621 CH2 (616), Setting Off To Hoenn (2)

The second contest that drew my attention was a battle tournament that was supposed to start the day after tomorrow. There was a restriction set that only Pokemon below the gold stage could be used which I did not find all that surprising since it made sense.

The organizers probably wanted to limit the chance of accidents happening since Pokemon at and above the gold stage likely had a higher chance of damaging the ship. Not to mention that the size of the battlefield would have to be smaller than a full-blown league battlefield. We were still on a ship at sea after all.

The reason I was interested in the tournament was the prize they offered to the winner. It was a 4-star Munchlax egg and I honestly could not believe my eyes when I saw that. While it was unbelievable that they offered a 4-star egg of the Snorlax line as a prize, it was important to note, that the egg was listed as Munchlax and not Snorlax, which made it even more valuable due to the chance its evolution presented.

I did an actual double-check and still found it hard to believe that a tournament on a cruise ship held for entertainment would have such a prize. I mean it was a luxury ship of the highest caliber, but a 4-star Munchlax egg and a complete Anorith fossil still seemed quite exaggerated. The Anorith Fossil alone had to be worth nearly a million Poke if not more, and that was not because research on revival technology was impossible.

I mean, it was not as if it did not exist, because it did, at least I had the knowledge in my head, and I was sure the scientists would have been able to recreate/replicate the machine. However, even if the technology did exist, it was not available since the league had actually banned that subject. The few "Fossil" Pokemon that some trainers had were ones belonging to tribes that actually managed to survive until today from previous civilizations or from experiments during this one before they got banned.

It was just that these Pokemon were not common since their habitats all had special requirements which was why they preferred not to spread out. If you added the alliance declaring those areas sanctuaries and restricting access to them into the mix, you had the reason why "Fossil" Pokemon were extremely rare.

Anyway, the Munchlax egg was even more expensive than the fossil, and I was sure one would be able to find buyers even if one tried to sell it for 2 million Poke or more. We were talking about a future Snorlax after all, and fearsome eating habits aside, Snorlax was an extremely impressive Pokemon. That Munchlax still had the chance to evolve and hence enhance its potential to 5 stars made it more precious than a Snorlax of the same level.

That along with the possibility of pushing its potential before it hatched as well as Utopia's greeting gift were why I was so interested in the egg. It was practically a free 5-star egg in my eyes since I was confident that Munchlax would have light blue potential after hatching at worst once it fell into my hands. I naturally directly registered for the tournament as well.

I was confident that Freya/Lopunny, Igneel/Charizard, Fortuna/Togekiss, Gaara/Gabite, Bruce/Crobat, and Jean/Espeon would be enough to sweep the whole thing. Either way, those were the 6 Pokemon I registered for the tournament since declaring one's team was a condition set by the organizers. 6 was the maximum number one could register, and participants were not allowed to use any Pokemon outside the registered ones. My guess was that they did that to avoid the chance of a boring end phase.

Regardless, after registering for those two events, I proceeded to plan out the first part of my journey. Obviously, my journey would have to start from Lilycove City since that was where the ship was heading, but the important question was whether I would head east from there or west. The east of Lilycove City did not belong to the "mainland" and had a few "island cities" that were considered part of Hoenn.

The four biggest examples of that were Moosdeep City, Sootopolis City, Ever Grande City, and Pacifidlog City, though the latter one was probably the most special among the four and that was despite Sootoopolis being a giant dead Volcano Island. What made Pacifodlog so special was that it was not on a singular piece of land but that a lot of very small isles were artificially connected to one another, creating a self-made/"artificial" island city.

The West of Lilycove on the other hand had pretty much the whole Hoenn "mainland", and would consequently take much longer to explore than the east side. In the end, it was the presence of Ever Grande City in the East that made me choose to travel west first. I would have to go to that island for the Ever Grande Conference anyway, so making it my last destination made more sense to avoid heading there twice.

With that decision made, I had to decide whether I wanted to travel through the mainland in an up-to-down and vice-versa pattern or a left-to-right one. If I went with the former I would come across the cities I knew from canon much earlier since the latter pattern would mean that aside from Lilycove City, I would only visit Fortree City as far as canon cities were concerned until I was roughly halfway through the mainland.

I ultimately decided to go with the right-to-left pattern simply because I felt that it would be more interesting. This one would allow me to travel across the desert and meteor falls earlier than the second pattern, which was important to me since I had goals I wanted to achieve in these two places, and while I was not really in a rush, I still felt that handling them earlier would be better than leaving them until close to the end.

That would be what would have happened if I had gone with the other pattern, at least as far as Meteor Falls was concerned. Still, even though I had settled on my travel direction, it would remain to be seen if I truly stuck to it. Nonetheless, it was always better to have a rough plan/idea of what to do than having none.

