Chapter 12: White Lights and Contest Fights!
(A/N: I have fond memories of pokemon contests from gen 3, but to be honest, I can't remember how they played at all in ORAS despite having played ORAS. As a result, the contest mechanics and interactions aren't as important in this chapter. Also unfortunately the arc in the manga isn't fully translated and skipped like 18 chapters so… I will be creating parts of the new character's personality on my end.")
General
The girl with the pokedex had a pretty face, blue eyes, long slender legs, torn jean shorts, and a white top with her dark brown hair held up by a white pokeball hat.
Blue was not having any of it.
She had already had to deal with the whole Lisia misunderstanding and right now there was another attractive… actually at this point it probably was a given that any girl that was about to get on Red's radar was going to be stupidly attractive.
At that moment, Blue decided to give up on even fretting over their attractiveness because it was a futile effort at this point. "I'll just work on making myself more attractive to Red" Blue resolved herself with that thought.
Before the group had a chance to introduce themselves to the new dexholder, a trio of older looking guys approached the girl and began to hit on her.
It looked like she could handle herself in this situation until one of the guys began to put his arm around her bare shoulders.
Red zoomed past the girls before anyone could react and had Pika hit the goons with a thundershock meant for paralyzing.
He then held both of his arms up in front of the new dexholder in a protective stance and declared "Don't hit on my girl…friend!". He left it purposely ambiguous which is pretty much one of the rare times where he was actually being clever.
… too bad his partners didn't read into his wording that way.
Red suddenly felt an odd chill down his spine once again and he could sense killing intent. Oddly enough, he wasn't 100% certain that the killing intent was only coming from the guys he had just paralyzed.
In fact, the only pleasant glance that he was getting right now happened to be coming from right behind him as the new dexholder was giving him an approving look.
"Dammit why do all the sexy women have to be taken!" One of the douchey looking guys muttered this and motioned for the rest of his pals to scram as they could also tell that based on the power of the shock, Pika was not a pokemon they could handle in a battle.
The girl behind Red tapped him on the shoulder and in the meantime the rest of the girls had also closed the distance and were slowly sizing up the new girl.
"Girlfriend eh? Pretty quick to pull the trigger aren't ya?" The girl gave a cheeky grin as she teased the poor boy.
"Wait I purposely said it like friend who is a girl so it wouldn't be misunderstood" Red pleaded helplessly as he got a small poke in the back from a jealous Yellow.
"Haha I'm just messing with you, thanks a lot for the help er…", "Red" Red introduced himself promptly.
"Red huh, nice to meet you, my name is White. Wait a second, are you the Red from Kanto?" White introduced herself with a theatric bow.
Red affirmed immediately and White clapped her hands together with a happy expression, "I've been looking for you! Professor Oak told me to look for Red when coming to investigate Slateport City. "
At that moment, the last vestiges of hope Blue had that this new girl was just someone who happened to have a pokedex in the area were wiped away. "Ugh more competition was the last thing I needed." She thought to herself.
Introductions were then made with White and the rest of the team, "wow there are a lot of girls in this team aren't there? Well I guess I'm not surprised, Black is also helping out elsewhere so I guess this is how the Prof wanted us to split up our resources." White nonchalantly remarked.
White was apparently an accomplished pokemon manager who helped produce commercials, musicals, and other events. Since she was more centered around showing off pokemon she had decided to enter this contest spectacular to better bait out the bad guys with her pokemon's extraordinary skills.
Red thought about it for a second before looking at Platina who gave him a nod of understanding, "okay then we'll have Platina and White enter at the same time so we can get our best chance to bait and confront Team Neo."
Everyone seemed to be on board with this plan and Lisia decided to take this time to join in the conversation that seemed to have been a dexholder exclusive meeting.
"Alright great so it looks like you two talented girls are going to be participating today. Perfect, I can get you in for the earlier acts so we don't have to worry about endangering too many civilians." Lisia made the helpful offer which the rest of the team gladly accepted.
Afterward, Lisia showed the two girls where to prepare for the contest and the rest of the team shuffled out of the backroom to get their front row seats.
Platina had told them to spread up in the front area of the crowd so they could cover the most space for protection purposes.
Thus Red took the middle area, Yellow and Blue took the left side and Mei + Sapphire took the right side.
The first performance began and a young boy named Joey came onto stage.
