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The New Normal - 12-10
🕑 Added 2024-11-04 12:00:08 +0000 UTCThe New Normal – 12-10 – Evolution
As unfortunate as it was, my date with Cynthia had to come to an end. As usual, her duties cruelly called her away from me, and she was forced to obey, depriving us of our dinner together.
Dramatics aside, I returned home with a smile on my face – I was happy to see that Cynthia had enjoyed her time as we toured Indigo, as I felt that I had repaid her for taking me on a tour of Sinnoh. More than that, I was especially pleased to hear that she was inspired by Ecruteak to try to develop Celestic Town along similar lines; it showed that she really took the tour to heart.
“You seem happy.” My mom commented as I walked in the house, “You were out for the whole day too. Let me guess, spending time with the girlfriend?”
“Yep.” I nodded, seeing no reason to try to hide it, “I took her around Indigo, showed her around a few places like Cerulean. She enjoyed it, and we had a good time.”
Years of experience taught me that it was better to be upfront with what happened to avoid my mother’s teasing. Trying to dodge around the topic would only make things worse.
“And she couldn’t stay for dinner?” She asked.
I shook my head, “Sadly not. You know how Champions are – they’re always swamped with meetings and appointments. She couldn’t get out of them.”
Speaking of which, there were a few unread messages on my phone that I should probably follow up on. I had glimpsed at them when I was on my date with Cynthia, but since they weren’t urgent, I had left them for the time being. However, now that I was free, I could properly look through them.
One of the messages immediately piqued my attention.
‘John, please come to the lab as soon as possible.’ Shelly had texted me, ‘We’re confident now that we can go ahead with your evolution.’
That was certainly a surprise. After our previous conversation I had thought the testing process might have lasted a bit longer, but this was good news to hear anyways.
So after wrapping up my dinner with my parents, to which I had to dutifully describe in detail everything that I had done with Cynthia to my ever-nosy mom, I quickly retired for the night as I sent a return text to Shelly promising to come over in the morning.
Therefore, with an excited mien, I headed to the Devon Corp branch office to hopefully receive Pixel’s final evolution. However, I realised that she wasn’t alone when I stepped in her office.
“Hey, you came here quickly.” Shelly greeted me, ignoring the surprised look on my face, “You seemed busy yesterday.”
“I was.” I replied, before turning to greet Blaine, “Hey Blaine. You doing good?”
“As good as I can be with a borrowed lab.” He responded.
“If you’re that unhappy about it then you can build your own.” Shelly shot back, “Besides, don’t you have an ounce of appreciation for the fact that I basically organised all this for you? I even created the role of a ‘consulting scientist’ just for you!”
Blaine shrugged shamelessly, “It just means you were burning to make use of my talents.”
Shelly slapped him across the head for that.
“…Ignoring this idiot, like I said to you, the evolution item for your Porygon2 is finally ready.” She said, “We’re calling it the Evolution Disk.”
I nodded. That sounded much more marketable than a ‘Dubious Disk’.
I followed after her as she led me to a different room, before pulling out a Pokéball and sending out a Porygon-Z. However, unlike the Porygon-Z that I knew from canon, this one wasn’t twitching about like its insane brethren. Instead, it stood still and buzzed happily as it flung itself at Shelly’s leg, giving it a hug.
Shelly carefully wiggled her leg to detach the Porygon-Z, “…As you can see, no insanity. The theory and process I described to you before proved to be just the thing to get the Porygon2 to acclimatize to the injection of data in a way that doesn’t lead to insanity or unstableness. We tested on over a dozen Porygon2 with similar positive results; let me show you.”
She carefully passed the Porygon-Z to Blaine, who had for whatever reason chosen to follow after us. In the meanwhile, Shelly moved over to her desk and opened up a few recordings to show me.
“Here.” She pointed to a video where they had a Porygon-Z fire off a few attacks, “We had it practice with a few common TM attacks that we had such as Ice Beam, Thunderbolt, and Psychic. We also did a few stress tests where we deliberately tired out a Porygon-Z and placed it in mock-battles just to make sure that there weren’t any lingering effects of insanity that would jump to the forefront during stressful scenarios.”
