468 CH101 (465), Halftime

More than half of my Pokemon were already at the gold stage, and I naturally could not leave them out of the fun, so I spent the following two weeks focusing on them. To ensure that they got the challenge that they wanted and deserved, I went deeper into the Moon Mountain Range, where the number of gold-stage Pokemon was much more abundant than in the area I had previously been hanging around.

Everyone got to fight more than 15 times since I made sure to keep searching for battles for at least 13 hours during each one of the 14 days that I spent in the "depths" of the Mt.Moon Mountain Range

Well, that decision obviously brought quite a bit of danger with it since gold-stage Pokemon were not the only ones that were more abundant in these parts. The same was true for dark gold stage Pokemon which I came across at least once per day compared to the once or twice every few days that was the norm during the last two weeks.

If I thought we stood a chance, I asked for a fight, which was then either accepted, or refused, or we got directly attacked, which worked for us just as well. Mothra/Butterfree, Horus/Xatu, and Stan/Gyarados, each got to battle against three dark gold stage Pokemon that way. Mothra managed to win all her battles, while both Horus and Stan lost once.

Yet, all three of them put on grand performances, and considering that they were fighting above their weight class, they had done tremendous jobs regardless of a loss or not. Everyone that watched their battles thought the same, which happened to be everyone inside Utopia since I made sure to stream all of the 600+ Pokemon battles that happened during these 2 weeks.

The three of them had already been the goals of everyone before this, but after their dark gold battles on ColliseumTV, the trio became the idols of nearly everyone inside Utopia. Still, idol or not, they all wanted to become as strong if not stronger than the trio, and Parvati/Beedrill straight up declared that she would surpass Mothra even if it took a hundred or even a thousand years.

Obviously, not everything went our way during this time, and whenever I felt unsure of our chances or straight-up thought we could not win, I made sure we respectfully retreated or directly escaped depending on the attitude of the other side.

Unsurprisingly, we also came across one or two platinum-stage Pokemon (Stage 6) every few days, which had only happened once during the whole two prior weeks. During those times I was mostly on tenterhooks, ready to flee inside Utopia at any given moment, but thankfully in most cases, the platinum-stage Pokemon allowed me to retreat unmolested.

I only had to use my teleportation twice to dodge an attack by one of them, but they did not pursue me when I rapidly chain-teleported out of there. I would have fled inside Utopia if they had done that, but it was not necessary so I simply put a lot of distance between the Probopass as well as Exploud and me during the respective occasions.

Nonetheless, I did not have purely bad encounters with platinum-stage Pokemon, since one of them actually acted somewhat nice toward me. Yep, Bellossom actually gave me a smile and a friendly wave when I noticed her in the clearing at the time I entered the place together with Gwen/Gardevoir and Thor/Raichu.

I did not dare to underestimate the cute, little Pokemon seeing how I could feel the stage 6 prowess radiating off of her, so I waved back with a polite smile. My two Pokemon were much more relaxed than me, which calmed me a bit.

Still, I was quite nervous when she suddenly began to skip over to my side and I was this close to simply "noping" the hell out of there along with my duo. That thought came to an abrupt halt when Bellosom warmly greeted us and began to chat with Thor and Gwen.

They talked for a bit and the reason for our stay at the mountain range came up. When Bellossom heard of our battle streak she seemed interested, and she even asked if we wanted to try our hands at fighting against her.

Well, none of us were stupid enough to think that anyone on our team stood a chance against her. Heck, all we could probably do was force her to "play" along during the fight which was not really beneficial for my Pokemon, so we politely declined the offer by pointing out that we would likely not even be enough to help her warm up.

Yet, she did not let that deter her. Bellossom simply said that I should send them at her all at once. The three of us goggled at her for a bit when she said that, but I did not directly decline her offer/suggestion and actually considered it first.

I currently had 27 gold-stage Pokemon, with only 8 of them being below the (high) gold stage, so all of them working together should be able to at the very least force her to take them seriously, at least somewhat. Due to her strength, I did not expect them to win even if they had a huge number advantage, but maybe a miracle would happen. Who knew?

Regardless, I decided to first share the number of possible combatants with Bellossom to see if she still wanted to do it, but she simply shrugged while telling me to go ahead and call them all out. I had live-streamed the whole encounter so everyone inside Utopia knew what was going on and I could feel their excitement at the prospect as easily as I could feel it from the two at my side.

Feeling everyone's excitement along with the fact that I could not feel any bad intentions from Bellossom I decided to accept her offer. Worst case, I did a complete Utopia evac, and hoped that no one got too badly hurt until I had evacuated everyone, but I honestly did not expect it to come to that.

