Pokemon: An Icy Path

Interlude 1

The odd movement of Pokemon

 By Assistant Birch Bark

Imagine you stepped into the Viridian Woods with a plan. You plan on capturing your favorite bug Pokemon, Caterpie, as you know they are abundant in this area of Kanto. Yet as you search around, you cannot find a single one. Instead, you find swaths of Sewaddle and hives of Combee around. 

In recent times, it is not uncommon to find out-of-region Pokemon. This can be because of migration due to a change in the environment they originated from, or by human intervention. Most of the Pokemon that can be found outside of their home region are the result of humans.

A trainer could receive a Pokemon from a different region, before heading to another and deciding to release it for any number of reasons. Sometimes a breeder will come from outside of the region with their specialty, but when they cannot afford to continue their practice, they sometimes just let the Pokemon go wild. Other times, due to unfortunate accidents, a Pokemon may end up escaping a damaged Pokeball and is forced to adapt to their new home away from home.

Those are just some examples of the many that can cause a change in the expected Pokemon in the region. To combat the influx of unknown Pokemon into the region, Pokemon Professors, like our own illustrious Professor Oak, will regularly sponsor a trainer and task them to record information and capture the wayward Pokemon for study. For those who worry about our local populations, never fear! Besides some outlier Pokemon that are particularly aggressive, all records so far have noted that our new friends have integrated into the area without issue. 

All over our world, there exist these amazing creatures that we call Pokemon. Some are weak enough to never cause harm, and others we bargain with and treat as gods. It is our duty to explore and understand these wonderful creatures that share our world with us.

Our Wild World

By Professor Samuel Oak

Kanto. Johto. Hoenn. Sinnoh. Unova. Kalos. Alola. Galar. Paldea. Every person who is a fan of Pokemon, or wishes to compete in the league, is aware of these names. These are the known and operating regions of the Pokemon League.

Back when I was a young lad, born in the Kanto region, we were hardly aware of any other region besides our neighbors to the west, Johto. Hoenn, and by extension Sinnoh, was a mystical place that wayward travelers seemed to brag about. Any place else was just completely unknown at the time.

That was until thirty years ago. The Mossdeep Space Center launched its first rocket into space and deployed its first satellite. However, the satellite did not last beyond forty-eight hours as some Pokemon decided to attack it. Thankfully, the information sent back by the satellite expanded our understanding of our wider world. It showed that there were other communities out there for us to get in contact with and set off an age of exploration and community. Each region holds its own unique secrets, waiting to be discovered. As we explore further, we will uncover the mysteries of these incredible creatures and the world they inhabit. 

You, as the reader, more than likely know about the different regions already. Instead, let us talk about what we found outside of the regions. We found that our planet has six large landmasses, each separated by thousands of kilometers of ocean. Sadly, we were only able to snap a few pictures of each landmass.

From what we can tell, each landmass seems to be mostly covered by one or two different biomes. To the south of the Kanto/Johto regions lies a secluded place that looks to be covered in desert with only small clusters of trees. To our west is a huge landmass that stretches towards the Galar/Kalos/Paldea region. The northern side of the landmass seems to be covered in ice and snow whereas the southern side seems to be covered in trees. South of the Paldea region is another huge landmass that seems to have three distinct biomes. Its northern side is covered in desert, the middle seems to be a jungle and the south looks to be plains. 

To our west, we have two more land masses. The southern one seems to be covered in jungle and mountains whereas the northern one, where Unova and Orre sit, seems to be covered in every biome. The final landmass we were unable to get a clear picture of, but it seems to cover the southernmost part of our world and looks to be made of snow and ice.

Speaking of Orre, that is an interesting topic itself. Most of you who are reading this have probably never heard of Orre until now, and that is for good reason. Let us first talk about the regions themselves. A region is a collection of towns and cities that are usually run by the Pokemon League and each official region must have a Champion-level trainer, four Elite-level trainers, and eight Gym Leader-level trainers. The Orre region does not have a structured league like most regions and works on a ‘Might is Right’ mentality due to their Colosseum-style battles. This prevents them from being included as an official region for aspiring trainers and more of a destination location for those who wish to challenge themselves.

Now, I mentioned the trainer requirement for a region, however, there is more to that. If a trainer wishes to explore the Wilds, they can put forth a request to any league they have competed in for the right to open a new region. Once the permission has been obtained the requester is then to establish a research outpost and recruit a Pokemon Professor to investigate the area.