“Fortunately, the test results all came back clean. Even when exerting them to their near-limits, we didn’t find any risk of insanity cropping up.” She explained, “So with that in mind, I was confident that there wouldn’t be any side effects for evolving your Pixel.”
“Thank you for being so diligent in your testing.” I said sincerely, “But what can you tell me about Porygon-Z? I mean as a battler.”
“Uh…you know I’m not nearly as adept as that as you are.” Shelly said unsurely.
“That’s fine, I just want to have some idea from your testing.” I replied. More importantly, I wanted to know if this Porygon-Z, due to the differing evolution method, differed with its stats from the canonical Porygon-Z I knew.
She pondered over my question for a bit before responding, “…I can say with confidence that Porygon-Z has notably increased Special Attack compared to a Porygon2. Even with our untrained Porygon-Z, the increase in their Special Attack power is quite obvious to us non-battlers. That makes sense, considering that one of our focuses with this Evolution Disk was to inject data that would increase a Porygon’s power.”
“However, I genuinely cannot make any comments with any confidence regarding Porygon-Z’s defenses or speed.” She said, “For us scientists, we just aren’t able to test the defences of a Porygon-Z that effectively, nor can we accurately compare it with a Porygon2. Same applies with its speed – though MAYBE I can say that Porygon-Z is a little faster.”
I nodded. Shelly’s words convinced me that Porygon-Z’s stats were either identical to their canonical counterpart, or very similar. While I was secretly hoping that Porygon-Z could maintain Porygon2’s better defenses, I wouldn’t be upset if it stuck to the stats it had in canon.
However, she wasn’t done yet. “Yet that only applies to the Porygon2 and Porygon-Z that we’ve tested here in the lab. Obviously, our lab-trained Porygon are going to very different to the trained one that you have, so we don’t know how the evolution will affect your own Porygon’s statistics. Perhaps, having trained up Pixel’s defences so much already, those bonuses will reflect itself in the evolution.”
“…Well, I hope it does then.” I said, “Having a sharp boost to Pixel’s Special Attack while not losing out on its previous defenses as a Porygon2 would be nice. But besides that, I’m happy to proceed with the evolution. And if I haven’t said so already, I appreciate you doing this for me.”
“Not a worry, John. I wasn’t about to sell this to you.” She chuckled, “I wouldn’t see the money anyways, so I might as well do this as a friend. Wait here for a moment, let me get you an Evolution Disk.”
She walked out of the room, leaving me and Blaine alone. I turned to the former Gym Leader, “So how’s retirement working out for you?”
“You brat, I’m not retired. I’m just no longer a Gym Leader.” He snapped.
“That sounds the same thing to me.” I joked, “But seriously, how are you faring now?”
He shrugged, “I’m not bored, which is what I was most afraid of when I stepped down. Honestly, I think I made the right decision. I’m a lot happier now that I have more time to focus on my research than when I had to split my time between being a Gym Leader and being a scientist.”
“Still, can’t believe that hag got to have the new Gym be in Lavender Town of all places.” He grumbled, “I was tempted to un-announce my retirement when that was confirmed.”
“If it’s any consolation, I doubt Agatha wants to be a Gym Leader herself.” I said, “She just wants it for the prestige.”
“Yeah, I realised that too.” Blaine agreed, “If I couldn’t tolerate being a Gym Leader, then there’s no way that hag could make it work. She’s more impatient than I am, and she’s definitely not the nurturing type – her apprentice aside, of course.”
“Hope Karen kicks her ass.” He muttered.
The Porygon-Z was still buzzing about the room, so I moved to pat it on the head as I spoke, “So what are you working on now? If you’re allowed to talk about it.”
“I have a couple of eggs that I’m doing some research on at the moment, hoping to find some successes with the PIT technique.” He explained, “Actually, there’s one that I’m pretty confident is going to be a success. I have this Growlithe egg that I’m nurturing with the Rock element – I think I mentioned it to you before – and now it’s almost about to hatch. With the egg changing colouration and everything, I think I’m about to discover a powerful new Fire/Rock type.”
“That’s very cool.” I nodded, “I hope it turns out well.”
