I start by returning to the Aether House, now that the Yungoos has returned. But it turns out that this was basically just one big diversion, and while I was gone, Lillie was abducted by ninjas! Or at least by Team Skull people. The game randomly cuts to a flashback sequence and shows what happened - Plumeria must have come back pretty much right after Acerola and I left the area, and she starts threatening Lillie to give up her Cosmog. She calls Lillie a thief (which is probably accurate, judging from what the intro cutscene showed, but I don't know the motives involved yet), and Lillie is unwilling to use Nebby's teleportation ability to escape since it seems to hurt it pretty seriously whenever it uses that. Instead, she decides to go with them willingly rather than risk any violence. And apparently Hau was there for the whole incident and didn't really do much to help, which he's pretty upset about.
Suddenly, Gladion (yes, I'm going to be using his actual name now, since he plays a pretty major role here) bursts in, grumbles a bit, and then randomly battles me. Surprisingly, the battle is actually kind of challenging despite the fact that my Pokemon outnumber his two to one, and one of his is a Golbat. That Golbat hits like a truck with Acrobatics though, and Type: Null isn't exactly a slouch. After this unnecessary anger-fueled battle, he takes me to the ferry back at Maile City to chase after Team Skull. But we can't actually leave yet because Hau isn't here (where the hell is he?), and then all of a sudden, Nanu shows up, casually mentions that he's the kahuna of the island, and asks if I want to battle him now. Can't say I saw that coming. I do at least get the option to delay fighting him for now, and if I talk to Gladion again, we still can't leave until Hau shows up. I wonder if these two unrelated events might somehow be tied together, HMM.
Regardless, I take this time to do a little bit of unfinished business. One thing I neglected to do the first time was check out the "clean Pyukumuku off the beach" mission thing back at Hano Beach. It's an unimportant thing to do, but you get quite a lot of money from doing it (20,000 pokebucks, I believe), so it's worth spending the minute or two to do it. I also catch another Haunter for the sake of an NPC in the Tapu Village Pokemon Center, since he wants to trade his Graveler for one. Both Haunter and Graveler have trade evolutions, so I get an Alolan "Great Leader of Soviet Russia" Golem. This thing is hilarious looking and I'm somewhat tempted to use one in a future playthrough. I've been saying that about a lot of things though, and I generally don't ever delete my original file in Pokemon games (especially not if it's the first game of a generation), so I'm not sure when that would ever happen unless I decide to get Sun at some point, or if the Stars rumor turns out to be true.
That's about it as far as time-wasting goes, so I head back to challenge *looks name up* Nanu. I swear, there's too many similar names in this. Hala, Faba, Hapu, Nanu, and arguably Lana (though hers at at least a "normal" name), along with all the locations. Haina, Hano, Hau'oli, Heahea, Hokulani, Kala'e, Mahalo, Lanakila, Paniola... it must just be a cultural thing, since I assume these all do actually mean things in Hawaiian, but to me, it's really hard to remember half of them. Anyway, since this is a Grand Trial, I first try to guess what type he's going to use. Eliminating the Z-Crystals I've already gotten, the remaining ones are Flying, Poison, Ground (which will probably be Hapu), Ice, Dragon, Dark, and Fairy. Given this guy's general demeanor and the giant pile of Meowths in his police station, I'm guessing Dark. And judging from his first Pokemon, a Sableye, I think I guessed right.
The battle starts out with Laylee versus his Sableye. I, stupidly, use Swords Dance and he one-shots me with Shadow Ball. So Lena comes out next, and it turns into a bit of a spamfest with me whittling him down with Disarming Voice and him damaging me with Shadow Ball. We both end up healing at some point, but eventually I win that matchup. He sends out a Krokorok next, and although I definitely have the type advantage here, I switch to Skeeter to share the experience a bit. Skeeter gets Swaggered on the first turn, but manages to hit anyway and one-shots the Krokorok with Leech Life. Lastly, Nanu sends out Garfielf (I'm not going to stop calling it that). I switched off to El Grapadura, and despite getting in a solid hit, he went down after two Power Gems. To finish it off, I sent out Ratzenberger and we had a bit of a Z-move showdown. Ratz managed to just barely survive the Black Hole Blitz, but Garfielf was no match for Hydro Vortex.
