Author's Note: As of this chapter over 50% of this fic was written this year alone! Though, I will say the only change from my outlines and notes I had back in 2021 when I started this is the expansion of Grampa Canyon's underground (which got added to my outline last…September I believe?) and the order of acquisition on some of these team members (Flygon was going to be decently later originally!)
I tend to post these the second I finish a quick proofread of them, because if I let something sit in my docs folder "completed" I tend to rewrite and re-edit until I want to pull my hair out and then never post them.
Chapter 18: You Got the Touch, You Got the Power
I arrived back in Saffron City invigorated. A quick flight on Hannibal over and I was once again on the Ranch. Ready to train up my new acquisitions, continue bonding with my pawniard egg, push Alberich closer to evolution, and finish my engineering project.
I sent Brock a message letting him know that he, Misty, and Ash should come out to Saffron after Ash got his eighth badge for some joint training. I sweetened the deal by saying I had new fossil acquisitions that would help he and Misty train up their kabuto and omanyte that they'd been given as gym leaders of the respective types to experiment with by my father's lab.
With Ash having gotten to the top sixteen in canon was I essentially helping my competition? Sure, but it would be kind of awesome to set myself up as a bit of a mentor-rival for the kid.
Calling him a kid, as if I wasn't also fif-no wait, I'd turned sixteen in the desert! Nice! Huh, maybe I should have a party? I'd invite…uh…I really only had one friend and then Ash and company didn't I?
Well maybe we'd have a belated party when they arrived for boot camp. I mean training. Hopefully as I got older here it would be easier to make friends. Regardless of how I didn't have the full breadth of experiences of my previous life the memory flashes and dreams had affected me pretty deeply. Less as I grew, but they'd had…odd side effects when I was a child.
There'd been a time there, before my mother here got consumed with High Society, that she'd been afraid I was possessed by a ghost-type pokemon formed from a dead pokemon professor.
All things considered, Ash and company were likely two and a half to three months away from joining me out here. However, with the amount of training I was going to need to do to properly incorporate Hannibal and the giant golurk into my team I could not afford to do more hunting for immediately strong additions abroad. Not with the amount of care and attention sandile and the pawniard would need (once the latter hatched).
I planned to have our new crocodilian friend at least to his first stage before the Conference. He was a feisty little guy I was toying with a few different names for. Currently Lyle was the main contender in my head.
The golurk, however, was a much gentler giant removed from the ruins and enchantments that had held it hostage all those long centuries, which meant he was not going to be named Goliath.
Something to suit his temperament as opposed to his stature was where I was leaning.
And so I entered what I was referring to as a "training montage" phase with my life.
One of the more popular ways to train up my less powerful members was to have them work in teams of three to six against some of those aforementioned powerhouses.
A few weeks into the process saw me observing Lyle the sandile, Ajax and Grauben the kabutops and omastar, and Alberich my trusty rhyhorn (who had to be desperately close to evolution) facing off against the superior aerial combatants of Hannibal the aerodactyl and Shahrazad our new flygon.
Shahrazad was proving herself to be an extremely interesting specimen. She eschewed the more close quarters fighting techniques typical of her species and leaned deeper into the sound-based moves they were known to have access to but never necessarily delve deeply into. Which made me believe she had a volcarona, crustle, or similar in her lineage.
She had come to us with Bug Buzz, Supersonic, and Screech under her belt. We had managed to improve the latter two into Boomburst and had developed a fighting style she loved where she whipped up a Sandstorm and flitted about unseen, barraging opponents with her different sound-based attacks and the occasional Mud Shot or Dragonbreath as well.
This made her an amazing partner for doubles battles for any of my rock-types. Hannibal in particular enjoyed fighting alongside her as he was able to fly in and out of her Sandstorm to disorient his opponents and come in from oblique and unexpected angles for kill shots. Or KO-shots in regards to battling. He was, as he demonstrated again and again, a ruthless bastard. But, one that was beginning to gel quite well with the team.
As Cleopatra had gotten more accustomed to her evolution she had been able to reclaim absolute domination of her team members in one manner or another. At this point she had Protect, Toxic, Dig, Sludge Wave, Earth Power, and Ice Beam down with Toxic Spikes and maybe even Thunderbolt to come. We were reaching her maximum capacity at this point, so Thunderbolt would probably be the final non-neutral and non-STAB type-energy she could work with without skill deterioration. Thankfully she didn't need the full Tri-Attack coverage spectrum. Between Earth Power, Sludge Wave, Ice Beam, and Thunderbolt there was nothing that she would not be in some way super-effective against barring the mind-types of dark, ghost, and psychic. And we had plenty of other options on the team for those, and many of the strongest of those types had secondary types making them weak to her regardless.
Artagnan and I had begun to gel far better than previously after his evolution. He now had a typing I had an affinity for and it showed in how much better we predicted each other's reactions in combat. We finally understood each other. Better yet, we finally upgraded Thief to Night Slash, giving us a great option against ghosts.
Huckleberry, my dopey and lovable quagsire, had finally upgraded to Muddy Water and Earth Power thanks to training with Cleo and the fossil pokemon. The rub was…that was it. He had retained Yawn and Amnesia but didn't seem to have the capacity to really retain anything else. This made him a defensive powerhouse, especially if I could teach him the RestTalk combination, something that didn't usually take up too much of a pokemon's mental capacity and was instead more based on having a compatible personality and movepool, but it also mean he didn't have the breadth of coverage that Hannibal or Cleo had.
