Mist!" Spinning around in a Rapid Spin simultaneously he distributed a quick icy fog across the field. This was going to be fun, as far as I knew the tauros had nothing to deal with this.

And indeed, I saw Mrs. Temple gritting her teeth across the field, "Work Up!" She commanded, guessing that the boost in offensive capabilities would make me more cautious to attack even in the Mist.

She wasn't wrong, my strategy did change mildly, "Strafing Powder Snow!" I commanded and while I couldn't really see directly, there were what looked like waves of the Mist turning to ice rippling through the field at where the tauros had been.

"Up!" The professor called, and out of the mist her tauros leapt, clearing half the field in a single bound, towards the source of the wave of snow. But I was right in my confidence that Brinker was no longer there, I'd told him to strafe and he was one of my most collected and intelligent team members as well as being versatile. Plus I had trained him to improvise.

From the moo of pain that echoed out and the lack of a second wave of snow I could only assume he'd ambushed the bull with a Metal Claw or similar. A Fury Swipes would have been over committing so I doubted it had been that. A few more moments, a few more echoes of combat, and Mrs. Temple returned her tauros.

"Blow that away, Noctowl!" She called out, releasing a rather large specimen of a noctowl that immediately released a Whirlwind. What followed started out as a close fight. The noctowl couldn't do a whole lot of damage to Brinker, who danced around the arena like his namesake on an icy pond.

However the powerful winds the noctowl could put out made it very difficult for the Powder Snow to land, the only move Brinker had that was super-effective and long enough range to hit a flying target. I thought we were winning, or at least setting up my next pokemon to win easily, when the noctowl managed to pull off a combination Double Team and Hypnosis, putting Brinker to sleep and allowing it to drain energy off of him with Dream Eater.

I winced as I returned him, that was a rough finisher, it would mean my next pokemon was not going to have as much of an advantage. But that was okay, "Bring 'em down, Alberich!" I called out, releasing my rhyhorn.

The release line was a code, the first thing Alberich did was start firing off Smack Downs, spinning bursts of rock that would slam flying-types down into the ground. I had trained Alberich to, instead of functioning as a charging brute, master his rock-manipulation and function as a kind of artillery or tank. Standing his ground and firing off blasts of rock and earth at enemies and then quickly repositioning with his charging when needed.

It was a non-traditional strategy for a rhyhorn and took my opponent by surprise, putting the teacher on the back foot once more.

The owl tired of his aerial dodging of Smack Downs, Rock Throws, and Rock Blasts long before Alberich did. Finally a few solid hits landed and the owl went down.

"So that is how you want to play then, boy?" She called down to me, returning her pokemon. "Very well, I have some surprises up my sleeve as well," With that she called out her wigglytuff.

The chubby rabbit-esque pokemon laughed somewhat ominously as it appeared. And she was right, I was unprepared for what followed. Reflect and Disable quickly neutered Alberich. Allowing him to be finished off by a vicious Ice Beam I had not seen coming.

Because, while wigglytuff actually have very respectable special attacking stats, they don't naturally learn much to take advantage of it. This one had been very well trained or given TMs or both. With a sigh I returned my rhyhorn, contemplating my next move. I'd have to play pretty dirty to come out even a little ahead.

"Huckleberry! You're up!" I called out my quagsire, a dopey pokemon if there ever was one. But a fantastic attrition fighter. Though he wasn't quite where he would need to be to fully utilize that skillset. I quickly had him use Amnesia to stonewall almost any special attack a wigglytuff might conceivably know. A purposefully wasted Water Gun allowed my follow-up, a bunch of mud slinging from Huckleberry.

Slaps and Bombs to lower speed and accuracy. As Huck shrugged off Ice Beams his mud covered opponent got extremely angry, cheeks puffing up in rage.

This was all a part of the plan, trick the creature into ignoring its trainer and attacking at close range. It took much longer than expected, but eventually the wigglytuff leapt in for an enraged Double-Slap.

"Yawn!" The status move hit the wigglytuff right in the face and with a sigh my teacher returned her pokemon.

"Well what do you know?" The announcer called out, "Isaac's got his first win! And it was four to three! Could we actually end up seeing him make a good showing at the conference this year?" I glared at him as the crowd cheered.

It wasn't a long trip to Vermillion City, and I left the day after the battle. Thus, I showed up for the SS Anne cruise early, at this point it had been just over a month since I met Ash Ketchum and now I was primed to meet him once again and this time on one of the most important events of the first season.

At least as far as behind-the-scenes developments go that is. Team Rocket might not have gotten everything they wanted, but they'd gotten a massive haul and a massive amount of notoriety from raiding the SS Anne.

Furthermore, Ash never releases Butterfree if he doesn't have to go on that walkabout after the shipwreck. Wow, was I really that traumatized by that episode or was I projecting something else onto the event? That was an idea I'd unpack later. For now, I was staying in the local Pokemon Center, going through my list of in-storage pokemon that I had on hand for trading.

Most of them were pokemon from around Saffron that I had captured when out and about training my actual team. I always would have a chat with the pokemon afterwards, letting them know I could release them if they wanted or I could keep them around until I found a good trainer for them. I had yet to actually trade for any pokemon that ended up on my main team.

But I had on a few occasions traded for other pokemon that might be useful in their own right for trades later on as well as just outright given a few away to various acquaintances that needed or wanted one for various reasons. My cousin (who I barely knew) had even used an ekans I caught as a starter last year. He'd done okay, was sitting at around three-badges and considering giving it up if he couldn't get to five this season.

On call for trading right now it looked like I had a pidgeotto, vulpix, goldeen, meowth, bellsprout, raticate, and a kadabra who called himself 'The Absent One' and said he 'foresaw' that I would 'face a trainer with great psychic potential in battle' and wanted me to trade him to them after I battled them. Which was both ominous and ridiculous in equal parts. The use of the word trade was promising though, suggesting I might get a good pokemon out of it.

I really should have figured out I was in an anime heavy interpretation of the world sooner. Though perhaps that was part of living in a world? You just don't think about how it would look to people from outside it all that often. I certainly had a unique perspective that was certain. The next day I headed downstairs to leave for breakfast and walked in on an interesting argument.

"Ash, you can't just run into Lt. Surge's gym without a plan like you did with Brock!" Misty's sharp voice echoed out.

"Hey-" Brock attempted to protest but was cut down with a look from Misty.

"Pikachu and my team can take on anything this guy can throw at us!" Ash yelled back at the redhead.

"Well come now, Ash." I began wryly as I walked over towards them, "A little strategy can't hurt every once and a while! I thought you took our lesson so much better than that!"

"Ah!" Ash yelled in truly anime fashion, "Isaac! What are you doing here?"

I raised an eyebrow, "I passed all my exams and won my first instructor-match so I'm out here for the SS Anne launch as my parents are also going to be in attendance with a few other Silph scientists and executives."

"Oh!" Another exclamation, this boy needed a chill pill, or five, "I think we're going to that, too!"

He turned to face his friends. "We are aren't we?"

Brock and Misty nodded together and then the older teen responded, "Yeah, we won those tickets in that raffle the other day."

A Team Rocket trap I knew, and not just Jesse and James in all likelihood. These circumstances were just the tiniest bit different from the anime that I was certain my theory on the Rockets being a compromise between the anime and game versions was correct.

"Right, I'll see you all there, but like I said. Ash, did you not take our lesson to heart? What's your plan for Lt. Surge? On three and four badge trainers he usually uses a voltorb, magnemite, and magneton, but he also sometimes uses a brutish raichu that he rescued from an unlicensed breeder a few years back."

"Uh…" Ash stated eloquently while he pulled up his pokedex, "Magnemite?" Misty smacked her forehead.

"Magnemite, the Magnet Pokemon- It's able to float through the air and emits Thunder Wave through its magnet-shaped units located on its sides." Ash quickly read the follow-up information, he was impatient and unfocused, not necessarily dumb.

"Well, okay! So I send Charmander out, right?" I nodded, "A good start, but say he gets paralyzed before he can do significant damage? And what would you do for the follow-up magneton? You just wore out your best counter to that on the first pokemon!"

I could metaphorically hear the gears in Ash's head clunking around.

"Oh...Bulbasaur and Pikachu can probably take the attacks but they won't be doing much damage back will they?" I grinned at the boy, see? Not dumb at all. You just had to get him to slow down with the right questions.

"So what are your three options? Assuming you get the standard match-up?"

"Er...train Charmander really hard...teach...new moves to Bulbasaur and Pikachu...and...what's the last one?"

"You could catch and train up a new pokemon!" Then Ash had another lightbulb moment of his own, one I hadn't even considered.

"Wait, I could train to get Primeape to work with me! He could pummel that magneton real good!" I opened my mouth, then closed it. That was...an interesting idea. And one that would skyrocket the power of Ash's team if he could get that powerhouse to work with him earlier. But wait…Ash already had Primeape? Maybe migration patterns were more consistent here and had changed the timeline due to realism or something.

"That's a brilliant idea!" I enthused, before turning to Misty and Brock, "So I've never worked with a lucario before have y'all ever worked with…" I racked my brain for a second, "I guess have you, Misty, worked with a poliwrath before?"

She grimaced and shook her head, "Only poliwags, sorry."

"Well…" I turned to Ash, "Then I guess it's time for a research party!"

I am fairly certain his groan was audible all the way over in Johto. It was a task which took up the better part of the daylight hours. We ended up getting both breakfast and lunch at a cafe down the road, courtesy of my wallet too, while sifting through pokedex data and PokeNet reports.

The biggest hurdle was that the only fighting-type move Primeape knew, was Seismic Toss. And Ash was hoping to use him against a floating pokemon that could shoot electricity. So while the move would definitely still do some damage it wasn't ideal. As grappling an electric-type was generally considered a Bad Idea™ unless you were a ground-type or had some special ability.

That meant we needed to teach Primeape a new move on top of getting him to listen to Ash. The first part was not insurmountable, with a little discipline Primeape should take to Karate Chop instinctively or learn Brick Break very easily. In fact…

"Ash!" I exclaimed at about one in the afternoon, "I have four pokemon that can all learn Brick Break! And Brock has one as well! And you even have three other pokemon that can learn it! What if we used Primeape's competitive nature and made it a contest with a prize to see which pokemon learns it first? He'd have the advantage on learning it the quickest. So if he won he'd feel validated for his strength and respected! And if he lost you could console him and push him to do better and fuel his drive!"

Brock's eyebrows raised, he definitely found the idea intriguing,

"We do have a few days until the SS Anne leaves, Ash. This could work."

Leaping up from his seat the young trainer pumped the air with his fist, "This is a great idea! Let's start now!"

I rolled my eyes, "There's an area past Diglett Cave with a mix of rocky ground and the beginnings of the next forest. We could start on branches and move our way up to the rocks and boulders."

That's how we found ourselves east of town forty minutes later. I released Brinker, Estella, Huck, and Artagnan. Each of them could learn the move. In front of Brock stood to my surprise a graveler (instead of the expected geodude) and even more shocking a kabuto.

"Uh...I guess he's just going to be watching?" I queried.

The gym leader nodded, "When he evolves he'll be able to learn so I want him to watch the process, plus he's...fresh so he hasn't watched much training."

I had heard something from my dad about relevant gym leaders and Elite Four members being sent fossil pokemon. So it would make sense that Brock and maybe even Misty and her sisters might have some of the Kantoan fossils. I had previously just thought he meant Lance with his aerodactyl.

In front of Ash stood Primeape of course, but also Pikachu, Squirtle, and Charmander. If Ash succeeded here...well there'd be a lot more coverage on his team going into the majority of his journey. As well as a semi-obedient Primeape.

I was causing waves; a thought I contemplated deeply as all our pokemon got to work based on the instructions we had compiled for learning the move from the PokeNet and pokedex.

They began by working on shattering branches with knife hands and punches. Once they could easily break the thickest branches we moved them on to the small rocks and boulders littering the area. Needless to say, Primeape was the first pokemon to finish this phase. Brinker and Estella followed quickly after. Though I had restricted Estella to attempting to learn it without her club, a close range surprise like this would be wonderful for pokemon that thought she was defenseless without it.

By the end of the evening, when it was time to head back to the pokemon center, Primeape was frustratedly pummeling at one of the very large 'completion' boulders. While every other pokemon was working on the small or medium ones.

