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The Quest for the Legends (ILCOE)
Chapter 4: Cleanwater City
After ten minutes or so, Mark and Charmander arrived at the Cleanwater city Pokémon Center, panting.
Mark went straight up to the bell on the desk and hammered it with his hand until a red-haired nurse dressed in white, whose name was most likely Joy, came out of a room in the back.
“No need to be so harsh on the bell,” she said serenely.
“I… I found this Eevee,” Mark panted, attempting to catch his breath, and gently placed the little Pokémon, unconscious, on the desk. “He was fainted near the road to Sailance…”
“Sailance?” the nurse, whom Mark just decided to call Joy, questioned. “Isn’t that out of the Pokémon-inhabited area?”
“Yes, it is, is Eevee going to be fine?” Mark asked very quickly.
“What was an Eevee doing there?” repeated Nurse ‘Joy’.
“Should I know that?” Mark said loudly. “I asked: Is he going to be all right?”
I kind of enjoy the brief running gag about the nurse's name here.
Here I'm really trying to hammer in that Mark cares, only in the process making him unnecessarily rude to the nurse. It doesn't read very believably, but at least it's cool that I'm trying to actually show it rather than just having his Pokémon arbitrarily sing his praises.
Nurse Joy took out a small tool resembling a red cellphone, pointed it at Eevee and pressed a button. A little beep was heard before she took it and read off it.
“He’s just exhausted, hungry and cold,” Nurse Joy announced upon looking back at Mark, smiling. “He will be fine, but it could take some time to revive him. Just have a seat, and I’ll alert you when something happens.”
Mark sighed in relief as Nurse Joy took Eevee into the room at the back, then turned around and as he was now breathing normally again, he took some time to look around.
The floor was covered in a light pink, fluffy carpet. The room was very large, and at random places all over except in the direct path from the automatic door to the counter, there were big, comfy-looking red sofas. Several trainers sat in them, either chatting or just staring into thin air, waiting for their Pokémon to be healed.
Mark walked towards the nearest sofa, which was empty, and sat down there, tapping his foot impatiently while observing the room better. The walls were painted white, but covered in posters and advertisements about everything from the Ouen league and challenges for trainers to always carry Potions with them to cheap travel packages. Meanwhile, Charmander stood at the foot of the sofa, watching his tail flame burn.
I almost definitely inserted this description solely because it had been hammered into my head that I was supposed to have more description and describe environments, but I actually like it more than expected - there's a little bit of world flavor there in addition to the plain physical detail.
This is, of course, the same fluffy pink carpet that May throws up on in chapter 73, and the same Nurse Joy who helps them there.
The automatic door slid open, catching Mark’s attention. A girl ran inside. She had long, brown hair and wore a pink sweater and a dark blue skirt.
She hurried to Nurse Joy, quickly handing her three of the Pokéballs attached to her belt, and then walked towards Mark’s sofa and sat down in it, glaring anxiously at the back room where Joy was treating her Pokémon.
Seeing as Mark had nothing better to do and many things to ask, he decided to talk to the girl.
“Um, excuse me…” he said, turning carefully in her direction. She jerked her head in his direction, and upon realizing he was waiting for an answer, she replied with a dry “Hello”.
“Do you live here?” Mark asked. The girl nodded.
“Can you tell me something about the Pokémon Gym here?”
The girl shrugged. “Sure. What would you like to know?”
“What type of Pokémon does the gym leader train?” Mark asked, happy to have managed to get to the point so quickly.
“Legendary Pokémon,” she answered simply.
“What?!” Mark yelled so loudly that a few people stopped talking to stare at him. He lowered his voice, his face going red. “Erm… how does a Gym leader train Legendary Pokémon?”
The girl giggled. “You’ve never heard of Rick? He spent ten years of his life finding the Legendary Pokémon of all four regions. He got some hairs, feathers, whatever of them, and cloned the Legendaries for himself and his junior trainers. They don’t train them much at all, though, so they’re really low-leveled.”
"All four regions", of course, because there's no way there could be any more canon regions by the time I finish this fic, nope.
Anyway, this is yet another baffling instance of Mark somehow managing to not know information that's public knowledge and should be a Really Big Deal to him. There's not even really any particular reason his parents would try to stop him from finding out Rick exists, so there's not really even that excuse, unless they were convinced he'd start trying to rescue the legendaries from Rick or something. Mark's parents just TALK to him about the dangers of drugs legendaries Jesus Christ
“Cloned? But that’s illegal!” Mark protested.
