I left the Vibrava happy with what I had gotten since my second thought stream had been working while I was dealing with the stuff outside, and Utopia had actually turned that blue Trapinch into the first Trapinch of my budding elite colony with light purple potential. As for the Huge Power Trapinch, it was missing about 2.5% to have its potential rise to deep yellow, and since that was the case I chose to adhere to at least some of my elite colony rules even for him, so Trapinch was not gonna father any kids until his potential had risen to light green at minimum. In fact, for him, it would be better to wait until his potential rose to light blue or at least deep green before Trapinch tried leaving any progeny. Evolution would make that much easier than it could have been and I was thankful that Trapinch was able to evolve twice.
Still, happy news aside, I started to consider whether I should speed up a bit since the eastern route still had 3 more Trapinch spots and the furthest one was supposedly 3 hours away, but as I had already deduced that did not apply to our usual travel speed, so it was possible that I might not be able to visit the last spot before dinner if I stuck to my current travel speed. Deciding to tie up the eastern route today I sped my sandboard up a bit, which made it harder to not fall to Seb/Nidokings interference, but even with the increase in surfing failures I was still covering nearly double the ground compared to before.
While we were moving toward our destinations, I got to see a few more Pokemon aside from the Helioptile that the Gligar did not mention, such as two Sudowoodo that hid among some cacti as if that was a good hiding spot, completely ignoring that they stood out like sore thumbs among the cacti around them. We even came across two little Scraggy, and when we first saw them, things looked like the Scraggy were beefing with the air, but a closer look revealed that they were brawling with a Kecleon. We also saw, a bunch of Numel lying on the sand in a circle enjoying the heat released by a Torkoal that was sleeping in the center.
I was not sure if Torkoal was aware that others were using it as a heater, but seeing how it was sleeping without a care, I saw no reason to disturb them after lightly brushing/touching all of them with my psychic energy and determining that I did not want one after all. All in all, it took us until 7 p.m., but we finally arrived at the fifth/last Trapinch point on the eastern route, and after a successful diplomatic approach, which I attributed to the 17 Trapinch I sent out as diplomats, I ended up adding another 3 Trapinch to my growing colony. With the 8 Trapinch, I got during the 3rd and 4th spot, the last 3 spots added a total of 11 Trapinch to the elite colony.
Out of those, there was a (high) iron female Trapinch that had her potential raised to light blue and a (mid) bronze male that ended up with blue potential, while the rest of the Trapinch had greenish potential. Either way, with the east side finally complete, we directly entered Utopia for dinner. Once we had eaten I asked Hera/Pidgeot what she wanted to do to celebrate her advancement, and she asked for a personal grooming session, which I naturally accepted. I opened a funny video playlist on PokeTube for everyone to watch while I was busy with Hera, and two-plus hours later, once I was done grooming her, we joined the others for another two hours before I decided to call it a day.
The next morning I left Utopia with my desert group right after breakfast. Since we had completed the eastern route, we decided to start with the western route today. Hence, we teleported back to our starting point before heading for the 4 marked Trapinch points on the western route. The first one was the closest one marked on the map, and it took us 20 minutes to reach it. I sent out my diplomatic party toward the Trapinch ahead of us, and it honestly looked like an invasion party was encroaching because the numbers of both sides were not that different. Still, the relatively small number of Trapinch on the other side had one advantage, which was that they directly accepted our demands, I mean our request for me to check them out to see if they had any members that I would be interested in.
After successfully bringing the Trapinch some democracy, I brought away 2 of their members and left them a few hundred kilos of kibble in return. Democracy invasion jokes aside, the Trapinch were pretty happy with the exchange, and I was guessing that it was due to the low strength of their group which resulted in an insufficient food supply. Regardless, by lunch, I had visited 3 of the 4 Trapinch spots and ended up adding 7 more Trapinch to my elite colony, with one of them having light blue potential. An hour after lunch, while we were still heading to the final spot, I got some nice news from Utopia, specifically from Anorith who advanced to the (mid) bronze stage.
I did a quick jump to Utopia to congratulate my young ancient water bug and praised him on the effort he invested into his training before telling him to think of what he wanted as a reward until dinner, though that ended up being unnecessary since he directly told me that he wanted a personal grooming session just like Hera. I naturally agreed and told him that I would do it after dinner before heading back out. After that brief interlude, we resumed our way to the final Trapinch spot on the western Trapinch route, and about 45 minutes later we finally made it to the marked place, though I failed to spot any Trapinch at first glance.