With that, the third island is officially complete! Well, aside from challenging the trial captains, but that'll be done a bit later after the plot events. Hau shows up, and Gladion's all "don't you dare say that this is fun", but Hau actually seems pretty serious for once. Our destination is Aether Paradise, apparently. We arrive there without incident, and Hau asks why Lillie would be here. Gladion, being the edgelord he is, of course doesn't bother to answer this question. They take off, and I'm mainly just curious at this point if Aether is actually the enemy or not. One of their employees seems to have no problem with me taking the ferry out of here if I need to prepare myself or whatever, so they seem to be fine with that. But after taking a few steps away from the dock area, I get spotted by a different employee and forced into a battle, so ... maybe some of them are bad and some are good. Or they might just be confused, since the dialogue seems to indicate that they're here to stop a Pokemon thief, and they don't actually know who the thief is. I continue through a few more of these battles, check the place for items (getting a Toxic TM in an area that was blocked off the first time I was here), and then make my way to the others at the elevator.
This elevator won't go down to the lower floor without the proper clearance, so we have no choice but to go up. There we meet up with Faba, who's being all self-important like usual, and Gladion insinuates that he knows what's going on. After some more uninteresting conversation, he battles me with his single Pokemon, a Hypno. Thanks to Laylee's flinch-causing Air Slash and a couple Chesto Berries, I get through the battle without taking any damage. Afterwards, Faba says that the Cosmog might be held downstairs, where they're holding "experiments aiming to tear the very boundaries of the world apart". As we take the elevator down, the camera focuses on Faba's random evil grin. Oh no, I wonder if there might be a trap or something. That would be so unexpected. I am frighten.
Reaching the basement area, Gladion mentions that he had last been here two years ago, and we need to go check out Secret Labs A and B. No really, they're actually called that. He goes to Secret Lab A, while Hau and I go to check out B. I'd take this time to check if there's anywhere else to go, but the game doesn't actually let me go anywhere else. Well, aside from leave the island entirely, that's a thing. So yeah, apparently Gladion's ok with being interrupted to head back to Ula'ula Island. I'm not even sure why he comes with, but he does.
I take this time to check out the malasada shop that now randomly contains an event that wasn't there before. An Oranguru (weird how I've been seeing so many of these around and not a single Passimian) in the shop just kinda grunts and hands me the TM for Frustration. Immediately afterwards, a cop comes in and explains that this is his "partner", Gru. I'd make a Despicable Me reference, but I only saw the first movie once and didn't get very much out of it. Instead I'll just mention again that this is probably Judy from Dr. McNinja. Either way, the cop gives me the TM for Return, which I teach to Dreemurr because Slam's accuracy is awful. I also take this time to buy the Bulldoze TM for Ratzenberger, since his current moveset kinda sucks (I delete Feint Attack) and go back to the desert to find that dude that gives the Safety Goggles. Luckily he didn't take that long to find. Oh, and at some point I ended up getting a Murkrow from Poke Pelago, which was actually a Pokemon I didn't have yet.
Ok, so back to Aether Paradise. I head over to the only area I can actually go, only to run into three scientists with funky astronaut helmets. Each one of them uses a single Pokemon - a Muk, then a Magneton, then a Porygon2. I remember this distinctly because this is where I got annoyed once again at Aleene's underperformance. I actually reset after fighting the first two and tried again, this time with the Eviolite, but it didn't actually help. Not even the Magneton, which is 4x weak to Ground, could be beaten without me having to switch to a different Pokemon. The Porygon2 would have been theoretically beatable, but it kept stalling with Recover and it made itself levitate to avoid Bulldoze, so I only had one non-STAB move, Giga Drain, to actually damage it. So yeah, those battles were made more annoying than they needed to be because of me trying and failing to give one of my underdog Pokemon a chance to shine. I'm reallllly hoping evolution fixes this problem. But ignoring that, the only other thing I get out of this encounter is the information that they're doing some kind of experiments on Nebby, and that it's the key to opening Ultra Wormholes. I think I already knew that, but it's hard to remember sometimes.
Gladion's hanging outside the door to Secret Lab A, and has a bit of an interesting quote, so I'll just put the whole thing here: "Don’t even think about getting in here. Me and Null... We’re more alike than we might look. We’re both what we were made to be... I was like an ornament to my mother. Wearing whatever she told me to wear, acting however she wanted me to act... Null was crafted just as carefully. It was made just to battle the beasts. In this room...right here..."
