C056 - Gligar evolves

As soon as the moon was seen through the clouds after the sun had set, Gligar, who was... chewing Dragonair's tooth began to softly glow. Jasmine held both her hands to her chest with teary eyes, excited for her friend to get the evolution it wanted so much.

Meanwhile, Elm was running circles around the pokemon, excitedly shouting everything he saw so it would get recorded in the video. Valentino and Pete were simply watching with wry smiles at Elm's antics.

"So it's highly likely nighttime that's required, but the dragon tooth is 50:50... between Elm's encouragement and her earlier actions of stabbing and cutting herself, it could be anything. If it's sharpness a Gligar needs to understand, why not give it a kitchen knife or a scyther claw instead of a precious sharp dragon fang," Pete mused.

Valentino looked at the Gliscor that was now taller than them when standing on her tail, and he added, "You know, I've been to many regions, but I've never seen a Gliscor. Whatever it is, it's fairly rare to happen in the wild."

Pete felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to Jasmine.

"Thank you so much," the shy girl spoke before giving him a big kiss on the cheek and running toward Gliscor.

The two held hands and claws and danced and jumped around a little to celebrate the success. Though, a few moments later, Jasmine froze on the spot and looked to Pete with a wooden expression.

"Is it still recording?" She asked with a shaky whisper.

Pete could only nod, which rapidly drained all the color from her face before her cheeks turned red.

"No worries, I'll edit that part out for everyone else when we send in the data," Pete quickly offered with a warm smile.

"Thank y- wait! Everyone else? So you'll keep a copy?"

"Of course, it is my prerogative as your boyfriend to keep stuff like that," Pete defended with a cheeky grin.

Valentino gave Pete two thumbs up and retreated after grabbing Elm's collar and dragging the man inside.

"B-boyfriend?"

"Yeah. I mean I like you very much and you like me enough to let me kiss you, so... we're girlfriend and boyfriend for now?" Pete suggested with his signature warm smile.

"Un!" Jasmine replied with a nod and walked over to give Pete a long kiss before releasing him with a warm smile of her own.

"I can see Gliscor grinning, but don't keep her waiting too long," Pete chided with another quick peck before releasing the girl.

The next morning, Pete was enjoying a cup of milk while watching over his farm with a blissful smile. Like so often these days, he was outside barefoot and training his ground affinity, so he quickly found three pokemon walking straight toward him from the river.

There were the two bridges spanning over 'Spice Island' and allowing people and pokemon alike to cross the river safely, though Pete had tasked Golurk with creating a bridge further down the river to cut down the distance you had to walk to reach the crops field Pete had planted at the beach front.

When he looked in the direction his senses reported the newcomers in, Pete shook his head because his eyes counted four, not three pokemon. Golurk, despite its massive size, was still able to hide from his ground sensing. The giant golem had told him via psychic link that his training was only over once he could see him, too.

It would take a while, but that's what he had in this world, time. Pete looked forward to spending so much time with his pokemon.

"Are you done with your special training? You two certainly grew quite a bit," Pete shouted to the newcomers.

One of them sped up to sprint to Pete and nuzzle at his leg.

"Thanks for taking so much of your time to train these two, Vileplume," Pete said in greetings to the oldest Vileplume he had seen yet.

Pete softly petted the head around the plant that grew out of Turtwig's head. And asked him how his last days were spent.

Two weeks ago, this old Vileplume offered to train Jasmine's and Pete's Turtwig all the grass moves it knew. Apparently, Torterra were revered among grass type pokemon, especially long-standing, peaceful tribes like the Vileplume tribe. Since Torterra was called the 'continent pokemon' in Oak's pokedex, Pete could think of a few ways why this pokemon was so popular.

Pete had recently learned how he could pump his typing energy into his pokemon at a very slow pace to feel out their overall health, state of exhaustion, and growth in their own respective affinity. Sadly, it only worked for pokemon with the appropriate typing energy, but that was better than nothing.

It was only after Turtwig had left, so he had no reference point, but he was quite excited to find that he was even more powerful than Snivy, the little battle maniac.