This isn’t all there is to establishing a region, but any ambitious or willing trainer with the expected level of strength can apply. Just remember the Wilds are extremely dangerous and most that venture into them do not return. There are many more things that we can discuss about our world, yet there is so much more for us to learn. Go forth young trainers and reach for your dreams, there is a whole world out there to discover!

You are not supposed to use that!

By Dr. Enerwise

We all know that each Pokemon has its own energy type or two in some cases. These energy types normally define what type of moves a Pokemon is able to learn on its own without a trainer. However, once a trainer gets involved, that is when things start getting weird. In the league circuits, trainers do everything in their power to push their Pokemon to win every fight thrown their way, all in hopes of completing their dreams.

Traditionally, off-typed moves were not something that most Pokemon, outside of a special few, could learn. However, a major shift happened around a decade ago when the technology for Technical Machines became more easily accessible for trainers. With the widespread usage of these machines, trainers started to force their Pokemon to learn non-standard move sets.

For example, in most of the Gym circuits, there is usually a Rock-type gym. Depending on your team, this gym could be extremely simple for you. Most generalists would not have an issue with the gym’s typing. Those who build their team around a single type or a theme would find this to be much more difficult. To combat this, these trainers will go through the effort to teach their Pokemon a move such as Iron Tail or Steel Wing, both of which are fantastic moves to use against Rock types.

In the case of dual-type Pokemon, they seem to be able to learn a larger spread of moves. Every now and then, you will find a dual-type Pokemon that uses a move that they are not typed to use naturally. Aggron is a great example of this. They are Steel and Rock-type Pokemon, normally found deep within dark caves or on a mountain. You would expect that they would only use mainly Steel and Rock type as well as untyped or thematic moves. Yet trainers have been able to get them to learn moves such as Water Pulse, Ice Beam, Thunderbolt, and Fire Blast.

  While this makes the recent competitive scene much more interesting as you never know what move might be coming, older trainers have their own thoughts on this. Most of the older or traditionally trained trainers will only use the moves that a Pokemon naturally learns. For them, it is a badge of pride when they can win against all odds without using ‘cheat devices’ as they tend to call Technical Machines. This mentality also translates into the official League circuit.

The teams that Gym leaders send against a challenger can have no more than one non-standard move taught to them and it must be shared amongst the team. This allows trainers to study the Gym leaders and plan without needing to worry about being hit with a bunch of non-standard moves. We will need to wait to see if the rules will change as the older generation is phased out of the Pokemon League and the next wave of trainers moves into their midst.

Humans can use Pokemon moves?

Taken from readdit.pkmn/r/general

So a while back I was wasting time on Poketok, you know like most of our generation, when I came across what should have been CGI videos. These videos started out normally, usually a trainer training with their team and learning new moves. You know the ones, where they sit there and explain the move one time and their pokemon learns the move no problem? Yeah, it started out like that, but it didn’t end there. The trainer went a step further and performed the move. 

Of course, you are probably laughing right now, I did too. This was impossible to do. I mean come on, make it believable at least. Humans can’t perform moves like a Pokemon. That’s what I thought too. I just laughed it off and moved on, until I saw a few more videos with a human performing Pokemon moves. The worst part was, that all of these videos looked to be performed by older trainers and using old grainy video cameras.

I thought that this could not be real, but the thought continued to bug me over the next few days. Finally, I gave in and started to research. I spent days digging through Poketube, Poketok, Pokegram, and the Pokenet trying to find anything about it. In my search, I came across information on Aura, the thing that some fighting Pokemon like Lucario can use, and found that humans are able to learn it as well. I also found that these Aura Masters can perform moves just like a Pokemon. 

Unfortunately, I was not able to find any way to learn it myself, despite all my digging. Yet my search was not totally in vain. On the official League video archive, I happened to spot someone I believe was using a Pokemon move. [Link to video here: ] Now if you pay attention to the trainer, I know so hard to watch such a cutie, at around the twelve-minute mark you will see her send in her Alolan Vulpix. The next part is what you need to pay attention to and make sure you turn up the volume. Her voice suddenly takes on a different tone and suddenly the arena is covered in snow and ice. I know this isn’t a big deal when talking about battles at the sixth badge and above level, but this was at Pewter City Gym, the first gym in Kanto.

After studying the video for a while, I found that after she calls for ‘Powdered Snow’ she suddenly looks weakened, like she used up a lot of energy all at once and in return her Pokemon over-performed the move. I think that this trainer has access to Aura and is somehow using it during the league battles. Does this give her an unfair advantage over other trainers?