I’m through the tunnel! And there’s a police station.

Route 9 Police Station
“Don’t fight! Don’t meet anyone’s eyes!”

…what? Is this like, their motto, or is it their victim-blamey advice for us, or…???

And then a police officer attacks me.

It’s OK for a Police Officer to be weak because Alola is peaceful!

Uh. That’s concerning.

I go inside to complain about his conduct only for the officer at the desk to tell me to go away because he’s on break. Not even wait, just go away and don’t bug him at all. This is now well beyond concerning. Sure, I can solve all my problems with wanton violence, but what about everyone who isn’t me?

The dead can sleep in peace here. Here in the shadow of Tapu Lele’s sacred ruins: the Ruins of Life.

Do…do you guys generally have issues with the dead not sleeping in peace?

Also don’t you also have angry ghost marowak dancing around? And aren’t I probably going to catch some ghost types if I go over there?

And yup, phantump appears. So they’re sleeping in peace except for the souls of lost children. (And yes also there’s that kid not understanding what death is, but that’s normal for kids.)

According to legend, medicine to cure any illness can be made by plucking the green leaves on its head, brewing them, and boiling down the liquid.

Huh, I hadn’t thought about that aspect of their design. They’re a dead kid fused with a hollow stump, but the sides have leafed out, so maybe the infusion of child spirit brought the tree back to life a little? But it doesn’t look particularly healthy, so what happens if you remove the couple green leaves? Does it redie? Does it easily sprout more since the leaves aren’t actually necessary but are just a weird accidental quirk of its undeath? Can you farm this?

I promptly trade little Flowey.

Through its roots, it exerts control over other trees. A deadly curse falls upon anyone cutting down trees in forests where Trevenant dwell.

With the previous entry in mind, the fact trevenant are both clearly composed of disconnected chunks of tree and have a lot of green, apparently alive leaves on them makes me think that yeah, just as fusing with the stump meant the kid didn’t wholly “die”, fusing with the kid has brought the tree back to some emblance of life. (I saw a bit of chatter once about what undead plants would be like, and it’s a surprisingly difficult question once you stop to think about it. It’s easy to make ones are generally gothy or into blood, but the main hallmarks of undeath are a physically crumbling body combined with continued motion, and plant motion is intrinsically tied to growth and repairing of itself.)

Another consideration is, again, the issue of how these connect up. So, a child gets lost and dies in the forest, grows up to viciously defend the forest? My guess is it’s a matter of going native. The phantump are going to grow up around other pokemon, so maybe it’s natural they’d switch allegiances to protecting those pokemon’s homes. (There’s also the issue of how exactly trading it fits in – if we’re to assume trade evolution happens only to captured pokemon, then phantump only decide to start murdering uppity humans after they’ve been captured and traded at least once. If not, then we’re left to speculate on what event equivalent to that happens to the wild ones and why that means they evolve into human-murderers.)

I manage to get all the way to the ruins, but hit those enormous blocks. I get why they changed it from same-sized boulders, it makes it a little more plausible you’d need a specific move, but did they have to be literal squares that look so unnatural? And the size just makes it all the more absurd that things reset out of the holes again. At the least, they should’ve stuck with puzzles where you have to move it to the side and not into a pit.

I head for the pokecenter.

What happens to a Pokemon’s consciousness when it’s put into a PC Box? To be conscious you must be awake and aware of the world around you, wouldn’t you say? But are Pokemon awake when they are in a PC Box or are they sleeping?

That would’ve been a really good question to ask before I found out all the pokemon I catch live on beautiful tropical islands that are so awesome random wild pokemon show up out of the blue and ask if they can be my pokemon too.

I wish I could go into a Box to find out…

But I’m really glad to see someone concerned about this kind of thing rather than taking it for granted!

Now, can you? Negrek mentions that canon really doesn’t seem to allow for humans to be digitized like Pokemon, but then, canon says human teleportation exists and its only use is to allow Silph employees to screw around at work and render their security system full of holes, so there’s really no way to tell the difference between “can’t” and “aren’t”.

