After my talk with Peter, I left Oak Labs and made a stop by my dorm room to do some dusting. Since the dorm room itself was not too big it took me less than an hour to have it sparkling, and once I had it in that condition I left for Hope Town.
My parents were already expecting me since we had already talked about our vacation plans beforehand. We would spend the first week together, or rather the first two weeks, since the first one only had 2 days, after which they would resume their traveling.
They would come back to our home around three weeks later for the new year celebration, so for roughly 4 days including Rayquaza's Descent and Ascent. Following the new year, they would continue their traveling for the duration of the second month and later come back home to spend the final/third month with me in Hope Town.
Anyway, just like we agreed upon, Mom as well as Dad spent the first 9 days of my vacation with me at home before they left, leaving me alone in Hope Town. I had made sure to actually spend the whole 9 days together with my parents, so once they were gone, I began doing some stuff I wanted to handle here in Hope Town.
Come Arcday, I made my way over to the Pokemon reserve/area I had built. By now everything was ready, at least on the material side. Each area was ready for inhabitation, and the buildings along with the necessary equipment were complete as well. I had even obtained all the permits necessary for the undertaking I was planning, so I could theoretically move the respective species from Utopia to the reserve.
There were only two points that stopped me from doing that. The first one was the more serious one of the two and directly pertained to the Pokemon involved in the undertaking. I set a number of 110 per species, including the 30-member quota for the older/evolved ones, as the minimum limit necessary to keep up a stable and healthy supply of Pokemon in the reserve.
Sadly, of the 6 species that would move there, only the Caterpie and Weedle groups were close to reaching the necessary number. The other groups were years away from reaching that point. Well, actually that was not completely accurate.
In actuality, I already had the necessary number of Pokemon at hand, if not for the fact that I had set a minimum potential limit to the Pokemon that could enter the groups since I wanted to provide good quality Pokemon to the kids.
I set the minimum potential to light green (4-star), which cut off quite a lot of Pokemon from qualifying. As I said, the Caterpie and Weedle groups were only missing 11 and 14 members respectively to fulfill the 110 members condition. Though both groups already had filled their older/evolved Pokemon quota of 30, so if any of the Caterpie or Weedle evolved, I'd have to replace them.
Nonetheless, I was confident that we could fill out those numbers within the next 8 or so months. Sadly, the other groups needed a lot more time than that. The Spearow group, which included 10 Fearow, was missing 39 potential members, which would need at least another year or more unless I went out to buy or capture them myself.
The Starly and Bidoof groups were worse off than that. An additional 58 Starly and 57 Bidoof were needed to reach the 110-member condition I set, and that would take at least another 2 years of regular breeding. This left me with the last group or rather a cluster of groups, and they were off the worst.
First of all, the regular Rattata group, which was actually not that bad. They had 17 Raticate and 67 Rattata ready to move, so only 26 more members were missing, which could be handled within a year or so. However, the variant groups were the exact opposite, and they were the most important part of the whole Pokemon reserve project I had in mind.
The 4 variant groups had grown by a respectable amount, with the electric group having 67 members, fire having 63 members, water having 84 members, and finally the grass group which had grown to 92 members.
Unfortunately, only a fraction of the variant Rattata and Raticate had the necessary potential, namely at the least light green, to qualify for the reserve. Going by the previous order, the electric group was short by 86 Rattata, the fire group was missing 85 members, the water group was short 78 members, and the grass group needed another 79 members.
Moreover, unlike with the other groups, I could not simply go out and make up the missing number by either buying or capturing them. As far as the variant Rattata were concerned, I had to wait until they had increased their numbers the regular way, and I was estimating that it would take somewhere between 3 to 4 years to reach the numbers I wanted. 5 years if my luck was not good enough.
This was quite a bit more than I had initially thought. At the beginning of all this, I believed that I would have everything ready by the time I started my official journey, which was in less than a year and a half. Obviously, I was wrong. This was just some more proof that things did not always go as one expected them to do.
Still, that was fine, I simply had to adjust my plans, and I had no problems with adjusting my plans. Ok, the new plan was simple. I would split the relocation into two parts, or rather groups, with the first one being made up of the Caterpie, Weedle, Spearow, Starly, Bidoof, and regular Rattata, while the second one would have the variant Rattata.
I would leave the first group inside Utopia until the end of my practical year, so a month or two before the start of my official journey. This would give them enough time to reach the stipulated numbers, and once the time came, I would transfer them to the reserve.
Since I already had all the necessary permits and equipment, all I would have to do was hire the personnel I needed for the upkeep of the reserve and the care of the Pokemon. Close to 1.5 years was more than enough time for that.