Either his pride as a fighter was on the line or he really wanted that pokemon restaurant buffet we'd promised. As we went back for the night, I knew that I'd given Ash a major helping hand, and he'd be ready to face Surge soon. Regardless of whether he used the normal team or that raichu.

Every single participating pokemon at least had a passable Brick Break down by lunch the next day when Primeape achieved what you could easily call early mastery of the technique. The shared excitement between he and Ash as they jumped up and down in celebration really vindicated my theory on how the two of them could develop a stronger bond more quickly.

"It's really impressive," I remarked to Brock as they continued to dance around circling the shattered boulder.

"The technique?" The gym leader questioned me, but I shook my head.

"How easily he can bond with the most ornery and stubborn pokemon of any type!"

Brock blinked, as if he had never noticed before, and then he chuckled.

"You know what? Ash is so dense, stubborn, and has so little academic knowledge that it slipped past me somehow, but you're right! There's a strange charisma to the kid, he seems to draw friends, enemies, danger, and excitement to himself like a magnet. And it goes double for pokemon!"

"If we work to fill in some of those academic gaps with some hands on learning on the subjects he could go far," I of course had some foreknowledge of Ash's potential, but even with just the minimum advice and help I'd given him the boy had already begun to shine all the brighter with that potential.

"It's a little embarrassing that he didn't start out knowing at least most of the common type match-ups," Misty commented to us as she came over to join the conversation.

Brock let out a deeper laugh at that, "Yeah, tossing Pikachu at my onix was...an interesting choice. But his team at the time was all disadvantaged I'm pretty sure."

I winced, remembering flashes of that episode, "Yeah that can't have been a pretty fight."

"So do you really think he's ready for Lt. Surge?" Misty asked.

I nodded, "At least at the three badge level. He's got a solid Brick Break on Pikachu as well as Primeape, and Charmander and Bulbasaur should give him the safety net he would need to defeat Surge's normal three-badge team."

"And if Surge demands a one-on-one with that raichu you mentioned?"

I shrugged, "That would likely be if Ash offended him, and we worked on Pikachu's speed enough in conjunction with Brick Break that I think he could squeak out a victory."

It had taken Ash barely an extra day of training to beat that raichu in the show, so I was assuming just a little bit but the assumption was at least supported.

However, the more I started changing by these strangely coincidental meetings with Ash, the more worried I became. Previously I had kind of assumed I could skate by as a character of the day or occasional recurring character. Now though...I was unsure if I'd be able to avoid major Team Rocket encounters and worst of all...movie events.

I did not have a plan for surviving Mewtwo as things currently stood. Other than hoping Ash pulled through like canon. But with Jesse and James being...still weak but at least not flamboyantly idiotic I was unsure if Mewtwo would be as merciful as in canon from the get go.

I didn't think I was in a grimdark interpretation, but this world was definitely mildly more realistic than either show or games. Pokemon were more difficult to relate to, harder to train up to high levels, life in the true wilds was according to the PokeNet way more dangerous than life on the travelled routes that are what we saw in the games and most of the show episodes. Team Rocket attacks had actually killed people and pokemon from what I could tell. In fact I was fairly certain there was a ghost of a marowak over in Lavender now from a report I had seen on poaching around Rock Tunnel.

That meant it was dangerous not just for me, but also perhaps characters...no not characters, people, that I associated with having plot armor. I was part of this world now and events were happening in real time, not on a tv screen being predetermined.

During my musings Ash and Primeape had finally calmed down and strode over both grinning widely. Or as much as one could tell through Primeape's fur blocking his expression.

"Well, Primeape won the buffet, huh?" Misty, Brock, and I all laughed at Ash's declaration.

"Yeah, let's get everyone over to the restaurant. Everyone gets a plate, but Primeape gets the all-he-can-eat!"

As we ate for the next hour my mind was a whirlwind of ideas and concepts for how I could hold up against Mewtwo for at least a little bit. All of them involved me leaving Kanto for a month or two. Luckily with my parents being new money I could probably pull it off. But I'd have to accelerate my plans for my team to be able to catch the pokemon I needed to catch and train.

I could likely bum the location of the Moon Stone off of Ash. Finding an Ice Stone might be difficult but I could start putting feelers out with some of the VIPs that I knew would be on the SS Anne. I definitely could get Alexei to evolve into a piloswine by the time I needed to take the trip. And a Metal Coat...well I had some ideas for building one if I couldn't get my hands on one the normal way. That allowed me everyone except Alberich and possibly Artagnan evolved before I took a training and hunting trip.

Which would allow me to capture the dark and ghost sub-typed pokemon I needed to hold even a hope against Mewtwo. In all honesty I'd already been considering this trip, just previously I'd planned to do it after the Conference.

Try and build myself up a team worthy of Ace, gym leading, or maybe even an Elite Four invite. But with the likelihood of a New Island invite in my future...I needed to accelerate every single plan I could possibly think of that would strengthen my team. And protect me from psychics.

"So, Isaac," Brock asked casually over our meal, "Why don't you have a fossil pokemon? Your dad does run the revival research, right?"

I nodded, "It's a preference thing. I want an aerodactyl or one of the foreign possibilities. The League literally won't let anyone below Ace level attempt to tame a revived aerodactyl. So my options are: become an Ace Trainer or better, or go on a paleontology expedition elsewhere. I'm leaning towards the second option, heavily considering Unova for that so that I can combine it with looking into some ruins for some of the interesting pokemon that fall under my specialty out there."

"They have some pretty powerful rock, ground, and steel types out there if I remember correctly. It's a long trip though, you have to fly in a plane or take one of the longest and roughest sea voyages out there."

"It would be totally worth it though!" I enthused, "Krookodile, golurk, bisharp, durant, and escavalier would all give me defenses against psychics, which I am lacking at the moment. Excadrill and ferrothorn both have amazing capabilities when combined with team members I already have, and it looks like one of the fossils out there may be a large sea-turtle type of pokemon. Which could hopefully give me more aquatic mobility. I love Huck, he's the sweetest pokemon in the world, but he's not built for speed at all."

"I have to say, that was a really deep self-analysis. I didn't previously have a great opinion of Pokemon Tech, but if they produce more trainers like you…"

I laughed out loud, "No, Brock, the majority of my peers are the trust-fund rich kids you saw lording their status over Ash before I interrupted. Most are pressured to switch in their final years out of the League Track and into something else so they won't embarrass the school at the Conference. That's how you'll see one or two decently talented alumni at the Conference each year and none of the entitled brats for the most part."

Misty was a bit confused by how I referred to my peers however, "Uh...Isaac...haven't you paid for like...all of this? And got invited by name to the SS Anne because of your dad?"

I shrugged, "Yeah but that's all new money from the last few years since the fossil revival panned out. I started off at Tech as a scholarship student. Actually really pissed them off that they couldn't milk my parents for money until the initial period of the scholarship ran out and they were able to reassess my family's 'need'."

"If I had money like that I'd definitely eat like this all the time!" Ash interjected as he and Primeape scarfed down multiple plates side-by-side.

"Anything else you can think of to do with it, Ash?" I replied, laughing through my response. He tapped his forehead, deep in thought, before poking his finger into the air as if he had had a revelation.

"A really comfy tent!" Misty fell out of her seat as Brock and I broke down in laughter so intense we teared up. Ash Ketchum had no use for mansions, for boats, for private planes, or for luxury cars. Ash Ketchum's heart was sold to the open road and the path to becoming a Pokemon Master. And there was something in that determination, that surety, that universal constant that even though the boy was so much younger than me, in both lives, I felt the anxiety about the future catastrophic events ebb just a little.

Isaac's Team end of Chapter 5:
Cleo- Nidorina, Hustle
Brinker- A-Sandshrew, Snow Cloak
Alberich- Rhyhorn, Rock Head
Estella- Marowak, Rock Head
Huckleberry- Quagsire, Water Absorb
Artagnan- Scyther, Technician
Alexei- Swinub, Thick Fat

 

[Isaac A Drake]

Isaac's Team end of Chapter 14:
Cleo- Nidoqueen, Sheer Force
Brinker- A-Sandshrew, Snow Cloak
Alberich- Rhyhorn, Rock Head
Estella- Marowak, Rock Head
Huckleberry- Quagsire, Water Absorb
Artagnan- Kleavor, Sharpness
Alexei- Piloswine, Thick Fat
Rum Tum- G-Meowth, Steely Spirit
Hannibal- Aerodactyl
Unnamed Omastar
Unnamed Kabutops

 

[Rodvek97]

Nice
U post here too and remaster huh. So many change from the ff net?.

 

[Starman25]

Thanks for chapter

 

[Isaac A Drake]

Nice
U post here too and remaster huh. So many change from the ff net?.

Click to shrink...

A lot of cleaning up and continuity and clarity fixes as I stopped and started this fic multiple times over the last 5 years. Then once we reach the "end" I plan to move into the planned arcs I never got to for new content!

 

[ThunderBasilisk]

Honestly this story looks promising. Especially with the trifecta of my three favorite types! Wonder if he will get a Teddiursa and stumble into its final evolution? But of a shame he already has a Rhyhorn though. Cause there's that Alpha one in the Orange Islands.

 

[Isaac A Drake]

Honestly this story looks promising. Especially with the trifecta of my three favorite types! Wonder if he will get a Teddiursa and stumble into its final evolution? But of a shame he already has a Rhyhorn though. Cause there's that Alpha one in the Orange Islands.

Click to shrink...

Isaac gets quite the team together by the Conference. Almost done with the next 5 chapters being tidied up which will also batch post. Then it switches to smaller 2-4 chapter arcs posted reworked together until we hit the end of the Conference.

 

[Isaac A Drake]

Chapters 6-10 Branching Out and the SS Anne Arc

"Alright, brat," Lt Surge was beefy in the video games and show, but all the gods above and below in person he was an absolutely terrifying mass of muscle. They could cast John Cena to play this guy and still he'd have been lacking in height and muscle. Luckily he was talking to Ash and not me right now.

"How about we do a one on one with that wimpy looking pikachu you've got there? Make it a real test?" Ash gritted his teeth in anger, trying not to have an outburst. I was pretty proud of him for that actually.

"I have another pokemon that I promised would get to fight, so umm…" Even Ash was a little intimidated, though the comment had riled him enough up that he wasn't backing down, "Could we make it two on two with another of your three badge team?"

Just like that, Surge's intimidating demeanor dropped and he let out a long, sincere belly laugh.

"Aha, wow! You've got guts, kid! I like that! Sure thing, two on two, that pikachu first though?"

Ash grinned back at the man, his normally abrasive and twerpish behavior abating in the face of simply being shown just a little respect.

"You're on! Come on Pikachu, let's do this!"

"Pika pi!" Electricity crackled around Pikachu's cheeks as he leapt to the center of the arena for the challenge.

In a flash of light a hulking specimen of a raichu emerged onto Surge's side of the field. It was obviously a bit more of a physical fighter than your standard raichu, but I knew from my insider knowledge that it also had gotten into Surge's Thunder Stone store far before it was actually ready.

"Begin!" Cried the gym trainer acting as a referee. Without even waiting for commands both pokemon shot off with their opening moves. The raichu firing off a massive Thunderbolt and Pikachu zipping out of the way with a Quick Attack.

"That's it! Now show him your own electricity! Thundershock!"

Well Ash was still going to be Ash, I thought to myself as the raichu shrugged off the electric move from the smaller rat.

"Ahahaha, you think that's electricity? Blast away Raichu!" Surge was obviously not taking this quite seriously, and honestly after having my challenger fire off a Thundershock I probably wouldn't have either.

However a few Thunderbolts later I noticed a pattern emerging, Ash...was following the lesson I had taught him with Brinker. About how you can use defensive measures to put the opponent into a bad position for an offensive switch.

Pikachu was running rings around these Thunderbolts, firing off pathetic Thundershocks just to convince the raichu that he was still actually trying.

Surge noticed it too if his grin changing from condescending to approving was any indication. And yet he didn't tell his raichu to change tactics. I wasn't sure if he was going easy on Ash due to his approval or if he wanted this raichu taught a lesson.

Either way, Ash and Pikachu were about to punish that, because the gaps between the Thunderbolts had increased by almost two full seconds. Plenty of time for- "Quick Attack into Brick Break, Pikachu!"

A blur of light and Pikachu's glowing tail slammed into the gut of the raichu between Thunderbolts, staggering it viciously.

