Sadly all the reviews are still down. You know what else is down? The mood of our students, after learning about how badly damaged the environment is thanks to humans. But don't worry, things might look bleak, but the researchers at the Pokemon HQ Laboratory are doing their best to try and restore the Orre Region!
Pokemon Academy: Beginning of Beginnings
Chapter 928
Marion had done an excellent job of explaining the purpose of these habitat enclosures and why they were looking after wild pokemon, and had even gone into great detail about Egg Groups so that the students better understood the necessity of them.
During the course of that, however, she had ended up depressing herself by bringing up just how difficult things were for Pokemon Conservationists and how much damage the environment had gone through, and was still going through.
The result of that was Marion, who was normally peppy and excited at all times, had brought down the entire atmosphere of the tour to crashing lows along with her own sinking mood, leading to an awkward tension hanging over the air.
Back home, Sango flopped over on her bed in frustration. She felt the same way as Marion, so she could understand her well. The damage to the environment, and how futile it felt to fix it sometimes, those were serious issues and they weighed on her, as well.
But ironically it was Marion herself who had helped Sango get out of that funk, thanks to the advice she'd given her all the way back at the Probationary Ranger Exam.
Sango decided that the duty of a Pokemon Ranger was to do whatever they could to help. Even if it wasn't very much. As long as she could help someone, then she'd do it. That's what being a ranger meant, after all.
Small steps were fine.
She was about to tell this to Marion but she lost her chance.
"Ahem. Well, thank you for that, Marion, that's very informative," Professor Jovi said, clearing her throat. She called the attention of everyone else back to her. "Now, let's continue the tour, shall we? There are a lot more types of habitats we have set up here, designed to imitate the natural scenery around the Orre Region!"
Professor Jovi was desperate to get the focus back on the topic of what they were doing at the Pokemon HQ Laboratory. While she could empathize with Marion's feelings (and had comforted the girl quite a lot on her concerns in private over the time they'd spent working together) now was neither the time nor the place.
The purpose of tours like these were to get people excited about helping the environment and inspire them to become activists themselves, or at the very least make some changes in their own lives to help reduce their own environmental impact. Either way, the professor didn't want people leaving here bummed out and thinking everything was meaningless.
She shot Marion a look, and Marion immediately realized what she'd done. She quickly restrained herself, thinking about all the great fish pokemon out in the ocean and how much she was going to do to help all of them with her harmonia.
In a flash, she was all smiles again, much to Sango's and the others' relief.
"Yeah, that's right, Professor Jovi!" Marion chirped, nodding eagerly. "If you don't mind, would you like to take over from here?"
Professor Jovi nodded, glad that Marion had recovered.
"Yes, I'd be happy to, follow me, please," she said, leading the students over to the largest habitat in the lab, taking up an entire wall and large portion of the floor in front of it. It was a simulation of a large cliff face, with a desert beneath it, and it was filled with pokemon.
"Now, as I'm sure you're aware, the primary landscape of the Orre Region is desert terrain," Professor Jovi explained. "Certainly there are areas of greenery like the location around our lab, and other areas along the coastline like Agate Village, but for most of Orre the ecosystem is very brutal and arid like we've simulated here."
The enclosure, like the forest, was sealed away by glass. There were gauges to monitor precipitation and humidity to ensure that the conditions were similar to those that might be encountered in the desert of the Orre Region, and even an intense spotlight was shining overhead to mimic the effects of the sun's rays.
"We closely control the habitats to replicate what the pokemon are likely to encounter if we were to release them into the wild," Professor Jovi said, gesturing to the computer recording the data. "Because Orre's ecosystem is primarily an arid desert, who can tell me which types of pokemon would most commonly be encountered here?"
Several hands shot up, including Sango's on reflex, even though she knew that it wasn't likely she'd get called on.
Professor Jovi saw how frantically Lila's hand was shooting up into the air. She was desperate to make up for the prior embarrassment with the Water type pokemon.
"Yes, pink girl, have a guess?" The professor asked, giving her an encouraging smile. Out of everyone here, Lila seemed like the one who was most likely to take a real message back with her when she finished the tour, because of how sweet and innocent she was. That was something that the professor wanted to nurture.
