7 Chapter 7

I ended up accepting the offered position as a gym leader of Sootopolitan. But the first thing I did was to return to littleroot and return May's bracelet and share the news. We had another nice dinner to celebrate before I headed back to Sootopolitan.

There was a lot of paperwork involved setting up my contract, but once it was finished Steven left and I had complete creative control of my gym. The first thing I did was get rid of all the gimmicky bullshit. In order to challenge me a challenger need to beat my two best minions that's it. Right I have minions now. Apparently being the youngest champion and gym leader makes people hear about you. People came to the gym for my advice and tutelage. I laid out a basic training philosophy and had the disciples work out amongst themselves via tournament who would represent me against all challengers. I tried to keep pretty hands-off and it seemed to work out fine.

The next thing I did was requisition a Pokemon to fill in the last spot on my team. This doesn't always work, but I requested a porygon and the materials for its first evolution. You can just buy porygons so this wasn't really a problem. I also requested a mega stone for Quill. I didn't need it yet as I still 2 evolutions to go, but I would eventually. That was harder than getting a porygon so I switched it up to be a trade instead offering up some of the mega stones I had but didn't need. That yielded better results and I got an offer a few months later.

In the meantime, I went about training my team to the max. I spent 2 years training them before I felt there was no more progress so I then dove into more experimental methods. My whole team was in their third evolution except porygon which I named Tori. Tori was the exception only being a porygon 2. For Quil, Herb, Walts, Rayquaza, and Kwan I pushed the bounds of mega evolution. Transforming them frequently and having them hold the transformation for as long as possible. 5 years of this training saw the result I was hoping for all five Pokemon had absorbed their mega stone using it like a normal evolution item making them permanently have a fourth evolution form. Except Rayquaza who became an evolved legendary.

I shared these results and changed what people knew about evolution and mega evolution. I don't know why it works just that it does. I leave answering why to the researchers.

As for Tori porygons evolve weird because all it needs is a tech upgrade. The evolution to porygon z for example is faulty experimental tech and is at best a tradeoff with porygon 2. In between my work with the rest of the team I researched ways to upgrade porygon correctly. I again didn't completely learn the background instead of focusing on the information relevant to me. Around the same time that the rest of the team evolved again, I made a breakthrough that led to porygon E. E because it transforms porygon into an electric type. From porygon 2 the head moved forward and down parallel to the body. The arms point perpendicular to the body grew longer and flattened out almost like wings. At the back was four medium-length tail rotating and not directly attached to the body. Along the back, we're evenly spaced metal bumps and on each arm was a long metal rod from which electricity could be channeled.

Tori was happy with the result and so was I. Porygon E made it both normal and electric type. Additionally, it drastically improved in speed with a slight increase in special attack. All without significant loss of stats in different stats.

The role of a gym leader is low maintenance. I do my job just by being. Gym leaders are like nuclear deterrents. Normal people can only ever have six Pokemon on them at any one time. The system in place works very hard to keep that true. Gym leaders are exempt from that, and are able to carry armies of Pokemon on their person. Gym leader Pokemon are also leagues above what most people's Pokemon are capable of. The gym Pokemon that challengers see are the newbies getting their bare-bones training in. Any true gym leader Pokemon could probably best 99.9% of all other Pokemon even with a type disadvantage. Then most gym leaders have hundreds of Pokemon of that caliber.

I was an exception instead of 99.9% my team could beat 99.9999 % they were the peak. It wasn't a matter of what Pokemon could defeat them it was about how many Pokemon could they take down before they got bored or tired.

Because of this difference Gym leaders are somewhere between warlords and superheroes. With our mere presence acting as a repelling force for crime, but we also hold political power. It's why Giovanni as the leader of team rocket was able to get away with so much. He occupied basically my position but in the Kanto league. His organization was basically the only criminal element and it was more or less allowed because no other criminal elements would challenge him for control.

My time as a gym leader was also especially free as I was the 8th gym leader I had the least challenges and I made sure my disciples were competent enough to fend off challengers I was lucky to face a challenger once every couple of months. So between the training, lack of challengers, keeping in touch with May and Birch it was a relaxing 9 years.