CH140 (504), Bottomless Pit

Well, Mothra/Butterfree's breakthrough and the developments that followed mostly ended on the same day. I said mostly since I had to deal with a few journalists who had heard about it and called me because they wanted to write a piece on us.

As the professor had said, I was the youngest documented person to raise a Pokemon to the dark gold stage in alliance history. Well, some of them said alliance while some said human history, but all of them were referring to the last few thousand years.

Their choice of words aside, I told them that I had no plans for any interviews. The ones I had to do for the Ursa papers had been enough for me for quite some time. Obviously, my refusal was not enough to discourage any of the reporters and they simply used the latest intel they had along with some of the public knowledge on my Pokemon to release an article on me anyway.

By the end of the week, I had read 4 such articles and by the end of the following week, that number rose to 12. None of them had anything negative to say about me. In fact, the majority of the pieces were positive with only 3 of them being relatively neutral, so I simply let them be.

Thankfully, no more articles followed after the second week of publications, so week four was as calm as it could get, at least on the publication front. My friends had decided that they really enjoyed teasing me in our group chat using quotes from some of the articles, and the stop of new articles did not stop them from teasing me for another week or so.

Quotes like "future of Kanto", "rising star of the alliance", "model of the new generation", "future of the Alliance", "prospective Professor", and "Aspiring Professor" were just some of the quotes they kept posting, and while each quote was rather flattering, one could only hear, or in this case read them so many times before it started grating on one's nerves.

Thankfully, it seemed that they had their fill by the time the month's last week came around. Just in time as well since I was coming dangerously close to declaring a prank war on them, so they unknowingly dodged a bullet there.

Though I did make a note to keep an eye out for any public news on them so that I could tease them back when the time came. Jessie was the only exception to that since I had teased her for a solid week or two when she had become a hit/success on PoryTom.

Anyway, the important bit was that they finally stopped, which allowed me to greet the new/11th month peacefully. Well, that peace swiftly ended up giving way to some excitement on Grouday, which was pretty much the whole first week of the new month because it was one of those months that were 6 weeks long and had two single-day "weeks".

Anyway, Grouday gave me some rather pleasant news or more like I saw something rather pleasing during the weekly check-up. It seemed like Stan/Gyarados had managed to raise his agility to SSS during the week, which left his energy capacity as the only parameter that stood between him and the completion of his limit-breaking phase.

Only a few more months, and he would be able to break through to the dark gold stage as well. Stan had finally managed to squeeze ahead of Horus/Xatu in that matter, but frankly, that was not really surprising since he had better racial values than Horus along with a slightly higher potential.

Though admittedly, Horus was not that far off from Stan in completing his limit-breaking phase. He was only short two SSS parameters right now, so he was currently in the same situation as Stan had been before his agility rose to the next grade

In that vein, it was not wrong to say that Horus was not too far off from reaching the dark gold stage as well. Everyone else was still a year or more away from that point. The closest to the Top 3 were the rest of the Slytherin Six members, and they could be considered to have barely started the final round of their limit breaking with a single SSS parameter each.

Yeah, they were going to need a while before they could complete their limit-breaking phase. Regardless, Stan and Horus were on the ball, and I was really hoping that the genuine Utopia upgrade I was waiting for would happen with Stan's breakthrough.

I had made sure to show none of my disappointment when the only improvement to Utopia was the size increase to Mothra's habitat, but that upgrade was really making me wait for it, and I was starting to get frustrated. Mew, forbid the upgrade did not happen after Stan's breakthrough. Well, frankly, there was nothing I could do if that happened, hence my frustration.

Heck, I was getting upset just thinking about it. I was really hoping there was a reason for this delay, and by everything that was holy, I was praying/hoping that it would happen after Horus' breakthrough at the latest because I did not know what I would do if it didn't.

Honestly, I did not think that I would be able to keep my frustration from showing if it came down to it, and that would be extremely unfair toward Horus. Still, I had to be positive. It hopefully wouldn't come to that, and the long-awaited upgrade would happen along with Stan's success.

Regardless of all that, what was important was that Stan had come close to the finish line, and he would probably be breaking through in a few months. That was great news, and it definitely counted as a good way to start a new month.

The week at the lab that followed went by normally with me paying a visit to yet another project. This time I chose to disregard my own bias to join the Shuckle study project. Shuckle as a species were actually a rather interesting study/research topic.

Not only because they could act like natural juice machines, but also because of the rather extreme racial values their species had developed. There were no second Pokemon species, as far as the alliance and I knew, that had such a specialized/unbalanced racial value sheet.

Some would disagree, listing species such as Ninjask, Blissey, or Stonjourner, but I would vehemently disagree with their disagreement. Blissey and Stonjoirner only had two racial values that were, excuse the language, shit, but Ninjask did not even have that.

Admittedly, half of Ninjask's racial values were rather mediocre, but they were definitely not shitty, unlike with Shuckle, where its defensive values were incredible, but the other four values were pure shit.

Anyway, this extreme discrepancy was why quite a few labs, including Oak Labs, chose to study the species as one of their side projects. After spending five days with them, all I could say was that they had some interesting theories.

One of those was that Shuckle could have been a Diglett variant at some point in the past before it became its own species, or that Diglett and Shuckle had a common ancestor.