“Me too, and I hope the other eggs turn out to be a success too.” He agreed, “Otherwise, Volkner actually reached out to me with a project of his.”
“Oh? What it’s about? If you can talk about it.” I questioned curiously.
“Sorry kid, can’t talk about it without his permission.” He shook his head, “It’s something he’s been working on for a while and he brought me on to assist him with a few matters regarding the alternate forms. Can’t say more than that.”
“That’s fine.” I replied understandingly, “…Say, come to think of it, haven’t most of your achievements revolved around finding out new evolutions or alternate forms for Pokémon?”
“They have.” He said, “And that’s what I’m going to be aiming to specialise in when I submit my application to become a Professor. I’m not going to do it yet, as I hope to have a few more achievements under my belt before I make that move, but I’m trying to angle myself to be a Professor specialising in Pokémon evolution and form changes.”
“You know Professor Rowan from Sinnoh?” He asked as I nodded, “He specialises in the same thing. I’ve spoken to him a few times. He’s a very smart man, and even with my experience, there’s much I can learn from him.”
Then the door to the office opened up again as Shelly stepped in, “Oh, did you manage to pry out what that project of his that he was working on with Volkner that he wouldn’t tell me about?” I shook my head, “Shame. I was hoping he would tell you.”
“You’ll just have to hear about it when we announce it.” Blaine said smugly.
“Mhm, I’ll just have to be content with our announcement of another Porygon evolution.” Shelly responded dryly, “Oh, woe is me. How would I ever cope with just a success like that?”
Blaine grumbled, but it was obvious he was being playful. I turned my attention back to Shelly and the little box she had in her hands, “Is that it?”
“Yep, that’s the new Evolution Disk.” She said, dropping the sarcasm, “It’s a little different from the UpGrade you used before. Since we wanted to prevent insanity, we had to stretch out the transfer of data to allow Porygon to properly accept the incoming data. So the whole evolution process is actually going to take a few minutes. No more than three.”
“That’s not a problem.” I said, releasing Pixel into the room. “Hey Pixel, are you up to finally evolve?”
Pixel buzzed excitedly, doing a little twirl around the room as his eyes danced in happiness. I smiled; Pixel had been eagerly awaiting its evolution for quite some time. He was finally going to get it.
Shelly offered me the Evolution Disk, “So do I just…?” But before I could do anything, Pixel launched itself at me and pressed its head against the Evolution Disk. A small tendril of white light formed between Pixel and the Evolution Disk, and its body began to slowly shine.
As the seconds ticked by, the small tendril of light began to grow larger, and Pixel began to glow even brighter. Pixel had its eyes shut in concentration, and I could sense the power that was radiating out of it.
Shelly simply stood there with a calm smile, silently reassuring me that this was supposed to happen.
Eventually, the surrounding white glow grew to become blindingly bright, and I was forced to cover my eyes as the signature light of an evolution covered the entire room. After a few moments, the light faded away, revealing Pixel in its final evolved form.
“Pory!” It beeped out happily, twirling around to inspect itself. It was now a brand new Porygon-Z!
Shelly immediately gestured to the nearby machine, “Let’s strap Pixel in, just to make sure there weren’t any complications.”
Nodding, I picked up Pixel’s new form and placed it in the machine, making sure I gave it a few comforting and encouraging pats on the head as I did so.
The tests were administered quickly as even Blaine moved to help out, and after a few rounds of tests a smile formed on Shelly’s face.
“All good news so far – let’s move to the testing range to flex Pixel’s new Special Attack.” She suggested, and the two of us moved to the range. Blaine stayed behind, saying his goodbyes as he returned to the project that he was working on.
At the range, I had Pixel use its more common moves such as Psychic, Ice Beam, Shadow Ball, Thunderbolt etc. just to test out its new power and to check if there were any signs of insanity that could be present. Fortunately, there was no insanity. But more importantly, the increase in power from its Special Attacks was significant.
From our practice against the local forestry near my house, Pixel’s Ice Beams and Thunderbolts were barely able to blast through the tree. However, with its new evolution, large planks of wood were snapped in half as the Thunderbolt demolished them.
I whistled, “Good job, Pixel. How are you feeling with your new evolution?”
