บท 696: CH76 (690), Next Step
Now that I had visited the last place on my list as well, I was done with Lilycove City. The only thing I had yet to do, was to follow up on the information I had gathered on the various species useful for my Pinkan project. The problem with that was that I was ready to move on and that those places lay in the opposite direction I was planning to head to, with me planning to head west while the nesting/hang-out areas lay in the east, so trying to follow up on the leads would mean that I would have to delay the next step of my journey by another 1 to 3 days.
The question I had to ask myself was if I wanted to do that or not. It had already been 4 weeks and two days since I arrived in Lilycove City, and that was already a bit above the 4 weeks maximum I had initially planned to stick to Major Cities with Major Gyms, though admittedly it was only by two days which was not much since I still had 69 months left until the tournament.
All things considered that should leave me with enough time to finish even my ambitious plan of challenging all Gyms in the region. Out of the 12 Major Gyms I had already challenged the hardest one and gained its Badge. That left me with 11 more Major Gyms, and even if I spent a month in each Major City that those Gyms were located in, I would still have 58 months left. Let's add a two-month buffer just to be sure. Yet, even with the added buffer that still left me with 56 months to clear the 14 Standard and 38 Minor Gyms that were present in Hoenn.
Even if I wanted to spend a full month in each one of the cities those Gyms were located in, I would still end up with 4 months to spare. Not to mention that I had no such plans, at least not for the Minor Gyms. I was unsure how much time I was going to allocate to the acquisition of a Standard Gym Badge, but I was not planning to spend more than 2 weeks on the Minor Gyms. The extra time was going to go into the exploration of the interesting areas of Hoenn such as the desert as well as the Petalburg Woods and the general wild of Hoenn.
I took a look at the Hoenn map while considering what to do. The next Major Gym on my planned route was the Fortree City Gym. Interestingly enough, the Fortree Gym retained both its specialization and its Gym Leader from canon. Winona Birnbaum was the Gym Leader of Fortree City's Major Gym, and like in canon, she was a flying type specialist. From what I had read up/seen on the PokeNet she was quite strong, even if she was not on the same level as Stephanie.
Considering that Fortree City was more than two thousand kilometers away from Lilycove City, it came as no surprise that there were cities between them, though only 3 of those were of true importance since they held 3 Gyms I would be facing before challenging Winona's Gym. Two of those Gyms were Minor Gyms, while the third one was a Standard Gym. I would come upon a Minor Gym first, namely the Hardfort City Gym.
The Gym Leader of the Hardfort City Gym was a ghost-type specialist with a decent reputation. Hardfort City was pretty close to Mt.Pyre, so it made sense to a certain degree that there would be a ghost-based Gym in the area. This being a Minor Gym meant that I would get a B-rank Badge/Challenge, and I had admittedly not decided yet if I was going to go with a 3-star challenge for this one or not.
I kind of wanted to let my weaker Pokemon have a go at the gym which would most likely require me to go with a 1-star challenge or 2-star challenge instead depending on who I was going to use. I would have to make that decision within about 6 to 7 days since that was how long it was likely going to take me to reach Hardfort City on foot from Lilycove City. I did not want to rush there after all since I did want to take a look at the wild/route between the two cities a bit to see if I would come across anything interesting.
The next important stop after that would be in Brightwick City which was home to the fire-type Standard Gym, though from what I had heard online, there were some complaints that the Gym staff could work as part-time ghost trainers. Considering that Hartford City was not too far away, I'd say that this was quite interesting.
Still, it was likely that this might be related to the relative vicinity of Mt.Pyre, which was a hotspot for ghost types, though I was wondering why they were complaining since there was only the Litwick line along with Alolan Marowak and Hisuian Typhlosion as far as fore ghosts were concerned. Unless, the Brightwick Gym had managed to get their hands on a group of variants, which would definitely be interesting. I was sure I would learn more once I made it to Brightwick City.
The final/third Gym on that stretch was in Drafthill City, and it was a ground-based Minor Gym with a reputation for being tricky. All in all, I was expecting my trip from Lilycove City to Fortree City to take somewhere between 2 to 2.5 months in total, maybe less if the cities on the way did not rouse my interest aside from their Gyms. During this time I expected enough Pinkan Berries to have grown to start the first round of experiments, so I had to first consider whether the Pokemon I already had were enough for this first round or if acquiring more eligible Pokemon would be better.
Those with less than 10 members were not even worth counting, and after ignoring those, I currently had 50 Bounsweet, 484 Slowpoke, 467 Wooper, and 15 Clamperl that qualified for the Pinkan project. The Slowpoke and Wooper made up a pretty good number, but as far as diversity was concerned, I found the prospects lacking. Now, I was pretty sure that I could catch a bunch of Wurmple while on the road, but just one more species was still not enough.