It was also for that reason that I logged into my alliance account and spent some of my points to purchase a few slightly more detailed maps. The maps I chose were related to the places that interested me the most. Among them was a map of Mt.Chimney along with part of its mountain range which while smaller than the Mt.Moon mountain range in Kanto was still of a decent size.

There were also maps for Meteor Falls, the Granite Cave, Petalburg Woods, the Desert, and Mt.Pyre. Obviously, none of the maps were super detailed, but they had the important landmarks along with the Pokemon that could usually be found in those places, and more importantly, a bunch of clean water sources, as well as some berry tree groves for sustenance, were marked down as well.

While the latter was less important to me due to the existence of Utopia, water sources were usually gathering places of Pokemon, especially in the desert. The same was true for berry trees as well, though to a smaller degree, which meant that they were worth checking out, even if in many cases a tribe/species tended to claim those places for themselves.

For now, the maps were enough, and while some of those places were restricted zones that needed alliance/league approval if one wanted to explore them, exchanging those permissions would have to wait until I made it to each individual area since those access passes usually had a time limit.

Anyway, after roughly determining the first stretch of my journey I left my cabin and began to explore the ship. Outside of the cabins, passengers were allowed to bring around a single Pokemon while on the ship, as long as the Pokemon's size did not exceed certain dimensions. I chose to let Chibi Mothra/Butterfree out and allowed her to accompany me while we explored the ship.

Mothra drew quite a bit of attention while we were strolling around the ship and more than one person approached me to ask some questions about my gorgeous Butterfree. On more than two occasions I even received an offer to buy her from me for a generous amount of Poke. I obviously declined the offers from the rich ladies and the businessmen.

Thankfully none of them tried the cliche "Are you sure you don't want to sell that Butterfree? Do you know who I am?" routine. Admittedly, it was still the first day, but I saw no indication that any of them had the "superiority/vanity disease", so I was sure there would be no troubles coming from them, and I was hoping that it would stay that way for the rest of my journey.

Regardless, we explored quite a bit of the cruise ship and decided to stop for the day after lunch. Once we had eaten at the board restaurant, we returned to my cabin and entered Utopia where we spent the rest of the day. The next morning two hours after breakfast, I left Utopia and made my way to the deck for the fishing competition.

The competition was slated to start at 10:30 a.m. and I saw roughly 60 people gathered in front of the little podium set up for the competition. There were cameras set up all around the deck, aiming solely at the edges where the contestants would be fishing. At 10:30 a staff member went up to the podium and began to explain the details/rules of the competition.

First of all, the competition would go on until 4 p.m. tomorrow, so contestants had nearly 30 hours to catch the winning "fish". He also assured everyone that the cameras only filmed the edges of the deck, though he added that they were in fact live-streaming the competition internally so that all passengers could watch the competition from any display across the ship, including the one in the cabins and restaurant.

Still, the cameras were necessary to ensure that no one tried to claim to have caught something they hadn't, so no one complained. It was also mentioned that one only had to fish out the Pokemon and either measure its size using a provided ruler or properly hold it in front of the camera for it to count. It was not necessary to capture the Pokemon, though contestants were free to do so if they wanted. In case one planned to do so, the guards would only protect the safety of the contestants. We were on our own if we wanted to capture any of our captures.

Important to note was that the winner of the competition would be determined using two factors. The species of the Pokemon and its size. The Pokemon's strength was not included, though it was often the case that stronger Pokemon tended to be bigger. The man finished up his explanation by stating that all contestants had to use fishing rods and bait provided by the staff to ensure the fairness of the competition.

The rods were all special models that could be attached to the deck to prevent people from being dragged overboard, which was a real concern since there were probably a lot of regular people among the contestants. Following that, they began handing out the rods as well as the bait, and everyone spread out to start fishing.

After moving to an empty spot I hooked the bait and cast the line before attaching the rod to the railing. All that was left after that was to wait for a fish to bite, and while I was waiting I considered whether I should bring out Togekiss for some good luck. Since we were on deck the size restrictions were a bit more lenient and contestants had even more wiggle room, so I could do it if I wanted to.

Still, I decided to try my own luck first. I would call her out tomorrow if I did not get lucky enough today. Until then we'd see how I fared on my own. It took a little less than 10 minutes for my rod to move, indicating that something was nibbling the bait. That was impressive considering that the ship was still moving which made fishing much harder. That demonstrated that the bait had to be pretty good.

Anyway, once I was sure that the hook had caught on properly, I began to reel in the line. Whatever I caught was putting up some pretty good resistance, so I was sure that it was a decent-sized Pokemon. After I had reeled in most of the line, I proceeded to pull out my catch. I could not help but be surprised at the Pokemon that was dangling in front of me, because it did not fit the impression I had at all. It was a relatively medium-sized Goldeen and after seeing that it had orange potential I threw it back into the sea without even bothering to measure it.

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