“Gon! Gon!” It buzzed back happily, firing off another Psychic that smashed and dented a steel plate as a demonstration of its newfound power.
“Seems like there’s nothing to worry about.” Shelly spoke up, “So far all readings show that Pixel is in line with other non-insane Porygon-Zs. Not only that, but the increase in power seems more noticeable when compared to our own Porygon. Though I suspect that’s just because you’ve trained up your Pixel so well rather than due to an increase in the Pokémon’s base Special Attack.”
I nodded, that made sense.
“Still, we haven’t done the stress test yet – would you like to get it done here?” She asked.
“I do. Better safe than sorry.” I replied, “Might as well get all the testing done here so I can train its new evolution with confidence.”
“Okay…let’s move over to the training field.” She said, “But I think you’re going to have to use your own Pokémon to stress test your Pixel. I doubt we have anything in the lab that would even come close to exhausting a trained Pokémon like yours.”
“That’s fine, I’ll just treat it like a training session.” I nodded, following after her. As soon as we entered the training field, where I noticed that there were a bunch of monitoring equipment scattered behind reinforced glass, Shelly moved to the monitoring room while I sent out Pixel, Klee, and Luna.
“Okay Pixel, you’re up against the two of them.” I said, “Try your best to fend off their Special Attacks for as long as possible. You know the drill.”
It nodded and flew over to the other side of the field while Klee and Luna stuck close to me.
“Okay, ready?!” I asked, getting a nod from Pixel, “GO!”
A powerful Thunderbolt instantly crashed down from above onto Luna, inflicting her with paralysis as she failed to put up a Protect shield in time. Klee fired off a Psychic of her own, but Pixel countered with another Psychic that tore through the incoming one.
The difference in power between Klee’s and Pixel’s Psychic was noticeable. Pixel’s had shredded through Klee’s.
A Heal Bell chimed as Klee moved to heal Luna of her paralysis, and a Moonblast was instantly sent Pixel’s way. In response, Pixel fired a Zap Cannon, sending a large orb of electricity blitzing through the air as it detonated itself on the Moonblast, nullifying the attack.
In the meanwhile, Klee had chosen to charge towards Pixel, relying on her natural bulk to be able to withstand against Pixel’s attacks. But a Thunder Wave was quick to stop Klee’s charge as she tripped over from the paralysis.
As Klee took time to use Heal Bell again, Pixel had the opportunity to use Conversion to switch its type to Electric – boosting its Thunderbolts with even more power. Accordingly, as soon as the Type switch finished, another Zap Cannon not only blasted through another Moonblast from Luna, but this time kept going and forced Luna to throw up a Protect shield.
Klee had pulled herself up at this point, and resumed her charge. But the artillery that was Pixel was determined to put a stop to that as it unleashed volley after volley of Zap Cannons that violently bombarded the charging Klee, each orb exploding with a large discharge of electricity as they detonated on the ground.
I grinned as I saw this – the old Pixel could never have unleashed this level of firepower before. But now, with its Special Attack significantly increased, it was now able to function as more of a support Pokémon – as its devastating bombardment of Klee showed.
A less bulky Pokémon would not be able to withstand this for very long. And that just made more all the more excited to finally make use of Pixel in a proper fight.
It was only because of Klee’s ridiculous bulk that even allowed her to waddle through the Zap Cannon bombardment without taking too much damage, though even Klee was struggling slightly to withstand against Pixel’s powerful volley of attacks. But before Klee could grapple onto Pixel, the Porygon-Z had dashed backwards and began floating into the air with a Magnet Rise.
…Only to immediately be sent crashing down as Gravity greatly intensified, causing Pixel to fall right into Klee’s waiting arms.
Klee had a happy smile on her face as she grappled onto Pixel before violently hurling it straight into the reinforced wall. Pixel crashed into it, letting out a pained buzz as it fell to the ground.
It was given no opportunity to recover as an Ice Beam blasted it straight in the chest, causing frost crystals to begin spreading over its pink and blue frame. Klee tried to pin down Pixel again, but a powerful Psychic forced her back for just long enough for Pixel to pull itself off the ground.
