We set off right into the little forest between Pallet town and Viridian and were confronted with a pidgeotto the moment we entered. It shrieked at us and decided to begin our relationship by diving straight at me with a quick attack. Luckily, Broly was able to get in the way in time and pretty much no sold the attack. He then took down the pidgey with a swipe of his arm blades. Luckily, he was listening to my ramblings about wanting one for the team.
I quickly captured it in my pokeball. It was weak but that was perfect for my purposes. You see, I didn't intend to participate in the conference with a pidgeot. If this one ever became strong enough for that, then sure. If it didn't then I couldn't care less. What I needed the pidgeot for was to essentially be my personal plane. If I wanted to win the conference then I did not have time to waste by walking everywhere and teleports were ridiculously expensive, even for someone with an allowance like mine. With my fresh capture in hand, I began to turn back to leave but the sound of a rushing stream changed my mind. If there was a stream over there, then there would be water pokemon and hopefully my luck would win out and I'd find exactly what I was looking for.
After two hours of wading around the stream, I decided that my luck had finally run out for today, I couldn't find a single magikarp I wanted to catch. Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of magikarp in the stream but not a single one that was worth catching. They were all docile and showed almost no interest in me. On the bright side, Broly had begun to find it easier to move with the weights on. My monster was adapting and growing stronger at a truly astronomical rate, Was this the power of pokemon? To grow so quickly. If this was true, then how strong were those trainers who'd been going at it for years?
I shook off that train of thought and headed back to my room to get a night of rest. I had a lot of training to do tomorrow.
I woke with the sun on the next day and wasted no time before setting out. The first thing I did was head straight to the nearest training supply store and buy another gravity brace for my bird.
I headed back to the clearing and released the pidgeotto. He wasn't pissed off about his loss at all and seemed to be interested in getting strong after I told him that my goal was to get him to evolve as fast as possible. After that, I gave him his own nickname. My little bird would be called Quicksilver. I intended for this bird to be the fastest fucking thing in the whole of Kanto. So that meant training, and a lot of it.
I helped him put on the brace and turned it up till he could barely fly. I then increased the settings on Broly's brace till he could barely move and then I had them play a game of tag. They were both ridiculously slow and looked pitiful, but this should apparently be more helpful for their growth in the long run. There were tons of studies about it with differing opinions, but what pretty much every pokemon researcher agreed on was that pokemon grew faster when they struggled.
While they occupied themselves with that, I sat down to meditate. Why? Aura, of course. The mythical overpowered energy that was within all pokemon and humans. You see, I'd always been a deep thinker in both lives. Donell was sure there was something about humans that made pokemon grow faster when trained by them. It couldn't be intelligence of course, because most psychic pokemon had us thoroughly beat in that category. He didn't know what I was but with my own knowledge from beyond the universe, the answer came easily to me. It was Aura.
My best guess was that humans subconsciously used their aura to stimulate the growth of their pokemon and since my goal required me to grow my team as quickly as possible, I couldn't ignore the possible advantages of turning that into a conscious effort. So, I began to meditate.
It didn't even take me up to five minutes to find my Aura. I had some experience in meditating from my first life, but I get the feeling that the reason it was so easy to find was because I already had a frame of reference for meditating in a body without aura, so all I had to do was find what was fundamentally different between both bodies.
Aura felt strange. That's the best word I could find for it. It felt warm and cool, solid, and liquid, smooth and rough. It felt like a lot of contradictions in one. It felt like me.
Using it was much harder. I could feel it, but I couldn't do anything with it. It just stayed there no matter what I tried. Dragging, pulling, pushing, coaxing, it didn't matter. They all did nothing. My core of aura just sat there.
In my efforts to move it though, I noticed something. There was a bit of it branching out of the core to somewhere else. Interesting. I paid more attention to it and noticed that it seemed to be pointed towards where Broly and Quicksilver were playing their game of tag. If I had to guess, this explained why Broly was growing so quickly. He was being empowered by my aura. So, I did what everybody else in my situation would do. I grabbed on my aura and essentially willed a tendril to flow towards Quicksilver. Astonishingly enough, it worked.
It worked and I felt a huge drop in my aura. It felt like I'd just run a couple miles without stopping. I dropped out of meditation to pay attention to my little murder beasts and saw that the game of tag was becoming more and more impressive. They were both finding it easier to move around. I called them over and took of the braces so they could play again.
Their speed was phenomenal. They had both gotten noticeably faster in just a single day of training. If they kept it up at this rate, they would be speed demons after our month of training. That wasn't all the training they did for today though.