Technically, Turtwig was a little older than the 'freshly hatched' Snivy, but Snivy's growth was nothing to scoff at because the little grass snake ate more Leppa Berries relative to its size than any of his other pokemon so he can keep training longer.

He had seen the training it had concocted with Nidoking the other day. Nidoking would use Rock Blast non-stop to aim at Snivy, who would either dodge, hit it with a Razor Leaf mid-air, or swat the supercharged pebbles with a Vine Whip. The two also experimented with poison type moves because when Pete found the Nidorino back in the forests of Violet City, it only knew one poison move, Poison Sting.

These days, the two found out how to use the move Toxic, and were slowly getting the hang of both Sludge and Venoshock with Pete's tips. Nidoking had also grasped Toxic Spikes after the Ariados battles with Steelix using Stealth Rock over and over again, but Snivy couldn't do it with his meager poison type reserves.

Instead, Snivy had grasped some dragon moves during his short tutelage under Dragonair and had concentrated on expanding his move pool like that.

'Hmm, both Turtwig and Snivy have very solid foundations and crazy wide movepools. I could speed up their evolutions with the few Leaf Stones I have just lying around. The adventure group found two of them so far and since Celebi lives in the forest, I'm sure those won't be the last,' Pete mused while listening to Turtwig and Vileplume recounting the days of training.

After the Vileplume left, Pete fixed the two Turtwigs a hearty breakfast and decided to follow through with his plan.

First, without Jasmine knowing, he taught both Turtwigs Dig through a TM to give them a deeper understanding of ground type energy. Then, he took out three smaller Leaf Stones and handed them to the two Turtwig and Snivy and told them to place them where ever they were sleeping.

Evolution with the help of evolution stones was possible for every pokemon with the appropriate typing, but some pokemon simply had special reactions to certain stones. These were the pokemon that evolved through stones in the game mostly. They didn't need these stones strictly speaking, but their evolution bottle-neck would be much higher without. Just like how there was no Sun Stone anywhere near the Evergreen Meadow, from what Pete could tell, but there were still plenty Bellossoms.

Since the three pokemon had received proper training, he had no issue hurrying along their evolution.

Done with that, Pete searched for the two Minccino. The two sisters had recently asked him for a treehouse to play in which he happily constructed and hung up on the Heart Tree. After all, that tree signified home.

He even made it a little bigger than necessary because of their evolution. The treehouse looked a little out of place with its size on the still growing tree, but Pete didn't mind.

The tree would still be growing anyway. And much much larger than any other berry tree if he had anything to say about it.

After playing around for a while with the two Minccino, Pete walked over to a sort of outdoor sports stadium Golurk had built.

His two Timburr were very sad that the construction of the farm house was over so fast. They were only happy when swinging around their heavy wooden logs or lifting heavy stuff. But lifting stuff with no purpose got boring really fast for them.

To alleviate their boredom, Pete had introduced his pokemon to a few sports he thought they would like. Even rock-paper-scissors was a big hit after all.

The Timburrs' favorite so far was golf! They would swing their logs at rounded rocks and shoot them toward the lake. That's right, they only cared about distance, not actually hitting a particular goal or hole.

Their second favorite game was a very weird fusion of baseball and cricket where the pitcher was allowed to hit the ball back if he was fast enough. Yet again, the two Timburr hardly cared for points. They only cared for accurately hitting the rock balls as hard as possible.

Even Zorua and Growlithe, who joined in that particular game most often, didn't really care. All they wanted to do is fetch the ball.

As he stepped closer, he once more admonished himself what a stupid idea it was to have taught them the olympic version of javelin and hammer throw. It was a great way to train their rock affinity by making something other than a round ball, but the immediate vicinity turned absolutely deadly. Them being only allowed to throw in one particular direction didn't help much. Their strength increased daily.

'I'll have to change the rules and have them hit targets instead of simply tossing them as far as possible. Even golf could potentially kill a random fish pokemon in the lake that was unlucky enough to swim past,' Pete thought to himself as his forehead gathered a little sweat.

'Are targets enough? Probably not. They'll want to measure who threw harder... steel targets with varying thickness,then? Can Klink provide enough of them in a day without exhausting himself?'