Chapter 24: A Neo Wrench in the Plans
(A/N: Hey everyone, this is probably the longest delay I've had (besides the time I moved recently), sorry about that. No good excuses this time, I didn't have inspiration while doing other work and I got into Genshin Impact (AR40) and Minecraft with my friends. I do appreciate everyone's reviews encouraging me to get back to it and hopefully I can deliver after being out of it for a while. While I do know where the story should be going on a macro level, I'd like to write it when I'm feeling most inspired as that would get the best results. Definitely not looking tor retcon too much like I did in the earlier chapters. With that being said, hope you enjoy this one and as always lmk what you think in the comments.)
General
Red picked up his phone and asked.
"Hello Korrina, what's up?"
Red could have sworn that he felt a chill in the room as he answered with Korrina's name.
Blue looked like she wanted to say something but Red was too absorbed in the call to hear her.
"Bad news Red, Gramps received a threat from Team Neo. They said they're planning on attacking the Tower of Mastery around the same time that your trial was supposed to happen. I don't know how they could have found out about the timing of your trial but we're going to need to come up with another plan because we can't handle them while also letting you do the trial." Korrina explained in one breathe.
Red thought about it for a moment before opening his phone on speaker phone and explaining the situation to the team.
After everyone had heard this, silence fell upon the group as everyone thought about how to handle the crisis (the temperature in the room seemed to have suspiciously rebounded back to normal too).
Platina spoke up first, "Korrina is there any way we can have the trial happen earlier?"
Red realized that he hadn't thought of something as basic as changing the script on Team Neo's plans.
Then he thought about it harder and a much grimmer reality set in his head.
Wasn't the reason Team Neo knew the date of their trial potentially because of a traitor tipping them off?
With that in mind, it would be hard to believe that Team Neo wouldn't find out about this change too…
Red decided to keep it to himself for now and see if he could figure out any clues from the behaviors of the others.
In the time it took Red to consider all of this, Korrina finally came up with her answer,
"Hm… honestly it'd be difficult to pull off but I think we could get you to do the trial tomorrow instead of 3 days from now. The only catch would be… it would be harder than the trial you were supposed to get. The toughest trial we offer is for champion level pokemon masters looking to obtain the ultimate rite of passage and the right to the most powerful Mega Stones. Normally we would be scaling the challenge down a bit depending on the trainer's pokemon and skill levels but now we won't have time to properly scale the difficulty." Korinna sounded apologetic on the other end before she followed up by saying.
"Honestly, if I were in your spot, I'd think there's no way we can do this challenge, I think that Red could potentially handle it as he certainly feels like a Champion level challenger, but unless the other challengers are also similarly strong, I just can't imagine that you'll be able to handle this. So with that in mind, I can at least allow Red to complete the challenge and then after we repel Team Neo in three days, we can have the trial go as normal" Korrina finished dejectedly.
Although Korrina had witnessed bits and pieces of the prep that Red's team had done for the tower's trial, she hadn't realized that there were multiple champion-caliber trainers on his team.
This was made clear to her when Red awkwardly cleared his throat and stated "As it would so happen… including myself we do have champion-caliber trainers in the team."
He let that bombshell stew for a while before he heard the expected "WHAT!?" from the other end of the phone.
Korrina clearly had not expected to meet a trainer of Red's caliber in the first place, so the fact that the others in his group were part of the handful of elites in the world known as Pokemon League Champions, was a bit too much for her to process.
To be clear, Korrina was a gym leader in charge of passing on the traditions as well as keeping the secrets of Mega Evolution. This put her well above the average level of a typical gym leader and even put her on par with the toughest gym leaders in most regions (matchup permitting) as there was an unspoken agreement from other gym leaders that getting into an 1 on 1 with her Mega Lucario was asking for trouble. This meant that she had a good idea of what kind of skill, perseverance, and talent, was involved in being a trainer that could usurp Gym Leaders, the Elite Four, and Champion of a region.
Red continued "Not counting myself, Blue was close to my level back when I became champion of Kanto, Sapphire already has mega evolution and she beat the eight gyms of Hoenn 80 days which is faster than I did at age 11, Platina beat that record and beat six gyms in 25 days while also beating multiple parts of the Sinnoh Battle Frontier. Mei and Crys are also competent battlers in their own right and we've trained together since coming together as a team. To say the least, I'm confident in their skills and would vouch for the battlers on my team."
Korrina nearly dropped the phone in shock. As a gym leader, she couldn't even fathom beating eight gyms in 80 days, the concept of going even faster than that was too much to handle. Not even getting into the topic of 25 days for 6 badges was basically saying that all Platina had to do for her gym challenge was to spend time traveling as the actual challenges must have not taken any time in her travel schedule.
Korrina briefly asked to herself, "Were the other region's gym leaders just giving out badges these days?" She then shook her head at that idea, of course not, the other gym leaders she had met from other regions were just as competent as Kalos' leaders. That just showed how terrifyingly competent these trainers were at the age of 11/12. She couldn't even fathom how scary they would be now with all their experience.
