The first two days of the new/third week were disappointing, but Giratiday ended up being a wonderful day since shortly after lunch, we managed to produce the last Leafeon trigger, which everyone in the Eevee project had been working on.
Surprisingly, the trigger even ended up working as well and caused the Eevee to evolve into Leafeon. However, since the first/previous successful trigger was cheaper to produce, this one would not be able to replace it. Especially, since it had no advantages compared to the other trigger, unlike our Arctic Heart.
Regardless, with the successful completion of the last object, we managed to officially conclude the Leafeon part of the project as well, which meant that we could now focus on uncovering a new Eeveelution. More specifically, we would work on how to trigger an evolution in an Eevee into a steel-type Eeveelution as specified by Professor Oak.
Well, I had to make a small correction. We would start working on a steel Eeveelution on Arcday since at the end of his congratulatory speech James gave all of us the rest of the week off to recharge for a bit. He also added that the lab would do its best to stock up on all kinds of steel-type items for our upcoming research while we were on our break.
Considering the way everyone cheered when he said that, it was safe to say that they were all happy to have that break. I also thought that the break came at a pretty good time since it would give me 4 days to properly test as well as push my psychic abilities since I had yet to have the time to do so since my breakthrough to Tier 3 Third-Class on Kyoday, and that was what I did.
Throughout the next four days, I spent up to 5 hours daily just testing as well as pushing all my current psychic abilities to determine my current limits. I noticed a decent improvement in all my current psychic abilities, but I knew that this improvement could be considered small compared to what would happen to certain abilities once I ranked up to Tier 3 Second-Class and First-Class.
I could not wait for it to happen now that it was at the tips of my hands. Reaching the second class would upgrade my Minor Teleportation to (standard)Teleportation, which would enable me to do long-range jumps instead of short-range ones. Directly skipping the mid-range I was about to attain through my hard work.
Though, I was assuming all my hard work would allow me to teleport larger distances from the get-go compared to what I would have been able to do if I had acquired "standard" Teleportation without the work I invested in Minor Teleportation.
Teleportation was not the only ability that would receive an upgrade once I rose to second class. Telekinesis would become Greater Telekinesis, giving the ability an instant boost while raising the limits of what I could achieve through training/hard work considerably.
I was curious just how fast I would be able to fly when that happened, and the boost my offensive capabilities would receive was also something I was looking forward to. My current limit was 13 individual telekinetic threads capable of complex manipulation, or 61 telekinetic threads in an array/acting jointly.
From what I heard/read, Greater Telekinesis immediately granted one the ability to wield 16 individual telekinetic threads capable of complex manipulation, and I was hoping that I would start higher than that due to my hard work. Seriously, if I ended up starting with 16 individual threads like everyone else despite the work I invested in the ability, I would probably feel quite miserable.
Hopefully, it would not come to that. I mean there were documented examples of people starting with more threads, so I was sure that I had nothing to worry about.
Anyway, unlike the second class upgrade, the first class one only improved a single ability, namely Telepathy. Telepathy became Greater Telepathy, and while that may not sound like much, it honestly was the point when this aspect of a psychic's abilities started to get truly scary.
The previous difficulties a psychic faced with accessing the deeper aspects of other minds, along with transferring more than just words or pictures, and other aspects of telepathy became possible. In my opinion, this was probably the most dangerous ability a Tier 3 psychic had. Heck, it was probably the same for Tier 4 and 5 Psychics as well.
Nonetheless, I was still some time away from advancing to Second Class, much less First Class. According to the conversion speed, I witnessed during the last few days it could take about 15 to 20 months to convert everything, thus reaching the second class, and that was with me actively working on the process.
If I left it purely to the passive process, which seemed to be a thing, it would probably take 3 to 4 years instead. On the other hand, if I did a blend of the two, which I was most likely going to do since there was no way that I could spend 4 to 5 hours each day focused on the state transformation, the process could take 1 to 1.5 years.
Wait a minute. Considering that I had unlocked a third thought stream, I could totally have one of them focus on the conversion process, which would allow me to finish the process within the 15 to 20 months timeframe, or even earlier than that.
The reason I was not mentioning a full-time/pure focus on the process, was that those thought streams had to rest as well and that it was still my thought stream, which meant I would get really, really bored and probably frustrated if one of my thought partitions always did the same thing without any change of pace or breaks.
