"THUD!" the moment the glass landed I started Vulcan off strong with a double leer to drop Gaia's defense dramatically. She grit her teeth as this forced her to stop her rock polish and go for an iron defense instead. "Get close , stomp!" I commanded capitalizing on the short time frame between Gaia switching moves. Vulcan dashed forward immediately with full trust in my ability to command it correctly. Gaia finished her Iron defense and I could see her trying to find a way out of this sticky situation. Her speed was currently a good chunk lower than Vulcan's and he was already getting within range to use his move after all.-
I went full bore on pressuring her out the gate in hopes the stress would force her to evolve without the need to get injured. Vulcans paws glowed white as it leapt into the air and came down at Gaia hard. She then did something that left me speechless , Gaia quickly reached down and grabbed a handful of sand before throwing it right in Vulcans face before he crashed into her. This wasn't the move sand attack at all but flat out fighting dirty and it totally surprised me since I hadn't taught her to do that.-
Still it paid off as Vulcan was forced to close it's eyes and look away which let Gaia shift the spot it was going to land to her shoulder instead of her head. "BOOM!" the move struck her loudly and spider web cracks appeared all over her carapace causing her to cry out in pain. "Back away a use leer to clean the sand out of your eyes!" I shouted and Vulcan retreated and did as I instructed. The thing about pokemon move energy is that is starts inside their bodies before being sent out in various ways.-
Thanks to this using leer on regular sand in a pokemons eyes that lacked move energy sent the sand out of the eyes without missing anything. As an added bonus Gaia also got hit with a defense drop again which forced her to waste time using iron defense again. Pretty much I had forced her back into that desperate position but this time she was damaged as well and we were wary of her playing dirty. "Lava plume while she can't evade!" I commanded and Vulcan raised it's head and howled with it's entire body glowing bright red.-
The red glow sank into the ground and a moment later super hot magma exploded from all around Vulcan including where Gaia was standing. I admit the "while she can't move" part of my command was a phycological trick against Gaia to make her think dodging this move was actually possible. In reality I was aware that only something like protect could save one from this move so long as they were in range. Gaia had canceled her iron defense in order to try and dodge which meant even though it wasn't supper effective against her it still hurt far more than if she finished her move.-
She seemed to realize this if the glare I got was any indication while her carapace was faintly glowing and steaming from the heat. "Swagger then crunch!" I commanded and Vulcan immediately started to glow white as it snorted in a disdainful manner. I honestly can't say how this move works but it does for some reason. Gaia immediately grows angry and confused while her form seems to grow slightly larger from the buff in attack. Vulcan immediately follows up with crunch as ordered which much like bite covers it's face in dark type energy.-
Crunch differed from bite however in that the dark type energy was much stronger and covered a wider area as well. In other words it was like an upgraded version of bite that also had the added bonus of having a small possibility to lower the opponents defense stat. Vulcan leapt forward and the giant black purple energy jaws closed around Gaia's mid section causing her to cry out in pain. Her eye were quickly losing focus and she was uneasy on her feet meaning she was close to getting knocked out. -
I didn't give Vulcan any more orders but I didn't need to either as Gaia grit her teeth in determination and cried out "LAR!" before a huge spike in energy erupted from her body wrapping her in a huge rainbow colored orb of energy that rested in mid air a few feet above the ground. "At a girl!" I cheered with a wide smile. Even Vulcan seemed to be happy for Gaia though I was unsure weather that was because this meant her power was closer to it's or not. This transformation was nowhere near as fast as depicted in the games and took nearly a whole hour to finish.-
I wasn't surprised that it took so long either since an evolution was just as the name suggested so it taking a bit of time was to be expected. The end of the evolution wasn't all that grand as the "cocoon" of energy simply turned into flakes of light that fell away until the entire thing was gone revealing Gaia's new form to the world. To my great surprise she wasn't light purple like shiny Pupitar normally are at all but rather steel grey with light purple stripes like a tiger.-
Other than that she looked the same as any other Pupitar minus the fact that she was twelve feet tall from top to bottom. Gaia didn't get the chance to celebrate her evolution however as exhaustion overcame her and she fell to the ground knocked out. I chuckled at that and returned her to her ball since that was the only way she was getting back to the cave. While she was there I checked her status screen and was pleasantly surprised.
[Pokemon: Pupitar{Gaia}
LEVEL:30
Moveset: Bite(E) , Leer(A) , Sandstorm(E) , Iron defense(Egg Move)(E) , screech(E) , rock slide(E)scary face(A) , thrash(A) , dark pulse(J) , payback(A) , rock polish(J) , metal claw(J) , sand bomb(J) , crunch(N)
Variations: Royal , Shiny(stage 2)
Attack:90
Defense:90
Sp. Atk:65
Sp. Def:70
Speed:50
Ability: Sand veil(J) , shed skin(N)]
There was a couple of pretty big changes in her status screen worth going over for clarity. The first was of course the change in the shiny variation Gaia had went from plain to type two. I actually had to really go digging for this one but eventually found out that shiny variation had well variations.-
A stage two shiny was one that basically got a drastically different coloration from the standard color swap of shinyism (is that a word? Fuck it! it is now.) Basically it was the cooler looking improved version of the shiny variation. Apparently all variations had the ability to do this if the pokemon exceeded it's racial norm in some manner through training. Not sure what Gaia exceeded on herself since I am not an expert in pokemon stats but good news is good news. The final big change worth going over was the fact that she actually kept her sand veil ability after evolving instead of swapping to just having the shed skin standard of her species.