No matter how I looked at it, the aura variant still reminded me of Mega Lopunny due to the similarities between them, and there definitely was an uncanny resemblance between the two. I could only spot 3, well, 4 differences if one wanted to be fussy.
The first difference was the ears, unlike the mega which had super long ears, the aura variant's ears stopped after the first cream-colored tuft. The second difference was the butterfly-shaped fur/tuft on its head. The crest was still there, but just much smaller, a bit less than half of it if I was not wrong with my estimation.
The third and fourth could have probably counted as one change that was linked to the upper body. The arms, neck/throat, and the area in between the two for the aura variant were thicker than what I remembered of a Mega Lopunny.
Those used to look as thin as noodles, but the aura variant's parts looked roughly twice as wide, or close to twice as wide as that of the mega evolution. Well, personally, I thought it looked much more balanced and thus better.
Anyway, other than those few changes, the aura variant looked like the Mega Lopunny I could remember. Now the question was if the resemblance remained a visual one, or if the two had more in common than just their looks, and I was planning to find out during my stay today.
I was after all planning to have an aura-variant join me, or at least a Buneary that would become an aura-variant, so I had to make sure I learned more about them, especially how to evolve them if I ended up choosing a Buneary.
We arrived at the hang-out spot while I was busy checking out the aura variant leading the way, and our arrival drew the attention of a majority of those present. I could feel the excitement as well as curiosity, and I saw quite a few of the extra curious ones coming up to us, so I turned to my companion.
"Can I call out a few of my partners? I'm sure they would enjoy playing with the Buneary," I inquired, and the Lopunny permitted it, so I called out Nyx/Umbreon and her Eevee Squad along with Saphira/Swablu since I thought they would get along the best with the Buneary.
Their shared fluffiness might have been why I called out Saphira, but I was sure that it was perfectly reasonable as far as motives were concerned.
"Alright, everyone," I said gaining the attention of my Pokemon. "I called you out so that you can play with the Buneary, so have fun," I told them, and they cheered before going up to some of the Buneary that had arrived in front of us.
Not to be left behind, I pulled out a few snacks that were Eevee-approved, which made me confident that Buneary would like them as well. As soon as the snacks appeared, the eyes of many Buneary lit up, and they rushed up to me to get some of the snacks.
"I see my reputation precedes me," I jokingly said before handing out the snacks to the Buneary that were acting all cute and shy while asking if they could have some of the snacks.
Even my guys and gals came running back with their new playmates in tow to ask for snacks as well. I naturally had no problem handing out my snacks since I had a big storage full of snacks I prepared for situations like this, so I would never run out of snacks in the middle of things, at least I genuinely hoped so.
There was no way that I would forget to check all the Buneary I could, and it took only a bit more than half an hour for me to come across a pleasant surprise.
'Species: Buneary
Gender: Male
Type: Normal
Potential: Blue
Stage: Iron-Stage (high)
Genetic variation: None
Abilities: Run Away, Limber
Talents: None
Affinities: Normal, Aura (budding)'
His potential was good enough, but the noteworthy point was the budding aura affinity. I was sure that an aura affinity of some degree was one of if not THE requirement for the aura variant evolution to Lopunny, so coming across my first Buneary with an aura affinity, even if it was the lowest grade, was notable enough.
I made sure to memorize the features of this one, in case I failed to find a Buneary with an aura affinity and better potential. During the next two hours, I saw a few Buneary with better potential at deep blue, along with some Buneary that had some decent talent, and I even came across 4 more Buneary with an aura affinity.
One of them actually had a weak affinity, which was a step above budding, but their potential was only light blue or blue, so I kept looking. Still, I did notice something pretty interesting during these 2 and a half hours, I did not come across a single Buneary that had Klutz as its ability among the more than 200 Buneary I checked.
Honestly, that kind of made sense, since Klutz was one of the canon abilities that could be considered purely negative without any positives for the Pokemon to have, just like Truant, so the unavailability of Klutz in this universe made sense since all abilities here had to have some positive effect as far as I had noticed, and I had checked a lot of Pokemon along with their abilities until now.
I mean I had confirmed that Truant was not a thing years ago, so Klutz not being a thing just served to confirm my idea, even if I needed a few more examples to confirm that there were no negative abilities or at least ones with a purely negative effect.
Anyway, a quick glance at my watch told me that I still had more than 80 minutes until 1 p.m. That was when I was going to start prepping for lunch, so I resumed playing with and checking the Buneary.
Unfortunately, no Lopunny had joined in so far, but I did notice three more aura variants hanging around the area, which honestly was not a lot considering that I had noticed at least two hundred Lopunny.
Regardless of all that, I kept going until 5 minutes before 1 p.m. At that moment the alarm on my watch rang, reminding me that it was time to start preparing for lunch.
Since I could imagine how the lunch was going to go due to prior experience, I directly went up to the elder Aura-Variant Lopunny and asked if I could call out some more of my partners, so that they could help me with preparing lunch. After I received the go-ahead, I called out what I was starting to think of as my cooking crew.
"Alright, everyone," I addressed them and thus gained their attention. "Today we are going to prepare lunch for the Buneary and Lopunny, so let's make sure to cook a lot of tasty curry for everyone," I informed them about our job, and they all semi-seriously saluted.
I could imagine them screaming "yes, chef" at that moment and had to chuckle a bit before I began pulling out the stuff we would need to cook. While we were busy with the curry, our actions and the increasingly fragrant smell of the curries attracted the attention of a lot of the inhabitants.
It took us around 45 minutes until we were ready to serve lunch, and as soon as I declared that the food was ready, the lines for the handout began to rapidly form in front of each pot.
