It was unfortunate that the Trapinch only had deep orange potential, but that was just how life was sometimes. Besides, I was not worried about not finding a good Trapinch during my stay around these parts since there had to be hundreds of thousands if not millions, maybe even tens of millions of Trapinch living in the Hoenn desert, so finding a bunch of blue potential Trapinch was definitely far from impossible. Heck, if one was lucky enough, one might even come across a Trapinch with a potential that was some shade of purple, because I was certain that there should be at least one or two of those somewhere among the Trapinch.
Not that I needed some kind of miracle to get my hands on one of those since Utopia could create a bunch of them by pushing the potential of some blue or deep blue Trapinch, and the likelihood of coming across one of those was much much higher than the purple kind. Either way, I simply let go of the Trapinch after seeing his low potential and watched as he burrowed back into the sand. As I expected I came across more Trapinch as I made my way deeper into the desert, though none of them happened to have a decent potential, with the best one being light green.
I planned to capture that one thinking that capturing him was better than nothing, but I changed my mind when I saw a second Trapinch burrow out of the sand and try to save the one in my grasp. A quick check showed that it was a female with orange potential and seeing the drama the two were having within my grip, it was clear that they were a couple, so I let both go since I did not want to separate them and the male was not good enough for me to care about adding the orange female to Utopia. Not when I had plans to start a Trapinch colony inside Utopia, which would be limited to light green Trapinch at worst if I could help it to ensure that it would be an "elite" colony since it would be a colony of dragons or at least future dragons.
Not long after I let those two go I got approached by the first human I saw since entering the Hoenn Desert. It didn't take long for me to recognize the approaching lady as a Ranger, specifically a Desert Ranger, due to the ranger uniform she was wearing. Alyssa warned me that I would be leaving the periphery zone of the desert and entering the proper outer area of the desert if I continued walking for another 20 to 30 minutes in the direction I was heading. She explained that I might start coming across more desert dwellers along with stronger ones. She also offered to point me in the direction out of the desert if I had lost my way or in a direction along the periphery if I was planning to safely or quickly catch a Pokemon in that area, which according to her was not that uncommon.
Meanwhile, I could not help but wonder if it had been a lucky coincidence that Alyssa stumbled upon us or if the rangers had a high enough number of Desert Rangers stationed here to cover the periphery of the Hoenn Desert. I honestly did not believe that it was the latter because doing so reliably would require at least a few tens of thousands of rangers just to ensure that each ranger covered a decent patch of the Hoenn Desert's periphery. Even if the Hoenn Desert was nowhere as big as the Viridian Forest, it was still a pretty big place that was larger than many of the countries on Earth, though it was still nowhere near as large as the Sahara.
Not that that was surprising since all things considered, Hoenn was still an island even if it was a pretty damn big one with its around 10 million km² mainland, 12 million km² if we added its various smaller sub-islands on top of that. Had the Hoenn Desert been as big as the Sahara, then it would have covered more than 90% of the mainland, so everyone living there was lucky that it was "only" around 330 thousand km² in size, which was a bit more than 3% of Hoenn's mainland. Still, seeing how big the desert was, trying to monitor the whole periphery in a detailed fashion made no sense, so it had to be a coincidence.
I could not help but want to ask Alyssa if it was okay if I inquired how many rangers there were stationed at the Hoenn desert; However, before that, I had Seb/Nidoking and Gaia/Nidoqueen briefly reveal their strength to assure Alyssa that we would be fine. Alyssa was startled at first when she suddenly felt my two companions release (high) dark gold stage undulations, but then she laughed and declared that I certainly would not have to worry about my safety as long as I made sure to pay attention and avoided any natural or artificial traps.
Alyssa did add that we might be able to explore a majority of the Hoenn Desert unhindered with the strength of my Pokemon, but she warned me that I still had to be careful if I planned to wander around the core area of the desert since we might come across stronger desert dwellers there. She also added that I should avoid confronting whole tribes in the inner zone since some of them were big and strong enough that they might be able to grind us down even if we were stronger individually.
I thanked her for the concern and the warnings/info, before asking the question I had in mind, following which she freely shared that there were 800 Ranger actively patrolling the desert like her and a total of 400 rangers stationed at the 4 bases in the north, west, south, and east of the desert. Considering how big the desert was the chances of stumbling onto a ranger on his or her patrol were rather small as long as one was not at a position of interest, like an incident or a spot on their travel/patrol route.