I had both of them attacking rocks and trees with only their wings. Pokenet claimed that this was the easiest way to teach a pokemon steel wing and we all knew the internet was always right. I did put on and turn up the braces before this though. Never miss an opportunity to train, that's what Oak always said. As they continued with that, I continued planning out my journey with the pokedex.
After we spent a month here and Quicksilver evolved, I'd fly straight to Mt. Moon. The dex told me there were herds of Rhyhorn over there, and a Rhyhorn would make a great addition to my team. Even if I never actually managed to evolve it into a Rhyperior, which was very likely as there were only about a dozen of those. A rhydon was still a very strong ground type pokemon, on par with Nidoking. I'd also head on in to try my hand at finding the moon stone. I had a very good idea as to where it was but if I didn't find it in a day or two, I'd bail.
After Mt. Moon, I'd go to Cerulean to find a feabas. I'd given up on Gyrados, as research into both pokemon told me they were about equal in power, but a Milotic would be easier to train and less likely to succumb to battle rage. The next goal after that would be Lavender town where I'd catch a Ghastly. A ghost type was essential for my team and what I'd seen Agatha's Gengar do was insane.
After that, I'd choose whether to head to Cinnabar in search of a magby or to the Safari Zone to see what I could find there. No point in planning beyond that since it would all be based on whether I went to Cinnabar or not.
It was getting late. I had my pokemon return to their balls and headed to the pokemon center for dinner and sleep.
It was about two weeks into my training regimen that something interesting happened. Quicksilver evolved. He'd been showing the signs for a couple days, but I wasn't sure when it would happen. He was playing another game of tag with Broly when he finally got frustrated at being unable to catch my monster of a scyther and evolved to accomplish his goal. He let out a cry of rage and became enveloped in a bright light. The light stayed for a minute or two and then my pokemon came out. A beautiful Pidgeot. And he was big. Very big. The average size of a pidgeot was 1.5 meters and mine was at least 1.8 meters. His wingspan was huge, and I could already tell that he could easily carry me.
The downside was his evolution broke the gravity brace. I didn't have enough saved up to get a new one, so I had to turn to something I'd been avoiding for a while. Battles. There were trainer battles going on in the pokemon Centre's training field and the wagers for these battles were quite high. If I could win enough battles, then I'd probably have enough for a new brace and some TMs to buff up my murder beasts.
I returned both Broly and Quicksilver and had them checked out at the Centre before calling it a night. The next day saw me in the training field bright and early waiting for anyone to approach. Luckily, I didn't have to wait too long before someone came over. She was a girl, apart from the fact that she had bright green hair and was around my age, there was nothing special about her. She came over and spoke in a cheerful, bubbly voice that I knew would annoy me very quickly, 'Hi, I'm June. Would you like to have a battle?' and she then went on to ramble about her pokemon and badge numbers.
I interjected to spare myself the headache, 'Sure. Standard wager?' She said yes and I quickly moved towards the battle stations to avoid the rest of her reply. Was I being rude? Yes. Did I care? No.
A different trainer came out and decided to act as the referee and asked us if we were ready. She loudly said yes, and I nodded my head. I chose to release first to get this over with. 'Broly let's get this done' I said while pressing the release on my pokeball.
She said something in that grating voice of hers and released a Butterfree. How cute. 'Rainbow, use sweet powder'
As if we were going to let that happen. 'Broly, rush it' My Scyther started off as just about average for a scyther when we started training but after weeks of gravity training while being enhanced by my aura, he was fast. Very fast. It didn't take him a second to get over to the other end of the field and attack the Butterfree with a steel wing. The fight was over as quickly as it started.
She was shocked but soldiered through surprisingly enough. 'You took down rainbow real quick, but don't get too comfortable. Pinky here is my starter, and she knows how to bring the thunder.' She then proceeded to release a pikachu of all things. I could only internally laugh at the irony. I returned Broly and sent out Quicksilver. I was going to enjoy this.
'Use thunderbolt' She screamed and this time her pokemon didn't waste even a second before unleashing a massive thunderbolt towards mine. It's sad to say that it was a valiant effort but still ultimately futile. My bird was long gone. 'Aerial ace' I said in a whisper, knowing he could still pick up on it. Quicksilver didn't disappoint and barreled at the Pikachu in a white flash that had the pokemon instantly knocked out.
She looked put down. She returned her pokemon, transferred my winnings and quickly hightailed her way out of there. She wasn't even gone for a minute before someone else came over to challenge me.
I ended up taking over 12 challenges before my pokemon were too tired to continue. I only lost 1 and that was to a trainer with four badges. He used an Electabuzz and a Poliwrath to wreck both my beasts. Broly could run circles around his Poliwrath, but the damn thing could always react in time to counter-attack. The battle between Quicksilver and the electabuzz was even worse. The electric type was continuously filling the sky with lightning and my bird could barely even land a hit without getting fried.
