Pokemon Alternate Universe Adventures

It was roughly two and a half hours after lunch that our surroundings had stopped showing any sign of aridity. There were no more dry spots or dry winds, only green-covered vibrant earth, as well as lively vegetation and Pokemon. We had finally left the Hoenn Desert behind in its entirety, and the question I was contemplating now was whether the road ahead was truly going to be covered in volcanic ash as it was in the games or not. Actually, that came out wrong; I knew that the route was occasionally blanketed in ash. Mt.Chimney and the rest of its mountain range were relatively close to the route I was traveling on after all.

In fact, it was not wrong to say that Fallabor City and the route leading to it from the desert were like Lavaridge City, located at the foot of Mt.Chimney and its mountain range, just on the opposite end/site of it. Admittedly, neither was quite as close as Lavaridge, which was located directly at the foot of the volcano/mountain; While the route I was on was located a few kilometers away from Mt.Chimney. Fallabor City on the other hand was located a few kilometers away from the foot of the mountain range that Mt.Chimney was part of instead of the volcano itself, and the Meteor Falls I was going to travel to next were part of that mountain range as well.

Anyway, back to the volcanic ash issue; Because a part of the route I was on was essentially located at the northern foot of Mt.Chimney the possibility that ash could cover part of the route arose. It mainly depended on how much smoke Mt.Chimney felt like releasing lately. While the volcano-mountain was an active one, its activity levels and subsequently the amount of smoke it released were not consistent. It had days/weeks where it was more active and days/weeks where it was less active. During times that Mt.Chimney was less active the smoke/ash it released barely covered a small part of the route that was closest to it, if at all.

It was during days that it was truly active, that the smoke it released was so dense that volcanic ash covered a majority of the route or even all of it. The reason I was so focused on that was because the ecology in this area had adapted to the situation in a rather interesting way. The activity level of certain species changed depending on how covered by ash the route was and whether it "snowed" ash or not. If the smoke was dense, and it appeared like it was "snowing" ash, with the ground blanketed in ash, Pokemon species like Sandshrew, Numel, Geodude, Diglett, Slugma, Ponyta, Nincada, Grimer, Koffing, and their evolutions were much more active, with the Slugma appearing exclusively during the times ash fell like snow.

Nincada were the only ones among the previous group whose evolution was not active with them during those ash/smoke dense periods, or at least the standard evolution wasn't. While Shedinja only hid away when the ashfall was dense enough to pose a risk to its health, Ninjask belonged to the group of Pokemon that were active when the smoke coming from Mt.Chimney was light, causing ash to barely cover a small part of the route or none of it at all. Other Pokemon that belonged to that group were Zigzagoon, Poochyena, Taillow, Machop, Tyrogue, Marill, Wurmple, Beautifly/Dustox, Skarmory, Spoink, Spinda, Scraggy, along with their evolutions.

Among those, Ninjask, Skarmory, Spoink, Marill, Taillow, and the Wurmple along with their evolutions exclusively appeared during these less active/ashy periods with zero or close to zero ashfalls. Now, while I was interested in meeting some Numel and Ponyta, I was quite a bit more interested in coming across some Spinda. I was still convinced that Spinda had an evolution and I was working on finding out how to trigger it on the side, which was why I continued to keep an eye on the Spinda quartet living in Utopia to this day.

My initial theory had been that they had to witness/be present for a certain number of evolutions for them to evolve, which was why I always encouraged them along with others through the announcements I made to witness the evolution of one of our team members. Honestly, their celebratory dance had become somewhat of a tradition at this point. Anyway, I also did my best to direct them toward other evolutions that happened in Utopia, though it was quite a bit harder to do that for the unplanned/unorganized evolutions.

Nonetheless, during all the years that the Spinda quartet has lived in Utopia, they had witnessed over 500 evolutions without evolving themselves, which had me start to believe that it might be not the only condition for their evolution after all. Well, either that or the number was something absurdly high like 999, 1000, or 9999. Still, the chance that another trigger was definitely higher than the chance of the number being 9999, and I had settled on two possible/plausible conditions that in my opinion would make sense.

First was a certain level of mastery over one or more dance moves since Spinda were known for their wobbly walking and their dances. The second one was that they had to be in a group of a certain size while they witnessed the evolution and did the celebratory dance. In fact, I was more inclined to it being a combination of two or even all three conditions, with the combination of condition one (number of evolutions witnessed) and condition two (dance move mastery) being the most likely one. Yet, despite that belief, I did not shut out the possibility of condition three being a factor, which was why I was hoping to capture more Spinda on my way to Fallabor City.

