The New Normal - 18-8 - Interlude - Juniper & Colress

The New Normal – 18-8 – Interlude – Juniper & Colress

(Juniper POV)

Naturally, as the resident Professor of Unova, she was asked to come to Castelia City after the battle was over to make sure that there wouldn’t be any lasting damage or harmful effects from the battle between Legendaries.

She would have joined in the battle herself, except for the fact that she was certainly no veteran trainer. Her skills definitely leaned more to the theoretical, rather than the practical. So even if she been in the battle, she would be no more than a liability.

That was why she so greatly admired her counterparts that were both a Professor and a trainer. Samuel, Blaine, and even Colress – they were all a good mix of both.

Speaking of Colress, she had been very pleasantly surprised by the contributions that he brought to their group of Professors. Initially, she introduced him because she felt that someone of his talents didn’t deserve to be wasted away just because of his, admittedly difficult, personality. She felt that there was a lot that Colress could bring to the table, given how smart and inventive he was.

And she was very quickly proven right.

Colress had finished up on his ‘Colress Machine’, which was now properly renamed to the Pokémon Stabilizer. It was now fully capable of both forcefully awakening and subduing a Pokémon, assuming that they were weak enough to succumb to its effects. But even against stronger Pokémon, the Stabilizer still could affect them, just to a lesser degree.

Thanks to Birch, who was his primary sponsor, the Pokémon Stabilizer had seen prototypes sent out to both Rangers and Nurses, who would hopefully welcome having such a tool in their arsenal. Already, the preliminary reports from them said that the Rangers especially enjoyed having such a convenient device on hand, because it made dealing with problematic Pokémon much easier.

It also helped that it was small and compact, making it easy to bring along into the field.

But besides the Pokémon Stabilizer, Colress’ true contribution to their group was his work on the Mega Stone project. After they had discovered that the Stones required ‘Life’ and ‘Death’ energy in order to activate, Colress had been hard at work with trying to create a functional substitute.

If anything, he was the hardest working amongst them. And always the most creative.

So what Colress had recognised after much more rigorous testing was that the Mega Stones only needed this energy in order to activate – after activation, whatever evolution process it will induce into the Pokémon will be fuelled by the Pokémon’s own energy. Therefore, the overall process didn’t require much external energy at all.

Furthermore, he had been experimenting with trying to replicate this special ‘Life’ energy. He deduced that healing moves like Life Dew and Wish would have similar properties, though obviously they would not be completely the same as these weren’t moves used by Legendaries. Likewise, moves like ‘Memento’ and ‘Curse’ were also tested, to see if they could mimic the opposite ‘Death’ energy in extreme enough concentrations.

Likewise, he had theorised that it might be possible to induce these restorative properties into the lingering energies from a Legendary in order to create something that could be used to activate these Mega Stones.

His theory was met with an understandable amount of scepticism, but Sam had given his approval anyways, stating that they didn’t have any better lines of inquiry to follow through anyways.

Which was why she was at Castelia City, not only to check on the aftermath, but to collect some samples of the lingering energies from the battle.

Hopefully they would be enough to make things work.

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(Colress POV)

Juniper had got back to him with the samples only a few days later – much quicker than he had expected. Of course, she didn’t come all the way to Hoenn by herself, she sent some faceless assistant over to deliver them.

…He should probably find some assistants of his own instead of relying solely on Birch’s. The increase in efficiency would be worth it.

Speaking of efficiency, he couldn’t deny that working with Birch and the other Professors had its ups and downs compared to when he was independent. When he was working alone, he never had to care about the opinions of others. He ran his experiments and tests at his own pace, unhindered by something as inane as ‘Safety regulations’ or ‘proper authorisation’. He had always felt that those things merely slowed down the progress of science.

He had not changed his stance on that. He still felt that the progression of science was worth any price, but he was forced to ‘play by the rules’ now that he was a group with the other Professors. They didn’t share the same level of ambition as he did, and so he was forced to adhere to their rules and regulations in order to continue working with them.

Honestly, he never thought he would be in a situation like this. After his reputation was tarnished in Unova, he had assumed that he would never find official work again. At the time, he was fine with that, and he was more than fine with reaching out for less scrupulous projects if it meant he got the funds necessary to do his own research. For that was the only thing that mattered.

That being said, now that he was working once again in an official team of Professors, he felt that the trade-off for following the safety protocols was worth it. He was never one for arrogance, so he could fully appreciate how useful it was to be able to bounce off ideas with minds of equal intelligence. It significantly smoothened the brainstorming process.