I'm sure you must be surprised to see me having Quicksilver participate in battles. The truth is the little guy's grown on me. After how much effort he put into his training, it just wouldn't be fair of me to bar him from battles. There was also the little fact that he was now my strongest pokemon. During the past two weeks of training, he learned double the moves Broly did. Somehow managing to master, brave bird, aerial ace, steel wing, agility, and roost in the time it took Broly to learn agility, steel wing and fury cutter.
The added power boost from his evolution made him into even more of a monster. Since I'd decided to call it a day, I took Broly and Quicksilver in to see Nurse Joy and then went shopping for a new brace and some TMs. I got the brace in short order and grabbed the TMs for hypervoice and signal beam. Both my pokemon needed more long rage options and this could help.
I got back to the Centre, took my pokeballs from Nurse Joy and used the centre's TM machines to teach the moves to my pokemon. I wasn't going to have them practice with it right now as it was already getting late, and we had a long day of training ahead of us tomorrow.
I woke up the next morning to an alert on my pokedex and I realized that I'd fucked up. I totally forgot about the requirements the league had for getting a trainer's license. You see, passing the examinations got you a provisional license, but you had to either get your first badge in one month or three badges in three months after you got the provisional license in order to have it upgraded to a permanent license. This was bad. This was very bad. Donell spent two weeks at home after getting his license and then got to viridian in his third week. I was comatose in the hospital for about two weeks, and I'd spent another three weeks here training. That added up to about two months of time gone. Getting three badges in one month was going to be insanely difficult.
At least, with Quicksilver fully evolved, travel time was less of a consideration. However, I still only had two pokemon. After Flint, every leader insists on three-on-three battles. I'd be fighting with a notable handicap. I couldn't just catch another pokemon and train it up in time to be a significant factor in a gym battle.
I gave myself a quick slap to the face. No use overthinking this. It's just a challenge. Three gyms in a month? I'd do it in two weeks. Because I'm Donell fucking Oak. Future Champion of the whole fucking world.
I got out of the room, packed up my stuff and checked out of the centre. I got to the outskirts of town and released both my pokemon.
'Hey guys, turns out I forgot something pretty important. If we want to make to the pokemon league conference next year, we've got to defeat three gyms in the next month. So that means I'll be doing a lot of flying with Quicksilver and we won't get as much time as usual to train. It's going to be tough, but I believe in the both of you.' They seemed excited at the challenge. I'd explained the concept of gyms and the pokemon league to the bot of them, so they knew how important this was.
I wasted no time from there in returning Broly to his ball and attaching the saddle I'd bought for Quicksilver a few days earlier when he started showing signs of evolution. I had to adjust it a bit for his large size, but it still fit quite comfortably. I climbed up on the saddle. Checked the GPS to make sure we'd be heading in the right direction. Then I communicated my intentions to Quicksilver in a way that went beyond words without even opening my mouth.
Yesterday, I got the idea that pokemon couldn't really understand English, but they could understand everything we said to them either way. They could understand everything- from the incredibly complex scientific jargon the professor was using to the barely intelligible garble Gary unleashed at every moment in his younger years. My answer was Aura. I felt that we imprinted some of our aura into our words when we spoke and what I just did was found a way to talk with my aura without actually talking. This didn't mean I could suddenly understand poke-speak or that I could communicate silently with every pokemon.
I suspect the only reason this was possible was because I had been soaking Quicksilver with my aura, so he was particularly sensitive to it. This was all a theory, but it worked so that's all that matters. For some reason, I could broadcast my intentions to my pokemon, and they could understand and act on these intentions.
Quicksilver took off and all those thoughts suddenly became much less important. His name was incredibly fitting because my bird was fast. Ridiculously so. If I hadn't but goggles for this exact reason, then I wouldn't be able to see the GPS on my pokedex, and if I couldn't communicate with him silently, then there's no way he'd have been able to hear me at this speed.
Flight was exhilarating. Quicksilver just ruined any other form of transport for me. The wind in my hair, the views from up here. It was incredible. To think that this wasn't even Quicksilver's top speed. I knew he was holding back quite a bit for my sake and even this was amazing.
We got over the forest and arrived at Pewter in barely 30 minutes. With these kinds of transport speeds, my goal of completing all three gyms in two weeks was seeming more and more possible. I got off the saddle and had to lean on Quicksilver for a few minutes to get feeling back in my legs so I could walk. I still had a noticeable wobble, but it was well worth it. I returned Quicksilver to his ball and headed straight to the gym.
