between sessions, i finally took the time to fix the clock. so now everything should be on time again!
as soon as we walk outside, we're immediately called by Elm. he tells us there's an assistant at the Pokemon Center who has something to give us. this turns out to be the mystery egg Mr. Pokemon found all that time ago. he lets us keep it... though i'm not sure what a demon such as myself would do with it that'd help. still, a gift's a gift. we'll go over what this is once it hatches, but for now we'll keep it in our party. moving on, if you try to head west, you'll find yourself at...
...except, there's not really anything we can do here. there's a patch of grass where you can catch Growlithe, a very good option for a fire type, but that's about it. so instead let's go south of Violet City to enter...
if you go south after entering the route you'll find yourself at the Ruins of Alph, but i want to save this for later once we have to tools to do everything here. instead, walk further south to finally make it past that guy who kept stopping us before. this route has a host of new Pokemon to catch, and if you want a poison type i'd personally recommend catching Ekans here. it's a pokemon that's served me well before, and it's fairly underrated. there's a few trainers on this route, and some of them have some pokemon we haven't seen yet, like Zubat or Nidoran. a very poison type heavy route so far, it'd seem... Jano also learned PoisonPowder along the way, which i let him have. i'm a big fan of statuses, so i usually like going for those types of moves.
ooooh, our first repel! at long last! i generally don't use repels on my first runthrough of an area since i like to get in a decent amount of wild battles, just to make sure i'm not falling behind on levels. still, it's good to have, and will DEFINITELY help with any kind of backtracking.
fishermen are a very unique type of trainer, because you can never initiate a battle with them by getting in their line of sight. instead, you always have to be the one to initiate the battle. they usually just have teams full of Magikarp, which... you're really hittin' home runs with that team comp, huh? fun fact about the fishermen, in the japanese version of the game they actually have cigarettes in their mouths. at the very least, they give Jano an easy time, which he deserves after the last chapter. speaking of which...
Jano hit level 16, and has now evolved! Bayleef continues the trend of the Chikorita line having excellent designs. :]
in other news... my mom apparently bought me something she thinks i'll like. listen, if it isn't a V8 Sparkling Energy+ Orange Pineapple flavor, i'm not biting. also, now that Jano has evolved, i've put Grechen up front so she can get some experience in. unlike the last gym, i don't see Jano being able to handle the upcoming one like he did with Falkner, so i'm fully investing in Grechen here. (also yes, i forgot to put Rocky back in the PC... so he gets to spend a liiiittle more time with us.)
i always found it really weird that Goldeen could learn peck. like, what exactly is the logic behind that? it is the horn on its head? i guess that'd make sense, but i feel like there's definitely a more fitting move for something like that. also WOW, that Goldeen hit through paralysis 6 times in a row. what rotten luck on my part. my status never even did anything! what a ripoff.
when we arrive at the end of the route, we meet this shady guy who asks us if we want to buy a slowpoke tail. for... $1,000,000. what kind of nutjob is buying this stuff?
in other news, if you go up here and check this tile, there's a Great Ball sitting there. this is just a better Poke Ball, it multiplies the catch rate by 1.5x and it's pretty good for where we are in the game right now.
there's also just... a Pokemon Center here? weird that it's in the middle of a route... now that i think about it, there was one of those near Dark Tunnel in Kanto as well, wasn't there? while i was here, i decided to finally say goodbye to Rocky. farewell my man, you may not have stayed long, but you served us well.
going a little further south i got to see Jano's first battle as a Bayleef, and despite being up against a bird keeper, he still absolutely killed it. nice.
Union Cave, huh? sounds... important. let's see what's going on in there.