Chapter 34: The Mega Aftermath Finale
(So I got my second covid shot and have been feeling meh since then, not an excuse for the gap of course, just giving an update. Currently my job has been grinding me down so I'm hoping that it gets better or I'll have to look elsewhere. As for other news, been closely watching MSI as it goes on and today was a wild ride and I'll leave it at that for those of you who haven't watched it yet. Not much else to say, this season's anime has been surprisingly good and hololive has been entertaining as always (Ayame got a new outfit!). Hope y'all enjoy the chap).
General
Behind closed doors in life, a whole bevy of things could be found behind them.
Some closed doors could lead to lavish prizes if you were on a prize show.
Others could hold the dark secrets of an evil organization.
In this case, Red and Mei had no idea what to expect behind the door but Mei had her hand on a pokeball just in case.
The light from the room that just opened up was stronger than the room in the main room that Red and Mei were in.
Of course, that wasn't the most interesting thing about the room though.
Behind the door, were the missing overseers that everyone was looking for.
Perhaps more surprisingly though, was the fact that the overseers looked perfectly fine.
First of all, none of them were tied up and it didn't look like anyone was roughed up besides the stressed out expressions the overseers seemed to have.
Secondly, the room that they were locked in was a lot more furnished than they had expected.
It wasn't even much of a room and moreso a large lounge area probably used for recreational purposes.
At a glance, Red saw a TV, Nintendo Switch, and ping pong table in the room. There even seemed to be an attached bathroom and kitchen to the area so it seems like the overseers were not particularly abused except for the possibility of some mental trauma from being locked away by intruders.
Red noticed that the overseers were looking at him apprehensively and he quickly acted to assuage their worries.
"My name is Red from Pallet Town and I'm here to help you on behalf of Korrina." Red led with a brief introduction.
The 3 overseers in the room looked visibly relieved when they heard that he was there on Korrina's behalf. Mei immediately followed up by asking them if they were all okay and generally reassuring them that they had taken care of Team Neo.
One of the overseers spoke up in response to Mei's assurance that Team Neo had been defeated, "Are you the trainers we were supposed to be giving the hardest trial to?" She asked both of the dexholders in the room.
Mei promptly shook her head and pointed to Red, "he's one of the trial-goers, I only helped out with fighting Team Neo during the attack."
Nonetheless, the overseers came and fervently shook the hands of Mei and Red, "thank you so much, we weren't sure what was going to happen for a while there. It feels like we've been stuck here for days and they took our phones and trial pokemon when they invaded" the overseer explained as Red and Mei tried to handle the gratitude exuding from the overseers.
"Do you know what they did with your pokemon and phones?" Red asked after the overseers had stopped shaking his hand.
The first overseer who spoke up "When we were captured, they asked us where we stored the mega stones in the tower. We weren't sure what was going to happen to us or our pokemon so we decided to cooperate for fear of anything worse happening." The overseer explained.
Red and Mei looked at each other and nodded, "okay let's go get your stuff back, assuming it's still in the mega stone storage room. As far as we know, no one used a mega pokemon in our conflict so it's possible that they didn't take any of the mega stones." Red said based off his memories of the previous battles.
There was certainly a Steelix and some other candidates for mega evolution available there. In the brief time that he had known them, he hadn't known Team Neo to be the type of organization to not use an advantage when it was available to them.
However the overseer corrected Red soon after Red made that assumption "it's possible that they did take some stones but couldn't use them. I think Korrina probably explained this to you before, but to recap, mega evolution takes a strong bond between the trainer and pokemon. So it's certainly possible that the criminals didn't have enough of a bond with their pokemon to make it happen."
"Hm, that is possible then… I guess we'll know when we see the storage area." Red mused aloud and then exited the room with the group after asking the overseers where the storage was.
As it turns out, the storage room was behind one of the doors that connected from the main room that the recreation room fed into.
The group walked over to the door that the overseer pointed out. On the way there, Red messaged the rest of the group to let them know that the missing overseers had been found.
At the very least, the scariest part of the ordeal was over, it seemed that everyone involved was safe.
Now just left the question of what state the Tower of Mastery's mega stone storage was when all was said and done.
The group arrived at a door with another familiar looking keypad.
It seemed like the overseer didn't mind if Red and Mei saw anything as they made no motion to cover the keycode from them.
The overseer nonchalantly keyed in 4-3-2-1 and the door made the familiar clicking sound last heard from the recreation room's door.
Red looked over at Mei excitedly and she just groaned a bit and shook her head disappointedly at the overseer's passcode sense.
Before they entered the room, Red's phone went off and he saw a message from Platina thanking him and Mei for finding the overseers.
This felt like the expected text for Red until he read the next line.
"Now that you've found the overseers, there's no need for you and Mei to group up together for "safety's sake" right?" She said in the group chat.
Well… that's an odd thing for Platina to say, Red thought to himself.
Almost immediately after Red had seen Platina's message, six thumbs up emojis showed up one by one on the message.
… How am I supposed to interpret these? Red thought again.