After failing to find any Trapinch at a second glance as well, I used my senses to see if I could sense any Trapinch, and I did sense quite a few signs of life deep under the ground, so I naturally decided that hiding from me/us like that was not okay. I used my telekinesis to grab the closest Trapinch and helped it surface. Only it was not a Trapinch, but a poor Diglett that I nearly forced out of the sand. Thankfully, I noticed the mistake and successfully stopped before Diglett's tiny lower body was revealed. The Diglett in question glared and cussed at me for a bit before it calmed down somewhat. I simply let it do that since I did deserve it to a certain degree, especially since it dialed down the level of its insults after Seb glared at it when it tried to mention my parents.
Once Diglett was calmer I first apologized for dragging it up like that before asking if the rest of the Pokemon I was sensing below the ground were its fellows. At first, it simply kept quiet and stared at us, but when I gave it an Oran Berry before mentioning that I was just asking because I had thought that a bunch of Trapinch lived here, it finally cooperated. Diglett shared that the Trapinch had left this area more than 40 nights ago after another member of their group evolved, raising the number of Vibrava to 6. It seemed that they chose to head deeper into the desert, confident that they could settle in a better place with their current strength.
The reason Diglett was so confident in that was that they used to live not too far from here and thus got wind of everything. They settled in as soon as the Trapinch were gone because the ground here was better than in their old place. Seeing how much the little one knew I went ahead and asked it if it knew how many members the migrants had and in which direction the Trapinch/Vibrava headed along with where exactly they had settled down, though the last one was a shot in the dark, really. As expected, Diglett had no idea how far they had gone; It just knew that the Trapinch had a few more members than they did and that they headed north. Thanks to my senses I knew that the Diglett's group had 137 members, so the Trapinch were probably somewhere around 140 to 150 in number.
I thanked Diglett before handing it a second Oran Berry, this time for the information it shared, before telling Seb and Gaia that I was recalling them for a few minutes. Once they had been moved to Utopia, I took off into the air and flew northward. Up in the air, I was able to see farther and I flew at a slow enough speed to not miss a bunch of Trapinch lounging around, though I was still going at least 30 times my usual traveling speed. Due to that, I stopped heading further north after 20 minutes, because I felt that if I failed to spot them by now, they probably walked too far away, which meant that it would likely take me too much time to find them.
I still chose to fly back to the starting point instead of simply teleporting there, just in case I got lucky and the tribe simply chose to veer to the west at some point instead of heading further north. I ultimately failed to spot the Trapinch, but I actually saw a Pawniard clashing with a Sandslash under the supervision of a Bisharp. That took me slightly off guard since I had not expected to see either of those two here. There was also the Xatu that suddenly appeared to my left, and nearly got a faceful of Hyper Beam courtesy of Mothra/Butterfree who thought we were getting ambushed.
Anyway, returning to the starting point took me just 20 minutes, which was a fraction of the time it took me to sand-surf to the 4th Trapinch spot. Once there, I landed and brought the Nido-duo out again. It was only a few minutes past 4 p.m., so we had enough time to check out the two Trapinch spots on the northern route. Hence, we began to head north without any further delay. In my case, I could add an again there I guess, but this time I was sand surfing instead of flying. About half an hour in I was forced to pull an emergency stop because a Graveler suddenly burrowed out of the sand right in front of me.
The Graveler looked tempted to attack me but seemed to decide otherwise after looking at Seb and Gaia/Nidoqueen. It settled for giving me the middle finger times four instead, and I was actually surprised it knew what the middle finger meant since it was a wild Pokemon, or at least that was what I was assuming it was since there was no other human around me in a 500-meter radius. Anyway, I had not been planning to bother with Graveler, but Mothra took an exception to those four middle fingers and blasted it with an Energy Ball, causing it to be hurled away. It skidded/rolled along the sand for a bit before coming to a stop, revealing that it was out cold, and since it was already down for the count, I decided to just go with the flow and check its status sheet.
When I saw that he actually had blue potential I decided to capture him. Even if he was already at the silver stage, he would have at least deep blue potential once Utopia was done with him, and that was more than good enough for me to accept him as a new Utopia citizen. Graveler had no right to complain since he ended up provoking Mothra and got bested/beaten up in a single move, which according to the rules of the wild meant that it was up to us to decide what we did with him. In fact, I was looking forward to his reaction when he found out what had happened because he decided to give me/us the finger, so I took out a PokeBall and threw it at Graveler's prone body.
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