Set in the original region of Arciel, Legends Rising is a route-inspired, but not strictly route-based, Pokemon roleplay. Pick a faction, pick a class, and strike out into the wild to take on the League, master Contest coordination, research the mysteries of Pokemon and Arciel, and much, much more. Will you be a classic trainer? A criminal? A farmer? Choose your destiny on Legends Rising.
Post by Marcus Spinnaker on Dec 4, 2019 11:49:03 GMT
Marcus had decided he was going to train his pokemon, but first and foremost, he wanted to train himself. While he hoped (and indeed, trained pokemon to preclude) ever needing to fight himself, he hoped to improve his own skills as a explorer, sharpening his eyes and skills when it came to exploring and mining. In this case, was actually at a slight disadvantage - he had no formal training as a miner or geologist, having opted to get a degree in business management and accounting and only spending a few pointless electives on geology. Most of what he had learned, he had learned spending summers and school holidays trailing after his father or one of his employees as they did the work of prospecting, mining, and recreational fossicking.
As such, the first step of his plan avoided actually entering the training ground altogether. Instead, he spent several days in a library, reading up on formal classification of stones, expanding his teacher's comments on different types of rocks with details about metamorphism and mafic basalts and the details of all the different grains that old men had called "Indistinguishable and more-or-less pointless". At the time, he had been very annoyed by that, assuming that they had been simplifying for the private-school kid whose curiosity they were obliging, but as he read through web-pages and textbooks, he began to suspect that in fact there was a deep practical wisdom in those off-hand comments about which minerals were good markers of things like elemental stones and fossils and so forth. After all, he was not training to become a geologist, and describe the history of the stones back to when they were first formed by some primal legendary, but to become a miner, and extract from the earth what useful resources he could. Thus, he could take a more pragmatic view, especially when it came to learning the details of some truly strange rock formations in distant lands. Of course, sometimes one could not help but spend time reading about the wonders of the world - some people could write so engagingly about the most mundane of matters, and when they had something fascinating to write about, take it to whole new levels, but that hardly counted as training, did it?
Post by Marcus Spinnaker on Dec 7, 2019 13:21:54 GMT
The second stage of his self-improvement was both simpler and more involved. He was going to go out and actually try and study some of the local rocks. That had some advantages - it would allow him to learnt how the local geology went to a greater extent than reading (often decades-old and while geology did not change that quickly, standards for sensible notation most certainly did) geological surveys. But it also might end up quite boring, since he couldn't exactly travel the entire country for this.
Marcus decided that he would take the opportunity to train some of his Pokemon. His team was already growing - he didn't have a full layout of six set in stone yet, but he did have some strong contenders - pokemon he would be happy to train with now, if not forever. Perigee, his Riolu was still his best fighter, but not by the margin she once was. He was fortunate, perhaps, that she was so devoted to training all by herself. She shared his drive, his desire for self-improvement, and that meant that she spent every spare moment trying to improve her own conditioning. Not for a second did he regret picking her from amongst his family's pokemon to travel with him to this country. Apogee, his Rowlet was growing steadily as well, though she took more tempting; she did not leap into battle with such enthusiasm, and training went best when abetted with a steady stream of dead mice and pokepuffs as rewards.
His newer team members were all a little less enthusiastic training. His Litwick, Eclipse, mostly just wanted to stay within arms reach of him or sit on his shoulder at every possible opportunity. It was honestly kinda cute, and given the weather turning cold he wasn't complaining about the warmth, but it did mean that Eclipse only really trained when he made her. Orbit was a bit better, which was good because he was grooming them for a significant position in his first gym battle, set to happen in the fairly near future, but they were a bit too much of a handful to leave unattended; he might come back to find some vital possession (like one of his jackets) covered in clay in "totally accidental" training incident. Phobos was much the same; it was a good thing she fought with blades rather than bullets, because she had no concept of "Overpenetration" and was happy to destroy the walls behind her practise target with her strikes just as well as the walls themselves.
So most of his pokemon were, in practice, not feasible to train while he was traveling, was the conclusion he came to. But he could leave Riolu at the training grounds, sparring with some friendly-looking fighting-type, and be fairly confident the he could come back and find no reports of disaster that were his responsibility. Similarly, he could happily carry litwick around, which was pleasant and served a purpose marking him as a trainer and protecting him from wild pokemon if nothing else. He could, however, serve a useful purpose training Apogee. The little Rowlet's best combat skills lay in complex flying tactics - in kiting and weaving and precise ranged attacks, so Marcus had worked out a scheme where he would direct Rowlet to take to the wing and then throw a leafage attack at a target he had pointed out. This plan was adding much-needed entertainment to his walks around the edge of routes 6 and 7 on the edge of town, finding road-cuts, collecting rocks, and building his own set of notes about the local terrain. This work was a little boring, but he could feel the maps he was looking at become less academic and more comprehensible by the hour, and if he got the knack of reading those, it would make the work of citizen-scale mining in unfamiliar lands much easier.
Post by Marcus Spinnaker on Dec 11, 2019 13:57:24 GMT
Marcus spent several hours doing just that, a quiet and pleasing time of walking down the side of roads and along streambeds looking for good places to examine the local geology. While the whole thing was very educational, it wasn't exactly enriching - places that were easy to get to, tended to be picked clean of all but the meanest treasures in short order. Barely a potsherd remained in any bit of stone visible to the road. But profit wasn't the motivation this time, so Marcus let it pass.
The time spent was excellent for Apogee's ability to follow commands. Marcus had noticed in thier few battles, that the little owl was prone to hesitating, to only making attacks when they were perfectly lined up, and thus missing opportunities to hit or force her opponents to dodge. A long series of training attacks was good for the young bird, helping her find confidence in her own aim (and get a sense for how good that aim was), independent of the other myriad factors influencing live combat, even spars. After a while, Marcus ceased just asking her to hit the stumps and fence-posts he was asking her to hit, adding in an element of timing how long it took her to hit them. This added pressure caused her to miss more often, and also lead to several pratfalls where she took to the wing too quickly and spiraled out of control. It was, in all honesty, adorable, when she didn't collide with something and need a hug and a few minutes to feel better.
When Marcus finished with his walking, he headed home. Now he had a backpack full of rocks (and one egg, which had been sitting content and warm for the duration of the trip), each carefully marked and labeled, and a registry of where he got each of them, forming a practical geology of the area around the training grounds. His return allowed him to set his Pokemon sparring for their own training, which was more constructive for them than just sitting in thier balls, while he sat down to start squinting away at these rocks with a loupe. The process is long and technical, and is interrupted two hours in by a brief vision of Marcus eating takeout ... some time in the future, and then a few hours after that by Marcus eating dinner (pasta with a homemade all'amatriciana sauce.), and taking the rest of the evening off. Tommorow, he would try and use his study to make some predictions about the local geology, and see if he could find any evidence of them.
(... yes, this implies that pokemon has a town named Amatrice somewhere. Not bothered by it.)