CH73 (687), Let’s Ignore That For Now

The next morning started off the second week of the 19th month, which was important because my 15th birthday was this Dialday. The setup and everything was already done, and the party would be held in Hoenn, which now felt a bit of a waste since I was already back on the mainland, so holding the party back in Hope Town would have been easier for everyone involved.

Unfortunately, as far as I knew, most if not all of my friends had already booked their transportation to Hoenn as well as their accommodation for the night since my visit to Mt.Silver only became a thing after everything regarding my birthday party had been organized. I had no idea if they could still cancel the reservations they made without making a loss, but I still decided to post the question to our group chat.

After I did that, I chose to stick around in Rosewood City for the next few hours to wait for the answers to my question. I did that just in case they ended up deciding that holding the party in Hope Town would be better for everyone and that the change would have no negative consequences for anyone. In the end, they held a vote and it was decided through a vast majority that the birthday party would take place in Hoenn, so after strolling around in Rosewood City for nearly three hours, I began my trip back to Lilycove City.

I chose to rehire the lady who brought me to Rosewood City in the first place, and after another 6 to 7-minute trip involving 4 jumps/teleportations, I was back in Lilycove City. Also, this time around I made sure to open an invisible portal to Utopia each time we stopped after a jump so that all my Pokemon capable of Teleport could memorize the coordinates of the rest points. This way we would be able to do the trip from Hoenn to the mainland by ourselves.

Anyway, there were still 3.5 days until Dialday, and I decided to spend that time inside Utopia with my Pokemon. The plan was to get better acquainted with Larvitar and spend more time with Munchlax as well as everyone else while also directly supervising their training, at least of the ones that were allowed to train. Munchlax would simply have to accompany me and watch the others as a mascot.

Larvitar's training like everyone else's training was split into two parts. The first one focused solely on improving his parameters, while the second one focused on his moves. For Larvitar the first training focused on his Agility since that along with his energy capacity was currently his worst parameter. Nonetheless, we could train his energy capacity during the second part as well, which was why Larvitar was currently running through an obstacle course. Once we were done with his agility training I would have him work on learning Dig to add another ground-type move to his repertoire.

The others received similar guidance from me, and I actually used my thought streams to control a simple earth body to preside over three Pokemon at once. I was happy that everyone's training was on track. Horus/Xatu was close to raising Substitute to advanced mastery which should be enough for our plan to create a literal Shadow Clone move by combining Double Team and Substitute, at least that was the plan. We had to see if those two moves would suffice to create a proper Shadow Clone or rather a Multiple Shadow Clone move, but for now I, no, we were optimistic.

Tatsumaki/Alakazam was interested in our plan as well and had contributed some ideas on the matter, but she was working on her own combo move that was actually inspired by a full-fledged Legendary, namely Hoopa. She got the idea into her head to try and re-create Hoopa's "signature" move Hyperspace Hole ever since I told them the "tale" about Hoopa and the battle between legends.

For now, she was trying to incorporate elements of Teleport, Gravity, and Cosmic Power into her own version of Hyperspace Hole, but the best she/we've managed so far was to have my observe acknowledge her effort, which at least showed that what she was trying to do was not impossible and that she was on the right track.

Compared to those two, having Mothra/Butterfree focus on learning Imprison to make use of her massive move pool was child's play. It was unfortunate that the only member of our family who actually knew Imprison was still in a temporal coma, but with Baltoy unable to provide live demonstrations of the move for Mothra, she had to learn the move the classic way, through descriptions, video examples, and practical attempts. Still, despite that, I was sure that Mothra would be able to learn Imprison within a week. Besides, learning moves the classic way on occasion was good for Mothra since it gave her a much more fulfilling experience.

Meanwhile, Optimus/Butterfree was trying to master Hurricane and Silver Wind to elevate his offensive options. Unfortunately, unlike his boss, Optimus could not just go around and suddenly learn the combo moves of others, so he was working hard on accomplishing the same the hard/classic way. All in all, everyone was working hard on mastering their old moves or expanding their move pools, while also working on their parameters so that they could eventually break through to the next stage since that was something that none of us/them could afford to neglect because ultimately their stage had the biggest impact on their power and lives.

It was a fundamental truth that the Stage of a Pokemon was its Hardware, while its moves and energy manipulations were its software. No matter how great the Software was, if it was limited by the Hardware, the Software would only be able to produce limited output. Conversely, if the Software sucked, parts, maybe even big parts of the Hardware's prowess would go to waste. My Pokemon knew that, they had internalized that, which is why they/we always made sure to work on both aspects to the best of our abilities.