"Hammer away!"

The fight almost ended there, Pikachu got another shot in before the raichu recovered and CAUGHT the third Brick Break with a glowing paw, the other one glowed as well and a heavy Mega Punch sent Pikachu back to the edge of the arena.

"Good one, kid!" Surge said approvingly. "But this big lug can take hits just as well as he can dish them out. Body Slam! Slow it down!"


Pikachu had barely managed to stagger up from that brutal punch before he had to clumsily backpedal out of the way of the raichu's plummeting body, which slammed right into where the smaller rodent had been not a second before.

"Get some distance again, Pikachu!" Ash called out, somewhat frantically. But then he saw the same thing I did, how long it took the raichu to stumble to his feet after missing with that body slam.

"Back in with a Brick Break!"

Surge's grin widened, "Got ya, punk! Mega Kick!"

The raichu which had been baiting them, thrust a glowing foot into the sky. Both pokemon hit each other in the heads with their attacks, sending the two of them flying opposite directions. Both failed to rise.

After that double knock-out I don't think Surge realized that the next fight was a foregone conclusion until he saw Primeape appear across from his magneton.

"You have a bruiser like that and you walk around with a pikachu?" Surge asked in surprise.

"Sure!" Ash said, "Pikachu was my first pokemon and it's only been lately that I got Primeape here to take me seriously!"

The gym leader nodded at that, "Yeah, pokemon with a temper and ego can be rough for you youngsters. How'd ya pull that one off kid?"

And then something I didn't expect happened, Ash pointed right over at me.

"Isaac's a really strong trainer! He helped me teach my pokemon that Brick Break move and showed me a lot about being smarter in my fights!"

"It's called tactics, Ash!" Misty chided from next to me.

I could tell Surge was instantly interested and turned his attention on me, "How many badges do you have, son?"

I gulped, "Uh...technically seven. I'm a student at Pokemon Tech and have passed enough of my exams and trials to qualify for seven. My final trial will be next month."

The retired soldier continued grinning, "What do you say after I finish this one you challenge my eight badge team for a real final badge?"

My mouth fell open, that was...technically allowed actually. I could substitute badges earned in gym battles as long as the substitution was for the same level I fought the battle at.

"Uh, of course! I'd be excited to have that experience!" Surge nodded then turned back to the fight at hand.

"Alright kid, let's see if your furry monster has what it takes!"

It turns out Primeape very much did, training so much with Pikachu had done a lot more for his speed than we expected. Surge used a very smart strategy with his magneton, don't get me wrong here, but it was obviously a three-badge magneton. He just couldn't get it to land one of the incapacitating or control moves like Supersonic or Thunderwave to slow Primeape down enough to hit with some heavy damage. Likely a higher level magneton under his control would have had Lock-on to get around this issue, I wagered, but that's what made gym battles fair. Leaders had to use pokemon with power within a certain range for the number of badges the challenger had.

Though admittedly some leaders had their gym trainers face the weaker trainers. Giovanni only showed up for badges seven and eight for example. And Sabrina from five onwards. Blaine used to show up for every challenger until tourism got bad. Now he had his gym trainers at his fake gym take on anyone with five or less, and six plus trainers still had to beat those gym trainers to get the location of his real gym.

In short, thanks to our training the previous few days, the battle went very favorably for Ash from the beginning. In fact the longer it went the more I could see Primeape's typically uncontrollable battle rage focus and hone itself. It was a miraculous thing to see, it was almost as if his state of mind was reflecting Ash's as the young trainer became more and more laser focused upon the fight himself. A final, brutal Brick Break sent the magneton flying into the wall of the arena, knocking it out. While it had landed a few Shock Waves, Primeape seemed still ready to go.

"Great job, Primeape!" Ash called out, flashing his ridiculous victory sign as his pokemon danced about before being returned.

Everyone took a quick break in the gym's lobby while Surge and I prepared ourselves for our battle. It would be my six pokemon against his five on his eight badge team.

I quickly used the PC system to swap Artagnan out for Alexei, my scyther, while certainly confident enough to try, wouldn't stand a chance against Shock Wave in particular.

I wasn't sure about Alexei's chances either, but I needed him to have more battle experience in order to evolve, which using him as my lead would certainly allow. Plus while he wasn't the strongest fighter, I had taught him a few tricks that would help out with him in the lead.

"Oh wow!" Ash exclaimed, "I can't believe I am going to get to see Lt. Surge's eight badge team in action! Think we can pick up some tricks, Pikachu?"

"Pika-pi!" The yellow rodent, recovered from his fight likely through some of Brock's medicine, enthusiastically punched a fist into the air in excitement.

It would be interesting to see how Pikachu developed. I had single-handedly caused him and Ash to dodge the anti-evolution bias that had developed in the canon that I could hazily remember.



However, Ash also very much wasn't the type to go around throwing evolution stones at his partners unless they asked him to or a spontaneous situation occurred.

Thus, if Pikachu ever did evolve, I fully expected it to be in the middle of some stressful or life and death situation. As far as I knew Ash didn't even have the Thunderstone he'd been given to evolve Pikachu on hand, as he'd never lost his initial match in the first place.

In fact… "Hey, Brock…" I whispered to the gym leader.

"Yes, Isaac?" He said back, dropped his volume to match mine.

"From the stories I heard while we were training…am I wrong or is this not Ash's first standard victory in his gym battles?"

Brock nodded, "Yeah it is. Though he did beat at least most of Misty's team before Team Rocket intervened and he got the badge for helping out."

"I think he's getting a taste for it." I mentioned as I casually gestured at where Ash had called Primeape back out and was doing a move by move reenactment with his two pokemon of the battle. Chuckling, the Pewter City gym leader nodded at my assessment.

"Mr. Beech, the Lieutenant is ready for you!" The receptionists announced.

Nodding I went to the challenger's entrance and the rest of my…friends? I was friends with Ash and the gang I guess, that felt odd. I didn't know a lot about Surge's eight badge team. What I did know was that it included a powerful electabuzz and raichu. Which probably meant my strong physical defenders should be saved for them. Alberich, my rhyhorn, and Huckleberry, my quagsire would shine there.

I could use Estella, my marowak, and Brinker, my Alolan Sandshrew, for any of the lightning fast electric pokemon that could be thrown my way. Cleo, my nidorina, wasn't quite ready for this kind of fight without her immune body she would get as a nidoqueen, but she could reasonably get some good damage and status effects in to soften something up.

Gripping Alexei's pokeball in my hand I walked out onto the field.

"Ah! That's a fighter's look in your eyes, kid! I think I'll enjoy this! Not only did you whip that brat into shape-"

"Hey!" Came from the stands.

"But you seem to take training far more seriously than the average student of those soft academies I have seen the last few years!"

"We all get out of life what we put into it, Lt. Surge." I replied, "Unfortunately you can't teach work ethics to trust fund babies."

The man laughed, "Oh? And you're different? You go to that blueblood school as well."

I shrugged, "I didn't start out that way, my dad just sold out to Silph."

"Beech…I thought I recognized that from some stuff Cerise was telling me a while back. Fossil Project right? Got any of those on your team?"

I laughed, shaking my head, "I wish, but the only one I would really benefit from would be an aerodactyl and those are sanctioned at the moment."

Though…I did know where to find one. That was an interesting idea.

"Ambitious! Good! That'll get you places, alright, let's get this party started. My five to your full team. Gym leader sends out first, go Jolteon!"

With a bark the prickly fox-like eevee evolution took the field. Electricity crackling along its spines.

I nodded and threw my pokeball, "Alexei, set the stage!" I called out, letting him know his initial strategy as he was called out.

Alexei appeared in a flash of red light, he was not a small swinub. His brows had thickened, he'd gained some bulk, and if one looked closely small bumps under his pink snout could be seen where his tusks would emerge. He was so close to evolving. But considering we were fighting an eight badge team the most I could expect would be for him to set up well. Which he immediately did, icy mist began leaking from his pores, enveloping him and the field.

"Ah, both a ground type and reducing visibility! Good choice. But we've been through this rodeo a few times! Cover the field with Pin Missile!"

My smiling face thinned into a stern look as I observed the field get peppered with the bug-typed missiles. I did, however, trust Alexei to have followed his directive. To make up for his slow overland speed he was currently burrowing beneath the field with Dig. And the timing was just about right that…

"Nub!" A cry came out from the field as scores of shrapnel ricocheted up from the swinub's exit tunnel. Only instead of crashing back down, it remained there hovering.

"Clever! Not enough, but clever! Dual Screens, now!"

I balked, that wouldn't be good, "Disrupt it, Alexei! Icy Wind!"

As the screens went up Alexei blasted a frozen gust through the misty battlefield, hitting the jolteon with increased power from the extra material, but still not doing much more than slightly slowing it down.

The screens went up, then Surge did something I didn't expect out of him. "Agility into Baton Pass!" His jolteon was a freaking Baton Passer.

The purplish-pink glow of Agility surrounded it then it zipped back to its pokeball, with Surge's powerful Electabuzz hitting the field, with dual screens and an Agility up. "Ah…crapbaskets."

"I thought Gym leaders couldn't switch pokemon?" Ash said, confusedly turning to Brock and Misty.

"They can't, but that was a special move that switches your pokemon. So it gets around the rule." The redhead explained.

"U-Turn and Volt Switch are both high expertise moves that do similar. Some trainers make entire teams built around a strategy called 'pivoting'." Brock added.

"Oh…that's bad for Isaac isn't it?"

"Very bad. We might actually see him lose this one."

A viciously super-effective Low Kick slammed into Alexei, making the swinub cry out in pain.

"Yeah…very bad." Even as the Stealth Rocks slammed into the electabuzz the psychic energy of the dual screens took part of the effect, and the energy of the Agility burst to life around it. Allowing a brutal blitz attack right into Alexei.

"Endure!" I called out, borderline desperately, as the glow of the move shined around his partner, barely allowing Alexei to hold on through the Low Kick that slammed into the swinub's comparatively tiny form.

As the yellow brute flickered backwards from its attack, preparing for another quick strike, a secondary glow erupted from Alexei. The glow of evolution.

I grinned, "Amazing show Alexei, but even with this I am going to bring you back. You deserve to rest."

"Swiiinnneee…" The newly evolved piloswine rumbled in agreement. That kick had hurt.

As my pokemon returned in a burst of red light, I tilted my head to the side, quickly examining the electabuzz. It was a big bruiser of a specimen for its species. Which makes sense, Surge was all about physical fitness. That Low Kick meant I couldn't send out Alberich the rhyhorn, typically who I would use against a heavy physical attacker. And the Agility boost from the Baton Pass meant my fast pokemon wouldn't be at as much of an advantage as they normally would have.

This meant that I really only had one choice, "To arms, Estella!"

In a burst of light my trusty marowak appeared, bone club spinning in anticipation.

Surge's eyebrows shot up, "You're a type specialist?"

I shrugged, "In the same way Steven Stone is. It's not all ground-types. But I do specialize in the earth element wedge. Rock, Ground, and Steel."

Surge nodded, "Well I hope that advantage and your tactics are enough for you then. Because I'll be doing my best to beat straight past those resistances!"

And with that suddenly his electabuzz was in Estella's face and vicious punches and kicks were being thrown at her, barely being blocked or deflected by her club.

Unfortunately your average marowak is not particularly fast, no matter what their bodies and techniques would make you think. And electabuzz were the same but in reverse. Extremely fast on base, regardless of what their muscle packed forms would suggest.
However, I had trained Estella very effectively. Out of all my pokemon she was probably the smartest and most tactically inclined. I had drilled this situation into her, well not this exact situation, but similar circumstances.

A brutally fast and strong physical attacker she couldn't dance around the way she could Alberich or punch through the way she could Artagnan? She knew this scenario.

I grinned as a Low Kick slammed into her purposefully lowered skull, seemingly doing even less damage than last time. Unfortunately Surge caught onto it too.

"You cheeky brat! That marowak knows Skull Bash and you've been holding the strike portion of the attack back to build defense!"

I shrugged, "That's part of it, Estella…Anger Burst."

She also knew both Bide and Rage. I had effectively combined the techniques. Every time she was hit her attack stat would rise as if she had been building her Rage. However instead of repetitive usage, it is charged to be unleashed similar to Bide. Combined with the Skull Bash's strike…well the electabuzz was extremely surprised when Estella rocketed forward and her boney skull slammed into its gut, shattering the dual screens, and threw it tumbling backwards. Giving her all the distance and space she needed to truly start the battle on her terms.