However, with the Gravity still crashing down hard, it was impossible for Pixel to return to the skies. This forced it to try to manoeuvre around Klee while also dodging past the Psychics and Moonblasts that were sent its way by both Pokémon.
Pixel did its best as it twirled past a Moonblast and formed a Protect shield that blocked another Psychic, but Klee and Luna’s onslaught of Special Attacks were rapidly beginning to overwhelm it.
That was to be expected. I didn’t expect Pixel, even with its new evolution, to be able to 2v1 Klee and Luna, but Pixel was making a rather heroic attempt at it. Its increased Special Attack was really being demonstrated here, and even in a 2v1, both Klee and Luna were occasionally overwhelmed by Pixel’s attacks, forcing them to temporarily switch to the defensive as they healed themselves up or blocked a few attacks.
Though they were slowly and gradually wearing Pixel down.
As my Pokémon continued to trade attacks, I remained focused on Pixel’s defences. From what I had seen, the sharp decrease of its defences that I had feared but expected did not come to pass, and Pixel seemed to have retained most of the defences that it did as a Porygon2, which allowed it to stay in the fight even after tanking through multiple blows from both Klee and Luna by using Recover to keep itself in the fight for longer.
Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for Pixel to eventually become boxed in by the two. It tried for a last ditch barrage of Zap Cannons to try and force Klee and Luna back with the threat of paralysis, but Luna stepped in front of Klee and blocked the attacks with her body.
Luna fell to her knees as the paralysis surged through her body, but that allowed Klee to grab hold of Pixel in her deceptively powerful arms, and she threw it right into a blindingly bright Moonblast from Luna. Pixel whirled painfully as the Moonblast detonated right on top of it, sending it crashing limply into the ground.
“Okay, that’s enough.” I called out, ending the fight, “Good job, everyone.”
As soon as the fight ended, Klee and Luna instantly moved to heal up Pixel and compliment their teammate. All three of them had smiles on their faces as they chatted about the recent battle and Pixel’s evolution. I saw them fussing over Pixel’s new form before I entered the observation room where Shelly was looking over the readings.
“Any problems?” I asked.
“Not at all.” She smiled, “Everything’s stable. Even after your Pixel started ramping up with its Conversion, there were no signs of insanity.”
“That’s good.” I said with an inward sigh of relief, “So there’s nothing else to be done here, right?”
“Nope. You’re free to leave with your newly evolved Porygon-Z.” She nodded, “Good luck out there; and try your best to show off Pixel’s power in a battle sometime. It’ll help greatly with sales!” She joked.
“I’ll try my best.” I chuckled, but I knew that I would be doing so. With this new evolution, I was confident that Pixel was now a serious contender to be picked when it came time for a battle. Its newfound increased in power was no joke, and its huge movepool would be a serious pain in the ass for a lot of opponents to deal with.
I let out a chuckle; what was worse for my future opponents was that Pixel was not just your typical long-range artillery Pokémon that relied entirely on its Special Attacks. Most Pokémon like that would usually be glass cannons – high attack, but low in endurance.
However, Pixel wasn’t like that. Because of all the recovery moves that I had taught it as a Porygon2, it was actually able to repeatedly regenerate its own health with Recover, while also having sufficient defences so that it wouldn’t easily go down in one or two big hits.
Therefore, it would be a constant annoyance on the battlefield, firing off big and hard-hitting attacks while also being able to repeatedly take hits without being knocked out. Combined with Wraith, it meant that I now had two incredibly annoying and versatile Pokémon to make use of in battles.
And it was only a matter of time before the rest of the world would understand that fact too.
A.N. Pixel’s final evolution is now here! It’s finally a Porygon-Z, with all the additional power that this entails! Like I said, all that previous training has borne fruit, and Pixel has truly become a powerhouse to be reckoned with!
I stuck to my promise to not create a completely new Pokémon, and the Porygon-Z you see here is mostly the same to its canonical counterpart stat-wise. However, what I did try to showcase was that, thanks to John’s rigorous training of Pixel in its defences, it didn’t lose the defences that it would otherwise have when evolving into a Porygon-Z. I felt that this was in line with the common idea that you should train up your Pokémon well before evolving to get the most out of it. Hope you enjoyed!