That was why, now that he had the samples of Legendary power in front of him, he and the other Professors had all gotten into a conference call as they watched the experiment play out in real time.

This was their first round of tests where they would be infusing as much ‘restorative’ energy from healing moves and trying to combine it with the extracted Legendary energy. The amount of energy that they would be infusing consisted of almost a whole month’s worth of stored power, since they doubted anything less would suffice.

Fortunately, they had built a new machine that would help do everything for them – at a safe distance – as everything was done under strict lab conditions, with every relevant safety protocol already run through just in case.

Messing around with something like this always carried its risks. If it was up to him, he would have moved on regardless of the risks, but the others were all in favour of taking things slowly.

“Activating it now.” He said into the microphone, “Does anyone else have any last-minute disagreements to this course of action?”

None did, so he continued, “Okay, combining the two in three… two… one… it’s activated.”

The conference call fell silent as they all stared at the machine, watching its every movement. The silence was loud, almost deafening, as all of them waited for the results of the experiment to be revealed.

This was probably not the first time someone had tried to experiment with a Legendary’s power, since Team Galactic had most certainly tampered around with something similar when they ended up creating the Red Chain, but this was probably the first time it was done in an official setting, in a project that was sanctioned by the League.

After what felt like a whole minute of pure silence, with only the whirling of the machine as the only background noise, the machine let out a ‘ding’ as it signified the completion of the experiment.

Inside a custom built glass container, which was almost the size of a regular test tube, contained a small orb, almost looking like a shiny marble, that served as the fruit of their experiment.

Had they just managed to convert the lingering energies from a Legendary into something else?

He carefully took this container, with the small marble-like object inside, and brought it over to Birch, who immediately begun running tests on it to see if his theory was right.

A couple of minutes later, Birch nodded, “…It worked. This is probably as close as we can get to crystallizing the energy that is used for the Mega Stone.”

“Is it safe to touch?” Blaine asked.

“The results do not suggest otherwise.” Birch replied after a moment, “There are no harmful energies that could be detected radiating out from it. It should be safe for human contact.”

“Never mind that.” He quickly interrupted, “We should get it tested with a Mega Stone right away. We don’t know if this ‘Life’ energy will decay overtime. We need to run the tests now.” He didn’t understand why anyone would wait.

Birch considered his words for a moment, before turning to the rest of the Conference call, “Are we all in agreement with this?”

Fortunately, they all were. “Which Mega Stones do you have with you now, Birch?” Rowan asked.

“I kept the Pidgeotite and Cameruptite with me.” Birch replied, “Should we do tests on those?”

“Start with the Pidgeotite first.” Sam said, “I’ll also call up Joseph and let him know that we’ve succeeded. I’ve already been filling in him on everything else.”

“Make sure everything’s recorded for him.” Blaine added, “Like it or not, he’s the one funding us. He deserves to be part of this.”

Someone went and did just that. Meanwhile, he helped out Birch as the man went to grab the Pidgeotite and his own personal Pidgeot for testing.

Once Birch was back, Joseph had joined in on the call as well, and they all once again turned to stare at the Pidgeotite as Birch carefully placed it in contact with the marble that they had created.

Immediately, the stone began to glow brightly, sending out rays of light in all directions that nearly blinded the entire room.

And the Pidgeot began to glow white as well as it reacted to its Mega Stone.

Once the blinding light finally receded, they were all staring at the proof of their success.

As a proud new Pokémon stared back at them.

A.N. AND MEGA EVOLUTION IS FINALLY HERE! I know it took a while and has been on the backburner, but I was just trying to set up the pieces for Mega Evolution to finally become a thing. I also felt that it was fitting for Colress to be the main driver behind its discovery.

In canon, he was working to ‘unlock the true potential of Pokémon’, which arguably is what Mega Evolution is. Furthermore, with how vague the explanations behind Mega Evolution are, I felt that this gave me the creative freedom to try and come up with my own explanation of how I could ‘recreate’ it without making use of Xerneas and Yveltal. I hope you enjoy the roundabout solution I came up with, and it will be explored more in a later chapter. Hope you enjoyed!

Also, I know this was a shorter arc, but this marks the last chapter of ‘Arc 18 – Ideals’, as I’ve covered everything I wanted to for this arc. Next chapter will be the start of Arc 19. Thanks for your support as always! It’s always appreciated!