Author's Note: Quick review poll, who is your favorite member of Isaac's team?
Chapter 15: Good to be Out of the Rain
I wasn't much of an engineer, but maintenance and repair was within my talents with one of the electives I'd taken last year. With my goals in mind I had decided it was best if I could do basic repair and maintenance on the less complicated devices often used. Basic pokeball maintenance, healing machine troubleshooting, software updates for storage servers, and things of that nature.
This project was both simpler and more complex than those at the same time. There were no electrical parts to fix, replace, clean, or oil. Just a lot of clockwork. Which meant as I took parts off to fix, maintain, or even in the case of a few smaller gears replace, I had to take meticulous notes and pictures so that everything went back the way they should.
But that was fine, this was a long term project anyways. And it was finally time to leave the ranch for Unova.
So I cleaned up my workshop, jumped into the shower, and grabbed my pack after dressing. It was time to get out there and rough it.
Luckily it had only taken two weeks instead of my estimated month to properly come to an understanding with Hannibal. Again, the aerodactyl was far too intelligent and cunning for his own good, but it worked out in my favor here.
He was quite excited to constantly be able to gorge himself on premium meat all the while getting to have ferocious battles.
Which meant I now had yet another powerhouse on my team.
To Unova I was taking Cleo and Artagnan with their newly evolved capabilities, Hannibal for mobility and even more power, Alberich in hopes that I may be able to get the rhyhorn enough experience to evolve soon, Estella for her combat mobility and having a solid environment in the desert, and finally Brinker for the ability of his ice-type moves to really do serious damage to the ground-types I planned on targeting on my trip.
I really wish I had found an Ice Stone in Porta Vista, I'd looked. Brinker was more than ready for evolution. Brinker had managed to learn Iron Head the other day while we had been training, which put him somewhere in the thirties level-wise. At this rate he was going to learn Blizzard before I could evolve him to learn Icicle Spear and Crash.
The Alolan sandshrew line was odd, due to the method of evolution being exposure or a stone instead of growth the way the Kanto version was; they were heavily locked out of a lot of the stronger physical aspects of their ice elemental attacks and instead had to rely on special moves. Not their forte necessarily.
But damn if Brinker didn't really make good on the moves he had access to. His harassment tactics with Rapid Spin, Rollout, Mist, Powder Snow, and now Iron Head instead of Metal Claw as a physical finisher were a master class on tactical fighting.
Speaking of new moves, we'd managed to get Take Down on Alberich as well, which worked well with his Rock Head ability, though not so much with his turret fighting style, which means we may have to adapt that into more of a finishing move as opposed to a mobility attack the way some rhyhorn used it.
So I finished clipping his Heavy Ball onto my belt as my sixth and final pokemon and headed out to catch my ride into town and the airport. Liam had planned his supply run around my schedule thankfully.
Unova was a long flight, but by the same time the next day I was circling down onto Unova Route 4 atop Hannibal and his shiny new saddle. While he could survive aerial maneuvering in the blowing sands of the Desert Resort, I would get my skin stripped off if I flew through the sandstorms at speed, so I was going the rest of the way on foot.
Returning the grumbling aerodactyl after tossing him some spicy jerky as a snack I called out Estella to follow along with me as my bodyguard.
Sand goggles and scarf covering my face I pulled my stetson down to stop it from flying away in the light surface winds.
"Alright, girl. Let's go catch us some friends, yeah?"
"Wak!"
"Indeed!"
We saw plenty of pokemon over the course of the day, though nothing that particularly caught my eye. I was looking for potential teammates, that meant I couldn't just catch any old pokemon that wandered around. I was looking for ones that would challenge us, approach us first out of curiosity, or any of the similar behaviors that indicated to a good trainer that a pokemon would be worth catching and training up to the highest levels of competition.
It was when we were seeking out somewhere to camp that we wandered into the board of a bisharp and its pawniard minions. A board was the term given to the claimed territory of a bisharp led pack of pawniard. A chess pun, because of course.
What was most shocking was to see the sheer number of pawniard, until I saw the second bisharp and the eggs placed in the hot sand along a small ridgeline overlooking the oasis they had claimed. The two bisharp must be a temporarily mated pair, when those eggs hatched they'd each take half the newborns and split the packs up again.
The larger of the two bisharp approached us and Estella immediately went on guard. It didn't appear aggressive, however that was not something you could necessarily trust with wily dark-types.
It began to gesture between Estella and itself, then at me itself and…one of the eggs?
I blinked, then I squinted over at the eggs. There were seven, an odd number, that would mean this bisharp and its mate would normally have to fight over who got the larger number of newborns to their pack. It wanted to fight Estella to see if I was a strong enough trainer to be gifted one of the eggs!
Sure the resulting pawniard wouldn't be strong enough by the time I got to the conference to fight on my side, but I was willing to make a time investment instead. This was some anime protagonist nonsense right here!
Grinning, I gave it a thumbs-up, "Let's dance, Estella!"
That was a coded start command as well, she immediately whipped her bone club and body around in a circular dance, conveniently also throwing up a veil of sand as she boosted her attack.
Eyes slightly narrowing the bisharp bolted forth towards her, one bladed arm out in a classic Slash attack.
