CH34 (398), Failure Is The Mother Of Success (2)

Nearly a full two weeks passed while my group and I focused on our objective of unearthing possible ways to use Mystic Water in creating an ice-type object capable of triggering Eevee's evolution to Glaceon.

We at least did succeed in creating Mystic Ice, which had virtually the same use as Mystic Water, just aimed at ice types, so that could be considered some sort of success since no one capable enough seemed to have bothered creating artificial Mystic Ice before.

Well, that or they did not reveal that they had done so, probably because Mystic Ice could be found outside/in the wild. Natural Mystic Ice was actually quite rare, which was why it was not among the resources on our list, so we actually got praised for that part alone even if we had yet to succeed with our main objective.

Unlike the first batch of tests, which we went through in rapid succession due to the items we used, creating the Mystic Ice alone took us nearly the whole two weeks since simply freezing Mystic Water did not do the trick.

We had to try a lot of different approaches to get out hands on Mystic Ice. Our methods ranged from using different items, both individual as well as mixed, to Pokemon moves, and at one point we even used the freezer. The correct approach, at least the one we discovered, involved one particular item and the correctly timed addition of an ice-type move. Moreover, all three aspects had to be of the same class/quality.

That meant that if the Mystic Water that was being converted was of the D-Class, then the Never-Melt Ice Shard used had to originate from a D-Class Never-Melt Ice as well and had to have retained its class. Also, the Pokemon that was using the Ice Beam had to be at the (mid) silver stage at worst and (high) silver stage at most.

Furthermore, just fulfilling these conditions was not enough. The Never-Melt Ice Shard that was being added into the Mystic Water had to be exactly 12.5% of the weight, not the volume, of the Mystic Water. Then one had to isolate the two and let them affect each other without any further outside input.

What should happen at this point, was the Never-Melt Ice Shard slowly but steadily freezing Mystic Water. The whole process took surprisingly long considering that there was only 150 ml of Mystic Water involved, which was the standard we set for our experiment.

Anyway, it took exactly 6 hours each time for the Mystic Water to completely freeze that way. Well, once that had happened you had successfully failed since the resulting block was only frozen Mystic Water.

No, we had to learn through numerous tests, that it was necessary to let the Never-Melt Ice Shard do its job, but only until the Mystic Water was only almost completely frozen because the last step needed an injection of ice energy that had to be provided by an Ice Beam of at least advanced mastery.

Only an Ice Beam like that was able to deliver the necessary amount of pure ice-type energy needed to complete the last step of the conversion process. Other moves such as Aurora Beam, Freeze-Dry, Frost Breath, or Icy Wind did not work even if they were fully mastered. We were assuming that the reason for that was, that the energy of these moves was not concentrated enough.

I had to add at this point that working at a renowned lab was really convenient for such tests since all kinds of Pokemon were available to help out in all our tests. Finding one Pokemon that had mastered all those moves would have been impossible considering that it had to be at the silver stage.

However, the lab had no problem finding Pokemon that had mastered one of them, so we still managed to test all of them. Additionally, the stuff we used to reach this point added up to a lot, so it was a costly success. As I said, it was really convenient.

Anyway, back to the last step of our Mystic Ice. As I said there had to be an injection of ice energy through Ice Beam during the last step, and the time window for this injection was limited from 5 to 1 minute before the Mystic Water completely froze without outside interference.

If you acted before the last 5-minute period, the conversion failed, and the same happened if the was less than a minute left as well, so while the time window to act was not really small, it was still important to act within the "active" 4 minutes.

Learning all this took us until Dialday last week, or day 12 after we started working on our idea of using Mystic Ice as a basis for our evolution object. Carl and Sibel did mention that our progress was actually quite smooth and that we could have taken much longer than that if we had been unlucky.

On Kyoday, we then tried to use the successfully created Mystic Ice in different experiments to create our evolution trigger, but all of them failed to pass the screening phase.

I usually did not "work" during the weekends, due to my internship following the school system's schedule, but I volunteered for "work" on most Kyodays for the duration of our Eevee research project, and I was planning to do so unless something else came up.

Regardless, today was Grouday, so we had the day off. Or rather our Eevee research lab was closed on Groudays, so no one could work even if they wanted to. That was a policy set by the professor to keep his researchers from actively overworking themselves since that seemed to be a genuine problem for some.

The only way to go around that was to get the approval from Professor Oak himself, and there was no way he would do so without a good reason, such as a time-sensitive/critical experiment that was in progress.

None of us had such an experiment, so we all had the day off, and while some actually complained, I used the time to spend some quality time with my Pokemon. Besides, tomorrow was not only the start of a new week but also of a new month, and I wanted to start the new month fully energized, which was why spending time with my Pokemon was important.

That was exactly why I was playing tag with Togepi and the juniors right now, while a majority of the seniors were watching. Our audience was cheering Togepi on since she was the hunter right now, and we had all long since learned that positive encouragement like this helped motivate our little egg by quite a bit.