“Super-clones are illegal,” the girl corrected. “And only if they could wreck something. His Pokéballs prevent the Pokémon they hold from directly disobeying a command, making them harmless. He made the balls himself. He even got a special license allowing him to keep one super-clone, no higher than level ten, mainly for experimental purposes.”
“But affecting Pokémon’s free will is breaking the Agreement!” Mark argued. The girl just shrugged.
“Yeah, maybe, but Rick’s got the police in his pocket. He’s capable of world domination with all those legendary clones, and they know it only too well. As long as he isn’t doing anything they absolutely have to do something about, they won’t. They’d get completely screwed unless they attacked in hundreds.”
“But he isn’t about to do anything like that, is he?” Mark asked worriedly.
“Of course not, he’s a respectable man with a little brother,” said the girl.
“What’s a little brother got to do with anything?” Mark questioned, puzzled.
“Their parents died in a car crash when Rick was fifteen, leaving him alone with his two-year-old brother,” the girl explained. “Rick has been like a parent for his brother since then. Shows that he’s responsible and knows what he’s doing.”
“Oh.” Mark paused. “So he has them all?”
“Well, nobody knows, since he only uses the Kanto and Johto ones, but that’s what they say.”
“So, are all of the Legendaries at very low levels, then?” he then asked.
“Yeah, they don’t go higher than level 15,” the girl said. “And the more Pokémon a junior trainer has, the lower are their levels. The strongest ones are possessed by the junior trainers with the fewest Pokémon.”
“Sounds balanced,” Mark said.
“But remember that they’re Legendaries after all,” she warned him.
“OK, thanks,” Mark said, and was about to ask something else when Nurse Joy stepped forward and pointed for both of them to come. Both kids stood up and walked towards the counter.
This girl is Megan Hayfield, the trainer with the Lunatone, Delibird and Letaligon that Mark faces in his second preliminary match of the League in chapter 48. It's pretty hilarious that she's so nonchalant about explaining that this one dude has an army of clones that could take over the world and therefore nobody can stand against him, but whatever, he's responsible for his little brother, it's probably fine.
Of course, given the legendary clones are supposed to be really low-leveled to the point that they're routinely beaten by beginning trainers, her insistence that Rick could totally take over the world with them is hard to believe. I can't quite recall if I intended this to be the actual reason for the leeway Rick's gotten at the time I wrote this, but the way it's written leads me to think I probably did; I had written Taylor using Mewtwo² to hypnotize the police in the original and UMR, but maybe I hadn't actually extrapolated that to being what he was doing the whole time. For the purposes of the narrative, though, she's just wrong and this is some kind of flimsy conspiracy theory.
Mark's really taking this new information that there's a gym leader training clones of legendaries who might possibly be capable of taking over the world better than anyone should; the "Sounds balanced" there kind of cracks me up. I'm also just generally amused at Megan explaining the legendaries' levels to Mark in this much detail; can you tell I'd written down notes on the exact Pokémon each gym leader and their junior trainers had, including their levels?
“Megan, your Pokémon have been fully healed,” Nurse Joy said with a small bow, handing three Pokéballs to the girl, then turning to Mark, “and your Eevee is going to be in perfect battle condition tomorrow. The hotel is just round the corner, if you plan on staying there.”
“Battle condition?” Mark questioned. “But isn’t he too young to battle?”
I'd gotten the impression, probably from other fanfics, that "questioned" was just a synonym for "asked", so as you can see, I was using it a lot, more or less interchangeably with "asked". I don't remember exactly at what point it was explained to me that it was in fact not, so be prepared to see a lot of it.
“Technically, yes,” Nurse Joy sighed. “But he’s been battling, apparently. Got some Rattata bites and scratches. Goodness knows what he’s been through…”
“Oh, okay,” said Mark. “But I’ll release him afterwards, right? He isn’t caught in a Pokéball…”
“Well…” said Nurse Joy sadly, “I have to admit that I don’t think that’s a very good idea. He’s been battling, but hasn’t fared all too well. If he came across a Raticate or Sandslash…”
“You mean I should take him?” asked Mark, shocked.
“I mean that we should explain the situation to him when he wakes up, and ask him what he wants to do.”
Mark didn’t answer; he wanted to own an Eevee, of course, but tried not to because he knew then he’d be disappointed if Eevee rather wanted to be released.
“Is your Charmander fine?” Nurse Joy asked, smiling.
“Yeah,” said Mark, snapping out of his thoughts. “Anyway, thanks. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
This is... kind of better than I remembered. Mark still really wants an Eevee because they're cool and rare and he's a kid, but at this point, after Charmander's lecture last chapter, he realizes it really should be up to Eevee himself and he shouldn't expect anything from him. So Mark comes off okay here; he's not pure and saintly and noble and thinking solely of Eevee's wellbeing, but he does still want to do the right thing.
