Years Go By

The week after coming back home was a joyous one. I and mom weren't the only ones having dinner and we both loved the company brought by the two girls. Mom would spoil both of them, and sometimes, I do admit I got jealous of all the attention the girls, particularly Serena, were getting. Well, girls are a mystery so I left them to their means and enjoyed the diversity in our life brought by the visitors.

Being free, Cynthia and Serena decided to do things to get themselves busy and both of them tried their hands at various stuff. For example, cooking. Man, that was an ordeal. For 3 days straight, breakfast was made by the girls instead of mom. Serena was Ok with some simple things but being the little girl she was, she couldn't do much. Cynthia however was a disaster. The food looked nothing like any food I knew of. A single bite and I was out of action for the day. I had to depend on a Chansey to make something edible for us. I was impressed by Cynthia's strong heart as she still declared to become a cooking champion apart from the Pokemon Champion she wanted to be. Things got normal after three days as she decided to get more practice before serving others.

Both of them then proceeded to try their hand at music. I think Cynthia had used all her luck in getting beauty and her trainer's talent as saying she wasn't good at music would be an understatement. She was outright horrible at music, so much so that Mom had to come from the restaurant to tell us to stop as customers were getting scared by the loud noise. Cynthia looked a little disappointed, but I guess she realized that music was not her cup of tea. For the stubborn person she is, I was outright amazed at how she gave up so quickly.

Serena proved to be a talent in music. She was able to play beautiful pieces on a small violin. Her talent for playing drums, however, was beyond genius. As I and Serena practiced, I saw that her energy while beating the drums was beyond limits. I knew beforehand that drums are something that seems easy but require tremendous efforts as you need tremendous muscular strength for it. However, Serena, holding her sticks felt like she had the powers of a Super Saiyan. Coupled with that she sang something in a very angelic voice. Truly, sometimes passion can enable anyone to do the craziest of things. Maybe that's why Serena never found her calling in the anime. I was quite happy for her.

However, every holiday must come to an end and surely, came the day of their departure. On Saturday, we received Serena's mom, Grace in our restaurant. She was quite happy to see her daughter bubbling about in our restaurant. Serena then took her courage to declare.

"Mom! I found out what I want to be. I'm not going to be a Rhyhorn racer. I want to be someone even more amazing."

Grace-"Oh really! What is even more amazing than a racer? Not a trainer I believe."

Serena-"No! I want to be a pokemon musician and singer!"

Grace-"What's that? I haven't heard of anything like that!"

Serena-"Then I'll be the first to be one! I want to be able to call and calm down pokemon with my music. I want to have that experience again. This time by myself!"

Grace was confused and asked my mom about the incident Serena was referring to.

Mom just smiled and told her that we'd show her in the evening.

In the evening we met up with Professor Carolina, who had arrived earlier and had been in some meeting with other Professors at Professor Oak's lab. As luck would have it, Gible was sitting on Cynthia's shoulders, just like my Pichu. Professor Carolina was quite pleased to see Cynthia's change. All of us had dinner in the restaurant and then went to Professor Oak's ranch.

This time it was me and Serena together and we started to play a piece I loved a lot. It was the 'Town of Kyre' from an anime. Just like the forest, all the pokemon from the ranch started joining us and in the end, it became an all-out concert with pokemon.

Serena-"This is who I wanna be mom!"

Grace-"I never knew my little princess could play so well!"

She smothered Serena with hugs and kisses.

Professor Carolina-"That was eye-opening. It really can become a good profession."

Cynthia could be seen acting so proud as if she was the one playing the music.

Well, came the next day when the girls departed towards their home.

Serena-"I'll practice playing music with pokemon. Please remember me and call me sometimes."

I assured her and told her that I would visit her hometown during my journey.

Cynthia-"Don't forget about me too! I'll become Sinnoh's champion. I'll wait for you to come to Sinnoh. You owe me a battle!"

Me-"I'll keep in contact with both of you. I won't forget any of you"

I took out a string and a hat. Both of them were attached to one Ho-oh's feather each.

"These are symbols that we had that adventure together. Take care both of you.."

Me/Cynthia/Serena-"Until we meet again"

Both of them then departed with their guardians, Cynthia with Professor Carolina and Serena with Grace.