Of course, Professor Jovi had no way of knowing just how shallow Lila really was inside.
"Rock and Ground type pokemon, right?" Lila answered, trying to sound confident.
"Yep, absolutely correct," Professor Jovi said with a nod. "You can tell just by looking at the enclosure, see? A region like Orre would be filled with Rock and Ground type pokemon if they were capable of inhabiting the deserts. And that's not all, deserts can also be home to Dragon types, Steel types, even the more robust Fire, Fighting, Poison, and Normal types! It's all about what the pokemon naturally eat, understand?"
She gestured towards the sand on the bottom of the habitat.
"Do you know why pokemon are able to thrive in a desert even without access to things like pokemon berries?" She asked.
Marion's hand shot up immediately, and she was the only one.
Then Ayame raised her hand, as well. "It's because of their diets, right?"
Professor Jovi nodded. "That's right, pokemon that live in locations like this, particularly Rock, Steel, and Ground type pokemon, their primary sustenance is rocks and minerals. That means that they don't need to eat the kinds of food that other pokemon eat."
"Oh, I think you guys were talking about that a few days ago, right?" Celia asked, turning to Marion and Hiromi. "Something about the reason why even the deserts were uninhabited after the mining accident?"
Hiromi frowned and nodded grimly. Marion sighed.
"That's right," Professor Jovi said, a solemn expression crossing her face. "After what happened in Pyrite Town, the damage to the crust of the Orre Region resulted in hazardous runoff that poisoned the land of the entire region. Now berries won't grow, and any pokemon swimming in the water would soon become deathly ill. But the worst of the damage was done to the ground itself."
"What, like even the dirt is poisonous?" Lila said, making a disgusted face. "Eww, that's just… eww! I knew dirt was yucky, but, like, EEEEEWWW!"
"We were just talking about this before, remember?" Darla reminded her partner, nodding back to the previous room of the tour. "If the soil won't sustain berries, then that means pokemon that feed on the soil won't be in very good condition, either."
"Exactly, so even though the Orre Region has the perfect climate to host a wide variety of Rock and Ground type pokemon, because the ground itself is toxic they wouldn't be able to gather nutrients from the natural mineral deposits," Professor Jovi agreed.
She quickly smiled.
"But that's not as big of a problem as growing berries, though!" She reassured the kids, which was a surprising thing to hear.
"Huh? Why not?" Celia asked, confused. All day they'd been hearing about how much damage had been done to the Orre Region's ecosystem, possibly even beyond repair, and now the professor was saying that it wasn't that big of a deal?
"While it's true that the runoff has seeped into the ground and poisoned the land, the chances of restoring the habitability of the desert is a lot higher than for the water or even the green areas," Professor Jovi explained. "If you'd like, I can show you why!"
That got everyone's attention. They looked curiously at the professor, wondering what she was talking about. Even Sango was intrigued. Orre and Unova might not have been exactly neighboring regions, but they were both part of the same union of trade regions and what affected one tended to have an impact on the other. Not to mention that, as a future Pokemon Ranger, this was a topic that was a lot more exciting to her than most of the other students.
The hopes of the students reignited, they followed the professor out of the room filled with all the habitats to the next section of the tour.
What they saw in the next room of the lab took everyone's breath away. Lila's jaw hit the floor and even the stoic Darla was caught by surprise. Ayame was so taken aback she nearly dropped Marion's tablet on the ground.
Even DONOMA didn't have anything negative to say about what she was seeing, she was as surprised as everyone else.
They were standing in the middle of a giant cave.
The section of the pokemon lab was still indoors. Everyone knew that, of course, there weren't any mountains or rock features anywhere close to the lab, just jungle and more jungle. And they hadn't gone underground or anything. Whatever this was, it was definitely an artificial, replicated habitat, just one on a far grander scale than any that they had seen before.
Hiromi was surprised. She'd seen a lot, and been in a lot of caves herself over the course of her career, especially the ones on Mt. Silver. This was a near-perfect replica of the kind of terrain she would have expected, they must have gone to great expense to build this model.
"Is… Is this for real?" Lila asked. She was a bit slow on the uptake compared to the other members of the group.