I'll admit, the backstory there is sort of intriguing me. I know a smattering of random spoilers for character backgrounds and motivations, but not everything, so it's still kinda interesting to piece it together. Anyways, I head over to Secret Lab B, where Hau is apparently having a heated argument with a shelf. No really, his animation couldn't possibly indicate anything else, it's pretty great. After fighting off a couple more goons, I check the room for information. I find a bit on Ultra Wormholes that doesn't really say anything I didn't already know, followed by a report on Cosmog: "Cosmog is hypothesized to be a type of Ultra Beast that hails from another dimension. A dimension that we have named Ultra Space. When placed under sufficient stress, it reveals the power to create and open Ultra Wormholes in order to escape from its suffering. We are now working on a device that will allow us to manipulate the Ultra Wormholes created when Cosmog is subjected to extreme stress..."
Once again, not much we didn't already know, but it does mention that Cosmog itself may be an Ultra Beast, so that's something new. We go off to deliver the information to Gladion, who now theorizes that we were sent down here on purpose to waste time in a dead end, so he rushes back to see what else can be done. I, in the meantime, take my sweet time checking out Secret Lab A, since it's now available for me to enter. There's a number of documents in here on "BKP Development", along with a blog that Faba's been updating. The blog, as is typical for Faba, basically says a lot of nothing, but there's a few noteworthy tidbits in there, such as development on a special sort of ball (which we kind of knew about already), and the line "My superior’s family stole the results of our research and ran off." Interesting.
The BKP Development stuff has more information overall, and I'll try my best to summarize it the best I can. BK stands for Beast Killer (the P is probably for Pokemon, but I don't think it's ever specified). Materials were gathered from the Canalave library in Sinnoh to start on development for the "Type change" program, or RKS System. They managed to create a dummy version of this system, and were ready to apply it to their artificial Pokemon named "Type: Full". They created three of these Pokemon, and after applying the RKS System to them, all three of them rejected it and went berserk. They were given control masks to limit their power, and all three were put into permanent cryogenic stasis ("for the rest of eternity", as the game puts it). Because the project didn't work, they were renamed as "Type: Null". Pretty interesting stuff overall. And although the game itself doesn't point this out, I'd like to mention for anyone who hasn't seen this or figured it out on their own: RKS, when said out loud, is extremely similar to (the correct, but frequently unused pronunciation of) Arceus. Arceus can also change to any type, and is most well-known in the Sinnoh region. It all ties together very well.
Now that I've finally finished looking at all this background info, it's time to see what the others are up to. There's more fairly unremarkable battles, though Crazy Bus learned Dig in the process. (I replaced Crunch, which may be a bad move in the long run, but I'd prefer more Ground coverage over Dark.) We go back up to the top floor, and are greeted by Wicke, who actually seems to be completely innocent in this whole situation. She refers to Gladion as "young master", which causes Hau to freak out a bit, though I can't say I'm entirely sure why. And then, shock and horror, Faba shows up with a bunch of backup! I wind up in another battle against him, and apparently he's added two more Pokemon to his team in the last few minutes. His two new Pokemon, a Slowbro and Bruxish, don't pose much of a problem. His Hypno poses even less of one because I battle it with Dreemurr. You'd think the AI would be smart enough to not try to put me to sleep when I'm already asleep, but it tried anyway and was unsuccessful as a result. The battle ends with a pretty great cutscene showing everyone's standard facial expression: Gladion's all angry and edgy, Hau's grinning like an idiot, and Luna's staring blankly into the camera with no soul. They really should work on that if Stars is a thing.
With Faba beaten again, we get the key to reach whatever the hell this big back area is, and come to find a scene of "like an uku billion Team Skull thugs", to use Hau's wording. Gladion rushes up to Guzma and they just make faces at each other for a bit, and then I go to check out the various Dead Guy Perezes laying around in the area. They don't respond at all, so make of that what you will. I mow through a couple of Grunts (though I will mention the second one's Raticate did a lot more damage to my team than it had any right to), and the third one actually gets smart and refuses to fight me. That means there's nothing more between me and Guzma, so I head back to heal and then unknowingly enter what is probably the hardest battle in the game so far.
I dunno what it is with me and the Guzma fights, but I always suck massively at dealing with him. I'm going to partially blame Aleene for this, since she's basically just an empty slot in my team as far as usefulness is concerned (you'd think the resistance to Bug would be nice, but it doesn't matter), but I'm also just using a bad set of Pokemon in general, since I don't have my main Fire or Flying users on me at this time. Anyway, I'm just making excuses, so let's see how the battle went.
