Part 65: Ceilidh Sent Out Angel
Update 66: Ceilidh Sent Out AngelSaturday night, I got back in contact with The Golux, universally-respected provider of LP assistance materials, to demonstrate the half of the multiplayer experience I missed last time. So let’s get into exploring that, shall we?
As before, we have to take a second to connect to the Internet and actually locate each other. While you can do any of this with random players, to have any control over your experience, you need to share an eight digit code with your other partners. There’s nothing stopping you from entering a code some other group of people are using, which I learned by using 1111 1111 and hooking up with random Japanese players who immediately dropped the moment they saw who I was.
Look at this thing. It’s like Turffield come to life.
I sent my Porygon over for it (managing to catch an unexpected screenshot of the start of the trading animation I’d missed the first time). Before it went over, I gave my Porygon an item called an Upgrade…
… Which does exactly that. And when they trade it back with another specific item…
… We get yet another evolution. Trading evolutions, especially ones that require holdable items like these two, aren’t overwhelmingly common; as
as Gamefreak can be about forcing social interaction, they do recognize not everybody is going to be able to get their hands on trading partners. It’s still frustrating to have to do that. Great status symbol, though.
They also send me over some interesting new Pokémon, one of which I decide deserves a noble sacrifice. Thank you, Murphy. Have you ever seen that meme of the one guy saluting and crying and then yelling? That’s how I feel right now.
But that’s only half of what I want to show you today. What would Pokémon be, after all, if the games didn’t let friends beat each other up?
(As an aside, I wasn’t exactly taking notes during this fight, so there’s a very good chance I misrepresented something. Let me know anything I missed or, if you’re up for it, leave a post that discusses your side of the matter).
While there are countless different ways to set up individual battles, we opted for a few baseline rules that should be mostly self-explanatory. The big thing is the whole “set of all to 50” things; it means your Pokémon face-off on equal grounds instead of letting the more powerful player just wrecked the other one. Also worth noting; it lets you set your own background music, so I naturally go with the game’s most appropriate battle theme. The one that uses Double Slap.
Pokémon Sword & Shield - Battle! (Mysterious Being) [1 HOUR]
We start off on the right foot by me assuming this was some Ice-type just from the little thumbnail it gives you of the enemy’s team before the battle, so I sent out Bruce; unfortunately, Angel here is completely unrelated, leaving me to just try to win the damage race. I do, but Bruce is in bad shape afterwards.
McQ here seals the deal, since I forget about its Disguise ability. It just soaks up a Pyro Ball and wears through Bruce, making my starter my first casualty of the fight. I throw out Mr. Blobby in response, but both him and McQ end up shuffled out.
I try to see if I can outtank Stardust here with one of the big Wailords, but it doesn’t work; it manages to put out more damage than I’m comfortable with and I sub it out for Bart. Fortunately, Bart’s more than powerful enough to take it down.
E: I have no idea how it got Burned.
Same with McQ, though it’s a lot closer. Play Rough is no joke.
James here is a different story entirely. While I do some damage to him, he nailed Bart with a couple powerful attacks that knock him out, leaving James sitting pretty. The Wailord, which I decided to just use up here, knocked off just a little bit more health before going down in turn.
At this point I don’t have any real good counters for James, so I go ahead and call out Goch in the hopes that I can outspeed him and hit him with a very powerful attack. I couldn’t outspeed him, but I could hit him; a Dynamax Cannon turns out to be the solution.
I took one look at such an obvious Steel-type and started using Flamethrower – and it worked! For the most part.
I did not expect it to be able to break out a super-effective High Horsepower. The thing drops Goch all the way down to nine hit points before I can finish melting the Melmetal down.
I know from experience that these things are terrifying; if it manages to do anything, it will take Goch out of the fight and force me to fall back on one of my two remaining Pokémon. At this point my plan was to have Mr. Blobby do what it could to wear it down before sending out Zamazenta to seal the deal.
But I underestimated Goch and it pulled off a true photo finish
! Y Ddraig Goch got to be a dragon slayer.
That was a hell of a fight! I don’t have much to say other than being impressed and happy I got to participate – oh, except for the fact that my party is like half Legendaries which probably skewed the results a little bit. But either way, many thanks to The Golux again for helping me show off the other half of this game’s multiplayer.
E:
The Golux posted:
It was a good match! I don't do as many battles as I probably should because my prediction is pretty bad (see also me not considering Dynamax cannon when I was trying to take out Ddraig with Clang). Stardust had a flame orb, which burns him after the first turn in battle which activates his Guts, making him stronger on offense... but I just noticed in that battle that he doesn't actually have Facade, which is the other usual part of the combination; instead he has Body Slam to try to inflict paralysis. Togekiss is my favorite pokemon, and McQ is also a very good boy. I tried to show off interesting mons and ones that would make for a fun battle!
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……………… I can’t do it. How galling.… I… I suppose I’m just not ready to discuss it get. Or at least, I’m not ready to blurt it out. I-I mean, I know quite well it would do my soul good to at least discuss this with another person, and I know if I could just get a grip on it I might be able to fully focus on being a Trainer, but I just can’t bring myself to do it… Then… Can I wager a guess? As you wish 
I’ve seen you levitate Pokéballs constantly, and there are very, very few psychics in the world that can get away with that. But I haven’t seen any evidence of you reading minds or projecting thoughts or teleporting or hypnotizing or anything else that psychics are supposed to be able to do. Well spotted. Is that why they kicked you out?…… Do you know the difference between mental illness and insanity? No? One of the therapists asked me that a few years ago. They told me that… Give me a second to reconstruct this. They said, mental illness is biological and insanity is perceptual; mental illness is what happens when your brain functions in ways that happen to make it harder to function in society, while insanity is what happens when your worldview is so offkilter it makes it harder to function in society. They are hardly mutually exclusive, and often go hand-in-hand, but they are separate, and they can and do exist independently. 