"No, no," Professor Jovi laughed, rapping her knuckles gently against one of the stone walls. "It's a model of the type of cave systems you can find in the area around Pyrite Town, perfectly duplicated down to the very last detail."
"For studying purposes?" Olivia guessed. She scanned the rocks, they even had the same reddish hue she'd seen in photographs of Pyrite Town.
"Precisely," Professor Jovi nodded. "We've been working on trying to artificially replicate the precise mineral composition of the natural bedrock of the region, and you know what we found when we did that?"
"…They're rocky?" Ayame guessed.
Hiromi rolled her eyes, her daughter could be such a dork sometimes. Not that she knew the answer herself, of course.
"They're toxic," Professor Jovi said.
Lila groaned internally. She was confused again. The professor had said that like it was some big surprise, but Lila thought that it was obvious? After all, the rocks had been contaminated by that runoff or whatever it was, so of course they were toxic. The professor had already told them that, so why was this some big surprise? Had Lila completely misunderstood something again?
Lila hated feeling like the only idiot in the room, so she looked around to see if anyone else was as confused as she was.
To her relief, she saw that she wasn't the only one. Not a lot of the others really knew what to make of the professor's response.
Sango was the one who spoke up, from the safety of being behind her screen.
"Professor, I don't think I heard you properly," she said. "Did you say that the rocks are toxic?"
"Yes, that's right," Professor Jovi nodded.
"But… I mean, we already knew that, right? Because they got contaminated by all the runoff, the same as the soil, so why's that such a surprise then?" Sango asked, still totally lost. She'd heard a lot of things about the Orre Region, but this was just making her confused.
A smirk crossed Professor Jovi's face, and with a triumph gleam in her eye she declared "that's because they've always been toxic!"
It took everyone a second to process this.
"Wait, what?" Ayame asked. "What the fuck's that supposed to mean?"
"Let me explain," Professor Jovi said, leading the students through a wide arch to another section of the cave. This one looked a little more developed, as it had actual lab equipment and tables set up to record samples. She brought them over to one of the tables and picked up a rock. "This here is a rock from Pyrite Town from after the contamination."
She held up a second rock, nearly identical to the first. "This one was taken from a mineral sample exhibit before the mining incident occurred."
"So that one's free of contamination, then," Hiromi said.
Professor Jovi nodded. "Now, let me explain to you what exactly happened during the mining accident in Pyrite Town."
Marion winced, this was one of those stories that she hated. But she kept a composed smile nonetheless and let the professor explain.
"While working on their mining project, the teams trying to excavate Pyrite Town were reckless and foolish," she said, her face darkening with a scowl. "They didn't care about the environmental impacts of what they were doing, and because of that, they repeatedly dug in areas that they shouldn't have, without the proper precautions. And due to the extent of their mining endeavors, they ended up polluting nearly 90% of the existing landmass of the Orre Region before environmentalist groups were able to step in put an end to the project."
"And that's how the Orre Region got to the extent that it did," Hiromi said grimly.
"That's right," Professor Jovi sighed. "Of course, nowadays, since we know the impact our actions can have on the environment, there are far more safety regulations in place, groups like the Aether Foundation and the Ranger Union exist to curb the damage that humanity's progress can end up inflicting on pokemon, and ultimately, on ourselves. It's a difficult struggle, but things are working better than they were back then."
"Yeah, that sucks and everything, but what does that have to do with the current damage to the environment and what you're doing here?" Olivia asked.
"What actually happened during the mining incident was that reckless use of high-powered machinery carelessly damaged deep pockets of rocks, releasing out chemicals and toxic gases into the air. These chemicals were contained deep within the earth's crust, but the mining equipment caused them to leech up into the surface and poison the ground," Professor Jovi explained. "That's why the water is toxic and the soil can't sustain berries, even if it's still able to nurture other forms of plantlife, and why the rocks aren't safe to eat anymore."
"Oh!" Hiromi gasped. Being the most experienced person in the room besides the professor about how impacts like that on the environment worked, she figured out what Professor Jovi had meant when she said the rocks were toxic.
"Exactly," Professor Jovi said, nodding. "Even though the surface minerals are more deeply contaminated due to chemical leakage, those chemicals were already present in their mineral compositions in the first place."
