Chapter 31: Destructive potential
I meditated with Vulcan for the next six hours roughly before Gaia started to stir from her slumber. Pupitar were a bit strange in how they moved about as they had a series of vents along the sides of their body that they use to pull in and expel compressed air to move about. Much like you'd expect this meant that when Gaia started to wake up and tried to move the air she shot out kicked up all the sand and dust in the cave. *cough! cough!* "God damn it all!" I cursed loudly while shielding my eyes to keep the flying dust and sand away.-
Soon though the sand and dust was totally gone from the cave and I could actually take a look at Gaia who was awake. When I opened my eyes I didn't know whether to laugh or cry as Gaia had somehow wedged herself at an angle at the back of the cave and was panicking. I knew her unfamiliarity with her new form would be rough after she woke up but this was both funny and sad to watch. "Vulcan go help her get unstuck." I said and the legendary snorted but stood up to do as I said.-
It was not gentle at all when it helped Gaia though as it grabbed her shell with it's paw and yanked , hard. Gaia popped out from the spot she was wedged and slammed into the other side of the cave which made my eye twitch just a little. Sure she wasn't stuck anymore but that was unnecessarily aggressive on Vulcans part. Gaia just glared at the legendary and looked like she wanted to retaliate but chose not to. I had expressly forbidden the use of moves in or around the cave since that was a fast way to turn me into a past tense.-
Since I definitely couldn't run away fast enough in an enclosed area like this that rule was very important. The look Gaia was giving Vulcan though told me that she definitely planned to get it back for this though and I couldn't really blame her. "Oi! Listen here you! We are a team and treating your teammates like that is a good way to find yourself in a bad position later , I expected better from you." I said using the most effective punishment I knew of for prideful shits like Vulcan , disappointment.-
It worked too as Vulcan looked thoroughly dispirited after I chastised it and had it's head lowed in shame. The thing about an inflated sense of pride was that if you hit it with a fact pointing out a flaw then that pride will shrink by various degrees based on the individual in question. In Vulcan's case it was prideful because it simply didn't know any other way to be but was also very much seeking approval from myself. Despite how powerful Vulcan was it was in fact a very young individual and as such was very much like a child in how it thought and acted.-
So my idea for training away it's arrogance was simply to treat it how one would treat a disobedient child , with stern parenting. I couldn't spank it either since that would literally hurt me more than it so instead I chose the other route , ignoring it. Children who did something wrong hated being ignored as it just made their guilt and shame eat away at them. "How are you doing Gaia? Any problems you can feel?" I asked and Gaia hummed a bit in answer.-
"None is good , now you should have an instinctual understanding about how to move. Slowly use that to try and sit up." I said coaching her to get a hand on her new method of movement. Compressed air blasted out of the vents on her direct left and right sides causing her to float off the ground about a foot while completely flat on her back. Gaia then started sending air from the vents at the top of her shell which tipped her forward. Once upright she stopped sending out air from all those vents and sent it out of the vents at the bottom of her shell instead letting her float above the ground.-
I gave her a thumbs up "Good work girl! Now slowly float forward so we can get you outside. We need space to let you stretch your proverbial legs as it were." I said encouragingly and she had a determined look as she slowly sent out small burst of air out of specific vents to push her forward while also using the vents pointed in the opposite direction to keep herself from face planting. She failed a few times and had to sit up again but she eventually managed to get out of the cave.-
The sun was already almost all the way down but Gaia had night vision so it didn't matter to her one way or the other. Once she got clear of the cave Gaia immediately started blasting her vents hard to basically accelerate as much as possible. This forced her to quickly get a handle of her new form of movement or risk crashing constantly. And oh did she ever , the mountain , the ground , trees nothing was safe from her hard and destructive faceplanting. I could totally see how people might think her species could destroy mountains with the sheer destruction she left per faceplant.-
If trained enough I imagine there is in fact a good possibility that a Tyranitar could actually rearrange a map by going all out. The reason for this is because while a pokemons stats will rise as it trains and masters it's moves the toughness of the surroundings remains at the same level it has always been. The worst part though is that humans have found out exactly what level of training is required to be strong enough to flatten mountains and it's not champion level.-
I looked it up on the pokenav and the answer was a mere ace level of training is required to become capable of changing maps albeit barely. In terms of gym badges that is to say someone with six of them would most likely reach this point. At this very moment Gaia was roughly at the four badge level in terms of sheer power. With that said she wasn't capable of knocking down the mountain or clearing the forest at the moment but she certainly had the potential to do so. Gaia only took an hour or so of constantly crashing to lesson the amount of it she did which was good progress in my opinion.-
Her evolution had made Gaia stupidly hard so even after this hour of crashing she didn't have a scratch on her. The thing that irritated me the most though was that she figured out how to get really high into the sky using her vents. See the way Pupitars air vents worked was that they had two incredibly large and powerful lungs that were connected but also functioned in two different capacities. The first drew in air through the vents not in use and compressed it before passing it to the second lung that then released it through whichever vent was needed. So if the first lung filled up with air and the second lung did the same before all that air was released at once then the distance into the air the Pupitar went doubled , Gaia figured that out.