Huh, the battle beyond is still going on.

You have four Gym Badges… You might be able to defeat Charles! Please beat him for me!

God, what’s with people ordering me about? At least this is to fight someone rather than be backup.

I guess this actually makes sense as a roadblock – I’m irritated but I think that’s because this is a retread of hiker asshole. This is a perfectly fine badge-related block in itself, it’s just that it’s the second time they’ve made me get a badge in order to get past someone.

You know, considering how annoyed I usually am by the game ignoring me, it’s odd that I wouldn’t mind the barrier just disappearing with implied time. I guess it’s because I also like the idea things go along on their own, and also because that’s how it was a lot in the first games.

Charles keeps going on about being a heartbreaker. Don’t care! Battle time!

He has a cool team though – tirtouga, sigilyph, and archen.

Beating him clears the way, naturally.

To the bridge!

The Driftveil Drawbridge… It’s also known as the Charizard Bridge! Because the raised drawbridge looks like the Pokemon called Charizard. …But, I’ve never seen Charizard, so I don’t know…

How hard is it to look one up?

Ducklett!

They are better at swimming than flying, and they happily eat their favorite food, peat moss, as they dive underwater.

Peat moss isn’t actually an aquatic plant…

And…huh. Beyond the drawbridge, at a second bridge, there’s a black-hat new Plasma grunt talking to a blue hoodie oldschool one.

Team Plasma: C’mon! Let’s have fun stealing Pokemon together, like we did before! says the newschool one.

???: I can’t. I’ve learned the hard way that stealing from others is wrong!

How do you learn that the hard way, anyway?

Team Plasma: Oh, come on! It’s too late to start acting all goody-two-shoes now!

I’m gonna give the guy this one, I mean, ??? is still in their thieving outfit, it’s ridiculous.

And newschool blackhat shoves oldschool bluehat.

Team Plasma: People don’t understand our just cause! Don’t they call you a villain who was plotting world domination?

Omg, N? I was thinking that N was like the only one we actually know the name of, so the only one who’d need it obscured, but I wasn’t expecting to actually get that. (Well, that and N didn’t steal pokemon…)

Even though you quit Team Plasma, people are still really cold to you, right?

Seriously, though, why wear the uniform if you quit?

So, you might as well just come steal Pokemon with us and take over the world! The people who are mean to you now will be groveling at your feet and saying how great you are!

Well, I’m convinced.

Ex-Team Plasma:

Aw, so, not N then?

I can’t… My lord N will be sad… I can’t do that to him…

So one of N’s groupies, I guess? Eh. They were the better set of villains, so sure.

Team Plasma: N!

Yeah, N! Awesome, wasn’t he?

Team Plasma’s king… What a joke! He’s nothing more than a traitor! He disappeared somewhere and abandoned us when we needed him!

And this surprises you because…? He was always using the organization for a goal, not for its own sake. Frankly, you should be grateful he spent so much time feeling responsible for you guys and trying to bail you out. For someone who was all about pokemon, he was surprisingly concerned for human wellbeing as well. Just a generally nice guy, I guess.

Hey! shouts someone offscreen in a spikey hate box. Please be someone new. Except Clay. Anyone new except Clay.

Nope, it’s Failry, who launches himself at the Team Plasma grunt in the new uniform, ignoring the one in the old uniform that would have been what he saw when his sibling’s pokemon was stolen.

Start talking, you Team Plasma trash!

Shut up and go away, the adults are talking.

Team Plasma: Oww…

Also don’t assault people.

You’re gonna pay for that!

This is your idea of an evil team, Nintendo? People who get mad when they’re assaulted by strangers?

Oh, yeah. Almost forgot… I’m not supposed to cause any trouble. I’ll get you next time!

YOU FUCKING RIVAL YOU INTERRUPT AN INTERESTING CONVERSATION AND I DON’T EVEN GET A BATTLE OUT OF IT!?

My dragon can’t come soon enough.