I start off the same way as last time, with Stealth Rock. The instant super effective damage to all his bug types (including Goliopod's re-entry) is too good to pass up on. Unfortunately, that's also the only thing Lubba gets to do in the match, since it gets one-shotted by Razor Shell. I send in Crazy Bus next, and get in a Thunder Wave since I'm still afraid of this thing destroying my entire team, and will take any opportunity to cripple it. My first Wild Charge doesn't quite manage to get it below 50% HP, which means that the second one will almost beat it. Through some stroke of luck, I do manage to get both of those hits in, due to Golisopod's decision to use Swords Dance on both turns. So I get it down to about 10% of its HP and it gets forcefully switched out to Masquerain.
Masquerain's a bit of an odd duck. I don't expect it to be particularly threatening (especially since it lost half its health from the Stealth Rock), but it surprised me. I took a turn to switch to Malone, who took way more damage than I'd expect. It then outsped me and I didn't get a single hit in, so that's pretty cool I guess. I sent in Aleene, since I figured the Bug resistance would be good here. Remember earlier when I said it wouldn't matter? Yeah. I got in a Shadow Ball, which did next to nothing, it used Air Slash, and Aleene got knocked into the red, so obviously that wasn't happening. I finally took it out by switching to Dreemurr and getting in a Sucker Punch.
Guzma's next Pogey is a Pinsir. Not the strongest of Bug types, but certainly not one of the worst, either. Surprisingly, it's the member of the team that causes the fewest problems. I start off with a Sucker Punch, knowing perfectly well that Dreemurr will probably not survive whatever attack comes in, and I was correct. So I switched to Ratzenberger and went for the Hydro Vortex to get it out of the way early. I kinda lucked out there though, since its X-Scissor nearly knocked Ratz into the Solo Form range.
Next came Golisopod again, who came out, took Stealth Rock damage, and then that was it. Ok, bye. That leaves only the Ariados, which I didn't expect to be much of a problem. Good lord, was I wrong. It starts off with Fell Stinger, which KOs Ratz. I didn't realize this at the time, but that move apparently gives the user a +3 boost to Attack when it KOs something, so that's immediately a problem. I send out Crazy Bus to try and get in the Thunder Wave, and through some miracle, the Refresh benefit kicks in and I survive with 1 HP, meaning that I do succeed in paralyzing it. If only it actually mattered. This thing has Shadow Sneak, so any hopes of actually outspeeding it are immediately lost.
From this point on, the rest of the battle basically turned into a sequence of reviving something, losing whatever was currently sent out, and repeating the same process until it got fully paralyzed and I got a chance to do something else. I went through about six or seven revives and did not manage to get a single hit on it that entire time. Every time I tried to either attack it or heal up, it would just one-shot my Pokemon with its maxed attack and priority. After getting incredibly sick of this, I decided to use a Revival Herb (basically a Max Revive that lowers happiness, I usually avoid these kind of items) on Ratz and got lucky with a paralysis turn. That allowed me to finally beat it with a couple Scalds, and I probably wouldn't have been able to if I hadn't gotten lucky and had it get fully paralyzed a second time during the process.
So yeah, overall it wasn't my proudest moment. Any battle that requires huge amounts of revive swapping is always a very undeserving victory, as far as I'm concerned. Either way, Guzma's out of the way and I can move on, but not before heading back to heal and switch around the team members. And then we have plot. Oh man, do we have plot.
I walk in on Lusamine belittling Lillie. She basically says that Lillie isn't even worth my time, because I'm at least a decent trainer. Lillie also reveals that Lusamine is her mother, which is a fact that I was spoiled on a while ago unfortunately. It turns out they have an extremely terrible relationship, with Lusamine denying that she's her child and saying "you're not beautiful enough for my world". In other words, if there was any doubt from our last interactions that she's a horrible person, then that's been cleared up now.
Lillie begs her mother to not sacrifice Nebby to open the Wormholes, which of course falls on deaf ears. Lusamine then takes a teleporter to her "private collection", with Lillie and I following shortly after. We arrive in another room that has the usual all-white decor, but this room also has the added touch of SEVERAL POKEMON ENCASED IN BLOCKS OF ICE. Jesus, this lady's got some serious problems. I made a joke last time about the old Bugs Bunny cartoon with the big guy basically killing his pets through too much love, and apparently I was quite accurate in that assessment. Anyway, she rambles on a bit about her plans for the Ultra Beast, basically saying that it doesn't deserve to be frozen like the others, but rather, it should have free reign to unleash its power and cause destruction.