That clinched it for me. I decided that I would spend 2 days roaming around the coast of Lilycove City to catch as many Remoraid, Corpish, and Tentacool as I could. If I stumbled upon any Feebas, Clamperl, and/or Wailmer I would catch those as well. I kinda doubted I would be able to stumble upon any Spheal, but if that happened, I would catch those as well. Decision made, I spent the rest of the evening with my Pokemon in Utopia.
The next morning after breakfast, I left Utopia and made my way to the beach. There I released Manami/Lapras and climbed upon her back. I then took out the map I had copied during my visit to the Ranger HQ, and after determining the closest marked hotspot, I asked Manami to head toward it. It took us roughly 16 minutes to arrive in the vicinity of the area where according to the map/rangers a Tentacool hotspot was supposed to be.
I sent out Kun/Azuraid to keep an eye on the situation underwater while we continued toward the center of the hotspot. Honestly navigating on the sea was not easy, and I had to keep an eye on the compass to ensure we were on course. About 2 to 3 minutes later Kun came back up and informed us that he had spotted a large colony of Tentacool along with a few Tentacruel hanging out in a coral field at the bottom of the sea right below us.
I thanked him for the information before I began to think about how to go about the next step, which was capturing some Tentacool. I eventually decided against trying to fish for them since that would take too long and would result in a relatively meager haul. No, I chose to go with the direct approach instead. Having made that decision, I asked Manami to swim away from our current position for a minute before I released Stan/Gyarados, Ryujin/Gyarados, Ignis/Gyarados, Jade/Gyarados, Medusa/Gyarados, Aby(ss)/Gyarados, Tiamat/Milotic, and Abzu/Milotic.
That was pretty much every water type in our main team except for Squirtle, but the little guy was still too weak to participate in this. A moment later I decided to call him out regardless. Not to have him participate in the battle that was about to erupt, but to have him stay at my side and watch the battles on site with his own eyes. I was naturally planning to stream the whole thing to Utopia, but being present was still different from seeing the projection in Utopia's sky.
Anyway, I briefed everyone about the upcoming clash and our goal of incapacitating as many Tentacool as possible for capture. The Gyarados Squad was quite excited at the prospect, and Abzu seemed pretty excited as well. Once everyone was on the same page, I told Kun to once again scout the situation below, but this time I wanted him to get a proper read on the number of Tentacool and Tentacruel. If possible, information on their strength would be useful as well. I emphasized that stealth was important and that I would rather have him spend an hour scouting rather than the Tentacool going into alert.
Kun gave me a joking salute before diving down and heading back to the coral field while we waited for his return. It took Kun nearly 15 minutes to come back, and he had a knocked-out Tentacool in tow. Aside from the Tentacool, he also had some pretty good information for us. Apparently, Kun first spent 10 minutes checking the field by himself before singling out a Tentacool that he observed for a few minutes until it was alone before ambushing it.
He quickly beat it up until it was unable to resist before interrogating Tentacool to verify his observation, which unsurprisingly had turned out incomplete, though it did help him verify that Tentacool's words were likely true. According to that Tentacool, there were around 600 Tentacool living at that coral field along with 13 Tentacruel. The number of Tentcool might be a bit higher or lower since Tentacool was not sure due to them not really bothering to keep a full count. As far as the Tentacruel were concerned, Tentacool was pretty certain, and the number it gave was actually 4 higher than what Kun had spotted during his observation.
Kun also managed to learn that the strongest Tentacruel was merely at the (low) dark gold stage, having broken through a few years ago, while 7 of the other Tentacruel were at various substages of the gold stage. Around 40% of the Tentacool were at the iron stage while the rest were at the bronze stage, with a handful being at the silver stage without having evolved.
Kun finished his report by saying that he knocked out Tentacool since I wanted to catch as many Tentacool as possible, but that it would still be better if we started within the next 15 to 20 minutes since he was not sure if Tentacool's absence would be noticed or not. I thanked and praised Kun for a job well done before capturing the Tentacool with a Pokeball. I then began pondering over the information Kun had brought.
The 13 Tentacruel, even their dark gold stage boss, would pose no real problem for my plan for obvious reasons. 1 dark gold, 7 gold, and 5 silver stage Tentacruel along with 5 to 10 silver stage Tentacool posed virtually no danger to our group. We wouldn't even have to mobilize the entirety of the Gyarados Squad to deal with them. No, it was the rest of the Tentacool that posed the biggest problem. Not because they were a danger to us or anything, but simply because their sheer number meant that we were unlikely to be able to keep them all from escaping/swimming away if it came down to it.
Thankfully there was an easy solution for this. We would simply have to raise our numbers as well, and I decided to use the Gyarados Squad's minions for this.
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This is chapter 2/4 for this week.
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