When Sin-kun wakes up, he expects it to be in the pokemon center.
Or worse, at home, in his bed, in the real world, his isekai adventure having been just another dream, and just another failure.
He is ready to accept the stomach churning grief of the idea. The frustration. After all, it’s his fault that his team lost. It was his hubris. He thought he could defeat anything. He thought ‘it’s just a game, and I always win’.
He deserves this.
But Sin-kun doesn’t wake up in the pokemon center.
He doesn’t wake up in his bed.
When Sin-kun wakes up, he is standing in front of Cress, dizzy and off balance.
He’s still here. At least he’s still here, and not back with his mother shrieking up a storm to wake him up.
He stumbles down the stairs to head to the pokecenter to get his pokemon revived.
So he lost a pokemon battle, so what? It’s not like it’s the end of the world. He can train hard and challenge the gym again! That’s how it works in the game!
… but this isn’t a game any more.
A horrible thought crosses Sin-kun’s mind.
His pokemon- they’re okay, aren’t they? They’re just fainted?
They’re not… they’re not dead, right?
Oh thank fuck they’re not d-
Wait a minute.
Sin-kun blinks.
His pokemon aren’t dead, they aren’t even fainted!
In fact they’re in the same condition they were before the battle, as if time has reset itself.
We reloaded the last save.
Despite the fact that Sin-kun doesn’t quite understand what’s going on, or how that happened, he knows he has a valuable gift. An opportunity to try again. To become stronger.
It’s time to train.
We turn around, and we head back to the pokemon center to do some planning.
The first thing we do is heal our pokemon. Sin-kun won’t be taking that for granted again. We put a little thinking into our strategy. We definitely want to get Ganon and Chi-Chi up a few levels at least before we challenge Cress again, and if there’s another pokemon we can add to our team before then, all the better.
We head out to try and tackle some wild pokemon.
Sin-kun is still unsettled.
Maybe grinding some levels will help.
Well, that’s useless.
Sin-kun trains hard. He runs back and forth from the pokemon center, keeping his team in good health while they battle an endless stream of lillipups, patrats, and purrloins.
So this is what it’s really like to be a pokemon trainer. It’s different than he imagined.
Harder. But he won’t let it stop him.
We replace tail whip with defense curl, because why not. They’re both equally useless.
Chi-chi learns fury swipes and we replace useless leer with it. It’s not a typed move but it still could be a weapon in our arsenal.
With Chi-chi and Ganon painfully slowly ground up to 13, and everyone else at level 10, Sin-kun drags himself to the pokemon center to collapse in a bunk and sleep.
He’s had a hell of a first day.
The grinding was a slog. Getting them up took forever. There wasn’t a single pokemon in the bushes we didn’t already have one of. No birds. No bugs.
But hopefully what we’ve done will be enough
Once everyone’s refreshed, we finally head out to try our luck against Cress again.
Sin-kun’s nerves are jangling as he heads in.
Cress repeats his spiel the same as in our memory of it, in the aborted timeline.
Sin-kun does feel lucky but not for that reason.
This time we send Ganon out to start with instead of fucking around with Arsene.
Things are already going much better than last time, with Ganon getting in the first attack. Cress even pays us a compliment. He says it “may have been a good attack.”
Let’s see if we can keep it up. Ganon is faster than Lilipup, and lilipup’s bite doesn’t even make him flinch! All our training seems to have paid off.
Three embers and the lilipup goes down! It gets one last bite in, but Ganon’s last ember left it with a burn, and it faints at the end of his turn. Sin-kun feels a rush of excitement, but tries not to let it go to his head.
As Cress sends out panpour, we send out Chi-chi.
It’s a complete reversal from last time. What a huge difference two levels makes. This time Chi-chi goes first, and gets a solid chunk of damage in.
Meawhile, panpour’s attack does almost nothing.
Another round and its more of the same. Cress doesn’t even use a potion! Will Chi-chi be able to take this thing out in three solid hits?
It’s over. We barely took any damage, and it’s over.
We did it. We beat the first gym. Sin-kun won his first real gym battle.
Buddy, if you only knew!
HELL. FUCKING. YES.
Even if it’s kind of the Basic Bitch Badge, Sin-kun is more than excited to have it, and so are we. It means the rough first chapter of the story is finally behind us.
Now is the real, real REAL beginning of our pokemon journey.
Those are words that Sin-kun understands! Not that we have any idea when we’ll get any traded pokemon, but you know, good to know.
They give us a TM which isn’t the most useless move ever, but it’s also not an ATTACK so it isn’t something we’ll get much use out of. Oh well.
Sin-kun asks if there’s anything else he should know before he heads out.
Admittedly, that warning does feel a little more ominous, knowing what happened the first time we challenged them. Sin-kun privately vows to make sure not to neglect his training.
Before we leave, the red haired one mentions one other thing.
Wait what?? They do? Since when?? Wasn’t the difference between TMs and HMs that TMs could only be used once?
Feeling a little baffled and off balance again, we head out, and back to the pokemon center.
…
You know what, old man? I don’t think there’s any way we could forget.
Enjoying the time travel/isekae subplot going on here a lot, honestly!
In regards to the TM/HM thing: I was curious about that too so I looked it up on Bulbapedia and apparently TMs being multi-use is a new feature that they added in Generation V.