Ash wasn't surprised Gary had heard about his trip to the Orange Islands. News of the battle with Lorelei had probably traveled across the entire world by now. It wasn't just a challenge against an Elite Four member. It was the battle that revealed he had a Legendary Pokémon on his team, Lugia, the Guardian of the Sea. The size and bearing of his Lugia were a little different from the legendary images on record, but there was no mistaking it for anything else.
Lugia is a Legendary, even rarer than the Legendary Birds or the Legendary Beasts. Even without a god domain, it has a very high chance of climbing to the god level. If it happens to be one of the leaders of its kind, it can even reach the Peak of god level, a height that exists only in legend.
Ash's Lugia clearly didn't hold a god domain and hadn't reached god level yet, but none of that erased the open-ended possibilities that lay ahead of it. Combined with Ash's ability, Lugia's talent meant Ash was practically guaranteed to own a god level Pokémon down the line. All he was missing was time.
"I had some business in the Orange Islands, so I made a trip out of it. What about you, Gary? Where have you been the past month? Did you go to the Silver Conference?"
He wasn't about to start running his mouth about what had actually happened in the Orange Islands. It involved four Legendary Pokémon with god domains. Telling Gary wouldn't have been a problem, but the explanation would have been a headache. That restraint itself was a sign of growth.
The old Ash wouldn't have cared and would have started bragging the moment Gary asked. The things he'd run into in the Orange Islands would set most people up for a lifetime of stories. The fact that he could resist the temptation in front of his childhood rival had to count for something.
Gary picked up on Ash holding something back, but since Ash didn't bring it up, he didn't push.
"I spent the period in seclusion, training. I figured my level at the time would have made me cannon fodder at the Silver Conference. Whether as a Trainer or with my Pokémon, I still wasn't anywhere close to ready, so I went off to properly sit down and sharpen myself."
Secluded training. Hard to imagine those words coming from the old, arrogant Gary, but looking at the Gary in front of him now, and the completely different presence radiating off him, it was no joke.
Pokémon aside, just as a Trainer, the current Gary was a wholly different person from the one at the Indigo Plateau Conference. It wasn't only that he was more composed. There was a faint, kingly air about him, the kind that only a seasoned Champion-level Trainer gave off. That air wasn't fully mature on Gary yet, but the shape of it was there.
"Want to have a battle?"
"That's exactly what I was about to suggest. Although you didn't come here to find me first, did you?" Gary accepted without hesitation, but he didn't get carried away over the prospect of the fight either. Instead he calmly reminded Ash of the reason he was at Professor Oak's Laboratory in the first place.
Ash clearly hadn't known Gary was back, so coming here was probably about finding Oak.
Ash blinked, then scratched the back of his head, a little sheepish. "Right. I came to find Professor Oak. Let me get that done first, then we'll battle." With that he hurried straight into the laboratory with Pikachu.
Inside, Oak was studying the Crystal Onix under a magnifying glass. After the match wrapped up, Ash had transferred the Crystal Onix back and rotated other Pokémon over. It was a vacation, after all, and he'd wanted to let the rest of his team enjoy the holiday feeling too, so in the span of a week he'd cycled through all the Pokémon he kept at Professor Oak's Laboratory.
Oak had known for a while that Ash had caught the Crystal Onix. He'd wanted to study its structure for some time, but with Ash training it constantly, there had never been a chance to bring it back. After the conference, with the schedule finally easing, Ash had sent the Crystal Onix back first.
For days now Oak had been at it morning and night. Apart from its outward shape being the same as a regular Onix, in every other respect it could already be considered a brand-new species. The case was different from regional forms. Regional form Pokémon had different types and clear visual differences beyond color.
A Crystal Onix was more like a Shiny Pokémon that had also swapped its type. Aside from color and typing, the appearance was identical. How that structure had come about, Oak still hadn't worked out.
"Ash, you're back." Hearing the commotion at the door, Oak looked up, smiling the moment he saw who it was.
"Professor, still buried in the Crystal Onix?"
"I am. The deeper I look, the more mysteries it has. I could study it for another three days and nights and not be finished." Oak said it with a wistful kind of satisfaction.
"Then leave it for later. Take a look at this GS Ball first." Ash pulled the GS Ball out of his backpack and handed it to Oak, along with the USB drive holding Professor Ivy's data. Professor Ivy had only used machines to investigate the composition of the GS Ball. When it came to actual analysis, Oak was the more qualified one.
Oak took the GS Ball and the data and set them aside, then let out a small sigh. "You really have worked hard, Ash. In every sense."
The "worked hard" wasn't only about the round trip with the GS Ball. It was about the difficulty of the journey itself.
Oak was one of the few in the know about what Ash's trip to the Orange Islands had actually been for. He knew exactly what had happened too. Given his connections to the Elite Four and the League, learning these things was no trouble at all.
