Over the next few hours we not only finished the pond-like part of the bottom layer but also the stream/channel part leading to the lower waterfall. We even checked the wall behind the waterfall itself just in case there was something like another hidden cave scenario. In hindsight it made sense there was none since that would simply end up connecting to the camber behind the visible opening on the waterfall's left. Unless, it was some kind of mini-room, but I had Hades/Gengar check the rock wall just to be sure, and he found nothing.
Back to my water exploration; Aside from the usual 3 suspects, Magikarp, Goldeen, and Barboach, I also found some more Luvdisc that I had not already checked, which I naturally amended in hopes of finishing this little side-quest of mine. The results of those checks denied that wish rather mercilessly, and in a moment of weakness after the 12th disappointing Luvdisc, I briefly considered whether I should lower my requirement for the Luvdisc before I squashed that thought right away.
There was no way that I could give one a 5-star fish while the other got a 4-star one. Moreover, I would never give either Rose or Jessie a lower potential Luvdisc since the Pokemon itself was already the way it was, so I continued looking for more Luvdisc and when we finished checking the lower level without finding the Luvdisc I needed, l simply turned my hopes of finding a second decent Luvdisc to the upper parts of the stream instead.
As things stood right now, we were just a few minutes away from 8 p.m., which left us with barely more than 30 minutes until the time I chose for dinner. That was nowhere near enough time to go over the bed of the middle portion of the stream, so after mulling over what to do for a few moments, I simply decided to end things here for the night. I moved us back to Utopia, and after greeting everyone I began taking out and handing out one of the pre-prepped dinners I made for this Meteor Falls exploration.
It was a bit earlier than I had initially planned, but that was fine since we had pushed the time back anyway, so all we were doing was to eat a bit less late. The favorite topic during the dinner conversation ended up being the integration of the new fighting types to Utopia, specifically their relationship to the fighting types in the main team; Both in general and those of the same line. None of the newcomers had managed to truly attach themselves to any of the main team guys or gals.
The Hitmons and Tyrogue had tried getting close to Kimura/Hitmonform, but he shot them down by declaring that they were currently too weak for him to take any of them under his direct command, though he followed that up by expressing his willingness to occasionally come over to their place to supervise their training. He claimed that it would help him strengthen his basics, which was totally something a tsundere would say, so obviously not something I had expected from Kimura.
The others teased him during our dinner conversation about his roundabout way of taking his fellows under his wing. Tyson/Machamp was better off since his approach was more straightforward even if it was practically the same thing at its core. He directly told the Machop and Machoke that he would occasionally visit their place to train with them and that the strongest among them could challenge him to a spar.
Tyson would only take in those who proved themselves adequate in those spars, so those who failed to meet his standard would have to keep trying if they wanted to join him at his home/habitat. Makuhita, Hariyama, and the 4 Scarggy as well as 2 Scrafty were much more fortunate since Po/Pangoro was much more chill than either Kimura or Tyson.
He directly allowed them to live at his place even though he declared that he had no plans to take in any minions. He even went as far as to ask me to place their adjacent to his, so that they could move between them if they wanted to. Po also followed that up by declaring that they were still free to approach him if they needed any help or advice with their training. Po's generosity was honestly the best thing the newcomers could have gotten.
Not everyone could get benefits without any expectations after all, and their being able to access some of the resources available at Po's habitat usually limited to the main team definitely counted as a boon. Still, that aside, the rest of the topics were pretty standard such as what they did during the day and how they were looking forward to watching Digimon on Kyoday in three days.
Once we had eaten and cleaned up, we spent the rest of the night relaxing and playing games. The next morning welcomed the fourth day since our arrival at the Meteor Falls. My goal for the day was to finally finish the exploration of the main chamber/space and start on the lower chamber. I was not sure if we could finish the whole first room/space today, but I wanted to be done with at least the dry part.
That way I could use the first half of Dialday to finish the pond as well as the second room, and even take a look at the crack that Tympole mentioned. Depending on the result, I would spend the second part of Dialday/tomorrow either following up on that or moving on to the upper chamber. Still, that would have to wait until tomorrow, so I stopped thinking about it and asked Mothra/Butterfree if she still wanted to accompany me today.
