It took some time, but leaving Breeze the Skiploom and Flora the Sunkern with the Day Care Couple simultaneously did produce an egg. This one hatched into a baby Sunkern as well, which leads to another question and an amazing discovery! I wonder if the offspring Pokémon is always the species of the non-ditto mother Pokémon? But most important:
This baby Sunkern knows a battle technique, Leech Seed, that neither Sunkern nor Sunflora learn naturally! If he inherited it from the father Pokémon, that's incredible!
As usual, I called Prof. Elm with my findings, but this time he told me he was worried I was giving too much of my time to his Pokémon research, and he encouraged me to keep pursuing my own Pokémon journey.
It has been some time since I challenged a gym, and so I set my sights on the next closest: Morty's Gym in Ecruteak City. Despite capturing Petri and clearing the way last year, I still hadn't ever found time to make it up to Ecruteak, ever since that encounter with Team Saturn. Today, I set foot in Ecruteak City for the first time.
At the Ecruteak Pokemon Center, I ran into Bill, the Pokémon researcher who designed the Pokémon Storage System popular in Johto and Kanto. I think there are more humane ways to care for Pokémon than to suspend them in cyberspace, but as the number of Pokémon I've caught climbs, I see the merit of his invention.
Bill also mentioned that he had been in the Center working on another invention he'd just finished: The Move Relearner. This machine and its programs, so he claims, can take the utility once found only in the rare practitioner-- to teach a Pokémon a battle technique that either it once knew and had forgotten, or to teach a Pokémon a combat technique held in its species' genetic memory-- and disseminate that utility to everyone who lives near a Pokécenter.
The widespread utility might be for the better, but Bill might also be putting a few Gurus and Move Tutors out of business, practitioners of ancient skills like old Kurt in Azalea town.
In Ecruteak the people are very talkative. I encountered quite a few who were happy to speak on the rumors and histories of the city, and of Johto at large.
However, when I went to the Ecruteak Gym to take on Morty, I met a tight-lipped sage there who only told me that Morty wasn't there. He offered no insight nor speculation as to where Morty could have gone. I wonder what he's up to?
In the mean time, while hunting down Morty, I was able to replicate my previous Pokémon breeding experiment, hatching a second Sunkern that knew Leech Seed, thereby proving my first experiment valid.
More as it comes,
Kris