I got there and scheduled my challenge with the receptionist. Luckily, there was no one challenging the gym at this moment, so she let me move on straight to Flint. I had to remember to schedule my other appointments to avoid having to wait on getting to the gym.
I strolled into the arena with a confident strut to hide the nerves I felt. Logically, I knew this would be a walkover. My feelings didn't seem to care much for logic at this moment. I got in and was momentarily blinded by the lights on the arena. I blinked out the spots in my vision and looked around the arena. If it could even be called that.
It was a bit small for a pokemon arena. Don't get me wrong, it was plenty large. The battlefield itself was as large as any other Gym arena. It's just that there wasn't as much space for viewers as I would have expected. The seats, even as few as they were, weren't anything close to being filled. There were a few kids here and there but apart from them the stadium was empty.
I ceased my examination of the arena and focused on the man himself. Flint, gym leader of pewter. The unbreakable rock (that was a legit nickname for him on Pokenet, I swear). He looked just like Brock did in the anime, if aged up quite a bit. He then spoke out,
'Welcome to the Pewter City Gym, home of the rock types. What is your name, challenger and how many badges do you have?' This was all a formality. The receptionist took all this information from me when I registered my challenge.
I gave him an answer though, there was no need to piss off a gym leader so early into my journey, 'Donell Oak. I'm here for my first badge'. I speak out calmly and clearly.
'Hahahaha. So much confidence. I like you, kid. Let's begin. This will be a two-on-two battle. You can swap your pokemon as you wish. Since you seem so confident, I'll be using some of my more advanced pokemon. I hope you don't disappoint me, Little Oak'. The laughter didn't quite reach his eyes and from the way he said the Oak, I could tell that dear old pops had done something to him. That was Samuel Oak for you, he offended people everywhere he went. I'm sure if he didn't end up retiring, someone would have eventually assassinated him. The man was a genius, but not a likeable one.
The referee asked if I was ready, I said yes and then he asked Flint to release his pokemon. The man smirked and then released a bloody Onix on the field. This was nothing like the Onix Brock had used against Ash. This one had a very smooth body that spoke of years of training. With rock types, the smoother their body, the stronger they tended to be. This one was also fucking huge. The stands for trainers to stand at were at least 30 feet above the ground and the Onix was at eye level with me when it reared up.
The referee asked me if I was alright, and I realized that I'd zoned out. The laughter I could see in Flint's eyes told me exactly what he thought. I calmed myself down and released Broly on the field. We were going to demolish this beast. The referee started the battle, and I wasted no time in twisting my aura in a way that told Broly to use swords dance and stay the fuck away from this beast.
'Headbutt' Flint commanded his pokemon and the beast dived right at Broly. Too slow. Much too slow. Broly ran circles around it while using swords dance to buff up his attack power. After Broly had used the move three times, I asked him to wait for an opportunity and bash this Onix's head with a steel wing.
The next time the beast crashed down to the ground in an attempt to catch Broly, my warrior didn't dodge to the side. He jumped up, used his wings to get more elevation and then flew straight down at the Onix's head with two wings of steel.
The collision caused an eruption of smoke and when it all cleared, I saw my warrior sitting on the head of the beast like he was some sort of gladiator that just slew the bull. He looked DOPE. Yes, all caps. He was just that cool.
Flint's anger was a thing to behold. He didn't show it on his face. In fact, he didn't show it anywhere. No change in his body language, no strain in his easy-going smile. But there was just something in his eyes that showed how pissed off he was. He was infuriated.
He released his next pokemon without saying a word. It was a Rhydon. Exactly the pokemon I was planning on catching right after this. I returned Broly after conveying exactly how proud I was.
I released Quicksilver and my bird of prey took a lap around the field to show off his radiance. The referee started the match and Flint gave out his orders immediately. 'Stone edge. Bring that bird down'. The rocks were impressive, and they flew at a good speed. It was all too slow for the bird I'd named after Marvel's fastest speedster though.
Quicksilver dodged around the rocks, and I told him to use hypervoice. It worked perfectly. The Rhydon was disorientated. Next, I asked him to look for the perfect moment and end it with brave bird. I would have asked for aerial ace instead, but that Rhydon looked sturdy. I didn't want to take the risk of aerial ace not having the stopping power to put it down. A red aura overtook my bird once he saw a good enough opportunity. He dove down in an absolutely beautiful display. All Flint's commands to dodge were ignored by his dazed pokemon and it was put out of its misery when Quicksilver's attack hit.
It was a one-hit knock out. The referee declared the match in my favor. I had done it. I had my first badge.