Well anyway, Fortree.

Pokemon and people have adapted to nature to survive. There’s no need to make nature conform to the way we want to live.

Dude, I can see the holes where you cut off the branches that were at this section of the treetrunk and getting in the way of your living space. You’re living closer to nature, not in an actual natural environment. Wooden planks arranged into a floor aren’t found in actual nature.

Furthermore, life has only adapted to “nature” in the sense that all life that didn’t is dead. That doesn’t mean you can’t make something better. You’re in a house wearing clothes. That’s not your natural state. Your natural state is to die if you try to live in a temperate area.

And across the giant bridge made of natural materials but not actually natural in itself. Next building is

Yo-o-o-o, Lucki!

I FORGOT HE WAS HERE DAMMIT

I knew we’d meet again! What? You don’t know where you are? This is the Secret Base Guild, of course! Huh? Whaddaya mean you never asked?

Lucki is sassy today.

Oh, you! No need to be shy, my girl!

ew ew ew stop talking

The Secret Base Guild is here to fully support everyone so they can have a Secret Base life full of adventure! We can give you hints on how to enjoy your base, and items you can’t get anywhere else! And, best of all, coming here means that you can always meet me! Anytime you want!

Okay, it looks like it’s over. Now to run the other way…

Y’know, Lucki, that reminds me… You still haven’t made yourself a team, have you? See, a team is made up of, like, the pals that hang out in your base with you. I guess you could just call ’em friends, but doesn’t “team” sound cooler? When you meet people in other bases, you can ask ’em to join your team! Nothing wrong with playing alone, course, but having some pals around sure can liven things up in your base! If you haven’t tried it yet, I think you oughta give it a shot before you write it off! Oh yeah! You’ve been collecting flags, little pal? Here at the Secret Base Guild, we assign ranks to all the teams based on how many flags they’ve managed to get, see. The more Secret Bases you find and the more flags you snag, the higher you and your team will end up in the ranking! Huh? You wanna know why we do that? Ain’t it obvious? It’s more fun that way! A bit of rivalry gets everybody fired up! And doesn’t it seem full of adventure to be on an endless hunt for more flags? The higher your rank gets, the richer your base life will become. You’ll see! So go out there and find those flags, and then bring ’em back here to show me! So lemme give a gift to my fellow base fanatic, for coming so far to see me here! A Proclamation will let you set the battle format that will fly in your own base. There are lots of Decorations with special and cool effects like that! Whenever you get a new big of swag for your digs, check it out to see what it does! And enjoy the base life!

He’s got a L23 flygon. I feel a little safer now that I know Lucki can murder him if he tries anything. Also, very confused.

Well, I buy all the stuff there so I won’t have to come back and move on.

The old guy by the pokecenter says, This city’s homes are built on trees. Perhaps because of that lifestyle, everyone seems healthy and lively. Why, even I do! I feel as if I’ve grown 30 years younger since I moved here.

This is actually a real issue in city planning! Building an area with pedestrians in mind leads to healthier people.

Another house has some old woman want me to guess what hand a coin’s in and then I get hidden power.

It’s Steven!

Hm… It looks as though that Pokemon can be found up on Route 120…


And that’s all. Thanks for not babbling on forever like Secret Base Creep.

The ground absorbs rainwater, and trees grow by drinking that water… Our Fortree City exists thanks to our having both earth and water.


So this is a valid point.

As I said earlier, life adapts to nature. Now, we’re not sure what the maximum range of life is, what with not finding alien life and such, but we do have some data points we can use.

The open ocean covers most of our planet, but has virtually no life. It’s possible that life might be able to evolve to better use it, but it’s had billions of years to work on the problem already. There’s three basic limiting factors: light, raw materials, and water. The ocean has enough water, but almost all the raw materials are at the bottom and almost all light is at the top.

Of course, it could be that the fact life works like this is the result of Groudon’s influence, and Kyogre’s original world would function on different rules. The fact that Kyogre can add water and Groudon remove water makes it clear that this is magic, and the fact Groudon appears to be actually generating increased sunlight despite the sun being ninety-three million miles away from Earth suggests the pokeworld’s cosmetology bears only a superficial resemblance to our own.

In our world, the sun is required to prevent us from being a closed system. Every time anything happens, energy is lost, so closed systems rapidly run out of energy and grind to a halt. Life on our planet continues to exist and develop because we’re an open system, where bonus energy keeps coming in.

Pokemon casually violate those rules left and right, and plenty of them appear to generate energy through unorthodox methods.

What happens if Kyogre’s clouds block out the sun? It should cause a drastic lowering of incoming energy, reducing how much life can be supported on the planet. But we also know that somehow, Groudon’s increased heat and light blights land rather than increasing total energy and turning everything into muggy hyperproductive rainforest, so it’s unlikely that Kyogre’s clouds and rain would have the same impact you’d expect.

Come to think of it – if my speculation about baltoy being special because they aren’t totally different than they were a few thousand years ago is correct (and we do know from BW that totally new pokemon species can pop up very suddenly, in the case of klank), perhaps the pokemon don’t have much to worry about in terms of what type of habitat is available. If Worldheart Kyogre wakes up to restore its vision of a solid blue planet, existing pokemon land-dwellers will adapt. Certainly in the games, it’s rain rather than instant flooding – if it takes a few hundred years to completely swallow up the land, maybe pokemon are fine with that. Maybe it’s only humans that can’t change fast enough and would be really threatened by this.

(Perhaps that rigidity is another hallmark of our being Groudon’s children, while the mutable pokemon are the children of water – and perhaps our ability to adapt at all is the taint of Kyogre, as Groudon has tainted the pokemon.)

Magic god cults are the best.