Outside the warehouse, Ash decided to set up camp… and while this all went down he heard some scuffling from behind the warehouse and decided to check it out.
He smelled whatever it was long before he saw it- it was a rancid, unbearable smell. Take the worst smell you can think of, dirty socks, rotten vegetables, and gym shorts, mix them into a pot and let it fester for several days and that's the kind of smell that Ash got.
But at the same time, it was oddly familiar somehow, Ash thought as he saw the purple ooze crawl towards him which was responsible for the smell.
"Pika pii," Pikachu said.
"Yeah, it's just like mine," Ash said. Of course, he had had a Muk, not a Grimer which this was, but it still reminded him of home and how Professor Oak and Tracey always reacted when his Muk came out. "Hey there, little fella… I'm guessing you're hear 'cuz all of the pollution, right?"
He whipped out his Pokedex to see if it could still identify Pokemon.
Grimer, this Pokemon was said to be created when sludge on a polluted beach was exposed to moonlight. Their very presence signifies pollution on a scale that is intolerable to other Pokemon and to most humans. The number of Grimer per square mile, as a matter of fact, is used as an index of pollution by many nations such as Unova and Hoenn while evaluating the ecological impact of cities.
The Grimer looked at Ash and Pikachu quizzically.
"Hey, if you want… do you want to come with us?" Ash asked and took out a Poke Ball. He kind of already felt attached to this Pokemon, especially with the fact that a Poison type couldn't be poisoned. It might make a good addition alongside his Gastly. He didn't know for sure what it was that Thomdolt did or what his special rule was, but his best guess (and Mr. Jennings agreed with him on this) was that it involved Poison type Pokemon or poisoning somehow. Ash reckoned if he had his own small army of Poison types it would put him at a lesser disadvantage when he fought Thomdolt than if he went at him with just his Pikachu and Fearow.
Grimer however, clearly had different plans as the moment Ash asked this it turned around and tried running away as fast as it could.
It didn't get far, however, before Ash zapped it and it fainted, allowing him to capture it with ease. It was clearly not a very strong Pokemon, and would need training along with the Gastly that Ash had caught.
Ash pinched his nose, it seemed as if the smell was still coming even from inside the Poke Ball. He didn't even know that was possible but he decided to ignore it as best as he could and went back to see that Gulliver was almost finished setting up camp.
"Where was ya?" Gulliver asked. "We didn't see ya and thought ya might be lost or somethin'."
"Nah, I caught a Grimer," Ash said. "I found one wandering around the back of the warehouse. Too bad I had to knock it out, you know, otherwise I would've loved to be able to train it right now."
Come to think of it, Ash thought, it was rather odd that he had been unable to pick up a single Potion or Antidote or any other sort of medicine despite the warehouse being full of almost everything else that someone might have were no such things such as universal Pokemon Centers in Galea.
"Just heal it then," Gulliver said, apparently not seeing what the problem was.
"With what?" Ash asked.
"Your Badge," Gulliver said.
"Wait- it can do that?" Ash asked. "And there are like- no side effects of healing?"
"Well, I ain't sure if it's y'know, instant or not or if there's a downside to doin' so, but from what I remember, yeah, you can use it to heal your Pokemon," Gulliver said. ""Cept when you're in an official gym battle o' course."
"Oh," Ash said. He then picked up the Poke Ball and whispered to it while clutching his Badge to heal his Grimer. His Poke Ball glowed blue slightly and twitched a few times in his hands like it did when a Pokemon was trying to break out, but it ended after a few seconds and Ash released his Grimer, which was as happy and energetic as when he had first captured it.
Gulliver and the others pinched their noses. "God that's an awful smell!"
"Yeah," Ash said.
"Pi piii pika pii pi," Pikachu said and covered its nose as well.
"I'm kind of used to it, I had one, or at least the evolved one," Ash said. "So I thought I'd train it. Come on, Grimer."
Ash took Grimer away from the camp so the others could put up dinner in piece- a dinner that was made entirely of things they had 'liberated' from the warehouse, and Ash found that he couldn't stop feeling bad about that. They had already eaten quite a bit of it, and so it was nearly pointless in trying to tell them to stop taking any more. He would have paid the store owner- except for the fact that the store owner had run away, and so he decided that he would pay the guy later.