She did her best and actually managed to catch half of us which was pretty good considering that her speed was her weakest point. Still, her performance showed that all the hard work seemed to pay off. Ok, some might have not given their all while escaping, but that was okay since they made sure Togepi had to work to capture them.

In fact, her enthusiasm during the game seemed to have helped her take the last step because while I was patting her head, injecting some of my aura into her to help her recover from all that running, she actually moved up to the (high) iron stage.

Her agility parameter had been holding her back, but our game of tag and the subsequent recovery seemed to have finally pushed her agility to C. Moreover, Togepi was not the only one that made some progress that day as a result of one of our games.

Anubis/Riolu actually completed his second round of limit-breaking as a result of the effort he put into our tug-of-war game. I had managed to divide the two sides in such a way that we ended up in an epic stalemate that lasted for nearly ten minutes, before the favor slightly tilted to the right team.

They ended up winning, and after checking out Anubis as I had done to anyone that I helped recover, I saw why. His endurance rose to SS, giving him a small second wind, which helped tilt the situation in their favor. I naturally gave him a few head pats and some praise for the effort he put in.

With this, Anubis had also started the last step before his breakthrough to the silver stage, and since his strength was already at SSS, he had already covered the first bit from the get-go.

Anyway, aside from those two lucky events the rest of the day passed with us simply having some fun, while otherwise relaxing. I did call my parents after dinner, simply to catch up a bit, but I ended up hearing some surprising news.

Apparently, the three acquaintances of dad that I had hired as security guards for the orphanage building had come over today since their work officially began tomorrow, and dad had shown them in. He told me that he was going to meet them all tomorrow once more to introduce them to the construction workers since they would be seeing each other for roughly a week until the playground and greenery project was finished.

I naturally thanked dad for taking care of that in my stead, but he waved me off by saying that I could leave such trivialities to him. I did not know if it was because she did not want to be left out, but mom chimed in as well and told me that she had already prepared an assortment of flower seeds for the green area of the property once the grassy part was ready.

I obviously thanked her as well for her considerate thoughts since I was sure that flowers would raise the ambiance of the place by at least half a level. Flowers and plants tended to have such an effect if planted well enough. Just because no one was going to stay there for a while did not mean that the place could not look good.

Anyway, I ended our call by promising them that I would come home for a visit next Grouday. That would let me see them and I could handle the talk as well as payment of the construction company since the current project was supposed to end at that point.

Well, there was not much to say about the rest of the evening since me and my fam simply lazed around until it was time for us to sleep. However, the next morning, nothing of that laziness could be found on my face. On the contrary, I was bursting with energy.

Arcday did not only welcome the new month, and the new week, but it was also the day we began a new round of experiments based on our Mystic Ice. Well, or we would have if we had not used up our last batch on Kyoday, so we first had to create a new batch, which took 6 hours.

Thankfully we could create a lot of Mystic Ice at once, so we ended up with 20 Mystic Ice pieces after the first 6 hours passed. We obviously did not simply laze around while waiting but discussed which materials we should use in conjunction with the Mystic Ice to create our evolution triggers.

Still, I suggested that we should just use the rest of our day to create another batch of Mystic Ice instead of directly starting with our experiment so that we could directly start with our experiments tomorrow and keep going for at least the rest of the week since 40 Mystic Ice pieces should theoretically hold out until Kyoday as long as we kept the number of actual tests per day to 8.

So, we ended up spending the first day of the new month shoring up on Mystic Ice. I used the second 6-hour period to speak with James for a while, to get an idea of the progress of the other groups, both in our Glaceon project, as well as the Leafeon project.

The other groups of our Glaceon project had not managed to achieve any substantial success yet, aside from those previous evolution objects that worked but ended up costing nearly as much as the original method. The first group was currently basing their experiments on the Icy Rock, while the second group was actually using the D-Class Ice Stone as the base for their experiments.

The second group wanted to see if they could influence the Ice Stone in such a fashion, that it could trigger the evolution of an Eevee to a Glaceon just like a B-Class Ice Stone could. So, they had simply moved on from using B-Class Ice Stone shards to using actual D-Class Ice Stones for their experiments.

Seeing how the previous one had managed to produce successful results, even if the cost made them practically useless, there was a not insignificant chance for their current approach to work as well.

The big question was if they could succeed while keeping the cost on the down low since the D-Class Ice Stone itself was already costly enough. Our goal was to produce something below the six-digit range if possible, or at least not go too much above that.

As for the Leafeon group, they also had some successful cases, but those were similarly too expensive to fulfill the actual target, so they were still searching for the right combination/object as well.

James did not want to mention what the Leafeon groups were working on right now, and I did not insist on seeing his attitude. Still, it was good to know how the others were doing, and I made sure to share the info I gained with my two group members as well.

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