That being said, there's some other weirdness here. Nurse Joy introduces the topic as if Mark's just automatically going to take him, but then turns around and says she means Eevee should choose as if she meant that the whole time, which is weird after she said your Eevee is going to be in perfect battle condition tomorrow
. And if Eevee's "technically" too young to be battling, isn't he too young to be potentially making the decision to go with a trainer and battle more? Shouldn't his choice be more like whether he wants to be released into the wild or adopted by a volunteer as a pet? Why is Mark taking him even an option? She treats it like since he's already battling that means he can be trained despite his age, but surely if he's too young and has been battling out of desperation, that doesn't just mean you shrug and figure he might as well keep battling.
Next, Mark went to the Pokémart with Charmander. It looked a bit like the Pokémon center beside it; a big, white building with an automatic door and a dome-shaped roof, except that instead of the Pokémon center’s red color, the Pokémart’s roof was blue. Beside the door, a large sign clarified the building’s identity.
Yeah, this one's just obligatory description to tell you what a Pokémart looks like because you need to know that I guess.
Mark walked inside. To the left, there was a counter with a funnily-dressed punk guy behind it, busy claiming cash for people’s purchases. To the right, metallic shelves with healing items, Pokémon food, and all sorts of Pokémon equipment stood in straight rows all the way to the back of the shop.
Mark examined the contents of the first shelf. They were healing items; to the far left, cheap Potions and status recovering items were stacked; then they gradually went more expensive as they went farther to the right. Mark grabbed a few of the purple and green spray bottles known as Potions, then walked a few steps on. Most of the things he wasn’t all that interested in; this early on, they wouldn’t be worth their price.
At the end of the row, he stared longingly at a little white box with a red cross on it; a Pocket healer, one could place a Pokéball into it and press a button, and the Pokémon inside would be refreshed with energy in an instant, besides gaining a boost to its natural recovering abilities while inside, being able to fully heal of all its wounds in a remarkably short time. Of course, this item was reserved for out-of-battle usage.
Unfortunately, the price tag contained the rather unattractive number of 98,000. Mark quit dreaming, and went on.
He browsed through the shelves. Stat-boosting items were for more advanced trainers, and he didn’t want to buy TM and HM moves until he had planned his Pokémon a bit better. If Eevee would come with him, he would maybe buy an evolution stone for him; of course, he reminded himself as he walked past them, Eevee might not come with him at all, and might not want to evolve, or would rather evolve into Espeon or Umbreon.
The Pokédolls he wasn’t too interested in, but near them were the Pokéballs and Pokéball belts, so Mark took one belt with six Pokéballs attached to it. Finally, he bought a bit of canned Pokémon food for Charmander and Eevee, and walked to the counter in order to pay. All this stuff put a huge dent into the money he had brought, but that was what the money was for, after all. He just hoped he had enough left for the hotel.
Once outside, Mark pressed the little buttons on the Potion bottles one by one, minimizing them to the right size to fit neatly into his backpack. He also put on his Pokéball belt. He checked his watch; it was six o’clock, and the rain had subsided. Finally, he stuffed the cans of Pokémon food into the bag; it was now getting full.
He eyed the hotel sign behind the shop, picked up his bag with a sigh and walked to the hotel, Charmander following him like a fiery ghost.
Like a ghost is right; apparently Charmander's had nothing to say whatsoever in this entire chapter. Dismayingly, we're back to him not really being a character.
This isn't a very interesting chapter otherwise either; it's very transitional, and barely anything actually happens. Mark drops Eevee off, learns about Rick from a random throwaway character that only incidentally ever appears again, then goes shopping for some mundane items. The IALCOTN made the shopping trip slightly more interesting with a bit of characterization and worldbuilding to it, but there really isn't much of that here, so all in all you could cut out this scene and the story would lose absolutely nothing, except perhaps that Pocket Healers would come out of nowhere later. (And it's kind of a plot hole that those are commercially available to trainers at all: wouldn't the legendary hunters want to be carrying some around to near-instantly heal minor injuries? The only places Pocket Healers are actually used in the fic are gyms; I really should've just made them an item exclusively sold to official battling facilities.)
Mark continues to be treated by the narrative as if he were an outsider character who needs to learn about the world instead of a native of the region, and it continues to be nonsensical. I can't remember when I stopped this but it probably takes a while.
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This is an author's commentary intended for readers who have already read the entire ILCOE. My retrospective comments on the chapter are in bold below, with some remarks within the text and then some overall thoughts at the bottom. The commentary will contain significant spoilers! Do not read the commentary on your first read-through!