After their departure, I started training in serious mode. Firstly I checked if I could use the multi-shadow clone Jutsu as a cheat to go OP. To my disappointment, I could have many clones to do random stuff, but training could be done by only one clone. No matter how strong my body was, it was still a normal human body and not some overpowered shinobi bloodline body. I even couldn't use clones to practice aura and psychic independently. In the end, the only silver lining was that I could use a clone to practice, i.e., I could do other stuff while my clone trained. Also, I could use a lot of clones to study in the library. Since my brain was developed by the library to advanced levels, I could take the mental load of a large input of information from the clones. Secondly, I could use my clones to train Pichu, Growlithe, Bodhi, and Ekans independently. Also, I could use my clones to do a lot of different stuff. As Ho-oh had advised I incorporated music into our training and yes the results were better. Not like becoming overpowering, but yes, in the long run, the extra results would become huge advancements.

I started a bit of serious training with all my pokemon. Now I had started using gravity rings on myself as well as the pokemon. Ekans was the weakest but he also improved the fastest due to shedding skin. I trained Ekans to have a tough and strong body. He was able to body slam boulders without much pain. Obviously he wasn't able to blow them yet, but the basic work of strengthening his body had been done. Growlithe was working on fine air and fire control. I believed that control of power is very essential in becoming strong. Pichu was being trained by battling me. His control of electricity had now been saturated and had reached the limit of his tiny body. Thus I started giving him lessons in hand to hand combat. Apart from this, I set aside two hours daily for aura training for them.

Apart from the training, I would often go to the forest to play my flute, as I had promised Ho-oh. Sometimes he came down to me, sometimes he didn't. I took my Mom once, to the forest on a picnic once and Ho-oh showed up at that time. I don't know why I played the same piece that made me see the life of Oracion again. At the end of it, I could see Mom in tears. She didn't cry but she went to Ho-oh and gave it a hug before petting him. She was petting a legendary pokemon's head.

Well, no wonder that mom's motherly instincts had kicked in. Ho-oh didn't seem to mind and in fact, I could feel that he was enjoying it. I could somehow guess why Ho-oh enjoyed it. Legendaries like him are born immortal. They don't have parents. Only their duties. So they haven't experienced parental love. I didn't destroy their moment and finally, after letting go of Ho-oh, mom gave me a very tight hug, "I'm proud of you Ash. I'm proud to be your mom."

I still don't know why she said it but I cherished it. My mom promised Ho-oh to bring food next time we came for a visit.

Thus started our meetings with Rain, known to the world as Ho-oh.

Two years passed by in a flash. The training had yielded awesome results. I had fine-tuned my aura and psychic control as well as my martial training. I could use almost all the weapons I remembered from my previous life and could use aura to construct them while controlling them with psychic independently.

Pichu had evolved to Pikachu 1 year after the camp. We kept training together and he started on increasing the amount of electricity discharged. Owing to aura training, he was able to use moves like aura punch, aura sphere, and aura tail, apart from focus punch, brick break, iron tail, and sonic tackle. The sonic tackle was a very high-speed tackle developed by Pikachu himself. He became quite fast and packed quite a punch even without using electricity type moves. But his progress with increasing the amount of electricity had become quite slow. So after half a year, I checked if he was eligible to use a legacy crystal and was excited to discover that he was eligible to assimilate Laxus Dreyer's legacy crystal. Laxus Dreyer had been a powerhouse in Fairy Tail and was quite an awesome Dragonslayer. Pikachu inherited his slayer powers and his limit for electricity advanced a bit. I was disappointed that the increase in power was not much and my cheat had failed. However, Pikachu was amazed and quite happy with the information he got for the legacy crystal. He still needed those cheek pouches for electricity release, but now he could control it from any part of his body and make constructs from it. We later discovered that he could absorb lightning, just like lightning rod ability, which would give a permanent increase in the amount of electricity packed in his body. After that, I started to go out during thunderstorms to absorb lightning and Pikachu started getting a true powerhouse.

Growlithe had quite a progress. He now had almost perfect control of his fire and wind. He was able to learn almost the entire fire moveset from anime and also learned moves like brick break, earthquake, and focus punch. His advancements with wind control were terrifying. He could release air blades, air shots, air blasts, sonic claws, supersonic tackle, drill tackle, aerial drill, and some others. With aura training, he was now able to casually run on water and had developed a very powerful move. Combining aura and wind we were able to come up with a move similar to 'Windscar' from anime Inuyasha. This move gave me a lot of inspiration as it had been developed without any legacy crystal, so I was a bit proud of it. His flames also had a very awesome lethality to it. He could easily change the temperature of flames by varying the air-fuel ratio and the pressure. He was now working on making plasmablasts. I checked him again if he could assimilate a legacy crystal but he still wasn't able to assimilate one yet.