Let’s say somebody thinks the government talks to Skwovets through his teeth, I guess he read too many questionable blog posts and it melted his brain. You could argue that you’d have to have something loose just to believe that in the first place, but that really isn’t the case, because the darkest secret of human psychology is that if people hear something enough, they eventually start to believe it even in spite of themselves. Anyway, there’s nothing actually wrong upstairs, he’s just convinced of something that’s completely barmy. He’s mentally healthy, but insane. Meanwhile, let’s say there’s somebody with severe depression. Sometimes, his brain will just up and try to kill him. He knows damn well it’s feeding him lies, he knows the world isn’t actually that bleak, but his brain chemistry says otherwise. He’s mentally ill but terribly, terribly sane.… When Hyde has a meltdown, he usually does it because there’s something around him that… Scratches his brain, I suppose. I’ve come into the habit of lifting him up and applying uniform pressure to his body every time it happens; he seems to find it calming. Yeah, for us, that sort of thing never happens at random, it happens when something hits us wrong and our bodies revolt. Even if we know it shouldn’t be THAT big a deal, we really can’t help it. That’s the latter. As for the former… I’ll be honest, I’ve seen a whole lotta nutters since a couple summers ago, some worse than others. You’ve probably heard some of their names on the news: Team Yell, Chairman Rose (and Macro Cosmos at large, too), those brothers… Me? Kind of? I mean, yeah, you absolutely had the wrong idea about me, but everybody’s a little mad. It’s hard to know what’s objectively real, after all, and we all have to convince ourselves of things we can’t prove and even things we suspect our true just to get by. But you were upfront about it. I noticed, a lot of people aren’t, because that twisted worldview thing only comes into play when it has some bearing on their actions. If someone is mad – I mean real mad, Skwovet-teeth mad – you might never know unless it comes up. You might never know about that guy unless you bring up the government, Pokémon, or teeth, and even then he might hide it or it might just not be relevant to the conversation. But the moment he decides he needs to start knocking out teeth to cut lines of communication, it gets obvious. And potentially dangerous.… All three of those groups… When you got them alone, Team Yell were perfectly ordinary, but they managed to convince themselves they could help Marnie by undercutting her efforts, and they ended up costing a lot of people’s chances at the Cup, to Marnie’s dismay. Rose… I think Rose was convinced he knew better than anybody else in anything and if he was mistaken, anybody else would be even more so. His cult of personality in MC thought similarly. As long as reality didn’t call his bluff, Macro Cosmos was the most powerful organization in Galar. But as it turned out, he didn’t always know what he was doing, and it turned back to bite him and nearly had the region ruined in the process when his master plan turned out to be a half-baked mess. And the brothers… They functioned perfectly well as politicians when there wasn’t anything royal involved. But when the government was weak and they knew the heir to the throne? Of COURSE Galar will accept its King. Of COURSE the heir to the throne will accept his birthright. Of COURSE Zacian and Zamazenta were easily-manipulated fakes they could use to stage their takeover. The moment the flaws in their logic became obvious, the moment the whole plan collapsed. And I became so convinced I had to defeat you that I resorted to sabotage and cheating. Yeah, but you made up for it. And that’s the rub. Because I’ve been lucky with most of the people I faced off against; either they came around eventually or I managed to beat them into the dirt enough that it didn’t matter anymore. But a lot of insane people… You can’t actually convince them. They can’t tell how mad they are because to them, that madness is perfectly logical. It’s a part of their worldview, it’s what they think the most rational way to view the world is even though it’s actually completely round the bend. For so many of them, there’s nothing you can do that will fix them or bring them back around because, in a way, they’re perfectly ordinary and healthy individuals. And I just implied the mentally ill are inherently unhealthy, which brings up a lot of complications around the concept of neurodiversity or whatever, but that aside… I’m getting lost. I think what I’m trying to say is that sometimes, people who seem otherwise perfectly ordinary can turn out to be mad, even dangerously so. You’re an excellent Trainer and probably one of the greatest telekinetics alive, but your family rejected you based on what you couldn’t do instead of your actual abilities, and that’s complete madness………… Is that everything? I suppose so? I don’t know if any of that made sense, it was just a tad stream of consciousness. I daresay it’s a lot to think about, but it didn’t HURT, at least. That’s good to hear… Actually, something just occurred to me. I need to go handle something. But before I go, can I ask you an invasive question? I suppose. Are you into men? Not usually, no. I have been known to make exceptions for the intelligent and earnest, however. HAVE you now.…
You sure look like you’re in a hurry. You off somewhere? Aye, wanted to let you know before I headed out. Do you think Sonia could use any help in the Crown Tundra? Last she texted me she said had her hands full down there, so probably. Excellent. I have some business there I need to wrap up there anyway. This is a little sudden. Since when have I not gone places impulsively? Ha, fair. Oh, before I go: have you talked with Avery there at all? Not really? He’s a little intimidating, to be honest. Here’s a piece of advice; go over there and strike up a conversation on Psychic-types. Sure? Trust me. You two have fun, I have a taxi and a train to catch.I started writing this back at Turffield. Did not expect it to be this topical.