Nonetheless, seeing how I was such a lucky individual, I decided to make use of this chance to ask Alyssa if she was willing to share any areas where a lot of Trapinch or other interesting species were gathered. While I had the maps I printed out during my time at Lilycove City, asking a "local" would likely be just as useful if not even more so. The maps were not up to date after all, and they only showed the areas that truly stood out. There was a chance that Alyssa knew about spots that did not make the cut but were useful for my purpose.
I ended up being right since Alyssa shared the position of a small Trapinch tribe numbering 80-90 members living not far from our current position, along with a handful of Gligar hunting around that same area. She mentioned that she occasionally had to observe them when the confrontation between the two groups escalated due to the Gligar stealing the Trapinch's prey to ensure that they kept the conflict between themselves. I thanked Alyssa for the information before we separated; She continued her patrol while I made my way to the Trapinch tribe she mentioned.
80 to 90 Trapinch was more than triple the number I had come across so far, and I had high hopes that there would be a few decent Trapinch among them. It took less than 10 minutes before we made it to the place Alyssa mentioned. There were a bunch of cacti growing out of the sand and once we tried to close in on those, the sand beneath us began to give away, forcing us to stop for a moment as Seb hardened the sand beneath our feet. The sand around us kept moving, forming a small sand pit around us with a single untouched sand block in the center. Four Trapinch poked their heads out of the sand at the edge of the pit and stared at us.
Just as I was about to speak up, one of the Trapinch raised its head and released a roar that translated to pretty much "Intruder!". It could have been addressing me, but when a few more heads began to poke out of the sand moments after that, it became pretty obvious that it had alerted its fellow Trapinch of our presence. The Trapinch made no attempt to conceal their strength, probably in an attempt to intimidate us, though that failed due to their strength. Seeing how the strongest of them was just at the (low) bronze stage so far, our little group simply watched them without doing anything since they were making things easier for us by gathering around like this.
Before long the sand pit had been surrounded by around 30 Trapinch, which if Desert Ranger Alyssa had been right constituted around a third of their group. The strongest among them was actually at the (mid) bronze stage, which made one wonder why it had not evolved to Vibrava yet, but considering that it turned into a dragon during its evolution it was possible that it was somehow just not ready yet. Either way, I made another attempt at speaking with them after I noticed that the new arrivals had stopped, though I once more failed to say anything before the other side acted. The Trapinch shot a collective wave of Mud-Slap and Mud Shot at us, and I released a sigh before I froze the approaching mud in the air. I then let them fall onto the ground before I had Mothra immobilize all of the Trapinch to stop them from starting a second attack.
The Trapinch froze, but after the (mid) bronze one used Crunch to break free the other followed suit using either Crunch as well or Bite, though to me it appeared like the ones that used Bite took just a moment longer to break free. I attributed that to the pretty vast difference between them and Mothra, but I stopped thinking about that after making a note to test it later on and told Mothra to just use Sleep Powder instead, though I had her avoid the strongest one since I wanted that one conscious. The (mid) bronze Trapinch took a moment to realize that it was the only one left awake, and in the meantime actually attempted to start another attack wave, before it stopped to growl at us when it noticed that no one was following suit.
I noticed a few more heads poking out of the sand not far behind the ones that had us surrounded, but chose to ignore them for now to answer the Trapinch's question of what we wanted. I directly told it that we had no interest in their cacti, which had Trapinch ease just a bit since I always used a bit of my aura to show that I was speaking the truth while speaking with wild Pokemon, or at least the ones that represented groups. I told Trapinch that I wanted to add a few Trapinch to my group and that I simply wanted to see if there were any Trapinch in their group that would rouse my interest.
Unsurprisingly, that pushed Trapinch's viligance straight back to its peak, but I unhurriedly told it that the ones that ended up joining me if I managed to spot anyone interesting would live in a much more bountiful and relaxed place. That had the Trapinch ease a bit again, though its stance was still mostly closed off, as in unwilling to allow that to happen, at least not without a struggle on their side even though I could read from its emotions and the stray thoughts it was releasing that it knew that such a struggle would likely be useless. I was pretty sure that it knew that and it was likely that it would still do so just to give those still hidden beneath the chance to scatter.
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