Last time,

Yes. Let’s get on with it.

Silph has rather lax security, if you think about it. If all the doors use the same system, then everyone must have the same card, making them easy to get as well. Also, why doesn’t one of the employees give you one? You can’t even say the idea is that Team Rocket took them, because the employees are all huddling in corners and hiding.

Hm… Maybe they hacked the system so that the current card keys don’t work and then used their own ones to allow access, and the card key you get was dropped by one of the grunts?

You rushed over and attacked me, moron. And technically I still didn’t know that was why until you said you were one.

What I’m getting at here is, the reason you didn’t get that promotion? It’s not because Silph doesn’t recognize talent. It’s because they do.

Mostly Team Rocket, though.

I remember finding this skeevy as a kid.        

Also, it’s a really flimsy excuse for a TM…

…And I always wondered why she was giving out that one in particular.

(I also thought the move seemed more like something Team Rocket should use than something the hero should, since even without going with the friendship thing, people generally don’t think it’s acceptable to blow up their sheepdogs to beat wolves, so it’s really weird to be given it now of all times.)

Quit attacking me while I’m trying to explore!

I always really like seeing how far people will walk, so almost all NPCs are choosing to come bug me, I’m not inflicting myself on anyone.

Also it’s not like I have a choice, you’re the ones who decided to interfere with the whole gym thing.

Hm…a genre-savvy villain would make sure not to block any crucial buildings, in the hope the hero would just breeze by.

Way, way ahead of you.

Given the location is how you get to the teleport-only areas, it’s a shame he didn’t drop a reference to that instead.

Well, obviously not give me your damn key, assuming the codes weren’t changed. Anyway, I hear defecting to Team Rocket is good. Wouldn’t know myself, but the scientists seem happy with it.

The real question is, why are there beds here? Did you guys live in Silph? Is that why none of you seem to be trying to leave?

Yup, that one just moves you to the hallway right next to it. God, that confused me as a kid.

Well, at least you recognize it, unlike that other idiot going on about how he worked for both.

So Silph either doesn’t study pokemon (hard to believe) or it has plenty of non-pokemon projects, like the teleporter. It doesn’t say Silph wouldn’t let this guy do unethical pokemon studies, so there’s no sign here the difference is a moral one, although in fairness, if you were going to do unethical studies you wouldn’t necessarily think that.

They’d better.

See! It’s canon that starting younger gives you an advantage!

Mind you, not sure what this guy’s excuse is for losing to someone who’s presumably not even been a trainer as long as he has. Maybe the idea is that kids bond with their pokemon better, so the kid is actually going to outclass anyone with similar experience? That undercuts the idea that it’s your personal ability that’s doing things, though.

This place I guess is their infirmary? Considering all she does is tell me to nap, for all I know this is the crash-after-allnighters room instead.

I was so thrilled when I stumbled across this place originally. My pokemon were really taking a beating.

For once, this isn’t dumb on the guy’s part. You can’t access Giovanni from the eleventh floor. If anything, going up there is a benefit to them because it’s a waste of your time and gives the other grunts more chances to take you out.

One wonders how the pokemon feel about this kind of thing. I mean, are they strictly trained not to question him, or are they just going along the same way pokemon always go along with it and this is in his head?

Note also that there’s no lack of assholes with pokemon in the game. Loving your pokemon is far from universal.

But the real question is, why are these lying about?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what these blocks even are. I always just assumed crates, but why would they have a room full of crates? This doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to be a factory. Is this their giant office supply area? If you asked me to say what they looked like, they look sort of like a computer screen set on a desk, but that’s clearly not it. Filing cabinets? That are arranged to be inaccessible for some reason?

I can’t believe none of you have better hiding places. Why doesn’t Silph have any closets? Why does it instead have whatever these are arranged in such a sloppy way? Also, come to think of it, why aren’t there computers around? You could be emailing the police instead of cowering.

Hm, maybe that’s why these are electronics-free offices now. There were plenty, but Team Rocket’s been removing them to prevent that from happening.

Back to this guy!

No.

See, just listen to yourself, how am I supposed to respect that?

This area seems like it’s a conference room.

That is one short report. Also, I wonder when they found this out? If the link cables are even remotely new, then it means that for a long time, people were completely unaware of those evolutions.

Come to think of it, the game generally makes very little deal about people discovering new ways for pokemon to evolve. It’s probably because it’s kind of retconny and they won’t want to draw attention to it, but you’d think it’d be a big deal to people.

Huh, hadn’t realized there were barely more moves than there were pokemon.

Huh. For some reason I’d always thought Silph made them, probably because they’re the big company and you learn about porygon here. But “POKEMON LAB” is getting used as a proper noun here rather than a description (not that it means much with some of the past issues the game has had, but still) and there’s no mention it’s a subbranch of Silph or has any other connection. Maybe they’re rivals, even.

It’s a really dumb name, though.

Porygon sucks as a pokemon, but I didn’t mind much because it made sense to me that the first artificial computer pokemon would likely be weak and buggy.

Come to think of it, I wonder if this has any connection to being able to store pokemon in computers? That data is presumably there to be read as code, so you could start comparing pokemon and getting an idea of what  different lines mean. Maybe there’s been a lot of technological leaps in very short time.

(I wonder if there’s pirate porygon torrents out there?)