"H-how about we compromise, I can accept Red, Blue, and Platina's entrance into the ultimate tower trial but we will still need to hold off for the rest of your team in the meantime. It's just for their own good that we can properly give them a trial so they can learn about mega evolution in a natural way." Korrina admirably regained her composure over the phone to deliver her idea.
Red looked around and after a brief discussion with everyone, it seemed that the team was okay with this idea. White especially wanted to use this time to plan some countermeasures against Team Neo, as she wanted to be prepared against any attacks, including the possibility of an early attack (which matched with Red's own internal worries).
He proceeded to convey the group's message to Korrina and she replied with "I'll get on informing the trial trainers of your intentions, what pokemon are you looking to Mega Evolve?"
Red knew that he wanted to use Saur or Gyara. After some debate, he decided he wanted Saur to be the first candidate and promptly let Korrina know this. He then looked at the other two for their answers (while expecting Blue to say Blasty).
Blue matched Red's expectations by quickly replying "I will be bringing Blasty, my Blastoise."
Platina had only one pokemon that could mega evolve so her answer came quickly "I will bring my Lopunny, if that is alright with you."
Korrina thought for a moment before replying"En, sounds like a plan, unless anything goes wrong, let's set a meeting for… 10:00am tomorrow."
With that, the group said their good-byes to Korrina and the call ended soon after.
Red was a weird mix of being on edge from the emergency, and being a bit more relaxded that they had found a sensible plan to the problem so quickly.
That was when he was hit with the unexpected truck that was Blue's iron grip on his left shoulder.
"So now that we've figured out the plans for the trial… care to explain R-E-D?" She said with an ice-cold smile as she spelled out his name.
"Explain what? I think Korrina did a good job of explaining the situation so I don't think there's anything I know about this that you don't know already." Red said with true confusion.
"Guess I'll have to spell this out for you as usual… why does she have your phone number? You didn't give me your number until we had known each other for a while." Blue said with a somewhat comically angry face. While she was actually upset to some extent with him, it was clear that she was mostly venting some jealousy on him and didn't have truly bad intentions.
"Wait wait wait, cell phones weren't even common back then! That one is beyond my control." Red said reasonably as he tried to get out of this situation.
Too bad for him, he had escaped one small trap and unexpectedly fell into a much bigger and ominous one.
Crys was the first harbinger of doom.
"Wait Red, I've known you for so long and I'm pretty sure I don't have your phone number." Crys said while pulling out her phone. She clearly had some qualms about some girl Red had met recently having his number before her.
Before Red even had a chance to make a rebuttal…
"Hey that's true, Red I thought we were close friends after all the battles we've been through together." Sapphire said while copying Crys's initiative with the phones. In Sapphire's case, she was actually thinking about this from the angle of being long-time friends with Red at this point.
Thankfully, Yellow and Blue already had his number or else Red would have had a lot of awkward questions to tackle.
But that was as far as his luck would take him.
White, Mei, Serena, and Platina all took their cellular communication devices and hit him with similar questions of "aren't we a team, shouldn't we have each other's phone numbers?"
Red was overwhelmed by the requests… he didn't expect it to be that big of a deal. For the team members, they were basically always together so he hadn't even considered the need for them to share phone numbers. Admittedly, it was clearly a powerful tool for communication. It just hadn't occurred to him as he rarely used his phone for anything as he was too busy focusing on his pokemon or the adventure in front of him.
That didn't mean he had a good answer for everyone though. "Ummm, I just didn't think it was that important to be honest and uhh, Korrina asked me for my number after our dat… after she gave me a tour of the city." Red caught himself as he sensed danger rising as he began pronouncing the word "date".
"Oh so you're saying that communicating with us isn't important huh?" Blue said jokingly as she tried to diffuse the situation that had clearly began to escalate.
"Of course not, I-I'd be happy to share my number with everyone on my team. In fact, we should call each other more often when we're split up." Red said nervously as he tried to diffuse the situation.
Little did he know, the offer to call each other more often was enough to break the tension that was building.
Blue's attempt at diffusing the situation with her joke played out differently from how she expected it but at least the result fit what she wanted.
In truth, she wasn't upset anymore after learning that she had beat all the other girls (besides Yellow) at getting Red's number. She wasn't sure what their status on this matter was before but it made her feel special again, especially after Serena came in and took the most recent childhood friend spot away from her.
After the crisis that they had just barely avoided, the team decided to take a rest for the night, so they could be ready for the less scary crisis of the trial.
(A/N: The League of Legends World Championship ends this weekend and I should be a lot closer to getting back to a normal sleep schedule as a result. That probably will improve my mental ability to write more consistently in the future. I'll keep the timing open ended till I readjust as I don't think my work does well when it's put under hard deadlines. I'm looking forward to writing the next arc as the Tower of Mastery trials begin in the next chapter. Hope you enjoyed this chapter and I'll see y'all next chap.)