Oh, and Gladion is her son, too. That I actually didn't know, which is surprising because the game dropped at least two hints earlier in this section about that being the case. Both he and Lillie stole something from the labs (Nebby and Null) and abandoned Lusamine... rightfully so, from what I'm seeing here, though I don't know if she was always this psychotic. But yeah, Gladion and Hau show up, just in time for things to get real. Lusamine had previously opened the wormhole using the gases emitted by Cosmog, but now that she's taken it and has it stored in a little box, she's able to use all of its power to open a bunch of portals across the region. The jellyfish from earlier appears in the room, and another insectoid beast appears above Melemele Island, basically right in front of Hala. Tapu Koko appears to battle it, but we don't see the results of the battle before perspective shifts back to the other characters.
Guzma decides to join the fun at this point, entering the room to try and remove us with force. The problem with that idea is that he's still quite outnumbered. Gladion shouts out some orders, saying that he's going to battle the Ultra Beast, Hau can fight Guzma, and I'm left with Lusamine herself. Clearly this isn't because she's the only one I haven't battled against, no sir. But yes, that means we're in for yet another major battle.
Lusamine starts off with a Clefable. I guess she's a Fairy user, then. I lead with Napstablook and, like usual, start out with a Thunder Wave. Clefable's first attack doesn't do anything thanks to Disguise, but oddly, it chooses to just spam Cosmic Power for several turns afterwards instead of actually doing any damage. When it finally does attack again, its Moonblast takes out more than 50% of Napstablook's health, whereas my attacks are doing progressively less damage to it thanks to its defense buffs. It goes for a Metronome and gets Super Fang, which thankfully, Napstablook is immune to. The same applies to its next Metronome move, Force Palm. Got pretty lucky there, and through a fair amount of patience, Clefable goes down.
Her next Pokemon is a Mismagius. Ok, maybe she isn't a Fairy user then. I'm hoping to outspeed it and go for the Shadow Claw again, but no such luck. Mismagius goes first and uses Power Gem, but somehow Napstablook manages to hang on with only 5 HP left and one-shots the Mismagius. The next thing out is a Lilligant, and I decide to finally switch, deciding El Grapadura deserves a shot in the ring. Lilligant's Petal Dance is not very effective, but it still takes out almost half of his health. My attack, a Fire Fang, gets it down to about 10%, but I can't take another hit so I have to use a Hyper Potion. After getting lucky and not taking confusion damage following its Teeter Dance, Lilligant goes down. (The opportunity to learn Thrash came up here, which I decided against.)
Next out is a Milotic, which is a pretty bad matchup, but I figure it's probably best to just take the loss instead of waste a turn switching. Luckily enough for me, its Hydro Pump misses, so I get a decent amount of damage in with Darkest Lariat before falling on the next turn. Fellana finishes it off with a couple Razor Leafs, resisting Milotic's attacks surprisingly well in the process. So that leaves Lusamine's final Pokemon, a Bewear. I've not had to fight one of these yet, but I know that it's extremely durable physically due to its ability. What I didn't know is that it's also stupidly strong. I'll spare the exact details, but each of my team members went up against it and either did a piddly amount of damage or didn't get a chance to attack at all up until my final Pokemon, Lubba. Despite it lowering its own speed a couple times with Hammer Arm, it still managed to go before me, but wasted its turn with the attack-lowering Baby Doll Eyes. Psychic takes it down to about a third of its health, and it goes for the Hammer Arm again, leaving Lubba at 2 HP. Deciding to go out with a bang, I finish it off with Continental Crush and win the match. (And a few levelups later, teach Sucker Punch to Fellana over Pluck, under the reasoning that I can always teach Acrobatics if I decide I'd rather have the Flying move.)
Despite having lost the battle, Lusamine doesn't seem terribly upset, and continues with her plan to catch the Ultra Beast in the newly developed Beast Ball. But then, and I have no idea if this was part of the plan or not, she disappears along with Guzma and the Beast itself into the portal. And I'm sure they'll never show up in the game again from this point on, this story arc is definitely over.
In the aftermath, it's found that Nebby has survived, but it has also changed into a tiny orb-like form. Lillie grabs it and from here it's somewhat unclear what we need to do next. Gladion suggests that with Alola's Legendary Pokemon, we might be able to access other worlds and go after them, but he's unsure if they even exist. Hau, ever the optimist, says that they must be real, and I know perfectly well that he's right (even if I didn't know anything about this game, it's on the freaking box art and the title screen, so yeah), so I agree. We all basically take it easy for the rest of the night and next time, we'll see what awaits us on the following day.
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