Rum Tum, the Galarian meowth, was integrating nicely as well. Unnerve instead of Tough Claws as an ability meant that he'd have the supportive Steely Spirit upon evolution though, which meant I'd need to acquire more steel-types to pair him with and to use him more as a disruptive support fighter than a brawler. Which, I didn't have anyone else that could learn both Fake Out and Taunt so it all worked out in my favor. Currently I was trying to get U-turn into his repertoire to really make him frustrating for opponents. I was probably going to have to wait until my next TM and evolution stone shopping spree for that however. I was going to check Celadon's department store for a restock on TMs and Ice Stones in about a week.
For my marowak, Estella we were focusing on just ironing out her current style to perfection. This meant a lot of footwork drills and practice on getting multiple ricochets from her Bonemerang.
Alexei was only recently evolved to a piloswine so we were going to shore up his fundamentals with his ice and ground techniques and slowly ease him into rock-type energy so he could eventually master Ancient Power and evolve. Mastery was key to that evolution from what I could tell, as I'd seen videos of a few piloswine using the move in battle, but they'd all been far below mastery, likely only using it because they could not afford stronger rock-type TMs and not understanding the power the move could possess. Endure and Ice Shard, particularly in combination with each other, were still his bread and butter however.
Brinker…was as high as his sandshrew body could possibly reach in my opinion without significant TM investment. I needed to get that damned Ice Stone.
All other focus was on getting Axel, Grauben, and Lyle up to where I could use them in at least the preliminaries and the initial round after the preliminaries. Dad wanted me to showcase my minor discoveries up until that point and then from there keep Hannibal and Artagnan as aces for reveals at the ends of six on six matches. I understood that the impact of them would be astounding however, so despite the fact that leading with or pivoting with Artagnan made more sense I would stick to that plan. I did love melodrama in no small amount.
I winced as even with my deep reflection I noticed Hannibal zoom out of the Sandstorm and send Lyle flying with a casual smack of his wing. It wasn't even a proper infused technique, he just did the pterodactyl version of a backhand. He cackled darkly before going into a tailspin to avoid five otherwise expertly aimed Rock Blasts from Grauben.
Those Rock Blasts constantly came out almost fully in sync with each other and so consistently on the same target that I was beginning to think that my fossil pokemon were truly regional variants. Their darker coloring and mottled patterns were perfect for their untold generations of development underground, and they may even have non-standard abilities for their species as well.
Axel, the kabutops, certainly had Weak Armor as an ability, but that was only rare, not unheard of for the species. With one of the existing examples revived from the fossils having it as well. Not that a sample size of a dozen individuals was sufficient for a statistical population analysis.
Lyle was really really trying. He had a vicious future combination with Hone Claws and Power Trip as his mainstays. We'd been working on getting that up and active as quickly as possible. The poor kid wasn't going to be doing much damage until he evolved into a krokorok however. His small sandile body just couldn't do as much. I was likely going to try and turn him into an alternative set-up sweeper. I am almost certain he had Moxie as his ability, therefore just a little set-up and one KO and Power Trip would skyrocket in power. To that end I eventually wanted him to learn Swagger and Roar to disrupt the enemy team and Earthquake to be the alternative damage option. We'd see later if he could handle an extra technique or two for coverage or situational punishment. Facade and Scale Shot would both be amazing for different reasons if we could pull it off.
My new golurk, name pending based on getting to know him better, was a physical powerhouse. He barely had any true control of his ghostly energies, finding phasing in and out rather difficult, but having a truly powerful Shadow Punch. He also knew Iron Defense, Heavy Slam, Hammer Arm, and Flash Cannon. We were gonig to change that up a bit due to his Iron Fist ability. I wanted to teach him Drain Punch and the elemental Punches, and I was honestly okay if Flash Cannon and Iron Defense went away. As a giant or Alpha pokemon (I was still unsure which it was) his weight was enough that Heavy Slam was great to keep.
That brought me to what I wanted to do with my soon to hatch pawniard. Obviously the end goal was to have it become a brutal wallbreaker after recreating the method to evolve a kingambit. But the path to that would likely be exceptionally long. There was no "leader's crest" item in this world that I could find. The only modern recorded kingambit was when Chairwoman Geeta's bisharp defeated a wild bisharp that was leading a swarm of other bisharp and pawniard in a raid that would have overwhelmed Zapapico Town. So essentially, you had to have your bisharp defeat bisharp in single combat that was a leader of multiple packs worth of underlings.
Not the easiest situation to fabricate or find. The good news was that as a bisharp the goal moveset wouldn't actually change all that much. I would still want Swords Dance, Sucker Punch, Iron Head, and then some coverage moves like Low Kick or Brick Break and utility such as Protect or Substitute. Pursuit would be another possible option to punish switching.
With these goals in mind we continued working ourselves to the bone over the following weeks. My father even visited to check out the pond of ancient pokemon. He was fascinated by my regional/environmental variant theory and the data I had so far collected and collated. I would be ready to present initial findings shortly. My initial paper on my exploration of the Colossus Ruins was actually already in the review stage and could be published before the Conference!
My pokegear pinged one night as I washed grease off of my hands after another hour of working on the antique Samson had procured for me. Brock said that Ash had beaten Giovanni's gym trainer and gained the Earth Badge. They would be here in a few days.
Showtime.