Her bone began flying around the battlefield, circling, looping, and ricocheting around stopping the electabuzz from closing the distance again. Even with the continued Agility boost. Occasionally mixing Quick Attack with its already boosted speed the electabuzz broke through, but the tide of the battle had turned.

I watched Estella systematically dismantle the brute with her rage enhanced strength and bone club. Bonemerang tosses slowly chipped away at its health until the yellow beast was returned.

"Good job, kid! Your marowak is well trained! Let's see it deal with something more versatile! Magneton, go! It's a ground-type, you know the drill!"

As the creepy, hovering, mass of magnets and metals took the field it immediately began blasting out Tri-Attacks from its multiple eyes and magnets.

Now Estella was back on the defensive, and not in the way she excelled. She only had ways to boost her physical defenses, not her special ones.

"You've got to force an opening! Dodge the ice, push through the fire, and deflect the lightning with your club!" Estella jumped into action, following my directions perfectly.

The Bone Club came up and whacked the magneton straight between the eyes. Which widened in surprise as it reeled back from the still stacked attack boosts. Which allowed her to finish the job.

"Can't underestimate you at all it seems! Alright, get out here electrode!" That…wasn't a great match up. Estella was tired, she definitely wasn't going to take an Explosion well if that's where we ended up.

"Keep your distance!" Estella tried to fall back on her Bonemerang strategy, but Surge had his electrode use Magnet Rise and begin zipping around the field, levitating and throwing out Sonic Booms. This time it was Estella who got whittled down and I returned her before she could be fully knocked out, but she wasn't going to be too much use the rest of this fight.

"Cleo, you've got this!" She had the biggest coverage pool of all my pokemon, and it would only grow after she evolved.

"Try and poison it!" A barrage of Poison Sting barbs and Toxic globules began firing out in alternation across the field, trying to track the speedy electrode as it rolled through the air. Swifts and Sonic Booms were fired back at Cleo and both parties got clips in, though Cleo never landed a proper Toxic.

Cleo didn't manage to finish off the electrode, but she did manage to poison it, which allowed me to send out Alberich to start building up momentum for Surge's fifth and final team member. Unfortunately he had to rely on Rock Throw for the most part, with the Magnet Rise in effect I couldn't have him use Bulldoze. Which caused me to make a big mistake.

Frustrated, I called out, "Roar!"

The Roar forced a switch out, bringing out Surge's raichu straight into a barrage from the Stealth Rocks I had laid at the beginning of the battle. It looked great.

And then the raichu led with a Fake Out, staggering Alberich, and opening him up to an absolute onslaught. Surge followed up with Endeavor, equalizing the raichu's low base hit points and my rhyhorn's high base hit points. I didn't like that playing field being evened, but Alberich was slow, I tried to have him toss out Bulldozes to slow down the raichu, and it did allow him to disrupt the first Brick Break, but not the second.
Eventually I had to return Alberich, needing something that could keep up with the raichu. Luckily I had that option. Or at least one that would soften it up.

"Out, Brinker!" I called, my Alolan sandshrew appearing with glittering icy plates and claws.

"Fancy! We hate fancy." Surge quipped, as he had the raichu switch tactics, as opposed to aggressive attrition it began blitz moves.

Quick Attacks into Brick Breaks primarily, but mixing in the odd Thunderpunch as my partner was no longer immune.

Brinker kept pace beautifully however. Metal Claws met Thunder Punch and Brick Breaks met air as he darted away with Rollout, slowly building speed and momentum as well.

Surge could definitely see that I was keeping pace with the war of attrition. And I still had a completely fresh pokemon on tap. Which is likely why he did his next move.

"Volt Switch!" Just like the Baton Pass his pokemon got around the leader-switching handicap and out came the electrode again.

Brinker made short work, only taking a few Sonic Booms. But then when the electrode fainted something unexpected happened. It let out one final explosion. His electrode apparently had Aftermath as an ability.

Brinker, after fighting two of Surge's pokemon and tanking that explosion was not in a great state, I returned him.

"Alright, Huckleberry it's your turn!" A quagsire against an already winded raichu looked good for me. But boy did that raichu put up a fight.

Amnesia worked greatly in my favor, boosting his already stellar defenses. The raichu was limited to Brick Break and Mega Punch, which weren't hurting Huck too badly. But I couldn't get him to land a Yawn or Mud Bomb to finish the fight either.

What finally finished the battle was a move I didn't even think had properly stuck in Huck's adorable but thick head. I'd been working for months on turning Huck into more of a special attacker than physical attacker, but the quagsire movepool was generally poor for that until higher levels and more expensive technical machines were involved.

So when Huck got frustrated and blurted out a torrent of water that slammed into the dirt arena and created a tidal wave of a proper Muddy Water attack I was surprised. It swamped the raichu finishing the battle. Both Huck and I slumped back into sitting positions.

"Whew…" I breathed out, exhausted by the strain of the focus leaving my body and mind.

"Good job, kid. You earned your final badge. I better see you whip the competition on TV."

I grinned up at the burly man who had walked over to give me my reward. "You got it, sir."

Twenty minutes to run to drop his pokemon off at the center ended with myself leading Ash and company back to one of the cafe's we'd decided we liked over the past week or so.

"And then your sandshrew stopped that Thunderpunch with its claw and that was so cool!" Ash had apparently really enjoyed my battle.

Brock was getting a good laugh out of his enthusiasm, "I hope you took notes, Ash. You seem to learn better from full examples instead of just me explaining it to you."

"I kinda wish I'd gotten to see more of his electric moves though…" Ash groused, "Maybe Pikachu could have picked up some ideas!"

"He certainly gave you a show on how to get around resistances and immunities with Pikachu though!" I chimed in, "Brick Break, Iron Tail, Tri Attack, Sonic Boom, he made sure all his pokemon had coverage moves or moves that didn't care about my own defenses!"

A microsecond of thoughtfulness crossed Ash's face, "Oh yeah! That's true! And Pikachu already knows Brick Break too!"

An hour later we all separated, "I'll see you all on the SS Anne in a few days."

As I returned to my room at the Pokemon Center I frowned. Hopefully I could avoid a gyarados swarm getting involved in that. My frown deepened as I approached, events were just different enough from the show for me to question the foreknowledge my dreams of a previous life gave me as I got on the SS Anne.

First of all Brock and Misty had been able to get Ash aboard as a guest of the two gym leaders, which made a whole lot more sense.

However, the place was still packed because there had been some kind of sweepstakes that had supposedly gotten out of hand. Which clued me in that Team Rocket was definitely still around with their hand in the cookie jar.

Merchandise being sold everywhere, people showing off and trading pokemon, and battles galore. There was an official tournament with the prize being a voucher for a pokemon from the prize counter at the Game Corner in Celadon City.

I wondered if that was legit or not. But there were plenty of small free-battle arenas for people to show off their skills or even just show off powerful pokemon that they wished to trade.

The day we arrived it was near the middle of the first day of the convention instead of directly before launch due to Ash not taking the extra time by losing to Surge initially. We'd still spent a good number more days than I'd expected on training Ash up however.

The trade center is what I really wanted. While we weren't all sporting Rotom-phones or C-gear yet, most trainers had some form of wireless communication device. Either a low-end Pokegear or Nav.

Ash was somewhat an exception at the moment. Even Brock and Misty had emergency League gears on them. Though apparently they were poor service.

So I collated my spare Pokemon on my PokeNav and posted it to the local hub run off the ship as "For Trade, LF Ground, Rock, or Steel types of uncommon or better species or ability".

I got a frustrating number of people asking if a run of the mill geodude or onix counted before I caught the fish I wanted. Someone was a big world traveler and he wanted to trade his Galarian forms for Kanto forms, and we both had meowths.

When I met the man I knew that there was a lot more to the story than that. "Professor Samson Oak!" I greeted, "I didn't recognize your handle, I am guessing this is much more involved than wanting to swap regional forms?"

The elderly but laid back and very tan professor scratched the back of his head, "Well you caught me young Beech. I've been going around and trading regional forms from other regions to promising young trainers I have found here at home before I jump off to the next region for study. I just got back from Galar and will be heading over to Alola for a few years next. It's quite like Cinnabar I hear so I should enjoy it."

Samson Oak was notorious for picking only the most plush and tourist friendly places for his bases when he did his travel studies.

"Well I'm glad to see you again, Professor. It's been a while since I showed Brinker off to you at that convention! He is about ready for me to find him an Ice Stone to evolve now!"

"Ah yes, your wonderful sandshrew! I hope to find many of his cousins when I go ski-I mean surveying that mountain!"

"So I take it you're transferring ships at Porta Vista when we arrive?"

If we arrived, I sardonically thought to myself.

"Hmm…ideally. Though my cousin might call me away and I'll have to teleport out before then. He had some last minute experiments he wanted my opinion on and I'm not sure if I'll be needed in person."

"Well your cousin wouldn't call you away for something small, so I hope to be reading about it after it finishes review!"

"Oh I'm sure you will, now, I believe you wanted a sharp and prickly meowth?"

I laughed, "Are they really that bad? I'd read they could be…prickly but that they are also great fighters, and I must say I do need a few steel-types to balance out my team. Brinker's been great, but I've recently seen some coverage gaps in my offense pointed out to me."

The professor nodded knowingly, "Yes, the curse of the type-specialists. Though you lucked out more than most connecting well with three types as opposed to the normal one or two."

I shrugged, "Most rock-type specialists also connect with ground-types just as well so I'd say it's closer to two anyways. Though it would be great to one day stand tall enough to give Steven Stone a run for his money I don't think that's really where I see myself going."

"Oh? And where do you see yourself after you've made a run of the League a time or two?"

I grinned sheepishly in response before he continued. "Yes I bumped into your father the other day, he can't stop bragging about you taking out Surge for your eighth badge instead of 'beating up some teachers'. In fact your school is also placing some clips of that fight on their ads for the coming year. They're preparing for you to be a dark horse in the League this year."

I sighed, "Yeah…well it's hard to get anywhere in this world in a pokemon related field without a little exposure. So I figured I'd run two or three leagues over the next few years and then work on an academic field degree."

"Ah! There it is, following or surpassing your parents?"
I groaned, "I suppose in a way both? With my type-specialty it would be a waste for me to not go into the paleontology field you know? But…I want to take it a step further. In fact… maybe you can work with me one day. Because I want to keep a foot in both yards so to speak. I want to study extinct regional variants of pokemon!"

Oak's substantial eyebrows lifted high, "Now that's an ambition! They've only been speculated upon based on archaeological evidence of strange looking versions of species we know from places like Sinnoh and Oblivia. Professor Carolina swears up and down that some fossilized tracks are not ursaring tracks but actually a regional second evolution! Wouldn't that be something?"

I nodded, "It definitely would be! Furthermore I really want to, oh man this feels bad, but we need to improve the fossil resurrection process. I'm fairly certain not all of these pokemon were inexplicably part rock-type."

Samson snorted and almost choked himself trying to contain his laughter.

"Yes, that has been a criticism of the…presentation of the facts surrounding much of your father and his coworkers' research."

"Now, the kabuto and omanyte lines I definitely could see it happening. And aerodactyl too, now that I think of it. The preserved pieces of the shells definitely lends to the rock-type analysis. But look at the Sinnohan shieldon! I bet you that the shieldon line was steel and ground in their own time. And don't get me started on amaura!"

"Yes, I too follow the originally mono-typed theory for amaura."

I shook my head to disperse my rambling, "Sorry to go off like that, Professor! But uh…yeah the meowth? It's a feisty one I am guessing then?"

"Indeed! Young, decently house-broken though, he has been staying on my cousin's ranch so you know he'll not be extremely difficult, just stubborn perhaps. No nickname, you'll be able to give it one yourself, which I know you like."

I nodded, "Sounds great! So only knows a few special moves?"

"Yes, Fake Out and Hone Claws stand out. Though analysis has shown it may have a proficiency for Night Slash, meaning a thievul is somewhere in the family line."

I nodded, that was all workable, "Well I have a few months to get him ready for the League anyways! Sure he won't be going in for the finals if I get there but I am sure he'll be a demon in the qualifiers!"

Samson wished me luck and we commenced with the trade. I had moved most of the pokemon I put up for trade into a temporary digital stasis box for easy transport as opposed to having to call the ranch and set things up live.