With a clang a Bone Club met the attack head-on, knocking the bisharp skidding backwards.
Estella went for a follow up but the metal parts of the bisharp's body shifted and emitted a harsh Metal Sound that caused her to flinch, giving it time to reposition itself more defensibly by leaping back and falling its fighting stance.
"Hmm…make it come to you! Bonemerang!" As she recovered she whipped her bone club through the air in a side toss, sending it spinning towards the other pokemon. It leaned its head to the side, narrowly dodging.
It had obviously never fought a marowak before, understandable as they weren't particularly common or native out here, and it chuckled evilly as it began charging a Night Slash, dark-type energy coalescing along both its blades.
Just as it was about to leap forward I smirked at it, it paused in confusion, and the bone club spun back around and with a resounding "THWACK!" cracked into the back of his helmet.
It was Estella's turn to chuckle as the bone spun back into her hand with a deft usage of ground-type energy to pull it over.
While it had taken significant damage from that, the bisharp was still in the fight. Instead of taking extra time to charge a smaller amount of dark-type energy covered its blades and it shot forwards at Estella once more.
What followed was a more even exchange of blows, bone meeting blade again and again.
We needed a way to break this stalemate, I was confident that the wild pokemon would tire first having taken more damage so far, but I didn't want to completely exhaust Estella if we could cut it short instead.
The problem is that at this point Estella didn't have any major finishers such as Earthquake or Double-edge. So I'd need to be crafty about it.
Or…I thought as I saw Estella begin to slowly glow a red hue, my girl was thinking faster than I was.
She'd been building a Rage this entire time.
"Take one on the head then Bone Club!" I called out one of our classic combinations, in a fighting game this would be considered move canceling into a special. She dipped into the first stage of Skull Bash, raising her defense and taking the next Night Slash onto her thick bone-plated skull, and instead of launching forward with the second stage of the attack, she whipped up her club from below in a vicious uppercut that caught the bisharp right under the chin and sent it flying.
With a thump the wild pokemon crashed into the sand behind it and outstandingly pulled itself up into a shaky standing position.
It was, however, quite obviously in no place to continue, so it gave its own shaky version of a thumbs up. The other bisharp, who had been standing watching solemnly in the background with arms crossed, nodded at all of us and swiftly ran over to pick up the smallest of the seven eggs. It trotted the egg over to us and I swiftly decompressed one of my two travel incubators from my pack. You never knew when you would run across an abandoned or poached egg and may need one.
After I had that sorted I also pulled out a Hyper Potion and motioned the injured bisharp to come over and receive treatment. This served to further ingratiate us to the tribe and we were invited to camp out at their embankment and oasis for the night. Something I was very happy to accept.
For all that they were merciless in battles and dark-typed to boot, the bisharp tribe in nesting mode was quite relaxing to spend the evening with. I called out Cleo to join us and it was almost as if they sensed the innate royalty of her evolutionary stage and treated her with great respect.
After sharing a little of my steel-typed food mix, berries for strengthening along with high quality metal shavings, with the tribe, particularly the younger members, Cleo began to gesture at how she was being treated and then at her own head.
"No, I am not commissioning you a crown!" I responded bemusedly.
She protested animatedly, waving her arms and gesticulating wildly.
"Fine, if we win the entire conference I'll commission a crown, happy?"
Her little happy dance was worth it. I was confident we would place top four, but completely winning? I wasn't sure that would happen.
The next morning we said good-bye to the tribe and I headed back out into the desert with Estella in tow once more. She'd gotten a good night of rest and I hadn't used her as much in the past month so I kept her out for bonding as much as convenience and experience.
We were more focused in our search at this point, as my goal was to find the Colossus Ruins and the ancient, giant golurk within.
At least that had been the plan. We spent that full next day wandering the desert to absolutely no avail. Luckily with miniaturization and storage technology I had plenty of water, food, and other supplies necessary for an extended stint in the desert. Not so luckily I was rapidly getting frustrated. I had THOUGHT that after going through a bunch of survey maps I had pinpointed a few possible locations.
I had been wrong, none of those three locations bore fruit. Neither above nor below the surface, Alberich and Brinker had come out to check with seismic senses and Dig at all three places.
I had known that I was years off from the original discovery of the ruins, but this was surprising. I had managed to find the entrance to the Underworld of Grampa Canyon hadn't I? Surely this was not going to be any more difficult.
Arrogance. What arrogance I had had.
"I think we need to take a different approach," I stated to Estella conversationally, "I think next time we find a strong crustle or even a darmanitan we let Hannibal fight it so that he's willing to do an aerial survey afterwards."
She contemplated the idea for a little and then nodded back at me. We really were running out of ideas. And the best ways to keep Hannibal compliant were the first two Fs. Food and fighting.
Current Team with new acquisitions:
Nidoqueen- Cleo
Marowak- Estella
Kleavor- Artagnan
Rhyhorn- Alberich
Alolan Sandshrew- Brinker
Aerodactyl- Hannibal
On Ranch:
Quagsire- Huckleberry
Piloswine- Alexei
Galarian Meowth- Rum Tum
Kabutops- Axel
Omastar- Grauben
Kabuto x10
Omanyte x7
Scyther x5