Two surprises arrived almost immediately after the camp. The two eggs mom gave me, hatched into two cute eevees. Both of them were bundles of cuteness mixed with naughtiness. Both of them were born pranksters. However, one of them was a bubbly childish prankster, while the other one had a cunning element added to him. I was very certain that the cunning one had a ghostly ancestry. Pranksters they were, but both of them would become the sweetest and most innocent kids in the world in front of mom. Their addition added quite a lot of liveliness to our family. Everyone welcomed the kids to our family. They also started training after one year. The bubbly Eevee grew quite close to Growlithe. while the great prankster Eevee remained a prankster for everyone.

Ekans, being the late addition to the team, had been quite weak initially, but, owing to the shedding ability, progressed the fastest. He became quite big and finally evolved into a huge Arbok. He stood at 6 meters long, almost double the size of his parents. He was able to strike a deal home with a legacy crystal accepting him. He received the legacy crystal of Eric, the poison dragon slayer. Like Pikachu, he didn't get much of a power boost directly, but he could now be strengthened with eating poisons, which I could easily get. However, since his evolution had been recent, there hadn't been much progress as of yet.

Bodhi became really powerful with the training she did. She became able to use aura and psychic simultaneously. However, there was a limit to the size of the aura construct as well as to the range. Independently, both aura and psychic control had advanced to a great degree, with aura control almost reaching perfection. She, like Growlithe, could walk over water very casually. Since she could control her aura and psychic I decided to move onto the next part of her training, which was heal pulse, fighting techniques, and finally cosmic powers. While heal pulse and fighting techniques came easily, due to reference being available, Cosmic powers were hard as I knew nothing about them. Still, taking my image of cosmology into consideration, I thought of using moves similar to the cosmological phenomena. We were able to make some progress and developed moves like a meteor shower, gravity crash, solar storm, and solar flare. These moves were very strong by themselves and using my memories of a certain anime, we developed a move 'meteor' which enabled Bodhi to become like a meteor and remove her only disadvantage-speed. Being an elephant Bodhi was quite slow and having such a move under her belt was very helpful. The time limit of the meteor needed working as she could only sustain it for 5 seconds. Cosmic moves were very powerful, but also very taxing.

As for myself, as I had started utilizing my library, I accumulated a lot of knowledge about engineering and technology and started working on a time chamber. I didn't need a gravity chamber as I had gravity rings for now and Bodhi for increasing the gravity later. I had not only to study a lot for it, but I also had to accumulate materials using my exchange feature, but the materials required for it were very demanding and through the course of 2 years I could only manage to get about 50% of the materials required. It took me 1 whole year, even with the clones to study that technology.

As work for the time chamber was progressing slowly, I was able to accumulate enough data to publicize my findings on pokemon food and taste preference according to their type and their effect on growth. As I had taken data from the real pokemon, I was confident in proposing my theory and confronted Professor Oak with it. He was quite amazed to see my work and helped me in publicizing it to the pokemon scientific community. Not only that but after the musical stint with Rain, I had also started working on the relation between music and Pokemon and was able to get a good result from it. I documented the type of music and its effect on the type of pokemon. Both of these researches were welcomed very warmly by the scientific community. I had however removed any data pertaining to the calming effect on wild pokemon. The research was solely upon the increased effects of training when coupled with music. Why? Because I didn't want people like Giovanni to know the methods of coaxing legendaries. I was able to achieve my goal of becoming a pokemon researcher. I wanted that title to have the restraints on my number of pokemon to be removed. How could I train pokemon if I had to send them to Professor Oak?

Apart from all these, JB (Jenny) had received her Growlithe egg, which she often brought home whenever she came to play over. Although I couldn't train her Growlithe, I did wish to have her Growlithe become strong. So, whenever she came over, I would request Bodhi to feed her egg with all his energies. The egg hatched after about half a year and the Growlithe became an underling of my Growlithe. It became a bit confusing with two Growlithe's so I decided to name mine 'Kaze', the Japanese word for Wind. Pikachu also expressed his desire to get named and I named him 'Bolt'. Both of them appeared pleased with their names. Back to the story, since JB's Growlithe became Kaze's underling, Kaze sometimes trained him. This made JB quite happy as she didn't have much knowledge about training pokemon. As she had a very strong dream to be a Pokemon Ranger, I told her to get trained as well as Rangers often had to rely on their own physique. I often trained along with her and taught her about aura as well. BTW I called her JB as her name was the same as her mother so to avoid confusion, I gave her a nickname, which, she took a liking to, as it made her look apart from her Officer Jenny lineage. I also sometimes took her to my musical performance in the wild and she also had the luck to meet Rain. JB was like a kid who saw her hero on seeing Ho-oh in person. Ho-oh also took a liking to her and she also got a feather from Ho-oh.

After the passage of two years, I was anxiously waiting for my birthday, not for the birthday itself, but I would now meet someone whom I wanted to meet.

Next time-

The long-awaited meeting