Gary: You’re not getting away!

Less talky, more running off the screen so I can go back to ignoring you.

Ex-Team Plasma: I’m OK!

Of course you are, also I don’t care.

We were friends when we were both in Team Plasma…

I gathered, also what about me makes it seem I care?

But two years ago,

No, that wasn’t rhetorical. Tell me so I can fix whatever’s given you the mistaken impression I care.

Team Plasma split into a group that follows Lord N,

Wait, so he’s still around? Or are you trying to follow his will as you understand it or whatever? Cults are fun!

who just wants to save Pokemon,

So…shouldn’t you be doing that rather than quitting the group if you follow N?

and a group that follows Ghetsis, who plans to take over the world.

Yeah I don’t think you need to worry about that.

Ghetsis will never succeed because he’s got to have a dozen plans going at once, with all the workable ones held off until the batshit ones complete. This is a guy who figured out how to hack all pokemon boxes at once, to get all pokemon ever, and decided that no, it was more important to run around doing a bunch of poorly understood mystical stuff to try to activate the whole legendary hero thing first, as well as doing other stuff for no discernible reason (seriously, though, what the hell was with the castle?), all of which were way more suspicious than the completely unknown pokemon hacking affair.

I’m just saying, if he ever managed to actually enact a worldending plan his first and only order of business would be to use it to shoot himself repeatedly in the foot.

You can hear the rest of the story in our home.

“Our”?

It’s on that little hill next to the Pokemon Gym.

“As was dictated by the terms of our parole.”

And bobblehead walks away.

On the street, someone else informs me Plasma stole but then returned his pokemon. Then inside a building, some guy gives me a shell bell!

Huh, the hotel has a floor fourteen, which I heard is actually super bad luck in Chinese?

Then on the nineteenth floor I literally steal a berry out of a pokemon’s mouth. God, I’m an asshole.

We can live unchanged, because we keep changing.

What.

I mean, Pokemon also evolve, but their Natures stay the same.

That didn’t really clarify anything at all.

Oh? By any chance, was your mother working in a Pokemon Center as a receptionist?

…so they’re not even nurses now, they’re “receptionists”. Fuck you too, game.

When things chance, I prefer the way it was, and when things don’t change, I get bored… I have a twisted mind.

Nintendo, it’s not that we can’t make up your mind, it’s that we want change that doesn’t suck.

A Pokemon of thunder and a Pokemon of wind were roaming everywhere and causing trouble! Then they were punished by a Pokemon of the soil. I like that story!

Yeah, I should really just go play Black, it was more fun.

…the gym is closed because Clay is “busy”. So that’s a total of zero gyms where the gym leader has just been in them without any fuss. Hopefully Clay’s busy in the same way as last gym and not in the sense I’m going to stumble across him and have to listen to him talk first.

And…there’s the Plasma grunt with some seven sages guy.

Ex-Team Plasma: Sir, that’s the person I was talking about!

And they rush over. Over here! This way!

…I’m like five, ten feet away tops. I don’t think that’s necessary.

Rood: Oh! So you’re interested in Team Plasma, are you?

I’m interested in whatever the right path is to the epic hero plot, Failry can fuck off into a volcano.

Ex-Team Plasma: If you hear what we have to say, you might be able to understand us.

I don’t know why you think I don’t already.

Rood: My guest. If you’re going to come inside, I would like to see what kind of person you are, Trainer. That’s right. In a Pokemon Battle. Do you find this acceptable?

I don’t see how this will show you I’m a good person, but I don’t care! Battle!

L30 herdier, really? And L30 swoobat.

Rood: I apologize for testing you. Being former members of Team Plasma, we must deal with a lot…

THEN STOP WEARING THE UNIFORM, DIPSHITS

I mean also what are you testing with this, that was totally random, but mostly THE UNIFORM. THE UNIFORM IS YOUR PROBLEM. WHY IS THIS SO HARD.

Gary: He got away!

Rood: And that is?
…
Your friend? He may join us.

