Once the small berry orchard was done, we bid goodbye to the Trapinch. With this, we had officially visited all the points on the Trapinch trail I had put together, though that did not mean that we would be aimlessly strolling around for the rest of our stay here in the desert. The Glilgar had mentioned 4 oases as well as 2 potential ruins after all, and we had only checked one of the ruins so far, so the rest still needed to be checked out. That was especially true for the oases since those tended to be gathering points for wild Pokemon, and I was hoping to stumble on some more Trapinch there along with other rare desert dwellers like the Sandile and Skorupi the Gligar mentioned having spotted around those parts.
The closest to our position was the medium-sized oasis, so we headed for that place first. It took us roughly three hours, but we eventually saw the decently sized patch of refreshing green in the otherwise dry and brown/yellow that dominated the desert. There was what I would call a mid-sized pond, though I would have to actually see how deep it was to determine if it was a pond and not a lake. Either way, I was surprised to see a bunch of Wurmple on the trees that grew around the tentative pond, and a handful of Beautifly as well as Dustox flying around the grass surrounding the oasis.
I knew that Wurmple and their kind managed to survive all around Hoenn as long as there was greenery for them to eat, but I could not help but wonder how the hell they had managed to show up here considering that there was a considerable stretch of proper desert between this oasis and the periphery of the Hoenn Desert where I had last seen any Wurmple or any of its evolution. However, then I really thought it over and realized that Beautifly and Dustox could have flown there even if doing that would have required them to fly for nearly a whole day through the, for their kind, not-so-hospitable conditions of the desert to reach this place.
I guess I had to tip my hat to the batch of Beautifly and/or Dustox that weathered the harsh flight and chose to start a family at this place ensuring that their kind could be found even in the desert. Honestly, with them living here one could have hoped that some kind of desert variant would pop up among the Wurmple at some point, but from what I was seeing there was just a bunch of regular Wurmple, Cascoon/Silcoon, as well as Dustox/Beautifly. Still, I did make sure to check every single one of the 271 Wurmple, 73 Cascoon, 65 Silcoon, 104 Dustox, and 92 Beautifly to ensure that I did not miss a potential variant.
Sadly, none of them had a rock or ground affinity, so no future desert variant for me, but I was very happy when I managed to spot some specimens with good potential. I ended up luring and then catching 6 Wurmple with light green potential and 1 with deep green potential along with 3 light green Cascoon and a green one. There were also 4 light green Silcoon and 1 with light blue potential. Finally, I also captured 1 light green and 2 green Dustox along with 2 light green and 2 deep green Beautifly. I had to lure them like that to avoid startling the other Pokemon living around the oasis. I already noticed that they were wary of our group's arrival, so there had been a very good chance that most of them would have beat a hasty retreat if I had begun to indiscriminately capture Pokemon.
When they saw me approach the Pokemon and then talk as well as feed them first before holding out a Pokeball allowing the Pokemon to essentially capture itself, they still kept an eye on me/us but did not run away. Still, successful plan aside, I had a hard time believing that a single wild Wurmple tribe with around only 600 members, or maybe two wild tribes with about 300 each if we considered the two lines separately, could produce 22 members with green shade potential along with a blue shade member. While capturing them, I felt kinda guilty enough to ignore the Wurple line members with deep yellow potential, which would have otherwise netted me 54 more captures.
Those were incredibly high odds for high-potential members among Wurmple. I would even go so far as to say that it was unnaturally or even near impossibly high, so there had to be something that caused it. It had to either be an environmental factor, which would mean that this oasis harbored some interesting/valuable secret along with the chance for more high-potential Pokemon among the other species, or the first batch of Beautifly/Dustox that settled here and started the tribe had very high potential along with maybe some form of (primitive) selective breeding allowing their descendants to keep a pretty high average.
Stuff like allowing only the Beautifly as well as Dustox to propagate or going even further than that by pairing them up according to their speed of evolution or taking things even further and limiting the right to reproduce to the first batch to evolve were stuff they could have come up with themselves, though even I thought that the last one was a bit much, so it was unlikely that a group of Beautifly/Dustox would do it. A tribe of dragons might actually use draconic methods like that, but I somehow doubted that even among them many would take this approach.
Anyway, seeing how dinner time was approaching I decided to use that to up my appeal in the eyes of the oasis dwellers, so instead of waiting until 9 p.m. to move to Utopia, I chose to have a barbecue dinner at the oasis to tempt the residents with the tantalizing smell. I pulled out my grill once it was 7 p.m. and began to grill some berries and vegetables for the salad. That caught the attention of some of the oasis dwellers, and once I began grilling the first round of meat, the smell drew a lot more attention. Two and a half hours later I had pulled nearly all oasis inhabitants into my dinner, earning myself some brownie points.
