So while grinding, I ran into this guy outta nowhere.
Sharpedo is cool I guess. I've trained I think one before? He was a pretty solid offensive option. But considering that we have Gojira and Tristen both as solid water types I don't feel too bad about missing out on the buttless shark.
So we got everyone leveled up to 20 except for Queen Marchessa who got boosted to 21 because, as we found out going back into this, Archimedes is kind of our weak link in the team. He's great for catching new friends because he has hypnosis but with only tackle and peck as offensive moves, he's not hitting anything hard just yet. Thankfully once he got to 20 he evolved, so we've got that going for us which is nice.
With everyone leveled up and evolved we headed into Goldenrod city to do some exploring... because I have no idea where we're at in the story. I think we're going to run into Team Rocket again soon? Maybe? Something about a radio station? I don't know...
We did some exploring around Goldenrod. Found the department store, everything's way to expensive, found Bills' moms' house, and then we ran into Bad Bitch Lyra again.
She graced us with a fashion case before mercifully being on her way and we were allowed to explore some more, finding a bunch of trainers and proceeding to kick their asses. They didn't even have anything special, so it was basically free money. I did notice that the highest level trainer pokemon I ran into was 11, so... we might have over leveled a little bit. Oh well.
We finished exploring around and didn't really find anything of interest, found that the gym leader was at the radio tower and noticed the obvious Team Rocket guy hanging outside of there as well and pretty much knew that that's where we needed to go to progress the story. However. Instead of doing that we decided to head up to Route 35 to battle some more trainers and catch a new friend. Our roster is only 5 right now and the pokemon we have in the box aren't really all that great. Plus, being over leveled, I figured that we could catch someone who's under leveled and keep them out front to gain some free EXP.
So we fought some trainers whose pokemon weren't actually all that far behind our own, spared a couple and found a patch of grass where we would find our next friend, who turned out to be...
An Arcanine! Oh hell yeah! Finally a chance to catch a fire type! I did my best to be careful while catching this guy 'cause I really, really, REALLY didn't want to kill it. Thus, as delicately as I could, I did my best to catch him. And... I'm gonna be honest. I used a save state here for one very important reason: Arcanine knows Roar. Which meant that there was a chance he would just yeet us off into the wild and ruin our chance at catching him. Frankly? I feel like that's kinda shit. So what I ended up doing is just reloading the state and trying to catch him on the first ball over and over again before he could use Roar. Is that cheating? A little bit. It's 2020 though cut me some slack :V
Let me be clear as well, this Arcanine was not easy to catch even doing this. I went through nearly half of my balls and used my only ultra ball, unsuccessfully, before finally managing to catch this big doggo in a regular pokeball of all things, so if nothing else I'm paying for using a save state by having to go buy more pokeballs. But, in the end we caught him on a lucky streak when we could put him to sleep and he just didn't use Roar. Archimedes took like 3 Fire Fangs like a champ. Everyone, say hello to Cerberus.
Truth be told I can't remember ever training an Arcanine before, so this should be nice. Not only do we finally have a fire type but one that I've never played with before. Hype, hype. Bold natured and quick tempered indeed you little shit >:V Oh and look, he was holding a TM as well. Reflect, weirdly enough. We took that off of his paws and gave him that charcoal we picked up ages ago, so now he'll do a lot of fire damage. Cerberus joins Gojira and IFO in the "we have items that make our STAB moves better" club. Also, upon reading his pokemon entry it became clear why he's called the legendary pokemon. It specifically says "Chinese pokemon" in the entry which is weird 'cause China doesn't exist in pokemon, but as a meta context it makes sense once you look at Arcanine and realize that it's based on those Fu dog statues. You know the ones, the weird lion dog things that sometimes have an orb under their paw (If they're supposed to be male). Arcanine's design is based off of those which I never knew before. The more you know.
Anyways we headed back to the pokecenter, healed up, put Cerberus out front and then went back to deal with the stragglers as well as see who else we could have caught on route 35. There was one trainer that actually gave us a bit of trouble with their fucking miltank.
The set up on this thing was actually kinda genius and I hate it. It knew the following; Defense Curl, Bide, Milk Drink, and I don't actually remember what the last move was. But, Miltank is tanky as I'm sure you all know which meant that even a super effective double kick did hardly anything to dent this things' health. So it'd just use bide, let me attack, which I'd only do once to not get OHKO'd, then when it was low on health use Milk Drink and occasionally Defense Curl so that it was even harder to kill. Just... god damn. Props to that trainer, that miltank is wicked solid.
Still kicked their ass tho.
We ran into Crobat, who could have been cool I guess. Possibly a replacement for Archimedes if he died. Crobats are fast little fuckers, and I've never trained one before so there was that as well. They're all around just a pretty solid pokoemon from what I remember. Still glad we ran into Cerberus first though.
We found an Iron Plate, which is cool I guess. If we ever come across someone who uses a steel type move or two, they can join the club with IFO, Gojira and Cerberus.