This left me with Cleo, Brinker, Artagnan, Estella, and most importantly Huck in my party outside of the new meowth.

With that in mind I swung by Ash and the group as they observed a match, "Hey guys, I just traded for a Galarian meowth with Professor Oak's cousin so I'm going to go to my suite and introduce it to my team. Toss me a ring if you need me before dinner, if not see ya there!"

I breezed out of there with a grin on my face as I heard Ash finally process what I said.

"Wait…Professor Oak has a cousin? Galar has a special type of meowth?! Wait…Brock what does he mean 'traded'?"

Back in my decently plush suite, man dad had been raking in the cash and endorsements with the fossil revival stuff this year, I released Cleo.

"Hey, girl! I got us a new team member so I thought I'd introduce him to you first and we'd go from there?"

She nodded. We hadn't gotten a new team member since the very beginning of the school year, when I'd gotten Artagnan from a Safari Zone excursion.

I released the meowth onto the middle of the floor and he popped right up, looking around curiously before turning his bright yellow eyes to me and raising his paws and giving out an adorable light growl.

I chuckled a bit, even as Cleo stepped in front of me, "So did Samson tell you he was planning to find you a good trainer?" The meowth growled back at me but nodded. Good, so he was responsive and likely just posturing.

"Well, my name is Isaac Beech, this here is Cleo, and we would like you to join our team."

Thankfully Samson had prepared his catches for the prospect of trade so things went about as smoothly as they could. The little meowth jumped around and postured a bit but when I pulled out a bit of steel wool and a Pokeblock and started giving him scritches behind the ear while feeding him a treat he was the calmest kitten you could imagine.

"Hmm…what to name you." I ran through literature and play names in my head like I usually did. But the one I landed on that felt like it fit gave me a good chuckle.

"Well I remember hating the play but for some reason it feels like Rum Tum Tugger fits you. How do you like that? Rum Tum?"

"Meoow!" He licked up the remaining crumbs of the Pokeblock.

"We'll go with that, then!" I returned Cleo and let our new little guy stay out for some bonding and made my way back downstairs to rejoin my friends. I vaguely remember a tv episode of some show from my old life where a guy goes out to get pizza and comes back and everything is on fire. It was kind of like that, Ash was mid-battle in one of the small rings but he was using Charmander and well…I think Charmander was getting a little angry at his opponent. An oddly nimble machop that I suspected was using Detect to dodge around every blast of fire sent its way.

"Come on Charmander! You can do it! We just have to hit him once!"

Oh dear, I suppose Ash still had some of his season one tendencies even if he was improving. The battle did go well for him, however. Thanks to our earlier arrival Ash ended up being a lot less overwhelmed and excitable. Well he was still extremely excitable but he didn't jump into making any exceptionally dumb trades. So I'll call that a win.

I hadn't spotted anyone that stuck out as a Rocket like a sore thumb yet, however. Which concerned me. It meant they were very good at hiding, not here yet for some reason, or I was extremely lucky and they weren't coming at all. I knew for a fact I was not an extremely lucky person.

The next day I ran a small analysis on who and what I had on hand. Alexei my piloswine and Alberich my rhyhorn were the two pokemon I had sent back to the ranch my family rented to care for my not in use pokemon. They both had limited mobility on the ship and I wanted to acclimate Rum Tum, the new Galarian meowth, to my team and style.

He wasn't quite all sharp edges like he would be once he evolved, currently it was almost like his fur was made of steel wool. Still not the most comfy of materials.

He had Tough Claws and knew Fake Out, Hone Claws, Metal Claw, Pay Day, and Taunt so that put him near level twenty on average. Though again, levels were like IQ scores, poor generalizations of greater and more complex phenomena.

We were to cast off this afternoon, and Samson Oak had left this morning, much bemoaning that he'd have to teleport instead of enjoying the cruise due to something that came up at his cousin's lab.

So as Brock chaperoned Ash through a few friendly battles and Misty socialized with trainers she knew from interactions at her family's gym I scrolled through the trades seeing if there was anything more that interested me.

Unfortunately there was not. I had hoped maybe with the proximity a larvitar might be available, while most stayed around Mount Silver some did relatively often wander down into the lowlands of Johto, and there were always breeders for rare pokemon at these events wanting to show off. And truly, there were, just not for my type specialties.

Quite a few breeders had the regional starters, eevees, and even one trading and selling mime jrs. But alas, the earth types were still mostly just onix, sandshrews, and the nidoran line. There was one swinub but I already had Alexei. No one even had a gligar or phanpy to offer unfortunately.

Sighing I closed my device and made my way over to where Ash was battling. He was having his charmander kite around a rather frustrated looking drowzee who seemed loath to drop its Light Screen to go on the attack and risk the flames. I knew Ash was just waiting for an opening to break through with Brick Break, however I would have stayed and watched to the end anyways except for a shock of purple hair I noticed through the crowd.

Peeling away from the match I as stealthily as possible began following them along. Unfortunately while I was able to catch a glint of gold that just had to be Meowth, I quickly lost track of them in the crowd. Team Rocket was already here. And who knew how many other trainers on the ship were Rockets as well?

I'm not sure if it was the early arrival or what, but this was definitely different than canon. In the same way the fight at the school had been, it was more realistic and less bombastic and cartoonish. Now it was not as bad as that Adventures manga or anything, but it was still worrying nonetheless. Didn't that manga kill people on this ship? Or was that a gritty grimdark fanfic?

Point being, even in a semi-realistic version of this universe I had to be careful, because both Rockets and gyarados would be deadly without even having active intent to kill.

Though…hmm yes that might work. I made my way back through the crowd to Ash's battle, which was now wrapping up with many cheers.

I wove through and placed myself next to Brock, "I saw James and Meowth but lost them in the crowd, you guys should keep your guards up."

He…well his eyes sort of moved up and down so I am going to count that as a processing blink, "Hmm…thanks for the warning, Isaac. We'll be casting off soon so this is about to get a whole lot tighter in here."

I nodded, "I don't suppose you managed to evolve that kabuto the League gave you?"

As the Rock-type gym leader he had received a resurrected kabuto from the League and my father's lab to raise, train, and develop knowledge of. Misty as the Water-type gym leader had an omanyte for the same reason.

Lance was the only one who had an aerodactyl, the things were nigh uncontrollable. Of course. I was planning to perhaps change that shortly.

With that thought in mind I went back to my cabin to go over some of my future plans. I knew the locations of a good number of pokemon that would be compatible with my team and training. Scribbling through my notebook I listed some of the more important, rare, and powerful ones. A giant golurk, hidden in some ruins at the Desert Resort in Unova. A very strong choice and very possibly one that could help greatly against Mewtwo. I knew where meltan could eventually be found, though I was unsure if they would be there currently, which made it a poor choice to hunt after, even with how powerful a melmetal would be. I knew where the Diamond Domain was…but that was insanely dangerous. Same with the Tree of Life and the possible lucario acquisition there. On top of that I didn't know if I could even activate that storage crystal. Similarly to both the previous examples, I knew where genesects would be once they were revived, but something told me that was years off as it would no doubt be based on an experimental expansion of my own father's research. And also they would definitely kill me.

If I didn't already have Alberich I would try stopping by Fairchild Isle and catching an Alpha rhydon. Hmm…I could probably catch that Alpha magcargo near Blackthorn City before that character of the day trainer got it. Honestly I only knew about this one because there were public reports about it already, and it had retriggered a memory. Actually most of these were memories retriggered from reading Pokedex or travel guide entries. I hadn't actually been able to remember them in a vacuum.

There was an Alpha claydol and whiscash in Hoenn. The claydol especially would be a strong addition. And I think there was a shiny donphan out that way? But I don't remember her being especially powerful.

Sinnoh apparently had a wild metagross living alone outside of Snowpoint. There were rumors treating it like a cryptid actually.

Magearna is out for similar reasons to Diancie. At least any active wild one would be. I have no confidence in my ability to take on even the relatively calm legends and convince them to join my side.

Didn't that weird pink island have a rather powerful nidoking? Something to think about if Cleo ever wants a mate I suppose. I wonder if the Zygarde cores have been released and exposed yet? That would actually be the most reasonable legend to get a hold of. Working through the twenty-five percent form (I think that was the number) would definitely be manageable and hopefully ingratiate it to me, but I had no idea if the timeline was that far advanced yet. I hadn't seen any rumors of Team Flare yet.

I wasn't ready to make a play on either of the two Regis I might be able to work with either. Yeah, legends were off the table. Especially as I had no idea whether they were just high base stat pokemon with cool abilities, or literal forces of nature and god-like creatures. Or something in between.

If I had to pick for a training journey before the Conference…Unova offered me an ancient giant golurk and a large list of standard wild pokemon that fit my specialty all near the target. Hoenn offered me multiple lesser but still well above average pokemon as well. Sinnoh though…I'm not sure I could pull off that metagross without the help of the golurk or other similar high power catches. If I evolved Artagnan and worked Estella to the bone I could maybe pull it off.

I'd heard the fog horn and felt us cast off about ten minutes into my note-taking and research checking. It was now an hour past that and probably time to show my face downstairs for dinner. I just had to hope awareness of the problem let us handle Team Rocket without a complete shipwreck this time.

We'd barely reached the mouth of the Vermillion Bay when the Rockets struck. There had been far more than I imagined disguised as both passengers and crew. Currently Brinker was playing defense with Mirror Coats, Mist, and Powder Snow to control the field while I had Cleo swerving in and out of combat with Double Kicks, Bites, and debilitating Toxic to force our foes into retreat.

Already we'd taken out two golbat, three raticate, who knows how many ratatata, and some assorted other standard Rocket fare. That's when a face I unfortunately recognized, and not from any of the Gen I games or anime, stepped forward.

Well, at least I recognized her mostly, Team GO Rocket Leader Sierra looked closer to my age than the mid-20s she seemed in the AR cell phone game I recognized her from.

Hopefully this meant she didn't have any of the more terrifying team additions of Gardevoir or Gyarados that had given my past incarnation so much trouble.

"Move aside, Grunts. I will handle this one. He's too cute to pass up." Oh, I was definitely vomiting after this was over.

"Sableye, let's test you out!" And she released her iconic shiny sableye, though thankfully it wasn't a shadow pokemon at all. Yet. Came unbidden to my thoughts.

"Brinker, continued keeping people off of us, Cleo, return!"

My starter wasn't the best choice I had here. Especially tired out.

"Engarde, Artagnan!"

A little over the top? Maybe, but what good trainer doesn't have a flair for the dramatic? My scyther appeared rearing to go, the engarde summon letting him know I was sending him out for a serious battle, not just mere training or fun.

"Scyyythe!" He was grinning like the battle lunatic he was, and for once I had a great outlet for him. We weren't as well coordinated in personality and mind as I was with my other pokemon, which made sense as while he could evolve into types I harmonized well with he wasn't at the moment, but when we both singularly focused on a battle of great importance I could feel the echo of what we will have later on.
"Shadow Claw!" Sierra wasted no time in opening up the fight and her well trained sableye darted quickly into the maneuver, ghostly energies flickering along its right claw.

"Execute the Fast and the Furious!" I called out, a very specific battle plan I had drilled into him in particular.

The claw swiped straight through Artagnan, revealing an after image. A lime-green glowing blade slammed into the sableye immediately sending it skidding along the deck.

However, when it got up and glared at the bug pokemon I knew it was glaring at yet another after image. Artagnan was using Agility, Double Team, Fury Cutter, and the Mist hovering above us from Brinker to chain after image strikes.

Sierra however quickly realized what was going on after merely the second strike.

"Shotgun Power Gem into the Mist!"

I clicked my tongue.

"That's right, the jig is up! Sableye, pelt the silly bug!"

"I think you'll find your DANCE card still rather full!" I have a weakness for quips, sue me.

Suddenly the Mist shot apart, to show Artagnan finishing up the motions of a Swords Dance. And he'd already used Agility quite a few times.

Needless to say it was over quickly. Two more Fury Cutters and the sableye thumped to the deck, unconscious. Sierra returned the creature, eyes burning with hatred.

"Don't think you're getting off so easily! My next pokemon earns the title of monster easily!"

Except, before she could release it, the entire boat shook after a small explosion. And a roar. Of a gyarados.