The level of danger in the incident was enough that even he, a veteran Champion, found himself sighing at how thin the margin had been. Counting Ash's Mewtwo, the fight had involved five god level beings. That was a scale even the top human Trainers had no business getting involved in. Even the world's second-ranked Champion, Sinnoh's Cynthia, had stood there like a statue when she arrived on the scene. The god level was simply too far above humans for them to reach.
It was precisely because she'd felt that helplessness that, by all reports, Cynthia had begun looking for ways to enhance her own combat capabilities. So she'd never freeze like that again if she ran into something similar, she had quietly started pursuing the power of gods. Given her temperament and her ability, the odds of success were high.
To obtain the power of gods, beyond defeating a Legendary Pokémon head-on, there was another path. You could earn the recognition of a Legendary Pokémon and be allowed to borrow its power for a time.
For a Legendary Pokémon, staying at a human's side for a whole lifetime was no more than a blink. A century-long human lifespan meant nothing to them. So a Legendary recognizing a human and staying with them until they grew old wasn't unheard of.
Such things even seemed to have happened in human history. Whether that history was true or invented couldn't really be verified, but Oak believed that with Cynthia's ability, once she actually tracked down a Legendary Pokémon, gaining its recognition wouldn't be a difficult task.
"It wasn't that hard. The battle was a good experience for me and Mewtwo, and Mewtwo grew stronger because of it. As for dangerous, it actually wasn't that dangerous." Ash scratched his head, a touch embarrassed.
To Oak it probably came across as Ash being modest. In reality, Ash was genuinely a little embarrassed, because the risk of the fight really had been almost zero. With Champion Ash on the field, unless the Creator God Arceus himself showed up, there was no real danger to speak of. So the "not that hard" line wasn't humility. It really hadn't been that hard.
Tactics and schemes were all well and good, but none of them could beat raw stats. Champion Ash with Mewtwo represented the highest tier of stats in the Pokémon world short of Arceus.
Only a Rayquaza with a god domain that had undergone Mega Evolution stood a chance of rivaling Mewtwo. So even against a corrupted Lugia, there had been no real danger. The corrupted Lugia was weaker than its normal state, and even if Yveltal's influence had fully consumed it, Lugia would still only have crawled back up to a weak version of its baseline, nowhere near its prime.
Lugia hadn't known how to use the power of its god domain either. In its corrupted state, the people from Team Galactic still hadn't found a way to make Legendary Pokémon channel their god domains. If they had, just facing the Legendary Birds with their god domains active would have been a nightmare.
All told, a trip that should have been life-threatening, thanks to the backup of a top-tier ringer, turned into a pure training experience for personal growth.
Oak just didn't know that.
"Nothing else to do here, so I'll be off. I've got a battle lined up with Gary." After handing over the items, Ash had nothing else to take care of, so he might as well use the spare time to fight. He was very curious about what Gary had been through over the past month and why the change in him was so dramatic. Everything would come out in the battle.
"Gary? Oh, right, Gary said he was coming back today. I forgot. Go on. I have no idea where that kid went this past month. I figured he'd gone out to Johto. Not a single phone call for a full month, and when I called his mobile no one picked up. If he hadn't returned my call yesterday, I was about ready to file a missing person report."
It clicked for Oak only after Ash mentioned it that his grandson was also returning today. Unlike Ash, who had said up front he was going to the Orange Islands, Oak had had no idea where Gary had gone. He'd assumed the Silver Conference had started and Gary had headed to Johto for Badges.
Usually Gary checked in with a message or a call every seven days. With mobile phones, reporting that he was safe was effortless. But Gary hadn't called for a full month, and when Oak called, no one answered. Eventually the phone was just off.
If Gary had waited any longer to call back, Oak would have actually gone to the police. In the old days, no contact for a month or two had been routine. With mobile phones in the picture, even ten days or two weeks of silence raised real alarms.
As for where Gary had gone and why he hadn't picked up the phone, he'd brushed it all off with a single line. He'd gone into seclusion to train. Gary didn't reveal anything else, and Oak didn't push. As long as Gary was safe, that was what mattered. And today Gary was back, except Oak hadn't even seen him yet. Ash had gotten to him first.
"No contact for a whole month, seriously? Where'd he go for that?" Ash said, more amused than anything.
"Who knows. As long as he's home safe, that's enough. If you two are battling, remember to have Mewtwo put up a barrier. The aftermath alone could blow my laboratory away." Oak's face was completely serious.
Whether it was Ash or Gary, both of them already had Elite Level Pokémon. The fallout from a Gym Leader Level battle was no joke.
"Got it, got it." Ash jogged out without looking back, Pikachu at his shoulder, leaving Oak shaking his head behind him.
Outside the laboratory, Ash and Gary squared off on a flat stretch of ground, with Mewtwo floating between them.
"One-on-one. If there are no objections, bring out your Pokémon." Mewtwo's voice echoed in both of their minds, and a faintly strange expression crossed its face. Who would have guessed that it, a god level Pokémon, would one day end up working as a referee?