I’d tell you why that’s a bad idea, but you just called Failry my friend, so I’m thinking you deserve what you get.

Let me introduce myself again. My name is Rood.

Gary: You guys are all Team Plasma too, right, finally recognizing the blindingly obvious outfits.

Tell me, what makes you different from the Team Plasma back there?!

Well they’re claiming to be ex-members, also shut up.

Rood: More accurately, we’re former members of Team Plasma.

“Who just wear the uniform because it’s fun being confusing and unhelpful.”

Because of the incident two years ago, we started taking care of the Pokemon that were separated from their Trainers as a way to atone for our misdeeds.

“Also, we’re taking care of that TV over there to atone for stealing it as well.”

And you are?

Oh god, don’t get him started.

I’m Gary. From Aspertia City… Five years ago, Team Plasma–I mean, you–stole my little sister’s Pokemon. I’m the pathetic trainer who wasn’t able to stop you.

If you were a trainer back then, how do you still have your own pokemon? Why didn’t they steal those?

“Separated?” What a joke! YOU were the thieves who STOLE them!

Good point, Failry! You’re almost tolerable.

And apparently this is a shock. Rood: Is that so… My sincerest apologies…

Gary: Just an apology? That’s it?!

Man, the pokeworld has the weirdest justice system.

Spikey hate box time! Where’s my sister’s Pokemon?!

Gary, after five years, they’ve got better claim to it than you guys on anything but the legal property level. It knows them, not your little sister who was probably a terrible owner anyway, I mean she’s like what now, seven? She was a little kid who shouldn’t have had her own pokemon back then.

Purrloin! WHERE’S PURRLOIN?

Rood: The Pokemon you speak of is not in this place.

“I know this instantly despite purrloin being relatively common among our ranks and the fact we statistically should have a handful here. Unrelatedly, please don’t examine the backyard.”

I imagine it is still being used by Team Plasma now. Just as you say, our apologizing doesn’t solve anything. But you can’t move forward unless you admit you were wrong and apologize…

Yeah it’s all about you, isn’t it.

Gary: Enough already! Apologizing isn’t going to get my sister’s Pokemon back! Farla! I’m going to the Pokemon Gym! I’ll get stronger and crush every single member of Team Plasma!

Huh, that was a surprisingly tolerable interlude. If Failry can restrict himself to just pointing out the stupidity of other NPCs from here out, he might even earn back his name.

Rood: Team Plasma made Trainers like him suffer…

I know it was hard to hear over all the whiny outrage, but actually it was trainers like his sister, nothing actually happened to him.

I feel terrible about it… How foolish we were…

I’m pretty in favor of stealing the pet of a three year old. I mean, seriously, you think three year olds can take care of animals properly?

Farla, as you can see, I can’t do anything to thank you.

You could give me your money and your pokemon. Or more practically, info about Team Plasma.

Actually, I have a favor to ask of you.

Whatever.

Could you please look after this Pokemon, Zorua?

Wait what.

Okay, nothing about this makes sense but screw it, pokemon mollify me. Give it!

Rood: Oh! Thank you!

No stalling, hand it over.

But what’s this? It seems you can’t take any more Pokemon with you.

Arg, hate it when the game does this. I guess it’s semi-justified here, though, he presumably wants me to actually take care of it and not leave it in a box forever.

The other people in the house do a way better job of justifying themselves than Rood.

We’re taking care of the Pokemon whose trainers we can’t find.

See? That’s all you needed to make it sound like atonement and not enjoying your ill-gotten gains.

I’m waiting for my lord N to return. He can talk to Pokemon. If he comes back, we can find out what the Pokemon here want.

And here’s the first and possibly last person in the game to express a desire to find out what the pokemon’s opinion is, instead of talking about how awesome it is that pokemon and people totally want the exact same thing, which is to do what the person says.

Outside some guy expresses concern they’re secretly evil. Which I guess is why he’s hanging out right outside.