"Uh oh…" I muttered, not necessarily surprised. Everyone else was though. They panicked.

"It's a gyarados! Rockets, grab what you have and retreat back to base!"

I, on the other hand, had plenty of time to bemoan the fact that I found magneton very creepy and had never picked one up. Because this would have been the perfect time to have something capable of using Thunder. And yet…I still ran off toward the roaring.

If we could subdue James's gyarados before it drew in the rest the damage could be minimized and the ship could perhaps limp into port. I…didn't have great options for fighting a gyarados however.

As I rounded the bend in the stern of the ship and came up upon the rampaging gyarados an idea struck me. I didn't have to fight it. I just had to calm it.

"Huckleberry let's go!" I called out my quagsire, this was going to be quick…hopefully.

"Yawn!" Huckleberry's mouth opened wide and a loud reverberating yawn echoed forth towards the irate fish-dragon. There was no way that freshly evolved it knew Outrage or Uproar, it was almost certainly just using a simple Rage and Dragon Rage to cause the disruption.

That said, even after the Yawn hit we needed to stall for a minute or two before it finally took effect. I sent Brinker back out to lay down Mist and Powder Snow to confuse the beast as it slowly settled down and drifted off to sleep. The Mist was so thick that I unfortunately did not see the red beam of light return the creature to a pokeball, something I would learn to much surprise in the future.

The ship was listing pretty badly to the side, but as far as I could tell I had perhaps saved the day. The next hour was spent running around and helping the crew keep the ship moving. Ice and mud patched up holes, set planks into place, etc.

Eventually everyone who hadn't immediately jumped ship via teleport or flight was exhausted and the captain made an announcement.

"Due to the tides we can't turn immediately around and must continue partially on, I estimate that at our current speed we'll make Acapulco and Porto Vista in a day. I apologize to all our passengers for suffering from this awful attack."

It went on like that for a bit, putting the blame firmly on Team Rocket, thanking the brave trainers that fought them off, and such. I found Ash and his friends over towards the front bow of the ship.

"Well…that was certainly an adventure." I commented.

"That stupid, Team Rocket!" Ash exclaimed, "I wish I'd had a chance to send them blasting off before James had that magikarp evolve!"

"Yeah that was…unexpected I am sure."

Okay, well it was for them, I'd definitely tried to plan around it. In fact, my planning had made the whole endeavor rather anticlimactic.

"Good call with the sleep," Brock commented, "Though I am pretty sure I saw it get recalled so now James has a gyarados, assuming he can get it to listen."

I thought back to James's propensity for pokemon attempting to swallow him out of love, he'd be in an interesting pickle if this one took up that habit.

"Yeah…that feels like a problem for next week's episode."

The three all looked at me as if I had grown a second head, I just raised an eyebrow back at them, "Think back and tell me your journeys so far don't look like a Saturday morning cartoon when it comes to shenanigans."

Brock opened and closed his mouth, Ash's brows furrowed in what was for him deep thought, and Misty just sighed. They knew I was right, even if I was using some odd meta knowledge from my dream-memories.

"So, Isaac!" Ash asked enthusiastically, "Did you find any of the pokemon you were looking for? Where are you going next? Lt. Surge was your only badge you needed with graduating, right?"


I nodded, "Yes, I need to collect a few more pokemon to give me a versatile roster for the Conference, and then I need to train up all those new acquisitions. We've got about seven months left. Which is probably enough time for you to get your badges, but try to move quickly with badges five through seven, Ash. You'll want a lot of time to train if you plan to take on the eighth and final major badge with Giovanni in Viridian."

Ash nodded enthusiastically, "Yeah! You bet'cha! I'll train really hard and a lot of my team are going to be evolved by then, too!"

Pikachu protested slightly at this, "You can stay a pikachu as long as you want, Pikachu!"

The small yellow rodent nodded in response, he wasn't as adamantly against the idea as in the anime due to Surge being far less derisive of him, but he still didn't like the idea at all of rushing it.

"That's great, Ash. After I finish my collection route I should be training at the family ranch between Saffron and Celadon, so come see me there for some sparring and practice before you challenge Sabrina, yeah?"

In this world Sabrina was more like the games thankfully, none of the completely off the wall behavior from the anime or manga to worry about. Of course that did mean Ash was certainly going to be curb stomped if he went in even after heading to Lavender and catching a haunter. He was less likely to give up haunter with Sabrina being different as well, so perhaps Ash would have a much more varied team moving forward.

He already had his existing team trusting him far more. Perhaps even Charmander wouldn't act out after it evolved, seeing as Ash had been able to be a more active participant in his growth with my Brick Break Boot Camp.

I handed Brock my contact card and that was that. We headed back to our cabins and about a day later we limped into port, where I needed to catch a ferry out a bit further southwest to check out a certain canyon.

Seven months, I thought to myself as I plotted out potential acquisitions once more, what could I do with seven months? I probably only had time to hit one other regions, two tops. Which meant I probably needed to prioritize. For example, as amazingly powerful as metagross would be overall, I needed things that countered Mewtwo's immense psychic power far more than I needed an attempt to perhaps come close to matching it.

Which meant I almost certainly needed a golurk, a krookodile, or a bisharp. And all three of those were native to not just one region, but one single location, the Desert Resort in Unova.

So unless I was to buy or delegate some acquisitions, something I didn't want to do with some of the more rare and unique pokemon I was aware of, I would be restricted there.

The good news, great news even, was that the sealed away giant golurk in the ruins there was very powerful. It was an absolute pity travel wasn't faster in this world, even with having a pokemon that can fly (something I was about to remedy) inter-regional travel often took days or weeks. The routes between regions were just so dangerous that travel was rarely direct.

Because, if I had the travel time to hit both Unova and Sinnoh, I had every confidence I could have managed to wear down or safely befriend on or more of the mythical pokemon of my elements I was aware of. Except…yes that might work, I thought as I searched through my bag for a very specific business card. Samson Oak was heading back to Alola soon, and I might offer to pay a bounty for picking up an interesting item from one of those antique shops for me.

 

[zack1224]

Thanks for the chapter

 

[Isaac A Drake]

Chapters 11-14 Hollow Earth Theory Arc
Author's Note: This is where the story really starts to pick up and show my own personal takes and flair for exploration. This is also where I begin to split up the full arc chapter into the original chapter breaks as well. So you can tell when originally one ended and another began.

Hollow Earth Theory

It turns out I was far ahead of the game of canon, Grampa Canyon, on a rocky peninsula jutting out between Pallet and the Cycling Road, had yet to be discovered or bought up by the company that started the Fossil Rush from the anime.

I forlornly surveyed the landscape, so different from what it would be after a bunch of fossil hunters and Team Rocket got through with it. It was, in a word, breathtaking. It reminded me of the Chaco Canyon region of New Mexico, just without the cliff dwellings and kivas.

It was completely untouched by humans instead. My old life rarely felt close and personal, instead feeling more like a distant dream that was a barely remembered haze unless some outside stimulus triggered it, which was why most of the time the only things I remembered were triggered memories of observing or playing Pokemon media. But sometimes a specific object or view would trigger something else. Something that felt deeper.

This vista was one of those moments. I long since had stopped feeling sad or morose when these moments hit, however, whatever life I'd previously had, I could feel it had been full and vibrant, so it only made sense to enjoy this one to as full and vibrant a level.

I had to cut my appreciation for nature's beauty down to get to business. I called out my newly evolved piloswine, Alexei, to help me survey the ground for fissures, sinkholes, or other ingress points to the cavern system I hoped was filled with ancient pokemon just like canon. I also released Cleo, my poor nidorina and starter who hadn't gotten as much action as she deserved lately. She'd do well with helping defend from any wild pokemon while Alexei swept the area with his seismic senses.

I had my suspicions from pulling up some cursory land surveying data that was available for the area and led us around and over some of the fissure-like canyons towards a high mesa that was the remains of a volcano whose cone had collapsed inward after it went extinct.

Cleo only had to growl at a few curious graveler, every other wild pokemon in the area, of which there weren't many, were weak enough that two middle stage evolutions scared them off.

It was quite the hike from the shoreline, which had cliffs that were a pain to scale…if I hadn't grabbed the Rock Climb technical machine from a Porto Vista shop I might have been in for a real problem. Luckily with the machine Alberich had been able to charge me up the sheer coastal cliff faces with ease, I'd returned my rhyhorn afterwards but once we managed to reach the odd volcanic mesa I assumed I'd be bringing him back out.

I admired the region even more the further we explored, if the ancient pokemon find panned out I might try to purchase the land from the League and set up my research-gym for my trainer retirement I had planned after I had a title or two under my belt.

That probably would require me to also take some time off for an internship with a known professor as well unless they wanted to outright sponsor my set-up. We were about half-way up the mesa and about ten meters short of where I would bring out Alberich for another Rock Climb when Alexei began snuffling excitedly around a boulder lodged in a mountainside depression.

"We get a hit? There's a hollow area pretty near the surface?" His bushy brown eyebrows waggled excitedly which I took as an affirmative.

I grinned, "Perfect! Alright, Alexei, return! Let's get digging, Brinker!"

The Alolan Sandshrew really was my most versatile team member, though he'd likely be somewhat eclipsed on the offensive flexibility side by Cleo when I finally decided to give her the Moon Stone I'd managed to pick up at the same time as the Rock Climb TM. Porto Vista had great shopping.

"Oh…I hope Misty is still there when the tentacool swarm happens to de-escalate that and get her horsea."

I shrugged, that was a canon event I was firmly lodging in the 'not my problem' territory. As Team Rocket had acted so differently on the Anne that I couldn't possibly assume it would have gone the same way as canon even without me. Hell, Rocket apparently had mid-tier members that were from a spin-off game, memories of which had been pretty sparse until triggered by meeting Sierra. Before then, the only time I had ever had those memories triggered had been when I met Professor Willow at a conference with my father.

An excited cry of "Shreeeewww!" cut off my musings, however.

Apparently Brinker had broken into the hollow zone. Equally excited myself, I ducked into the decently sized tunnel for a pokemon of his size, he'd known to enlarge it enough and keep it shallow enough a decline that I could follow him in.

Shaking a professional grade glow-rod I held it up and the blue light illuminated a tunnel that went at least ten meters in and down until it broke into a chamber a short hop above the floor. Cleo followed closely behind and soon we were standing below our ingress tunnel with Brinker happily dancing around and twirling, he was an excitable fellow outside of battle.

"Alright, bud, let's calm down and lower the volume just in case we aren't-" First one, then two, then over a dozen pairs of red eyes illuminated the distant darkness.

"Alone…" I sighed releasing Alberich and Estella from their pokeballs as an angry, "Tops!" echoed out. One instant they were forming in bursts of red light, the next Estella was in front of me, blocking a kabutops's scythe-like claw on its quest for my jugular.

"Yep, GO TIME!" I called out, taking a small leap back myself.

"Alberich, bodyguard and artillery support! Cleo, hit and run with Double Kick. Brinker, you're crowd control! Estella, beat down time!"

I backed up to the wall below our tunnel with Alberich in front of me. Brinker rolled off with Rollout to use Mist to create a wall of obscured vision stopping our not-so-fossilized foes from accurately spamming long range moves like the Water Guns that almost immediately after began firing through that fog and hitting the walls and boulders around us.

Estella, meanwhile, was having a rapid exchange of Bone Rush and Slash with the kabutops that had rushed out of the darkness. Whatever she didn't duck and dodge she leaned into and took like a champ on her rock hard skull.

As they fought I noticed something odd about the creature she was fighting, it wasn't the standard brown and cream of a normal kabutops or the green of a shiny one. The coloring was some kind of mottled brown, black, and gray. Likely an adaptation coming from hundreds of generations of living in this cavern system.

"Alberich, Stealth Rocks into the Mist to intercept!" I commanded, causing Alberich to pause in his opportunistic usage of the occasional Rock Throw to instead send a bunch of rocky shards hovering off into Brinker's Mist.

A mix of cries from unknown assailants from the fog told me it was a good call. Well, I could assume they were a mix of kabuto and omanyte, but technically they were still unknown.

An angry omastar managed to break through the line, looking pretty beat up, that was when I pulled out the first specialized pokeball and lobbed it at the creature. Sure enough, it was injured enough that the increased catch chance of the Dusk Ball sealed it away with very little struggle. The ball sparkled in white light and disappeared over to the automatic storage system. I'd told the ranch supervisor that I was going to be likely to catch some volatile pokemon and to keep anything that came in on stasis until I dropped by to work on them personally.