Now it was Ayame's turn to gasp in realization, and Sango had begun to put the pieces together, too. Marion's eyes were gleaming as she nodded with a smile, glad they were starting to figure it out.
Lila wasn't, though. For the millionth time today, she was feeling dreadfully lost. She glanced pathetically at Darla, who shrugged. She might have some knowledge of Egg Groups and things like that but she didn't have the first clue about ecosystems or pollution.
Fortunately, Professor Jovi was happy to clarify things for everyone else.
"What that means," she said, "is that because the rocks and minerals in the Orre Region naturally contained traces of these elements, the contamination merely increased the concentration of existing toxins. That is very, very good. Can anyone tell me why?"
Ayame's hand was the only one that went up, along with Sango's. The professor called on Ayame to explain.
"Well… it's like this thing that I learned about in one of my caretaking classes," Ayame tried to explain. "See, some species of pokemon are more resilient than others, so they can handle eating foods with chemical contaminants. Poison types and Steel types usually, but when the contaminants are in things like rocks and minerals, even Ground and Rock type pokemon can handle them to an extent, isn't that right, professor?"
"Exactly," Professor Jovi nodded. "For centuries, pokemon lived in the desert wastelands of the Orre Region, naturally eating the rocks and minerals found there, even though they were filled with toxic chemicals."
"So then the reason they all left was because there were suddenly too many chemicals in the rocks!" Lila gasped in realization. She looked over at Darla like a Growlithe pleading for a treat. "It's like when Darla makes coffee, and she puts too much sugar into it and then she can't drink it anymore!"
Darla rolled her eyes. "Any amount of sugar is too much sugar," she muttered under her breath.
That was… quite an analogy. Professor Jovi grinned, and shrugged. "Yes, something like that. The wild pokemon who lived off the rocks and minerals were naturally adapted to a certain degree of contamination, but when the mining incident increased it, the sudden change was too much for them to tolerate."
"So… how is that a good thing?" Giselle asked, frowning. "You said that the damage to the desert wasn't as bad as the other places, right? Or did I misunderstand?"
Professor Jovi shook her head. "It's not that simple. You see, if pokemon can naturally tolerate the contamination, then all we have to do is adjust what they're used to. We can take wild pokemon with naturally high chemical immunities and slowly alter their diet by gradually increasing the amount of contaminants contained in the mineral reserves. Over time, the pokemon will adapt to the point where the rocks and minerals won't be toxic anymore, and they'll be able to thrive in the environment again!"
That… sounded very grim. Ayame frowned. What the professor was saying was roughly what she'd expected, but that didn't make it sound like a very compelling idea.
"Isn't… isn't that dangerous to the pokemon though?" Lila asked anxiously. As a Fairy type trainer she knew quite well how dangerous poison could be to a pokemon. "You're… you're basically poisoning them, that can't be okay!"
"Oh, no, you don't need to worry about that!" Professor Jovi said quickly. "We're working closely with the Pokemon League Health Organization to humanely adjust the diet of wild pokemon, with a team of medical staff on hand to record any sudden hazardous impacts to a pokemon's health! Remember, our first consideration is for the pokemon! We're making sure the process is safe as can be, so pokemon can painlessly develop a natural immunity to the poison over time, and begin repopulating!"
That did a lot to assuage the worries of some of the other students, but Ayame wasn't quite convinced.
"I've done some studies myself on pokemon dietary habits," Ayame said, frowning, "and what you're describing would take years to accomplish, if it could even work at all."
Professor Jovi's smile dulled a little and she winced. "…Yes, that is a bit of a drawback. It will be many years before we would begin to see progress on this endeavor." She quickly recovered, though, a confident look crossing her face. "But even so, Professor Jovi still believes that it is vital for the sake of restoring the Orre Region! Even if it takes 5 years, or 50, or 500!"
Marion smiled, her eyes shining with awe at the professor. Words like those were exactly the sort of thing that made her proud of the work she planned to do as a Pokemon Conservationist.
So things look very grim for the Orre Region, but Professor Jovi has given us all some hope that circumstances could, theoretically, improve! Only time will tell, however.