They theorized that, at one point, Shuckle was a Diglett that invested all of its species' potential along with the potential to evolve into its defensive capabilities, and that the species gained its current extreme values in return for this sacrifice.

The sacrifice was supposedly also the reason why Shuckle had a higher species potential than Dugtrio. Species potential was what most of the scientific community liked to call the racial value in such situations.

Honestly, Dugtrio's low species potential compared to Shuckle's values was the biggest issue I had with the idea. Though I had to admit that I thought that the idea was not without merit, and I even had a theory on how the discrepancy could have occurred.

I thought of something along the line of infusing the potential of the additional heads, or bodies or whatever you wanted to call them, into the main body being less wasteful than growing two additional heads.

When I proposed the idea to the team on day two, I learned that a few others had already thought of that idea as well since it was among the many theories created on the topic.

On Kyoday, a day after my time with the team was over, I decided to mention the Shuckle/Diglett theory to the group chat, at least the parts that were "public" knowledge, meaning the stuff that was already published/shared among the scientific community. Most of them showed only the tiniest interest in the topic, but Kinji, Jessie, and surprisingly Yu displayed a genuine interest.

Kinji was a bug specialist, and Jessie was a Pokemon nurse, so I got why they were interested, but I had not expected Yu's interest in the matter, so after a few minutes I could not stop my curiosity from winning and asked him where his interest in Shuckle came from.

I had to laugh when I heard his reason, and I was not the only one. The whole chat got flooded with laughing emojis. Apparently, he had come across someone using a Shuckle as a personal shield, which left an impression on him, especially since he used to be a knight academy student at one point.

When I imagined Yu on his Zebstrika with a Shuckle strapped to his left arm and a lance in his right one, I had to laugh some more. I obviously shared the mental picture with the chat, which resulted in a second wave of emojis. Yu on the other hand actually sent over a thoughtful emoji, which made the whole thing even funnier.

Everyone began making Shuckle shield jokes, and some of them were quite good. I especially liked Takeshi's "The great border wall made of Shuckle", and Wendy's "Aerial Shuckle Drops". Well, it was definitely nice to see the chat so lively, and we spent an hour or so just joking around/talking with each other.

The following week, I once again switched to a new project, but this one had seemingly entered a somewhat dry phase. The team was currently observing and documenting the "small" Tauros and Miltank herd staying on lab grounds.

Apparently, they had added three pairs of Bouffalant to the herd two months ago, and they were observing the interactions between the two groups ever since.

The reason I called it somewhat dry, was that the integration process between the two groups was close to finished by now, and I seemed to have missed some rather interesting reactions that happened at the beginning.

Everyone knew the mostly proven theory that Bouffalant branched out from the Tauros and Miltank line, but that, unlike their ancestors, the Bouffalant line did not have gender-specific species. The team had wanted to see their interactions as well as reactions if brought together, and I thought it was a pretty good idea.

I read through their findings, and there had been a month-long period of clashes/competition, which seemed to have mostly been held to redetermine the hierarchy between the males.

However, once the hierarchy had been settled, neither the Tauros nor the Miltank discriminated against the Bouffalant despite having the obvious number advantage. In fact, after the Pokemon had some time to get to know one another, the two groups started to fuse into one herd nearly seamlessly.

Anyway, the rest of the week, as well as the month, went by just like that, and before I knew it, we were once more at the end of the month. Tomorrow was the last day of the 11th month, which also happened to be one of those "single-day week" Arcdays.

I was currently doing my weekly check-up routine, and so far everything looked fine. There were still close to two hours until lunch, and by now I was halfway through the checkups, so I was guessing that I would be done before then.

When it was Hades/Haunter's turn, I first took a look at his body, predominantly gaseous or not, before moving on to check his status screen. It was there that I saw that Hades actually managed to complete his second round of limit-breaking.

That was definitely good news since it meant that if he kept up his hard work, he could most likely break through to the gold stage within a year or less. Still, I could not help but think about the progress we made with the essence/energy absorption method I had come up with for his evolution to Gengar.

The energy Hades absorbed came from poison and ghost-type materials instead of fresh bodies, but my modified version was proving itself to be truly much more energy intensive than the original evil one. It seemed taking in the essence and/or poison from freshly killed or still alive Pokemon was much more filling than simply absorbing the energy from materials.

By now, Hades had to have absorbed ghost and poison energy from materials worth more than 90 million Poke. Despite that, he had still not reached the point of saturation or rather the point where he could evolve into Gengar.

Honestly, if I was not self-sufficient as far as materials were concerned I would have switched to buying fresh carcasses from the military, alliance, butcher, or whoever else sold fresh bodies. I was sure that I could have reached the needed essence/energy quota that way by now, and for less than I had spent so far as well.

I decided to note that down as an alternate evolution method of the current one for people with less money or those that did not care about using Pokemon to evolve their Haunter. Though, I had to admit that I was wondering if publishing this method would be a good idea or not.

This version could not be called evil like the original one since it was not necessary to go around killing Pokemon for the purpose of absorbing their essence. However, I could see how easy it was to simply forgo buying the bodies in favor of hunting them to save money. I'd probably keep it to myself or exchange it with the alliance instead of directly publishing it. It was better to be safe than sorry after all.

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