He looked over at Mei and noticed that she was looking at her phone with a annoyed but cute expression.
"They sure like to joke around don't they?" Red said with a small laugh as he made eye contact with Mei.
"Y-yeah… they sure like to joke around don't they." Mei said with a slightly forced smile and she thought about ways to get even with Platina later.
Back to the matter at hand, the group had entered the storage room and …
it was surprisingly in an okay state.
The room was bigger than expected, albeit this was the same impression Red had when they had entered the recreation room.
There were holders similar to the one that Blue had seen for her Blastoise trial, but Red wouldn't have known that so to him they just looked like somewhat ornamental holders.
In the middle of the room there was a large space with an empty pedestal and nothing else around it.
"Well at first glance, it looks like nothing is missing unless something was on this big pedestal before." Mei observed aloud.
Red seemed to agree that besides the pedestal, everything looked pretty normal.
The overseers shook their head in unison and looked down at the ground with solemn expressions.
After a pregnant pause, one of the overseers spoke up, "so do you want the good news or the bad news first?"
Mei consulted with Red briefly before saying "The good news please."
"It would seem that they did try to take the mega stones but they probably thought they were defective when their pokemon wouldn't mega evolve so they just put them back randomly. The storage area has many stones in the wrong places but this isn't the end of the world, we can figure it out by the stone's designs and the stone holder's labels." The overseer let them know that the warehouse was in much more disarray than the dexholders initially had thought.
Wait, if that's the good news, what's the bad news? Mei realized that the current mess hadn't even qualified as bad news then the upcoming news must be really bad.
"So… what's the bad news then?" Mei asked apprehensively.
The overseers sighed in unison, and then the overseer from before spoke up, "At first glance, it might look like they didn't take any mega stones, but the reality is that they took the most important one we had here."
The most important one…? Red and Mei had a bad feeling about this, Red spoke up this time around "it wouldn't have something to do with that big empty pedestal over there would it?" he asked while not wanting to hear the answer.
"Unfortunately that's exactly the case, did you hear about how there was trouble in the Hoenn Region's Mossdeep City a few months ago?" The overseer asked.
"It just so happens that we were the ones who resolved it" Red replied.
The overseers looked shocked for a moment until one spoke up and said "I guess it's to be expected of the same trainers who could repel the massive attack on the tower."
She then continued "The original attack in Mossdeep City made the space station there worried that their recent huge finding would be in trouble. As a result they decided to entrust it to us, the institution that was both the best equipped to research the object in question, and protect it as well. While of course we failed that second part, we did confirm their suspicions about the object and that's why this is bad news."
"Okay so I get that it's bad news that Team Neo stole this object that the tower was supposed to be protecting and researching, but what was this object for and why was it supposed to be relevant to the tower?" Red asked as he couldn't figure out why something from the space station would be related to a historic tower.
"Could it be, that object from space was a mega stone?" Mei piped up as the dots connected for her.
"If this were a few weeks ago, I would be happy to tell you that you were correct. As it stands, with it being stolen, the fact that it was a mega stone from space is the worst outcome possible." The overseer said solemnly.
"That makes sense… but how important could one mega stone be that they decided to take it with them when they abandoned the other ones?" Red followed up by addressing the elephant in the room.
"About that… we were entrusted with no ordinary mega stone, it was… a meteorite found from a recent space expedition that had energy signatures very similar to the mega stones found on earth." The overseer replied.
"Then if this meteorite was a mega stone from space… who was it for?" Red said tensely as the apprehension started to mount for him and Mei.
"We found out that the meteorite would be used by Rayquaza to mega evolve." The overseer finally let the cat out the bag.
"Well that's awful, we have already faced mega mewtwo and frankly I don't think I would want to face another uber powerful mega legendary pokemon." Red said as he realized how crazy the notion of a mega Rayquaza would be having faced the regular one a few years ago with Sapphire and the Hoenn/Johto/Kanto dexholders.
"That's not all." The overseer cut into Red's thoughts.
"There's more?!" Red and Mei exclaimed in unison.
"We were originally excited to find out that this meteorite would be the first mega stone that we knew of that could just be consumed by the user to mega evolve at will. This means that you could ostensibly have Mega Rayquaza hold any item along with being able to mega evolve. This also potentially means that the bond between the trainer and the pokemon might not matter either if the objective was to just let Mega Rayquaza go on a rampage." The overseer let the final bombshell drop.
The room was silent for a few moments before Red could be heard shouting "Ahhhhh shiiiiiiitt, are you serious? It would seem that anything goes when it comes to ridiculous mega evolutions."
(That's it for this chapter, if I can figure out the troubles with my job I should be able to post more often, also I'm curious about feedback on potential update chapters (aka I'll tell you how far I am with writing a current chapter in the form of a placeholder chapter with an estimate on when the real chapter comes out). Let me know in the reviews if you would prefer this or just random chapter drops when they're completed. Again as I mentioned in the previous trials arc, a finale to an arc does not mean the finale for the series. It is far from that point actually, so do not worry too much about that. Hope you enjoyed the chapter and I'll see y'all in the next one.