I had the urge to say keikaku dori but settled on smiling happily as I began to approach the Pokemon with good potential that I noted during the dinner handout. Not all of them were interested since life at the oasis was already pretty comfy/easy, but at the end of the day, when I returned to Utopia with Mothra and the others, I had captured 5 Sandile, and 2 Krokorok, 11 Skorupi, 7 Sandshrew, and 2 Sandslash, 6 Trapinch, 13 Diglett and 3 Dugtrio, 7 Cacnea, and 1 Cacturne, and even 2 Lotad as well as 2 Lombre, along with more than a third of the local Taillow/Swellow tribe, though aside from the Taillow/Swellow I limited myself to those with light green or above potential.
As far as the Taillow/Swellow were concerned, however, I even went so far as to capture half the birds with yellow potential. That netted me 28 Taillow and 6 Swellow, leaving behind 49 Taillow and 8 Swellow. The reason I went so far with them was that they would probably have overhunted the Wurmple tribe(s) in the future since I had taken away their most promising members along with some of the better Beautifly and Dustox. I could have ignored that, but I was kind of biased in favor of the caterpillar lines, so I decided to ensure that the natural balance they had established between themselves here at the oasis did not get upset by too much.
Still, the fact that I managed to find so many Pokemon with good potential among all species/lines living at and around the oasis as well as a bunch of Lotad and Lombre proved that their high number had to be related to the oasis and not the tribes themselves like I had previously assumed as one of the possible reasons for the Wurmple issue. There was just no way to explain how I managed to catch so many Pokemon with high potential despite not catching everyone with good potential when the total number of Pokemon living here did not exceed 4 maybe 5 thousand.
That was why I decided to spend my morning and noon the next day investigating the oasis with my gang to see if we could find the reason for the potential anomaly. Yet, despite our best efforts we failed to find anything that could have caused something like this, so all I could do was to consider that maybe some kind of blessing was at play here which ensured that those living/hatching here had decent potential. I unfortunately had no way to check or confirm that since my Observe did not work on the oasis itself, so I was unable to confirm if that was true, though I honestly thought that it was all things considered the only thing that made sense.
Nonetheless, I had to admit that I was curious if it was a natural blessing bestowed by the elements or if a legendary was involved, though that would prompt the question of why a legendary would bless a medium-sized oasis in the Hoenn Desert. Anyway, I decided to spend the rest of the day/evening inside Utopia with my Pokemon since I felt that leaving the oasis just to enter Utopia in 3 or so hours would be a waste when our next target was more than half a day away. I left Utopia the next morning after breakfast, leaving my earth clone to supervise the morning training session while I along with the desert squad headed towards the small oasis that was our next goal.
It was nearly 6 p.m. by the time we made it to the small oasis, and after radiating my aura to signal that we were non-hostile, I wasted no time before taking out my grill to start a barbecue dinner session. The good-smelling food succeeded in luring over a significant number of oasis dwellers again, and I was pleasantly surprised to note a small number of Kecleon among the species that seemed to live here, though it was not hard to miss that there were no Wurmple line members around in exchange. Unfortunately, the Pokemon here did not seem to share the good potential benefit that the previous oasis had. I only managed to spot 11 Pokemon in total with light green and green potential; Of those just 3 agreed to follow me since the rest were the leaders of their species/tribes.
The only regretful thing was that none of the Kecleon had light green potential and that the deep yellow Kecleon refused my offer to join Utopia. I didn't insist and entered Utopia shortly after to spend the rest of the evening with my Pokemon. We left the oasis the next morning to head to our next destination which was the second ruin-like place mentioned by the Gligar. It was a bit further out so it took us two days to get close, and it was only during the morning of the third day that we stepped foot onto the ruins.
This place was bigger than the previous one we visited, and it actually had what appeared to be the ruins of a medium-sized keep. I also spotted ruined parts of what I assumed to be the outer wall of the small settlement, along with a few places that could have been houses or maybe storehouses. Unlike the first ruin, this place had some Pokemon living here. I spotted a pair of Sudowoodo in the center of the keep ruins, along with a small pack of Houndour led by a Houndoom. Those guys seemed to be the only non-rock type Pokemon since the only other Pokemon I managed to spot during my first rudimentary search were a bunch of Geodude and two Graveler. It seemed the Houndour pack scared away any other species that had a chance to potentially land on the pack's menu.
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