As for group 2, I would leave them alone for the next 4 to 5 years and only transfer them over when they were ready. That way I did not have to delay everything because of/for them. I also decided to officially open the orphanage at the same time I transferred the first group, so in about 1.5 years.
However, that did not mean that I could leave everything for later since the orphanage needed more work/employees than the reserve. With that in mind, my next stop ended up being the orphanage, and after greeting the security guards, I went around the whole orphanage and made notes on how many people I had to hire for what jobs.
I also made a list of permits I would probably need along with the contacts and suppliers I had to reach an agreement with to ensure that the orphanage could operate smoothly. Still, the second part could wait for a bit, but it would be better to start looking into the employee and permit matter as early as possible.
To that end, I went to an agency recommended by Dad and later on verified by Oak Labs. I instructed them to be on the lookout for 4 cooks, 4 housekeepers, 6 regular caretakers, 4 live-in caretakers, 2 educators, 1 clerk, 1 live-in matron, 1 janitor, 2 handymen, and 1 gardener. I gave them a year to find the best ones, and they informed me that they would present me with the options once they had gathered enough candidates so that I could inspect the files and interview them.
I had previously made sure that there were no problems with my plan to open an orphanage. Nonetheless, I spent the rest of the week ensuring that I had everything on paper, and I even let the administration send an inspector over to verify that everything was up to standard.
Once they were done, I was informed that the building, plot, and papers were up to par and that I was good to go with the documents at hand for the next 10 years.
However, that was only facility-wise, the inspectors straight up told me that I, or rather the orphanage staff would have to through a final inspection once I had hired some before the alliance gave me the final document that allowed me to officially open the orphanage and let it act in that capacity.
If I, or rather the staff I hired did not pass that final assessment, I would have to postpone the opening until they did. I did not mind that and was actually pretty happy that the administration had such strict standards since that meant that the number of "bad" orphanages was much smaller than it would have been if the standards were lower.
Anyway, by Palkiday evening nearly everything that had, or rather could be done had been done. The only thing left I could do right now was taking care of the financial aspect of my prospective orphanage and to deal with that, I went to Viridian City the next morning right after breakfast.
I went to the local branch of the Bank of Kanto and went to the business line. Once it was my turn, I handed the clerk the files of my orphanage and explained that I wanted to open an account for the orphanage and that I was planning to directly transfer a good amount of money as the starting capital for the orphanage.
Thankfully the clerk turned out to be a really nice lady and she actually spent the next hour or so taking care of everything so that the account could be opened as fast as possible. Before the second hour was up, the orphanage account was open and I directly asked the clerk to transfer 10 million Poke from my private account to the orphanage one.
I had quite a bit of money in my account thanks to the dividends I received, so I had no problem with paying that much into the orphanage account. That way all expenditures could be drawn from the orphanage account which would allow me to avoid directly involving my private one. I also requested that Sarah transferred the monthly payments for the security guards to the orphanage account.
I was guessing that 10 million would be enough to cover the orphanage's expidentures, bills, and salaries for the next 3 to 4 years at the least, but I would have to wait for it to open first to see whether that was true or not.
Nonetheless, I thanked Sarah for her help and left the bank.
Seeing that lunch was not too far off, I made my way to Pallet City and waited for Jessie's break before inviting her to lunch. We naturally talked over lunch and I told her what I had been up to.
I also used the occasion to remind her of the job offer I gave her, and she actually told me that she would come over to take a look at the place once I had hired everyone.
Jessie said she would give me a definite answer after she had done that and not before then. I was just happy to have finally received a concrete reply on the topic since she had previously simply said she would think about it.
Anyway, after lunch I escorted Jessie back to her workplace before heading back to Hope Town. The next day I spent taking care of my Pokemon and I repeated the same on Grouday. I also did my weekly routine check-up while I was at it, and I actually saw that Gwen/Gardevoir's strength finally reached the A value.
That meant that she had officially begun her limit-breaking phase, though I had to add that her energy capacity was already at S-value since that one had grown while her strength parameter decided to take its time.
Now that Gwen had started her limit breaking as well, only Parvati/Beedrill, Abzu/Milotic, Tyson/Machamp, Tatsumaki/Alakazam, Hashirama/Venusaur, and the recent member of the club Osiris/Marowak had yet to start their limit breaking among the current 25 (high) gold stage Pokemon I had.
Though admittedly some of these 6 were not far from that point, and I was convinced that, maybe except for Osiris, all of them would reach that point before I began my journey.
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