Anyway, the week did end eventually, and Arcday came around once more. I swiftly made my way over to the lab, excited about finally starting to work on the steel-type Eeveelution, and everyone else in our research team seemed to be just as excited.
"Alright, everyone," James clapped his hands to get our attention before he continued to address us. "As you can see, there is a stack of catalogs on the central table," he said motioning towards the table, and everyone turned to look at it.
On it were a batch of catalogs and each one looked to be thicker than some phone books I knew of, which was rather impressive.
"As you have no doubt inferred, the catalog lists all steel-type materials our lab has organized for our research project, and our first task is to go through the whole book and test each object to see if it is capable of triggering an evolution in an Eevee while documenting the process.
Only after each item has proven incapable of evoking Eevee's evolution will we start on the next step" James shared before passing the first catalog to Samantha, who was standing to his right.
He then motioned for us to take one as well, so everyone stepped up to get their catalog. I naturally followed suit, and looking at the thing in my hand, I had to admit that it was even thicker than I first thought. I took a look at the last page and saw that it was page 1483.
Looking at a few pages, I noticed that each page listed 15 items along with a little pic to show what the items looked like. We had 26 people on our project team, so if each person could go through 30 items each day, we would be able to go through the whole catalog in around 6 weeks, which was about 1.5 months.
After everyone had their catalogs James talked about the work division for the following week, and everyone began working through their part after he did that. I ended up being assigned the first two pages as my workload for today, so I began working through it immediately.
There were a few metal types and alloys among the 30 items, regular Aluminum being one of them. However, there were also a few that I recognized without having to take a look at the picture, which as the Amulet Coin, Aegislash Tassel, Aron Plate, and Aggron Plate.
Just like everyone else, I had to go to the warehouse, take the items on my worklist, bring them to my workable, and have my assigned Eevee touch them while documenting the process. I also had to make sure to keep an eye on the energy reader to see if any fluctuations were coming from either the item or the Eevee as a reaction to their contact.
A fluctuation was a good reaction, but sadly, by the end of the day, none of the 30 items on my list caused either an evolution or an energy fluctuation. I was not the only one that ended up being completely empty-handed at the end of the day, but 4 out of the 26 of us reported that they had gotten a reaction with one of their items. However, all of those ended up being weak fluctuations, which ultimately was better than nothing.
Anyway, we all kept working through our assigned work throughout the week. Yet, there was no successful evolution by the end of Dialday. Truthfully, that was not really surprising, but it was still noteworthy that we had gone through nearly 4000 steel-type items during these 5 days, and the biggest reaction we had gotten was comparable to a tingle.
The weekend passed, the second week of our project began, and it ended similarly to the first one. No evolutions, and minimal reactions coming from a scant few items out of the 3750ish tested that week. Dialday was the last day of the month, so the weekend was already part of the new/23rd month, and Arcday ended up being the start of the second week of the month.
Start of a new month or not, the week passed without any of the items giving us a pleasant surprise. At this point, we had gone through roughly half the catalog, so we still had another half ahead of us. Still, on a more personal front, I actually ended up getting some good news on Grouday during my weekly status check. I saw that Po/Pangoro managed to complete the first round of his limit-breaking.
I truly hoped that this symbolized the start of a string of good news, but sadly the following two weeks were completely silent both at the lab as well as on my private/personal side. The fifth and last week of the month began that Arcday and we were close to being done with the catalog.
The number of items left was only enough to last until the end of the week or the start of the next one at most, and if none of the leftover items ended up successfully acting as an evolution catalyst for Eevee, then we would have to start with phase two.
Just when I thought this week would pass quietly as well, I got some good news on Palkiday. Hera/Pidgeot managed to reach the (high) gold stage sometime after lunch, and we celebrated that after dinner. I certainly enjoyed having something to celebrate.
Unfortunately, even though the month ended on Grouday, we neither managed to find a viable trigger nor did we manage to finish the catalog. We had to go through the last few hundred items on Arcday, which happened to be the first day of the new/24th month.
We went through those items shortly before our lunch break. Sadly, the awaited/anticipated catalyst made a no-show. While all of us were no doubt disappointed that we failed to finish our project the easy way, some chose to actually verbalize their disappointment during our group lunch.
With a few leading the way, the rest followed, and soon enough nearly everyone was venting their disappointment through a few sentences/complaints. Honestly, looking at them acting like that, one would not think that they were dignified researchers/Professor assistants. I kinda found it great since it was moments like these that showed that we were all just humans as well.
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