The day passed just like that and before I knew it, we had passed our usual dinner time by nearly two hours. It was already 8:30 p.m., so I finally decided that enough was enough and began to take out everything we needed for dinner before calling everyone over to eat. Despite the breaks we had taken between each session, we still had trained for nearly 9 hours today, so I felt that a movie night would be a good way to finish the day.

Once everyone had gathered, I told them the news, and they cheered happily. I saw Larvitar join them despite feeling confused about why the others were so excited and had to smile. We discussed over dinner what we should watch, and we settled on watching Lilo&Stitch the series. I had shown them the movie and they wanted to know if there were any more Lilo&Stitch movies, so I told them about the series. Once they heard about the series, they all wanted to see it.

I saw Squirtle excitedly telling Larvitar and Munchlax, who were the only ones that had not seen the movie, about the plot of Lilo&Stitch. I made sure to put that into my mental folder along with the other adorable moments I had witnessed so far.

Anyway, after dinner was over, we cleaned up before I brought out snacks and drinks for our movie night. I also brought out a bunch of beanie bags of various sizes for everyone to comfortably settle on before streaming the first episode of Lilo&Stitch the series into the sky without worrying about Disney and any copyright claims seeing how we were separated by multiple dimensions/universe clusters or whatever. If they couldn't sue Schpielbunk for Arcanine King, they could do jack sh*t to me.

Unsurprisingly, everyone loved the first episode and we swiftly moved on to the second one, the third one, and the fourth. We only stopped watching after the tenth episode and I was pretty sure the others would have loved to continue binging episodes, but it was already past midnight. We still had to train tomorrow, so I put my foot down and ended the movie night at this point, though I promised them that we would continue tomorrow night, or tonight I guess seeing how it was already passed midnight.

Mewday went pretty much the same way as the day before, and just as I had promised, we continued watching Lilo&Stitch after our belated dinner. We once again binge-watched 10 episodes before I declared that we were going to continue the next time. I had to say that the anticipation for movie night, or more specifically for Lilo&Stitch certainly seemed to motivate everyone during training since they were even more enthusiastic during their training than they had been during the first day.

I honestly expected Giratiday to go the same way, but an hour after lunch an unexpected but definitely welcome deviation happened. Tatsumaki/Alakazam approached me and requested that I check her status sheet. Knowing what this request meant, I naturally immediately did as asked, and it turned out that Tatsumaki did successfully complete her limit-breaking phase.

I naturally directly shared the good news with her before doing the same for everyone else through UtopiaFM. After the announcement we all moved to Tatsumaki's place, where we proceeded to wait 20 minutes for everyone who wanted to be present to arrive. Tatsumaki was not in a hurry so I did not bother rushing anyone and neither did I send out Teleporters to bring them over to speed things up.

We simply used the time to talk about her upcoming breakthrough. We knew that her potential was slated to reach the next grade, and Tatsumaki said that she was looking forward to joining the Aurora club. Attaining light aurora potential naturally meant unlocking a third ability, and Tatsumaki as an Alakazam was slated to unlock Inner Focus as her third ability. We had already talked about this before, but she once again honestly admitted that she was a bit disappointed that her third ability was going to be Inner Focus.

It was not because she thought that Inner Focus was useless since it was a decent enough ability, it was just that she had pretty much achieved all its effects aside from the flinching preventing one through her own efforts, so the only thing Inner Focus would bring to the table was its ability to prevent flinching, which was useful but a bit underwhelming. Still, even if she was complaining, Tatsumaki had come to terms with the fact that she would get Inner Focus as her new ability, so after grumbling about it for a bit we moved on to another topic.

That topic was her current favorite subject, namely her recent move project, Hyperspace Hole. She excitedly talked about her most recent progress and any new ideas she had come up with on how to improve her attempts. Eventually, she asked a question that threw me into a momentary loop, because I had completely disregarded the very real possibility of the scenario taking place. Tatsumaki posed a innocent but eager question, she wanted to know if I thought Hoopa might come over to take a look at things if she managed to actually use Hyperspace Hole, considering that it was Hoopa's signature move.

I was taken aback since I had disregarded that possibility until now. I had not considered this at all and frankly, the chance of that happening was not all that small. Everything I knew about Hoopa told me that it was a curious and mischievous Pokemon/Legendary, at least in its bound state, so there was a real possibility that a successful Hyperspace Hole from a non-Hoopa would attract its attention, and from there it was not a big jump to it wanting to see the individual that used it's signature move for itself.

I was not sure if I wanted to see Hoopa show up in front of me someday and I definitely did not want to think about it right now, so I simply told Tatsumaki that it was possible before changing the topic to something different.

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