My general assumption is that this is a the result of a taboo. Humans probably did figure out how to jam other humans into balls but decided that was horrible and a line that should not be crossed. Human capture is actually pretty nicely positioned for something like that – before the modern age and mass manufacture, when you’re using hand-crafted apricorns, pokeballs would be rare and it makes more practical sense to save them for pokemon. A great many things that we say are horrible and unforgivable are the ones that are impractical, while the practical ones are horrible but accepted. And we can see from the “people and pokemon” business that they have some very entrenched separate but equal narratives. You could see things developing from “pokemon go in apricorns, humans don’t” to “don’t do things to humans you would do to pokemon”. (The pokemon generation shorts I keep seeing reminded me also of how N was accused of not being a real person – and while I see the argument that Ghetsis is a manipulative person, it seems to be a sincere belief, particularly given he’s frothing about it in the BW2 showdown, and a belief he finds so self-evident he doesn’t need to explain, suggesting it’s something he picked up from the surrounding culture. Humans and pokemon are supposed to be close and work together, but everyone has to stay in their place, and someone violating that, someone blurring the lines between “people” and “pokemon”, they’re a danger.) We also see very little in the way of human on human violence and the closest we get to exceptions, fighting-type trainers, are generally introduced with a degree of eye-rolling. We’re introduced to a fighting gym in the first game as those losers who got their asses kicked and lost gym status before we got there. Third game has a fighting gym leader who tries to show off his own muscles and gets “yeah but all that matters is your pokemon” in reply. And, of course, the enemy teams may be willing to destroy the entire world, but they never break the convention of using pokemon battles to resolve all disputes.

So, maybe they absolutely could code it so a human could check out a box, but they never would.

(Another option is that pokeballs are not safe – we generally think of/treat them like stasis, but that’s not well borne out by canon and the fact they can’t catch unconscious pokemon may be an important clue, as well as the fact poisoned pokemon continue to take damage from poison. Also there was that one episode where Ash had to transport medicine from one pokecenter to another, rather than the other pokecenter teleporting the pokemon to the one with medicine, and yes, that was because the writers didn’t give a fuck but that sums up 99% of the worldbuilding we’re dealing with. Point is, pokeballs may cause damage, the sort of thing pokemon can just heal right back up given they handle getting beaten to a pulp regularly just fine but do that to a human a couple times and you’ve taken years off their life. In that case humans can’t check on things like this…but it also means that the average trainer just has to take it on faith that their pokemon are okay with being stuck in a box or whatever.)

Back to the game, there’s some Aether guy who’s apparently charged with a survey on a pokemon, but has failed, so he wants me to show me a pokedex entry on it and then, presumably, he’ll falsify an entire report and data trends based on that. Sadly, the yes/no option comes at the start and you can’t refuse once he explains his plan to pollute important environmental information. “Species not found” is actually a pretty damn important thing to be reporting, you irresponsible idiot.

Outside, a random dude is offering to sell me “herbs”. Sadly, they appear to all be completely legitimate.

I also try out some haircuts and buy more clothes. I’m running low on money, but then I sell all the pearls and stuff and end up with six digits.

Kahuna Olivia is a Rock-type Pokemon user. It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it. Rock types have plenty of weaknesses. She’s definitely something, to be able to boast of such strength even when she uses such a disadvantageous type!

Hm. I mean, it sounds pretty cool when you put it this way, but will the game follow through by giving her extra high level pokemon to model this?

Really, this would be the perfect time, wouldn’t it? There’s a ton of water types about, we got access to grass types this island, and there’s a bunch of ground types too. Rock types tend to be slow, which means even a high level one capable of beating my pokemon in a single hit will still be taking hits from me as well.

I walk to the other side and someone just hands me a special z-crystal for pikachus, because of course there’s a special one for pikachus.

Alright. Next time: actually doing that challenge and getting off the island.