But then as he sent out his Gastly it occurred to him that whoever the owner was, he or she probably wasn't the actual owner and it was probably Thomdolt. And he couldn't exactly give the money back to him once Thomdolt would be put in jail after Ash beat him, and that got him to thinking as to how long was he going to keep the Gym Leaders like Marley imprisoned? He wasn't sure if they deserved life imprisonment for what they did and even so, was life imprisonment going to be forever given that-
"Pika pi?" Pikachu asked him.
His Pokemon, including Gastly and Grimer, were looking at him, puzzled. Oh yeah, he was supposed to be training them and not staring off into the void.
Ash started off with trying to improve his two newcomer's speed by asking them to dodge Pikachu's Thunderbolts. This failed as a single shot was enough to take either of them out and they weren't really all that fast, and Ash had to heal them again and again.
So after that, he realized that the only ones strong enough to actually battle with them yet weak enough so they wouldn't get wiped out were each other, and so he had the two of them lob attacks at each other and try to dodge them.
All in all, after about an hour, he felt like he had made very minimal progress. Training was alright, but he knew that the real path to becoming stronger was to battle other Trainers.
He returned to camp and saw that the others had set up dinner and he grabbed a plate. The food they had picked up was the kind that could be stored for long- so it didn't exactly taste very nice to Ash but he noticed the others were eating it with gusto. He also noticed just how very thin most of them were and didn't complain about it.
They swapped stories late into the night after that. Ash was the center of attention, of course, and as the others grew more acclimatized to his presence (they seemed pretty hesitant about asking him anything, or at least, everyone besides Gulliver seemed to be) they asked whatever they wanted about his life back outside Galea.
Most of them seemed to be unable to believe most of the things he was saying- though clearly they never actually said this out loud given that Ash was sure that most of them were worried that he might smite them for saying something inappropriate. It was something he had noticed with a lot of the people he had interacted with since he had landed in Galea.
He didn't get to ask much of what they did in return as he was busy answering their questions and most of their answers were pretty much the same of having to work on the fields or plantations. And anyway, that wasn't what they wanted to know about, so it was hardly talked about. They wanted to hear about the cities of Sinnoh, the mountain ranges of Hoenn, and the lush fields of Kanto where Pokemon roamed freely. Ash hadn't even gotten to tell them about all of his legendary encounters with Pokemon like Ho-Oh or Lugia or how he had seen Kyogre and Groundon fight with each other. He figured if these guys had trouble believing the normal stuff that he had told them- how were they going to believe any of the things that sounded outlandish even to him?
Eventually the questions stopped when Pikachu wanted to get some shut-eye and so began shouting at them and they stopped talking after that.
The next few days as they advanced to the capital took on a routine, monotonous tone as wherever they walked people ran as if they carried the plague and left whatever they had behind. But that wasn't just it, the pollution, if anything, seemed to be getting worse. There were far more Grimer that they saw as they continue to make their way towards their journey, and the numbers seemed to increase day by day.
They also saw a large number of Pokemon who were clearly being affected by the pollution. Magikarp- a Pokemon that Ash was told was resilient to even the most polluted waters according to his Pokedex- were found lying near the banks of rivers. The water was so bad that apparently dry land was better than the water even for them.
Ash could try healing them, but he noticed that whenever he tried cleaning up an are with his Badge, it would stay clean for just a while before, in a few hours it would muddy up again. And every single time that he used his Badge, he got an odd feeling- the same one that he had felt when he had first stepped foot in Thomdolt's neck of the woods- the eerie feeling that he didn't belong here and an urge to turn back and go to Deluge City as fast as he could.
There did seem to be more Pokemon around and active who didn't mind the pollution however, as Gulliver unluckily found out when he accidentally walked into a nest of Skorupi and was stung a whole twelve times before Ash and Pikachu got him out, healed him, and Ash identified the strongest one of the herd of Skorupi and captured it.
That mean that he had three Poison types with him now, and part of him thought that was a bit overkill, but then again, he had no idea what was in store for him as the capital began to materialize on the horizon.
A/N: In the anime, I remember that when Ash sent his Muk to Professor Oak the Professor complained about it smelling though it was just a Poke Ball. I have no idea how that works given a Pokemon is completely converted into energy apparently inside the Poke Ball but you know, I tried to write it in anyway.
