Walking away from Spinda, Dante began contemplating. Spinda only said that his 'hopes and dreams' will be accomplished soon but didn't give an estimate when.
'I hope Spinda won't take too long. I already have so many Gummies stored in Kangaskhan's storage. Hopefully the Cafe will open before the Rookie Competition starts.'
When Dante and Pikachu met the client to submit the task, they were pleasantly surprised by the additional reward. In addition to the promised 200 Poke (after guild tax) on the task description, the client gave an additional Focus Blast move disc.
The both of them thanked the client and then proceeded to return to their quarters while waiting for dinner. During this period, Dante took out the Focus Blast move disc and stared at it with a complicated expression.
Focus Blast is a Fighting type Special Attack move with a base power of 120. Because it requires a bit of charging time to focus the energy before releasing it, the opponent can have some time to prepare and dodge the move.
However, even with that little flaw, it is still one of the most powerful Fighting type moves. Unfortunately however, neither Dante nor Pikachu can learn the move right now. The both of them can only learn the move when they evolve into either Raichu or Zoroark.
Of course, Dante had no plans to let Pikachu evolve and Pikachu already agreed with his decision as long as it's something that makes him stronger. Therefore, this move disc can only be used for Dante's future Pokemons or when he evolves after the both of them beat Dialga and some other post-mainline story.
This also reminded Dante of another painful fact, he doesn't know much about what he should do after defeating Dialga! When playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers of Sky, the furthest he could go would be after graduating from the guild and then meeting Shaymin.
At that point, most of Dante's Pokemon were already at max stats with their best possible movesets. His exploration rank then has also already reached the Guildmaster rank.
In short, Dante had nothing else to grind for in the game, except to advance the storyline. Therefore, he slowly got bored and just read a brief description online on what will happen next in the story.
Luckily for him now, that period is still a long time away. Dante should focus more on how strong they would need to be to defeat Dialga at the end.
Thinking of this, another question popped up in Dante's mind.
Should he directly help Grovyle collect the Time Gears from the beginning?
The main storyline for PMD Explorers of Sky is pretty simple. The Temporal Tower in the present timeline where Dialga resides is starting to collapse which is also the cause for the time getting out of whack, as Chatot put it.
As the Temporal Tower completely collapses, the time in the world will freeze, waters will not flow, there will be no night and day, and the planet itself will stop moving. The Tower's collapse will also cause Dialga to become crazy in the future.
In order to stop all of this, Grovyle from the future will travel back in time together with his human partner, which is supposed to be Dante, in order to gather the Time Gears, put them in the Temporal Tower, and prevent the worst from happening in the future.
However, Dusknoir, a subordinate of the future crazy Dialga will also travel back in time to stop Grovyle. Because if Grovyle succeeds, then that future timeline will cease to exist, along with that version of Dialga and every Pokemon (and human) born after the planet's paralysis.
Dusknoir will gaslight everyone in Treasure Town and the guild into believing that Grovyle is a criminal whose goal is to make the planet's time stopped by stealing the Time Gears.
With the time in the region where the Time Gear was placed stopping, coupled with the world's time getting more out of whack, everyone anonymously believed Dusknoir's story.
Grovyle, being the cool and stoic Pokemon that he is, didn't even try to clarify to anyone what his plans are. His main goal was to quickly collect all the Time Gears, repair the Temporal Tower, and then 'coolly' disappear as he is erased from the world.
When Grovyle almost finished collecting all of the Time Gears, the protagonist and his partner will appear to stop him. The protagonist and his team will be beaten, then Dusknoir will come out and chase the fleeing Grovyle.
Dusknoir will catch Grovyle and then return the stolen Time Gears to where they were stolen from. When he is about to take Grovyle back to the future, he will grab the protagonist and his partner and drag them along.
The protagonist and Grovyle will have an adventure in the future timeline, understand Grovyle's goals, then proceed to travel back in time with Celebi's help to once again steal the Time Gears.
Dante doesn't want to go through all of that. Grovyle already collected all of the Time Gears, why should they recollect it again?
Therefore, Dante plans to confront Grovyle after he has already collected all of the Time Gears for the first time and directly proceed to placing them back to the Temporal Tower. As long as he can make his and Pikachu's strength strong enough, they don't need the additional training from adventuring in the future.
For that reason, the opening of Spinda's Cafe is really important. Dante can only collect as many Gummies as possible so that his and Pikachu's strength can instantly tremendously increase after it opens.
Speaking of strength, Dante also took a look at the Ginseng in their Item Bag. The Ginseng was a reward Chatot gave after they achieved a perfect score during their sentry duty.
Ginseng is a very simple but powerful item. Ingesting it can allow a Pokemon's moves to have an increase in Base Power by 1 or even 2 or 3 if lucky.
It may not look like much, but when used on the right moves and the right Pokemon, its effect will be tremendous!
An example of this is Breloom with Technician Ability using Bullet Seed. Technician is an Ability which boosts the power of moves that has a base power of 60 or less by 1.5 times. And because Breloom has the same Grass typing as the move, it will be further strengthened by 1.5.
Bullet Seed has a base power of 25. After being boosted by 2.25 times, its power will become 56 for each time the Bullet Seed hits the opponents. But what if Bullet Seed's base power is boosted by Ginseng to be 30? 40? Or maybe even 60?
At 60 base power, each Bullet Seed can hit for 135 power EACH. At that point, each of Breloom's Bullet Seeds are literally like the shells of a cannon.
It doesn't just have to be Breloom. It would be useful to use it on any moves that have low base power but powerful effects like Fell Stinger, Power-up Punch, Greninja's Water Shuriken, Draining Kiss, etc.
Unfortunately, Dante can only get a few Ginseng before the main story is done. Therefore, Dante hopes to use it in the most efficient and effective way.
Dante's thoughts about ways to further strengthen him and Pikachu were cut off by Chingling's bell signalling it was time for dinner.
Dante got up from the straw pile while Pikachu reluctantly paused the video playing on the phone. Yes, the phone.
In order to test whether they are able to bring an item from the human world to the PMD world, Dante tried putting the phone inside the Item menu.
The result of the experiment was needless to say, with Pikachu downloading movies and series on the internet into Dante's phone so he could watch it when he had nothing to do in the PMD world.