He sent out his Rattata which he introduced proudly as being a top tier Rattata, then proceeded to have the Rattata flail about somewhat helplessly in what could only be described as a fairly poor attempt at appealing to the audience.
Still the audience seemed to be pretty enthusiastic about the event as a whole and they gave him polite applause as he finished his routine with a quick attack and muttered something about how the audience should have FEARed his Rattata. There was a tacit agreement amongst the team that Joey probably wouldn't be baiting any bad guys with his Rattata so everyone subconsciously loosened up a bit.
As predicted, no one interfered with the performance and this stayed true for the next few ones who gave standard contest performances you'd expect to see.
Then Platina got on stage in a beautiful white dress with a transparent/sheer material covering her otherwise bare shoulders.
She brought out her Empoleon and he showed off his extremely impressive hydro pump in conjunction with bubblebeam. The sheer power of her Empoleon was almost as scary as it was impressive and it showed that Empoleon not only had power but majesty befitting her emperor title.
Platina finished the performance with a combo between hydro pump and flash cannon, both were fired so quickly in succession that it almost felt like two pokemon were firing the attacks in sync.
The crowd went wild for Platina's performance and comments like "Bro I am so gonna stan Platina" could be heard from the more enthusiastic fans.
Despite the extremely strong crowd enthusiasm for Empoleon, it seemed like team Neo was still not making any moves for this very talented pokemon.
"Maybe Empoleon was just a bit too strong for Team Neo to want to take a stab at it…" Red thought with a small sweatdrop reaction as he was again reminded how capable Platina was.
As if to affirm his thought, Platina looked a bit disappointed when no one attacked her as she was curtsying on stage.
Red was taken out of his thoughts when White got on stage in a pure white dress. As Red had only seen her in her tomboyish outfit, he wasn't sure how to react to this elegant look for her besides being a bit slack-jawed.
The bright white spotlights centered on her and little sparkles started to reflect off the bottom part of her dress.
She sent out Amanda, her Serperior and then began a show of Leaf Tornado plus Leaf Storm, which caused a smaller concentrated spiral of leaves to be the center piece to the stronger and wider Leaf Storm.
The technical excellence in this combo showed that Amanda was raised with great care.
She wasn't done yet though, she then showed off Amanda's contrary nature by adding two more layers of Leaf Storms that were increasingly wider due to the power increase contrary was granting.
This created the visual effect of a giant flower of rapidly spinning leaves that captivated the audience.
While Amanda didn't have the raw firepower of Platina's Empoleon, it made up for it in the personality it expressed in its movements along with its technical excellence. One could tell that White was an extremely capable trainer when it came to bringing out the personalities of her pokemon.
All seemed to be going well for the performance when suddenly all of the leaves stopped in motion.
The audience didn't seem to understand that this wasn't part of the performance and they started cheering for the cool trick.
Red, Blue and Yellow immediately recognized that this was the work of an extremely powerful psychic pokemon. But they couldn't fathom what pokemon could pull this off.
Suddenly a net flew out from the side and wrapped around Amanda. Disguised Team Neo grunts revealed themselves and started causing havoc in the venue.
Backstage the screams of distressed contestants could be heard as more nets were being popped.
A typical onlooker might wonder why the contestants didn't fight back against the nets and grunts, but that's when the answer appeared suddenly in the middle of the stage and caused immediate confusion in the dexholder team.
Mewtwo had appeared in front of them and was currently suppressing not only Amanda and her leaf storms, but probably all the pokemon backstage as well or else more resistance should have been heard from back there.
"Red! What is Mewtwo doing here, and why is he working for Team Neo?" Both Yellow and Blue were extremely distraught by this revelation as Mewtwo was supposed to be bound to Blaine. His appearance here left a lot of unpleasant questions about the state of their old friend.
Red was about to reply that he didn't know as well when suddenly a pokeball flew towards Mewtwo just to be smacked away.
Red turned his attention towards where the pokeball came from and saw a familiar girl looking at her pokedex as she said "Looks like we're gonna have a fight on our hands eh Red?"
(A/N: White joined the cast! I love Black and White, especially Black 2 and White 2. I wish the manga was a bit a coherent for this arc but still, Hilda/Touko/White has one of those designs that I just couldn't forget growing up. She's slightly older than the other members of the cast as she was already older than them when her arc started. I hope y'all enjoy learning more about my version of White and I wonder if anyone can guess who the new(?) girl is.)