The flash of light and the disappearance of his comrade startled the kabutops and it left an opening where Estella was able to slam a Bone Club into its skull, dazing it and opening it up directly for me to nail it with yet another Dusk Ball.

A few more cries from the Mist caused my grin to grow even bigger, "Brinker, Rapid Spin to clear your Mist!"

He did so as the kabutops's pokeball flashed away as well and I pulled a few more out to rapid fire catch the omanyte and kabuto that Brinker had mercilessly knocked out while they were trapped in his domain. After about five minutes of constant throws I sat down, slightly winded.

"Whew! There must have been almost twenty!" I declared in surprise, far more than in the anime episode I vaguely remembered.

Looking around I saw perhaps why, there were a lot of shells of hollowed out kabuto and omanyte with very large teeth marks.

"The aerodactyl doesn't live here…it hunts here."

I looked around, searching for some way deeper into the subterranean system I had no doubt that I had stumbled onto. Cleo pointed and I slowly looked up to see that on a ledge overlooking a pool of water was a rather large opening of a tunnel.

"That must lead in deeper!" I grinned around at my team, "Wanna check it out?"
Chapter End Notes: New Captures- Kabutops x1, Omastar x1, Kabuto x10, Omanyte x6.

The Lost World

I returned everyone except Cleo and bit my bottom lip nervously as I looked down the tunnel. This was far more extensive than those flashes of Ash and Team Rocket's battle I had gotten would have suggested.

Alternatively…Team Rocket had used a lot of explosives. What if this had always been here? Waiting for discovery? This…this was huge. This was the kind of discovery that absolutely COULD get me a direct sponsorship from Professor Oak as a conditional independent researcher. I would submit reports directly to him for approval and he'd be on them as a co-author. Lending his credibility to me and boosting his reputation as always being ahead of the game and cooperative on new research.

But, I needed to confirm my hypothesis first. And, I really needed that aerodactyl to have access to an appropriate flier for myself. Very few other accessible pokemon of my compatible types truly worked as aerial transportation. I'd have to go all the way to Hoenn for a flygon, because as cool as they were, a skarmory would take far too long to train up as safe transportation. They took a notorious length of time to teach how to angle their razor sharp feathers to be safe.

Plus, ever since my father's work on the fossil resurrection machine had triggered that round of memories and dreams about fossil pokemon knowledge from my past life, I'd known that aerodactyl had been my absolute favorite pokemon that my current self was compatible with. An ancient dragon of rock that was meant to rule…no, dominate, the entire sky? I'm not frequently ambitious, but that for some reason stirred a hunger to strive forward and grow in me. One that my mother in this life had perhaps accidentally squashed by trying so frequently to force it to grow.

I would continue on until I caught this aerodactyl. No matter how far down it was or how insane these caverns got. Even if they were as extensive as the Sinnoh Underground I would persist. Because, there was something down here calling to me. I could feel it, almost like I had just drained a huge thermos of hot tea, a burning feeling in my chest that pulsed with every step I took deeper into these tunnels.

I…hadn't noticed myself moving down through the tunnel. I had been in some kind of a trance, I looked down and Cleo looked up at me worriedly, she'd followed along but had definitely noticed I had been out of sorts.

"There's way more than an aerodactyl down here, girl."

I whispered, worried for all of us. But I firmed myself, I wasn't just a trainer good with the earth elements. I was going to be a master of them. I'd shown a lot of the reliability of stone in my life so far, but now it was time for me to show the resilience of steel.

Of all the elements people showed multiple proficiencies for, perhaps combinations of my three were the most common, though all three being high was slightly rarer. But there were plenty of people who had high proficiencies in grass and poison together, or water and ice together.

Soon to be Champion Lance was a great example of Dragon and Flying being at extremely high compatibility in fact. And his cousin Clair with Dragon and Water, she apparently had a gyarados that could shame Lance's original. Or Agatha and her mix of Ghost and Poison leading her to have those terrifying arbok.

But if I was going to push all three of mine to the limit, I needed to embody them. And I needed to train and evolve my team to embody them. It was easy when embodying Rock and Ground to get stuck where you were. But I had to remember that for every mountain there were rock slides, for every mesa there were innumerable particles of sand whipping through the desert winds, and for every shield there was a sword.

And continents could shift. If I was all of the Earth I needed to stop standing still and hiding out in my ivory tower. I licked my dry lips and thought back to that small fight against Rocket Sierra with Artagnan. He and I were getting there, if I could find him a metal coat we would be where we needed to be for our bond to strengthen to as good as it was with any of my other pokemon upon his evolution.

And Cleo, she'd be ready for her moon stone soon. I had to remind myself that everything was coming together, and I just had to make sure I wasn't the weakest link.

"Alright girl, let's move out." The air became oddly humid as we moved forward. I frowned to myself, as this was rather odd compared to how dry it had been even with the underground lake that had been in the previous chamber.

However, clues started to slowly reveal themselves to us as we continued. The tunnel widened more and more until it seemed we were slowly spiraling down something the size of a decent highway, and with a ceiling of almost six of me. Because slowly we started to see plant-life. There'd been some algae in the lake chamber, but nothing like the moss and mushrooms of increasing size we were seeing now.

Paras and even one or two parasect were visible out of the corner of my eye before they moved away and hid from us, shy creatures in the best of circumstances. I was not surprised that ones which had never even met a human in genetic memory would hide amongst the growing forest of funguses.

As the tunnel opened up into a proper cavern chamber however, things got…weird. My glowrod was no longer the only source of light. Curious, I stowed it away to determine where the new light was coming from. It was at first the undersides of some of the larger mushrooms, they were bioluminescent. Which was, excuse my language, so fucking dope. I got a few flashes of seeing bioluminescent algae at sea as I took in the forest of flowing underbellies of giant mushroom caps.

"Cleo…this is…wow."

My nidorina, also never having seen anything like this, nodded along mutely with wide eyes. I had read something about mushrooms somewhat similar but only the size of people in Galar's Glimwood Tangle. This was so much more than that though, many of these mushrooms stretched all the way up to the ceiling, a solid five meters up.

And the deeper I went the higher that got. I also began to see flickering white and pink lights along the tops of them, another memory from that episode hit me, and I wondered for a moment if those were perhaps wild togetic? Or even togekiss? Due to the size of the mushroom caps the stalks were spaced far enough from each other that Cleo and I could both pass between them with plenty of room as we continued.

"I can't believe all of this was down here!"

I kept glancing around in different directions in wonder, trying to take all I could in. We continued to wander and explore for the next hour almost, the forest seemingly not ending, merely going deeper as the downward incline continued. Twice I had to bring Alberich out to take us down some kind of jagged cliff face where the floor of the cavern dropped by a large amount only for the forest of mushrooms to continue on at the lower level.

It was a few minutes after I returned Alberich the second time that Cleo's ears twitched, giving us the only warning we got as a scyther of all things dropped down from one of the lower mushroom caps with a battle cry. Cleo met the Fury Cutter with a Double Kick and the two creatures bounced away from each other.

"You can take this, Cleo!" I called out, however I still called Alberich back out as well and commanded the rhyhorn, "Bodyguard duty."

And it was a good thing I had called my trusty rocky boy out, because after Cleo and the scyther exchanged a few more blows and it cried out in pain as she got a solid Poison Sting in, a low buzzing began to sound through the area.

"Uh oh…" I muttered as Alberich kept his head on a swivel.

"Stealth Rocks!" I called, and mere moments after he set up the trap the rock shards moved to slam into five figures attempting to blitz us with a round of Quick Attacks. And more were coming.

"En Garde, Artagnan!" Fight fire with fire after all. My scyther was a peak specimen I had trained rigorously. Like some sort of shonen samurai or dual wielding ninja he met two incoming Slash attacks from different bugs. My own battle crazed bug cackled wildly and used the spinning motions of Swords Dance to push both back and simultaneously raise his own attack.

"Atta boy!" I called out before also bringing Brinker back to run interference as well. By this point Cleo was on her second scyther and Alberich was resetting the rocks.

Brinker couldn't jump back into his Mist tactic from earlier, because the wild scyther could blow away the fog with a concerted effort. I clicked my tongue and moved him to hit and run tactics and wide shot Powder Snows.

It wasn't more than another minute of furious exchanges before the remaining scyther backed off into the distance, buzzing their wings angrily. I pulled out a few Net Balls and tossed them, catching the ones that were fully knocked out and nearby. The disappearance of their allies caused the grouped ones to cry out in alarm.

And that's when it went to shit, the mushroom above us shifted in a strange manner, then there was a loud and gruff cry of, "KLEAVE!"

Before a large scyther-looking monster with stone axes instead of scythe blades came crashing down on Alberich, knocking him out immediately.

"Holy shit!" I cried out as we all jumped back and I quickly returned my rhyhorn.

"SCY!" Artagnan called out before rushing in to block another ax sweep aimed at me with twin Slash attacks crossed in front of his body. The force of the blow still sent him skidding back into me and I was bowled over.

I quickly rolled back to my feet however, because I remembered a flash of insight years ago about an ancient alternative evolution for scyther from before metallurgy had changed the evolution to be scizor.

Kleavor, the Stone Axe Bug.

"Vacuum Wave hit and runs!" I called out, "Weave with Slash when he's in close and use Quick Attack for maneuvering!"

He'd gotten off at least two each of Swords Dance and Agility during the fight with the rest of the swarm, so I didn't have to worry about buffing him.

This kleavor, I noted as they began viciously going at each other with their different blades, was still the same green coloring as a scyther, which usually denoted a 'shiny' pokemon as I believed from my flashes of insight that it was supposed to be a tan color for the body.

I wasn't going to replace Artagnan on my team, he was too well trained, but I was damned well going to catch this kleavor and study it to figure out how to evolve Artagnan into a kleavor instead of a scizor if I caught the aerodactyl down here.

I'd mainly wanted scizor for the mega evolution potential after all, and if I had an aerodactyl I could forgo a second potential mega evolution. I winced in sympathy as a few shards of the Stone Axe attack embedded themselves in Artagnan's thorax. That attack was super-effective twice over and I could tell that Artagnan was feeling the strain, he'd gotten very lucky with his double stack of Agility allowing him to dodge a solid eighty-percent of the wild kleavor's attacks.

The kleavor was feeling the strain as well however, Vacuum Wave might not be as supereffective as it could be if the bug-type resistance to it wasn't there, but it was a special attack based move and was getting around its hardy defenses while being boosted by Artagnan's Technician ability. It was also constantly being staggered by how fast that move was firing off.

Eventually I saw Artagnan's opportunity when the kleavor missed and embedded an ax into the stalk of a mushroom-tree.

"Dance into a major Slash!" I called out, with the exposed positioning of the kleavor I was hoping for a critical strike here. And boy did I get it. Artagnan spun around in his glorious dance and used the momentum to send himself spiraling down to hammer both scythes into the arm of the kleavor, snapping it and partially shattering the stone ax while sending the other bug flying.

As the kleavor struggled to rise the stone shards embedded in Artagnan began to glow, and then HE began to glow too.

"Fragments of a defeated kleavor's axes as an alternative?" I whispered in awe, it made sense, of course a kleavor's ax was made out of the material used to evolve into the form in the first place.

And then everything happened way too fast. A shriek from the sky caused everyone to look up just in time to see a gray, vaguely pterodactyl shaped, form crash through the mushroom caps and chomp down upon the defeated kleavor. Tearing the upper body free of the lower. Just as Artagnan finished evolving.

Nature was terrifying sometimes. And then the aerodactyl screamed at all of us in challenge. Make that fucking terrifying.

Chapter End Notes New acquisitions: wild scyther x5, a healthy fear of the power of nature

The Smoky God

"Yeah, screw this!" I yelled as my new kleavor fell into a combat stance, "Cleopatra, catch!"

I frisbee-tossed an item through the air towards my starter. She was well trained enough that she immediately leapt into the air and caught it in her mouth.

"Artagnan, use those new stone axes with hit and run, then fall back and let Cleo finish the job, you've worked through too much energy!"

Sure he'd have a small burst from evolving, but evolution mostly gave you an offensive energy boost and didn't recover your health. I didn't think Artagnan had the stamina to go from fighting a kleavor as a scyther, evolving, and then still take out this aerodactyl. But you know who would?

