Nova held up an Everstone in plain view of everyone and said in a dramatic tone, "Oh wow, an Everstone! An item that stops a Pokémon from ever evolving. I'd better keep this safe."
With that, he casually tossed the gems and the Everstone into the bag behind him.
It was nearly time for lunch. Everyone had just come out of a tough battle, and whether they had pushed themselves to their limit or not, their energy was spent. So Nova made a bigger meal than usual that afternoon, with extra portions all around.
After lunch, Nidoking found a quiet spot and settled in for a nap as he always did, while Corviknight drifted overhead in slow, lazy circles. The other three needed to get through their daily training, nothing too strenuous, just their usual routine.
While those three were busy, Nova picked up Lapras and made his way to the edge of the saltwater lake.
The little one was only two or three days old, yet it had already grown from roughly the size of a plate to something closer to a large bolster pillow. At the rate it was going, Nova figured that in a few more days he would not be able to carry it at all.
He wanted to test Lapras's purification ability here.
This ability had the potential to save the whole team in an emergency, so being careful about understanding it was only sensible. Nova needed to know how much water Lapras could purify at once, how thoroughly it could clean the water, and how long the process took. Back in Stone City, there had been no suitable water source available for a proper test. Now there was this bend of saltwater right in front of him, and it would be a waste not to use it.
As for whether the local Geodude colony would have any objections, Nova did not particularly worry about that.
He started by using Nidoking's food bowl to scoop up some water.
The bowl itself was a decent piece of equipment. Though made of alloy, it folded down into a compact size, which meant Nidoking never had to eat off the ground out in the field. When unfolded it was nearly as wide as Nova's cooking pot, and scooping water with it was more of a struggle than he expected. Still, he would not dare use any of the other partners' bowls for this. If there were traces of Toxic compounds in the water, Nidoking consuming them would be no different from a health tonic. For anyone else on the team, it could be a serious problem.
Nova brought the bowl up and took a sniff.
The smell hit him immediately. It was sharp and unpleasant, something like sulfur mixed with caustic soda, with a faint sour and bitter edge underneath.
He decided not to dip his finger in to taste it. A human drinking this would be in serious trouble. So instead, he carried the bowl over to Nidoking, who was half-asleep and looking thoroughly unbothered, and asked for a taste test.
"Nidoking, open up. Time for your medicine," Nova said.
Nidoking's mouth was held open, and the bowl of oddly scented liquid was poured in.
Nidoking swallowed it, smacked its lips slowly, and gave a low rumble of satisfaction.
Nova took that as a positive review. If Nidoking found it agreeable, the toxicity was probably not low at all.
So the question was whether Lapras could purify something like this.
Nova scooped another bowl of water from the lake and gestured for Lapras to give it a try.
Lapras leaned forward obediently and dipped one of its front flippers into Nidoking's food bowl.
The moment that pale blue flipper touched the surface, the water changed.
Starting from the small point of contact, the murky water began to clear. The transparency spread outward at a speed that was easy to follow with the naked eye. Within moments, the entire bowl had gone completely clear.
Nova stared at it.
That fast? Had it really just been purified that quickly?
He leaned in and smelled it. The sharp, unpleasant odors were completely gone. What remained was a clean, simple scent of salt.
He brought the bowl back to Nidoking and tried to get another taste test. This time, Nidoking was not interested. Its thick tail swept back and forth, waving Nova off like he was a nuisance.
"Nidoking," Nova tried again.
The tail swung again. Clearly Nidoking had no desire to evaluate clean water when perfectly good toxic water was no longer on offer.
Left with no other option, Nova decided to taste it himself.
He steeled himself, dipped one finger into the bowl, and touched it to his tongue.
It was clean, pure saltwater. Very salty, with a slight bitter aftertaste. It reminded him strongly of accidentally swallowing a mouthful of seawater while swimming. If anything, the water Lapras had purified was even cleaner than that memory suggested.
In other words, Lapras truly could remove substances from water that had no natural place in it. They were not converted into something else or left behind as sediment. They were simply gone, eliminated entirely by Lapras's purification.
It was not something that could be explained with any standard scientific understanding. It was closer to something miraculous.
Nova recalled that a researcher named Mr. Sherif had once published a paper with several theories about why polar Lapras carried what he called the Purification Gene. One of those theories suggested that the polar population had somehow received a blessing from Suicune, the North Wind Pokemon, or had even inherited Suicune's genes in some form.
Watching what Lapras had just done, Nova found that theory increasingly hard to dismiss. If this ability did not trace back to a Legendary Pokemon, it was difficult to account for.
That said, there were still practical limits to how useful this ability could be.
Seawater, in an everyday sense, might seem like a clean and natural source of water. And since Lapras itself was a species that lived in the ocean, its purification ability was naturally calibrated to ocean water. It did not convert saltwater into freshwater.
That meant that to use Lapras's ability to produce drinkable freshwater, the source had to be freshwater to begin with. Toxins, pollutants, and harmful compounds could be removed. Salt could not.
This saltwater lake in front of him, even after Lapras had worked on it, was still just a very clean bowl of seawater. For Nova, that was essentially useless.
The thought did remind him of something, though.
Back at his home, there was still a foul pond in the backyard where a group of Grimer had been living. He had caught every last one of them, and the worst of the smell had faded since then, but the water inside was still badly contaminated. Worse, the pond had no flowing source to gradually flush itself clean. It just sat there, stagnant.
Nova had long suspected that if it was left alone, the conditions would eventually attract new Grimer on their own.
He had been meaning to just fill the whole thing in and be done with it, but one thing after another had kept getting in the way.
Now that Lapras was part of the team, though, perhaps there was a better solution waiting for him back home.