She actually declined this time, which surprised me a bit since I had actually expected her to insist on coming along, but she said that she had something she wanted to train instead. When I asked her what it was, she acted all mysterious which caused a lot of chuckles/giggles around us. Seeing her like that, I let it be and told Kun/Azuraid and Hades that it would be just us today, which everyone swiftly denied.
They collectively insisted that I bring along another water type, and when I told them that I would have loved to do that if not for the fact that the size of the rest would likely scare away the Pokémon I wanted to see. This was true for Lapras and the Milotic as well, not just the Gyarados. I did not expect Horus/Xatu to Teleport AlphaBro over just to ask him to bring over BossBro.
While AplhaBro was just as strong as BossBro, if not stronger, he was also quite big due to his Alpha gene, so I understood why they did not choose him. Horus Teleported away with AlphaBro as soon as he agreed, and less than a minute later, Horus reappeared with just BossBro, who had apparently advanced to the (mid) dark gold stage since I last saw him. BossBro greeted me before he greeted everyone else.
He then smacked his chest and promised everyone that he would keep me safe as if I required special care. I just told him that I was happy to see him join us before I finally left Utopia with him, Kun, and Hades. We appeared beside the stream at the mid-level and dove straight into the water. The depth of this part of the stream was not even half of the lower area's depth, so despite the two sections being close to the same size, it took us less time to explore the middle section of the stream.
We were pretty much done with the whole thing an hour before lunch, and unfortunately, I once again failed to find a second Luvdisc that fit my capture criteria. What I did see, however, were a few Marill and Azumarill. There had been none of them in the lower section, which had felt a bit weird at the time, so I directly asked the first Azumarill we saw why that was the case.
Apparently, they avoided that area due to the three Gyarados and two Whiscash that lived there since they liked to attack Marill. When Azumarill mentioned two Whiscash, I realized that I seemed to have missed one during my exploration, which either meant that it had slipped through to another area while I was exploring a certain area or it had simply burrowed/hidden well enough for me to miss it.
Either way, I was not interested in going back to see if I could find it, though I did tell Azumarill that the number of Gyarados had fallen to 2. Azumarill thanked me for that but shared that they would stay out of that section until one of the Gyarados chose to leave for the sea or a Whiscash ended up dying. That tidbit aside since we had finished exploring the middle section, only the upper section of the stream remained before we were done exploring the main chamber.
Thankfully, this did not mean that the upper section was not our last chance to find a good Luvdisc. There were still a few ponds in the other chambers, so I still had a chance to find a Luvdisc even if I ended up failing to spot a qualified Luvdisc there as well, though I would prefer it if it did not come down to that. That said, we spent another 5 minutes checking out the wall/rock behind the very wide waterfall this section had.
However, even after that we still had close to an hour before we had to enter Utopia for lunch, so we directly moved on to the final section of the stream, or rather the first one since the rest of the stream was an extension of the wide stream generated by the upper waterfall. Origin or not, the depth I noted after diving into the upper section of the stream was barely equal to the middle section.
I did notice that the depth increased the closer we came to the upper waterfall once I began to explore the rest of the stream's bed/floor, which made some sense. The difference was not that big, 3 meters at its maximum when one compared the two ends of the upper section, but it was there. Another thing that we found there which we had not seen in the lower sections, was a handful of Feebas that lived close to the area close to the upper waterfall.
I was unable to find out why they stuck to this area, but I was pretty sure that they came from the closed channel above that produced the waterfall. There were Milotic up there after all, so the presence of Feebas made sense if they got swept away by the current and carried down the waterfall. Maybe it was also why they stuck around the area.
It was possible that they wanted to return, though unless the Milotic came down to retrieve them, that meant ascending the waterfall, which was no easy feat. Honestly, I had heard of the legend of Magikarp climbing waterfalls and evolving to Gyarados, but a Feebas doing the same just to return home felt pretty impressive as well, if admittedly a bit less rewarding.
Now that I thought about it, I had never actually thought about testing if that Magikarp Waterfall evolution legend was true or not. Given the many, many Magikarp I had and Utopia's malleability, I could easily create a multitude of waterfalls to test if that legend was actually true.
Before I let my second thought stream start on creating a bunch of different waterfalls to test the idea, I let him go through the super library to see if there were some books/notes on the topic just in case someone had already done research on the topic. After all, I knew already that at least Professor Serizawa studied Gyarados, even if his research was more on variants.
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