Anyway, I let all goldies out, and the excitement was palpable in the air once they made an appearance. That came to a sudden halt when Bellossom said that she had to briefly leave to get someone that could keep an eye out to prevent others from taking advantage of us while we were playing.

The last bit caused me a bit of emotional damage but fired the others up even more. I could practically see their aura scream "I'm going to make you take me/us seriously". Anyway, it did not take long for Bellossom to come back with a Vileplume, who happened to be at the platinum stage as well. The way the two were behaving and talking made me believe that they were either a couple or siblings.

After cheerily introducing Vileplume as her hubby she asked if we were ready and seeing the numerous nods she asked Vileplume to count down from 5 to start off the battle, which he did. Honestly, I would like to say that we won or that we came close to winning, but that would have been a total lie.

While the smooth cooperation between my Pokemon actually made Bellossom take them seriously rather quickly, they failed to cause her any real/serious injuries. By the end of their 20-minute struggle, all my Pokemon were either knocked out or unable to continue/move, while Bellosom was only taking slightly deeper breaths.

The most I could see on her little body were a few scratches as well as scrapes, but nothing substantial, and even that quickly vanished after she used a Synthesis. Though admittedly even that was impressive since she was a (mid) platinum-stage Bellosom.

I saw Bellossom give Vileplume a look and he waved his hand, releasing a cloud of Pollen Puff which flew at my Pokemon and healed them after landing on them. After she saw that they were all back up on their feet, she gave a self-satisfied nod, before announcing that she had fun. She then asked us to take care and simply skipped away with Vileplume in tow without another word. Hurricane Bellossom came and went as she pleased.

Well, after she skipped away without giving us/me any chance to thank her for the opportunity to face her, we were all a bit perplexed, but there was nothing we could do, so I just shrugged and relocated everyone back to Utopia before entering myself.

The others began cheering when we appeared, and they began to excitedly chatter about the battle they had just watched. Well, at least the ones that were still conscious. I let them be for a while and focused on dealing with the injuries they had suffered during the fight before I asked them to calm down so that we could start our after-action report/discussion.

Anyway, all in all, I could say that those two weeks were definitely fruitful and everyone was happy with the results. Still, after the two weeks were up, I was only left with another week before it was time for me to go back to the lab, so I decided to go back to Hope Town to spend the last week of my vacation with my parents.

They were certainly happy to see me and asked me how my training trip went. I had a lot to tell them and they enjoyed listening to the adventures of Captain Mikail and his motley crew of desperados. It was certainly a relaxing and comfortable week after having truly spent 4 weeks in the wild.

I returned to my dorm on Grouday night and checked up on everyone's status screen before I went to sleep. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Stan had completed his first round of limit-breaking sometime during the week I spent at Hope Town, and I went to bed with a smile that night.

The next morning/Arcday started off a new week, month, as well as academic term all at once, and I was officially back at the lab after being gone for a month. James as well as the others all welcomed me back with a smile and I was directly given a new list of combinations to start on.

During the lunch break, Carl and Sibel came up to me to talk. I told them how my break went and they told me how it went at the lab while I was gone. After the break, I made sure to go through as many combinations as I could until 6:30 p.m., and after I clocked out, I visited the Egg Room.

After surveying the situation there, I went to the plot the Professor assigned to me to visit Toedscruel, Vileplume, and Co. Not only did I check up on them, but also on the younglings that Vileplume and the Gloom were taking care of.

There were only 3 months left of the 18 months I gave them, and once those were up, they would have to move to Utopia. Well, at least those among them that were actually 18 months old. Those younger than that still had a few extra months until it was their turn.

I was honestly a bit more excited about the prospect than I had thought and expected myself to be, but I guess that was simply due to my fondness for Pokemon. Anyway, after sharing dinner with them and staying until 8 p.m., I left for my dorm room.

Upon checking my emails and messages, I saw that I had actually received a mail from my homeroom teacher, which was a rarity. It was a reminder sent to me to remind me that there were mid-year exams at the end of this term and that I had to take part in those. I sent him a thank you reply which assured him that I had not forgotten about it and that I would be there.

The following days after that flowed by at a calm but steady pace, and before I knew it two weeks had passed. It was on Mewday of the third week that we reached somewhat of a milestone. By lunch that day, we had actually worked through half of the list of combinations.

On one hand, that meant that we were half done with the list. On the other hand, it also meant that we failed to find a working combination despite going through half of that pretty extensive list. Around 160k combinations, and yet none of them worked as a trigger. Hopefully, one of the leftover 160k-ish combinations would end up working.

While that would mean an early end to our Eeveelution project, it would be a successful one, and I was pretty sure that none of us would mind something like that. I certainly wouldn't, especially since there were still a lot of other projects I could take part in, so finishing a project early was no problem, as long as the reason for the end was our success.

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