I made sure to check the status of as many of the inhabitants that I had yet to check as I could, especially so for the Lopunny since I had not checked any of them so far. I also made sure that I personally handed the curry to the aura variants so that I could check their status without attracting any attention.
After checking a lot of Lopunny along with the aura variants I came to the simple conclusion that everyone would/could have made in my place. My conclusion was that a Buneary needed a standard/complete aura affinity to evolve into an Aura-Variant.
The reason for my conclusion was that all Aura-Variant Lopunny I checked had a standard affinity for aura, while some of the regular Lopunny that I checked had either a budding or weak aura affinity. Naturally, there could have been another reason for the aura evolution besides the completeness/grade of the aura affinity, but I doubted that to be the case here.
This meant that I had to find a Buneary with a standard aura affinity since a budding or weak one would not cut it. Well, I could probably get one of them and try to raise their affinity but that would cost me a lot of time that I could save by getting a Buneary that already had the regular affinity.
Still, I would keep the others in mind in case I failed to find one that fulfilled the condition. I did find a few more Buneary with a budding or weak aura affinity during lunch after all. One even had deep blue potential on top of it, and I made sure I memorized his features just in case.
There were a few more things I managed to find out during the lunch fiesta. Namely, that aura variants had the Normal/Fighting dual typing, which to be honest was not that surprising, seeing how they resembled the Mega Lopunny, who had the same typing.
Another thing was that all aura variants had Scrappy as their ability instead of Cute Charm, which was once again the same for the mega evolution.
Thankfully, focusing on the species name allowed me to see the base racial value of the species/Pokemon. I made sure to do the check for each variant I came across, and until now it had been unchanged, but in this case, I actually found out that the Aura Lopunny had a base racial value of 520 instead of the regular 480.
To me, it seemed as if the aura-variation, or rather the aura, simply allowed Lopunny to unearth parts of the full capacity of its species, which was what Mega Lopunny or rather mega evolution in general was all about. That was also why I set mega evolution synonym to unleashed potential until now since that was what it did for the species/Pokemon.
Now, back to the Aura-Variant Lopunny. I kept focusing on the 520 BS while thinking that it would be great if I could see how the stats/parameters were distributed. Imagine my surprise when I actually saw the parameter/start distribution.
That was the first time I saw the explicit value split, and I kinda felt stupid for not checking if I could see that before this. Well, actually, I did prod the screen a bit in the past to see if I could find the stat spreadsheet, but I did it on the main screen so to say, and not while explicitly focusing on the total racial value, so I had failed to find the spreadsheet before this.
I made a mental note to check the base racial value of the Sinister Six since I had always wanted a definite answer on how their variant evolutions had affected their parameter distribution. That had also been the reason why I went around searching for the function in the past.
Regardless of past failings, what I was seeing here did hint towards my aura and mega theory, since the distribution did follow the pattern of the Mega Lopunny from canon as far as I could remember. Comparing the stats with that of a regular Lopunny showed that the Aura-Variant Lopunny had 30 strength/attack more along with an extra 10 endurance/defense.
This did look similar to the stat sheet I remembered from Mega Lopunny, which was the reason for my belief. It was not as if there was a Mega Lopunny around for me to confirm my theory.
Anyway, lunch was once again a big hit, and after it was over the number of Buneary approaching us/me increased by quite a bit. Even Lopunny began to join in, but just as it had been at the Togepi habitat, the elder informed me that I could only choose a Buneary.
Apparently, the Lopunny were out due to the same reason as the Togetic, which made me think that all tribes/species with a bond/friendship condition for their evolution thought the same way.
I accepted the condition, not much I could do against it anyway, and kept checking all the Buneary I could, searching for one with a standard aura affinity and great potential.
Around 4:30 p.m, I found a Buneary with light purple potential, but it had no aura affinity at all. I still memorized its features, but the aura thing was quite crucial for my choice, so it was unlikely that I would choose it.
Regardless, I kept checking one Buneary after the other, tirelessly trying to find one that fit my criteria, and thank Mew, Arceus, as well as Jirachi, I managed to finally spot one roughly a quarter past 5 p.m.
'Species: Buneary
Gender: Female
Type: Normal
Potential: Deep Blue
Stage: Iron-Stage (high)
Genetic variation: None
Abilities: Run Away, Limber
Talents: None
Affinities: Normal, Aura'
She was just what I was searching for and I made sure my second thought stream kept an eye on her while I kept inspecting more Buneary during the last 40 or so minutes I had left. You know, just in case I came across someone even better.
Well, with only 5 minutes left until 6 p.m, I could say that I had failed to find a better candidate, and I frankly had enough, so I simply stopped checking any more Buneary. Instead, I went up to the Buneary I had been tracking and directly asked her if she wanted to join me.
She did not agree immediately and began to think about it. Seeing how long it took her to come to a decision, I actually started to worry that she would disagree, but thankfully she ended up agreeing after thinking things through for a few minutes.
I immediately pulled out a Pokeball, blood-registered it, and balled her as soon as she agreed, before calling her out once again so that she could say her goodbyes.
While she went around doing that, I began recalling everyone else, including the cooking crew that had been allowed to stay out after lunch. Buneary came back about 5 minutes later, and I recalled her after telling the elder that we were ready to go back.
The elder aura Lopunny accompanied me back to the arrival and I waved goodbye to the inhabitants before leaving the hangout area. Gallade was actually already waiting for us at the place we arrived which made sense since it was already 10 minutes past 6 p.m.
He exchanged a brief greeting with the elder Lopunny before we vanished and appeared inside Mr. Cameron's office.
-----------------------------
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