Stupid Mountain

The stupid mountain can wait a bit longer. I found a path to the side with some trainers. The first one to face me is a blue-cap kid who states that he always wears shorts. Great, but why is it that you and so many other boys always wear these blue hats? Apsu bites his way through that battle. The next trainer is a hiker. Hanuman and Apsu take turns crushing things. Finally, there's a crazy martial arts woman with Meditite and Machop. She gets to see firsthand what Khali can do with psybeam.

I enter the dreaded mountain. A Machop bothers me while I walk and gets a psybeam in return. I reach a rock and am about to have Hanuman smash it, but a man with striking blue hair approaches me. He speaks...

"According to one theory, Mt. Coronet is where the Sinnoh reion began." He turns to the side, watching I don't know what. "...In a newly created world...A world where only time flowed and space expanded...There should have been no strife. But what became of that world? Because the human spirit is weak and incomplete, strife has spread...This world is being ruined by it...I find the state of things to be deplorable..."

He motions for me to move out of his path. Without even thinking, I do. He departs. Too bad. I would have liked to challenge his philosophy there. Firstly, strife is presumably a human condition. Perhaps he would disagree, but if strife is an abstract concept that transcends consciousness, strife may indeed have been present early in the universe. This would be incompatible with his talk of the human spirit anyway. But if strife is a human condition, surely it is part of a greater human framework that includes whatever faculties he is using in making his assessment. He is, from his position as a human, judging the world as being "ruined" by a human quality, namely strife. It is my suspicion that strife is inextricable from this framework, not something that can be isolated. Unless he is claiming to be without strife himself, and therefore different from the rest of us, strife is part of his own framework and he is necessarily using strife to damn strife. This is begging the question: the faculties used to make judgment can neither validate nor invalidate themselves. And being without strife himself would create a new problem because without isolating strife and without experiencing it, he is in no position to judge it. I would have liked to hear his answers to those criticisms. Then again, he probably has not thought this through very well. He is likely a dangerous and irrational man.

While I am considering this, a pokemon called Chingling attacks me. Khali easily beats her with astonish. Another Machop takes a psybeam and goes down. I encounter another Chingling. I am about to try to catch this one for the pokedex project, but I am running low on poke balls. Best to save them for rare pokemon, if I run into any. There are some parts of the cave I cannot get to right now (rocky walls that will probably be scaled by an HM move later), so I leave through an exit that takes me to a series of bridges. Here's another hiker. Geodudes, of course. A man running around in a gi challenges me. Why is he wearing a gi? Oh well, he has Machop, which is easy for Khali. Another hiker blocks my path as I am leaving the bridges. He actually leads with Onix, which takes more punishment than Geodude, but is still easy enough for psybeam.

I descend a large staircase and cross a field, battling a Psyduck along the way. Another man in a gi is at the bottom, but he does not challenge me. He just gives me an item. An "odd keystone." He tells me to go to Route 209 and go underground. He also tells me to listen to the stone pillar and talk to people underground. Right. Still, nice to know that some people have psychoses more severe than my own? I don't know.

An old man in bizarre clothing challenges me. A veteran trainer? His "Mime Jr." pokemon goes down in one hit against Khali. Since Khali is now Level 25, I switch to Apsu. I want my other pokemon to have some fun. My opponent uses "Bonsly." Apsu has little trouble with this tree thing. As I keep walking north, a woman act's all absent-minded and says that she was about to enter a contest, but that beating me won't take long. Combee goes down in one hit against Khali's psybeam. Roselia takes two hits. Easy.

I find some berries. I pick them and do not plant anything because I am not into planting berries. I barge into the nearby house and find a berry guru or whatever. He gives me another berry. A little girl in the house gives me a Poketch app that locates berries. Excellent. Now I can strip Sinnoh of berries forever. All of the berries will be mine. None for anyone else. All mine, I tell you. Someone is trying to sell me mulch, so I get out of there and arrive in Hearthome City.