I was not sure what it was with Spinda and mountain ranges, but they seemed to prefer living in or close to them. I had found mine while exploring Mt.Moon's mountain range, and in Hoenn, they could only be found around this part, Mt.Chimney's mountain range. Mt.Pyre was a bust on that front, and my theory on that was that they disliked the high concentration of ghost energy in the area, or maybe it was because the place was not part of a mountain range, but a single mountain.

Regardless, I was going to capture as many Spinda as I could without compromising Utopia's standard too much since unlike the Pinkan experiment, the Spinda evolution did not require too many Pokemon. I chose to set the lower potential limit for the Spinda to deep orange, which, while not indiscriminate like the pinkan one, was already rather grand of me. However, my compromise had its limits, so the propagation limit of light green still applied to them as well.

While my main interest for the stretch in front of us lay in Spinda, which was why I was hoping that the ashfall would be low or non-existent, I would not mind checking out some of the Spoink that were said to appear here. Honestly, aside from the fact that Spoink were psychic types, which made them somewhat more practical than most, and the decent strength of Grumpig, my interest in them was mostly scientific/medical. Spoink were some of the few species that were created rather disadvantaged by nature, and unlike Slakoth who was simply extremely lazy, Spoink's drawback was rather lethal in a more direct fashion.

The Pokedex entries in the games for Spoink were rather ominous, citing that Spoink was persistently jumping around because the shock/rebound of its bounces was what kept its heart pumping. Hence, according to the GameDex, Spoink would die immediately after it stopped bouncing or shortly after it stopped. The real Spoink were fortunately not as fucked up as the GameDEx made them out to be, BUT there was, unfortunately, a kernel of truth to them. While the hearts of Spoink in Terra did not cease pumping when the Spoink stopped jumping, they did slow down drastically which while not directly lethal like the GameDex version was nearly as dangerous for the Spoink.

It simply dragged out/slowed down the death caused by heart malfunction instead of causing direct heart failure. Spoink here had a few hours to start jumping before they died compared to the direct or near-direct death their game counterparts suffered. During these hours the Spoink in question became increasingly lethargic/listless which was due to Spoink's slower heart rate/blood flow. That lethargy as well as weariness could reach a point where Spoink was unable to restart jumping even if it wanted to, and the duration they could survive varied from Spoink to Spoink, mostly depending on their age and strength/stage. The same was true for the point after which they were unable to remedy the situation on their own.

Generally, that point was around the final 2-3% of the duration they could survive before Spoink's heart failed since that was the juncture at which their physical condition affected/muddled even their minds preventing them from using their psychic powers to manipulate their body. Their bodies stopped reacting before that at roughly 5-8% of the duration. Not that that changed the fact that Spoink had a fatal flaw in their bodies which was exactly what roused my curiosity since everything I learned and saw until now told me that Pokemon did not have fatal flaws or entirely detrimental abilities. Slakoth and the absence of Truant were a good example of that.

The fact that Grumpig did not have this problem indicated that whatever inherent flaw caused the problem got rectified during the evolution process, which had me ponder if Spoink's flaw may stem from an outside influence. I was not talking about Spoink being a Pokemon with an artificial start like Porygon, but that maybe Spoink used to be different but that something happened that only left a bunch of handicapped descendants which led to the current/modern Spoink population. The easiest example I could think of was the previous food/nutrition-focused civilization that according to history caused quite a few species to go extinct.

If Spoink were among the species they hunted or reared for consumption then they might have bred them into their current form on purpose to prevent them from causing trouble. That would explain why they had such a physical flaw and why they needed something like a pearl to use the full extent of their psychic powers. Those could be intentional flaws bred into them, which would be extremely cruel but considering that the civilization got destroyed by the legends for their actions against life I could not exclude the possibility. Naturally, this was only a theory and there were multiple other possible reasons why and how the flaw came about, but I personally thought something like the purposeful addition if the flaw was the most likely one.

Nonetheless, I believed that Spoink could be stronger or at least less pitiful if these flaws could be rectified, and I was sure that its evolution/Grumpig would definitely be stronger once that happened since I was certain that part of the energy/focus during Spoink's evolution went into repairing the inherent flaw(s) it had. The fact that stronger Spoink could hold out for longer periods without jumping hinted at the fact that a strong enough body might be able to compensate for the flaw, so that was a possible direction to look into. I had heard that there was some research being done on Spoink but nothing conclusive had been published.

Considering my earlier idea, looking into the records I had from the 3rd civilization might let me find something on the matter if they were truly the source of Spoink's plight, though confirming the source would, at this point, likely not help all that much with rectifying the problem. I made a mental note of the issue on the very long duties and to-do list entrusted to my thought streams. Once that was done, I turned my focus back to the road ahead of us and with a quick prayer to Mew and Rayquaza for ashfall-free weather I continued walking forward.

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