The New Normal – 4-4 – Interlude – Lorelei
Training to defeat a member of the Elite Four was much easier said than done. Especially when there was no one around to support you while you did so.
For the past week or so, her life has been an exhausting balance between maintaining her duties as a Gym Leader, while fervently training for her battle against Walker. Her life at the moment was sustained only through pure spite, determination, and an overdose of coffee.
To that end, she had to ensure that she knew every little detail about Walker and his strengths and weaknesses.
And one of the more important things that she noticed was how Walker relied on hit and run tactics like a crutch. In fact, all of his Pokémon seemed to fight in the exact same way. They would first fly up high into the air, and then make use of the space to either buff themselves up to the point where you couldn't resist their attacks, or to slowly ground you down with long range moves while staying out of your reach.
It was, at its core, a very basic strategy, but Lorelei couldn't deny its effectiveness. In order to beat it, you would have to either have superior long-range firepower to be able to disrupt his setup moves and bring down his Flying types, or you would need to have some way of challenging Walker while in the air, in his field of expertise. And while Flying types weren't the greatest of powerhouses, their mobility and flight allows them to dodge through many powerful attacks if given the opportunity to.
Of course, you could just beat Walker using sheer volume of firepower or strength. She recognized that the other Elite Four members would hardly break a sweat at defeating Walker, just by using their overwhelming strength or firepower. Even her uncle, who Lorelei thought was long past his prime, would find it a simple matter to defeat Walker. But Lorelei recognized that she lacked the raw strength of those in the Elite Four.
Thus, she understood that, for her to win, she needed to take full control of the battlefield with her Ice moves and prevent Walker from taking advantage of his superior mobility and flight. Since she lacked any Flying types, she knew that there was absolutely no point trying to contest Walker in the skies.
In practical terms, that meant training up her Pokémon to prioritize their ranged Special Attack and large area-of-effect moves, as she predicted that those would be the moves that would be most effective against Walker. His Pokémon were mostly superior in speed and agility compared to hers, so her best option was to blanket the entire battlefield in Ice and hope that his Pokémon gets caught up in it.
Coupled with her type advantage, and his Pokémon's lack of endurance, a well-targeted attack from her should be able to bring down most of his Pokémon, or at least slow them enough so that her Pokémon could get in range to finish them off.
Luckily, or annoyingly, her connections to Pryce as her uncle actually proved their worth for once, as they allowed her to secure an important item from Sinnoh that would have been unavailable to her if she was not family. She was gifted the package because she was her uncle's niece, and the gift, likely from a notable politician in Sinnoh, was probably to butter up her uncle for some political reason or another.
Normally, she would be upset about the corruption, but she kept her mouth shut in this case. The Dawn Stone in front of her was a very precious possible trump card she needed to secure her win against Walker.
With one hand, she carefully lifted the Dawn Stone out of the box, and with her other hand, she released her most recent capture, a Snorunt.
"Snorunt?" Her Snorunt questioned, before her eyes gleamed interestedly as she stared at the Dawn Stone. "Snorunt! Snorunt!"
"Yes, Snorunt. It's finally time for you to evolve." She replied, slowly moving the Dawn Stone towards her Snorunt and pressing it down on her forehead.
Instantly, a bright white light filled the room as her Snorunt's figure slowly started to morph and change. As the light faded, a newly evolved Frosslass was revealed to the world.
"Froslass! Fros! Lass!" Froslass cheered at her new evolution while inspecting herself and her new form. Lorelei allowed herself to smile for a moment and indulge in her Pokémon's happiness, before reality caught up with her and she smothered her smile.
Her newly evolved Froslass was certainly going to be a nice surprise addition to her team, especially since she knew that Froslass was going to be the fastest Pokémon that she had, but she recognized that she was also the least trained.
With whatever time she had left before the match, she would have to train her new Froslass as much as she could to ensure that she would be able to match up against Walker's Pokémon.
There was no way she could actually train up Froslass to surpass Walker's Pokémon in terms of training, so she knew that she was going to be mostly relying on pure surprise to offset her Froslass' lack of training.
But she also needed to challenge Walker as soon as possible, right after the battle between Lance and Pryce, so that none could challenge him before her. Not that she cared who won between those two; at this point she was solely concerned about digging herself out of the pit that she was in.
It was a race against time, but she was determined to win. She couldn't afford to lose.
A.N. A quick Interlude on Lorelei to remind everyone that she's still training up, and that she hasn't been forgotten. Hope you enjoyed her new acquisition.
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