"QUEEN!" A newly evolved Cleopatra would. Especially since typically nidoqueen learned a few moves upon evolution.

"We've been preparing for this!" I reassured my starter, "You know what you should be able to do! As soon as Artagnan falls back hit it with a Sludge Wave!"

We had been working on her Poison energy manipulation for months now, preparing for this. A lot of times pokemon that learn moves upon evolution will have a hard time controlling their new techniques if they haven't practiced the control of that element extensively.

Our timing was perfect as well, Artagnan was just leaping back away from the aerodactyl's burning maw as it snapped at him with a Fire Fang. Embers catching a nearby mushroom on fire.

A viscous film of purple goo surrounded Cleopatra's new body and then expanded to be almost half again the size of her. It moved like a strange gelatin for a moment before it shot forth in a wave of toxic sludge, straight at the aerodactyl.

It hit the creature like a hammer, pushing it back into another stalk and the onslaught did not stop. Damn, I thought, that must be what Sheer Force looks like. But that wasn't all I'd been preparing Cleo with in anticipation of her evolution. Our goal had been to turn her into a powerful special attacker able to hammer away at type weaknesses on any enemy.

So we'd been practicing a very special TM for months now. And I bet she now had the juice to pull it off.

"Ice Beam!" I called out. With a roar Cleo reared back and an orb of light blue energy formed in her maw. The attack lanced forward, in line to hit the aerodactyl dead in the face as it began standing back up and growled over at us. The hit was followed by a powerful explosion of smoke and…steam?

"Wait…what? Steam?"

"Da…da…da…" The sound coming from the impact point sounded like…chuckling.

We all tensed as the smoke and steam began clearing. Cleo charged up another Sludge Wave in preparation, Artagnan fell back to play defense on my person, and Brinker I noted had dove into the earth, likely looking for a flanking position as I'd taught him.

I fingered my remaining pokeballs on my belt, wondering if I should send out an extra team member. But I had swapped Huckleberry out, assuming he'd be too slow for this expedition, and in a way I had been right, but I'd also dramatically underestimated this aerodactyl.

Because as the smoke and steam cleared the final embers of a Fire Fang faded from its jaws with more wisps of steam. It had melted the entire Ice Beam with an elemental bite. That was both genius, and showed an insane amount of power as well as cunning.

As we watched in a moment of stunned silence the beast's tongue came out and licked away some remaining haemolymph from the kleavor off of its chops. Mew save us, that was horrifying. And metal as Hell, I totally was going to catch this bastard.

"Alright, Hannibal," I'd already named him in my head so sue me. "Let's dance! Sludge Wave! Follow up with a high Toxic in the wake!"

With Sheer Force she couldn't poison him off of the Sludge Wave or have any secondary effects on her damaging moves, they were just pure unadulterated type energy power. So I'd made sure, again in preparation for this evolution, that Cleo had known Toxic long long ago. It had been perfect practice for the Poison energy anyways.

As my nidoqueen unleashed the poisonous techniques I knew immediately that I'd called it right. The aerodactyl leapt into the air to dodge the Sludge Wave, only to squawk indignantly as the Toxic orb splashed it right across its face. It was almost certainly blinded now with that venom burning in its eyes.

"Charge up an Ice B-" we were all cut off as the blinded aerodactyl began flaring its wings out wide and sweeping them forward and we all were sent tumbling back a solid meter or two. Fire Fang and Whirlwind? What a crazy moveset for a wild aerodactyl! The millennia of natural selection down here must have created a divergent moveset perfect for hunting the native pokemon!

I imagined it probably knew Thunder Fang and Crunch or Rock Slide then, if it was hunting the kabuto and omanyte lines I had seen with the grooved carapaces up in the lake level. What a monster.

It was at that moment that Brinker struck, he flew out of the ground and let loose a vicious spray of Powder Snow. The frosty zephyr struck the aerodactyl from behind and underneath and we got very lucky with the legs and tail of the beast freezing stiff. Unlike the games, certain status conditions could stack.

It squawked even more indignantly as the ice pulled it down towards the ground and the poison continued to wrack its system. The time was perfect, I pulled out another Dusk Ball, unfortunately the aerodactyl was just a little too light for a Heavy Ball to be any more effective than the Dusk Ball in the cave system, and let fly.

It didn't go easily into the…spherical night? Nope, not the time to be poetic. The point is I was worried it would break free for a second as the ball shook a third time, but then, finally, it went silent and came back to my hand before going off to the ranch in a flash of white.

The rest of my team and I all collapsed straight onto the ground, exhausted from both exertion and adrenaline. That…had been a lot.

I grinned and looked over to my starter, "Hey, Cleo, liking the new evolution?"

The sprawled out nidoqueen nodded her head and gave me what passed for a thumbs up when you only had three claws.

I turned my head towards Artagnan next, "How about you, bud?" He clacked his new stone ax-blades together and grinned at me, well as much as a fixed jaw could grin.

"So, that wasn't expected. I think we're going to have to revise some training plans, yeah?" He nodded back at me, somehow portraying a mixture of excitement and deadly seriousness. He seemed ready to take his training more seriously now than he had when he'd been an arrogant scyther.

Perhaps it was-My thoughts were cut off as the cave system shook. The physical shaking was followed by an immense and crushing pressure that flooded the area. I couldn't put proper words to the sensation. It was as if that burning energy from when I first entered the deeper caverns had been compressed and dropped atop my head in a wave of liquified hot air. After either a moment or an eternity it ebbed to a point where I could push myself to my feet and return most of my team, leaving only Brinker out to run by my side as interference as we retreated and I frantically applied a Revive to Alberich's pokeball.

Whatever the Hell had caused that was not something I wanted to tangle with. A strange screeching echo followed us as I reached the first of the staggered drops and managed to call my rhyhorn back out to get us up the sheer rock face.

We beat a full retreat out of there. Full steam until we were safely outside up on the mesa. It was dark, with the moon high in the summer sky.

"Well…" I said to my two team members out with me, "That was…bracing." I'd have to camp out up here tonight and then make my way back to the pick up point for the boat I'd chartered. "Dad's going to freak."
End of Chapter New Capture Notes: x1 Aerodactyl (Hannibal), fear of drums in the deep

Jurassic Ranch

I didn't even get to go to sleep that night when my pokegear began ringing.

"Hey…Dad." I picked up, immediately knowing who it was.

"Am I reading the registry on your storage server at the ranch correctly, Isaac?" His tone was sharp but anticipatory, as if he was trying to force caution and cynicism forward to mask excitement.

"Oh you're reading everything perfectly, you won't believe what I found." I excitedly began to explain the underground lost biome I had discovered.

"This…this is huge!" He was almost shouting in his excitement,

"This is perfect! This is…oh we have to keep this to ourselves! We have to keep this connected to my lab." This I was a bit hesitant about, he'd need to convince me.

"I get that the Cinnabar Lab specializes in this, but can I really get as much benefit from that as if I had gone to Professor Oak or Cerise?" I could just imagine him waving his hand dismissively as he continued,

"Oh absolutely! I'll make sure of it! I'll renew your research assistant position, take your survey data, present it to the board and get a grant for you to be granted a conditional research sponsorship after the conference and all the construction is done. That will take at least that long, and your discovery of it plus how well you do at the conference will shut down any naysayers."

I scratched my chin, where in this life I had yet to begin accumulating any of the facial hair I got the impression of having in some of my more extended dreams and flashbacks.

"Hmm…well if you can guarantee it's my research station I suppose that works. My only real concern is losing personal control. You remember what I said about my hasty retreat? We'll need a lead who is at least as strong as I will be after the conference to safely explore. And if that isn't me then it's not going to come cheap."

"Give us a top eight showing at the Plateau and I don't think we'll have to worry about anyone taking it away from you. Particularly if you can train up one or two of those acquisitions from down there for your final team. Between this new scyther evolution, kleavor was it? Between that and the aerodactyl and perhaps the kabutops I can't see anyone arguing you won't be the best to run the facility."

"To that end, I'm going to head back to the Ranch and get the fossil pokemon under control and then use the last of my major savings to chart a trip out to Unova's Desert Resort. I need better counters for psychics and ghosts if I want to stand a chance against the types of pokemon that get used at the top eight level."

Or you know, blasted Mewtwo inviting me to an island of trainers to clone our pokemon. I…still had to figure out what I was going to do about that outside of attempting to stack my team. I was fairly sure Lance hadn't started his G-men yet as he was still struggling for the Championship position and I was definitely sure Looker and his International Police weren't around either.

We were only two-thirds of a generation out of…well it was the closest thing to a war there's been since many of the regions rediscovered each other, so that's what it was called, but Unova's nautical trade dispute wouldn't have counted as a war on the scale of any of the mythological ones like AZ's nightmare or even the Unovan civil wars that required legendary intervention.

"That seems reasonable, if this all works out in our favor you won't be needing to worry about money again. Especially if we can get these…hmm they aren't really fossil pokemon now, are they? If we can get these pokemon from your lost world to breed at better rates than the resurrected ones I could see a lot of supplemental income being involved in this endeavor."

I…had not considered that. "Huh…yeah can you secure us the licenses for breeding and perhaps even turning this peninsula into a preserve along with the research gym?"

"It will happen in stages, the land deeds and research grants will come quickly. The breeding license probably soon after that, the preserve status will likely come after your conference showing, along with the gym status, they'll want you to hit top eight at minimum and perhaps set up some Ace battles."

"That sounds fine, now let me get to sleep so I can head back to the ranch and work on taming that beast of an aerodactyl I caught."

I was not looking super forward to that, I may have to beat it down a few times with Cleo and Artagnan, both of whom had now surpassed the rest of my team in power.

I couldn't tame Hannibal, absolutely what I was going to name the aerodactyl after that vicious introduction, fast enough I decided as I sat on the speed boat heading back into the Vermillion Harbour. Flight would open up so many better travel options for me, within Kanto at the very least. While distance wise it was viable, flying over the Silver Range wasn't suggested as you were likely to accrue a lot of aggro from the very strong wild pokemon up there. So it was better to take a detour down to New Bark or a ship around the coasts and then fly once you were on the other side of the mountains.

But, a full day of travel after I left the…underworld for the lack of a better term, saw me back at the family ranch to the southwest of Saffron, almost equidistantly south of the city as the Academy was to the north of it actually.

Liam, a burly ranch hand who was normally not anywhere near as nervous as he seemed right now intercepted me, "Mister Isaac…I'm hopin' you ain't planning to let those monsters loose all at once are you?"

As one of the lead wranglers he definitely had access to my storage roster so I understood his concern.

Which I promptly waved away, "Hardly. I'll be starting with the kabutops and omastar, once I have an agreement with them we can let the other semi-aquatic ones out to enjoy the lake. Then I'll move over to…is the North Field still set up for a badlands biome and relatively clear?"

He nodded to my inquiry, "Good, I'll release the aerodactyl there and my team and I will handle the rest. Also…get me a case of the really good tauros steaks. I think showing our vicious brute what the good life is like might help ease some tensions, hmm?"

The kabutops and omastar were extremely easy to integrate actually. The second I explained, with the help of Cleo, that they were basically getting free room and board in exchange for occasionally training and fighting with my main team if they wanted to and maybe some of their extra eggs, they were completely sold on the idea. A little bit of a tour for them, releasing the younger stage pokemon from their cavern, and a good meal later I was set to walk over to the craggy badland area where I planned to negotiate with hopefully my new flying-type.

Twenty minutes later saw me frowning as Hannibal tore through half a crate of raw tauros steak. He was…too smart and too dangerous in my opinion. I may have to delay my Unova trip by at least a week or two more than planned. That put me at going in a month, meaning I would come back with…five months to the Indigo Conference. And four months and some change until New Island.

My dream-like memories of that event were more like nightmares. I had to be ready. I don't care if he was somehow going to come back from it, the image of Ash laying on the ground dead with Pikachu crying over him was not something I was looking to allow to repeat.

Surely Mewtwo could be convinced to civility in some less dramatic way? Right? Shaking my head I began approaching Hannibal, Cleo and Artagnan in tow.

For now this would be my main project, along with starting some repairs. Samson Oak had come through, very confused about what I wanted with the device, but I'd more than covered purchase and shipping so he was happy enough.

 

[Zetakille]

Oh dear.....there's gonna be some kind of Kaiju down there, isn't there?