Yet another starter we missed out on. Mudkip honestly might have been preferable to an arcanine. Maybe. I do love me some fire types, and we've got an over abundance of water types right now, but... c'mon. It's mudkip. Mudkip would have been siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. Ah, oh well.
Found another TM, which is cool and all. Might teach this to someone at some point, idk.
Found an exeggcute by headbutting a tree. Exeggcute would have actually been nice, we don't have any grass types and we don't have any psychic types either even though Archimedes can learn some psychic moves. Would have been a nice type filler in the party. Still would have taken Cerberus over it tho.
After heading up past Route 35 we found the National aprk, but I decided against heading into the grass just yet for 2 reasons. The first was this is a thursday, meaning that there's a bug catching contest thingy that I can apply for and I'm going to. I decided that since the contest is its' own separate thing during one day of the week (pretty sure it's just one day, any ways) that I was going to treat it as a separate encounter entirely. This means that I'll technically catch 2 pokemon from the national park, but I'm going to medigate that slightly by doing the following. If you'll recall, there's 2 distinct patches of grass in the National Park, one short and one tall. For the purposes of the bug catching contest I'll only go into the short grass, while for the free roam I'll go into the tall. This way each instance is completely separated from each other. As best as possible anyways. Just so we're all on the same page.
Oh hell yeah, Dragon Pulse is a dope move. Soon as I have someone who can use it I'll teach 'em this. Maybe Gojira can? Lemme check...
Nope. But Cerberus can apparently. Tempting. Tempting. I'll keep it in mind for now (or at least try to) and come back to that later. If no one else comes along who is more deserving, sure. Cerberus can have a little dragon pulse. As a treat.
We headed out of the park after picking that up and went to talk to the contest guy in order to try and get our pokemon off of the contest. Low and behold:
Aw hell yeah. Scyther is fuckin' siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. Love me a good Scyther, and he's a bug type which we don't have. That means we really, really want this boy. Especially since I think we might have a metal coat that we could use to evolve him potentially. After giving him a good bite that got him down to the yellow we threw some balls at him and badda bing badda boom, we caught a scyther. But we're not able to nickname him just yet. Gotta finish the contest first, but I won't be catching anything else. Every other pokemon will just get bit to death by Cerberus. Let's see who else we could have had.
Pfffffffft. A weedle. Next!
A beedrill. Nice. This is the third bug pokemon that I've run into in a row, which makes me wonder if the bug catching contest isn't actually affected by the randomizer? It's possible. Either way, we're happy that we ran into Scyther first.
Definitely not affected by the randomizer. Butterfree is a monster in nuzlocke challenges for catching new friends because of all the different status effects it can inflict, but. Scyther.
That was really all that there was to catch of note. We finished the contest and got second place, winning an ever stone and getting to nickname our new friend. I've been playing a lot of Tekken 7 lately, and I don't know if you guys know this or not, but Season 4 just came out along with a returning character. With that in mind and the pokemon description of how fast Scyther is supposed to be, we had the perfect nickname for her. Everyone, say hello to Kunimitsu.
We went back to the pokecenter and switched Tristen out for Kunimitsu for party balance reasons. Having two water types is never all that smart. With our latest friend and having done quite a bit of exploring and grinding, we decided it was time to actually progress in the story a bit and so we headed to the radio tower with our new friend. Before doing that though we took a quick peak at what TMs we had to see if we could teach Kunimitsu anything neat. Ultimately I decided to teach her Roost because the thought of having a Scyther that can heal itself just seemed right.
We found Whitney in the radio tower taking a quiz to win a radio. We took it ourselves and got the answers, then Whitney left to head back to the gym. Seeing as how we couldn't go any higher in the tower for now the gym was the logical place to go. So we went, and we started heading for Whitney with a team full of spunk and a fistful of grit. We cut our way through the gym trainers without any issue. I got spooked for a second when one of the trainers sent out a seel that knew Ice Shard, a super effective move against Kunimitsu, but when I saw it only did 10 damage I wasn't worried any more. After we took care of the corneys it was time for the main event: Whitney.
She started off by sending out a level 17 Snover which made a hail storm. Not the worst thing in the word but definitely bad news for Kunimitsu here. If only we had an answer for this. If only there was some way to combat this snowy threat, some sort of dog to take a hot piss all over this snow covered tree so to speak. Just a real hot dog...
Yeah we took it down in one shot when we switched out to Cerberus. Thanks 4x effected STAB fire move~
Next she wanted to send out a Shuckle. Which. Was. Bad. News. You do not fuckle with the shuckle. Shuckle can turn your world upside down if it wanted to. Shuckle is more powerful than Arceus! We did the sensible thing, though, and kept Cerberus in since he one shotted the last guy after all. It took 3 shots rather than 1, a testament to Shuckle's sheer might even in the hands of a pissant trainer like Whitney, but we beat 'im, and we beat 'er, giving us our third gym badge.
And that's where I decided to call it for the day. Having caught 2 new friends and a clear avenue of where to head to next, Route 36, to catch even more friends and help Kunimitsu grow even more, it's time for a break. A lot happened this time around and, thankfully, we lost no friends. Fingers crossed we can keep that trend up from here on out.