Aria's World Domination Log - A Pokemon Rejuvenation Playthrough

Preface
Recently, I saw a Pokemon youtuber I followed restarting his playthrough of an old, yet in-progress fangame called Pokemon Rejuvenation. I used to have a save file, but it was pretty meh. So, I decided to have fun and just restart the game since I was playing on the old Version 5 and the game was on Version 9 at this point. It’s a fairly grimderp game, much like many other Pokemon fangames and it can get cringy but it’s still fun and I can play as a cute pink-haired girl. So, I figured I’d start it. Midway through my playthrough, Lem suggested world domination after I got mugged in-game. And so, thus begins Aria’s World Domination Log.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a lot of screencaps so I can only make do with what I have till I press forward.

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Prologue

Bedtime Story. Neat. Though, it was a bit depressing. What kind of bedtime story is this?!

How can anyone, after that story?

You said it, sister. Meet this cute little girl Maria. She lives a normal life with her normal family and normal home. It’s quite mundane and cute but she’s a happy little Maria. She’s not Aria. She’s Maria. Note the M.

See how normal her life is?


Little Maria is told to go freshen up in her room. So she does like a good little Maria. *crack*

What was that? Who knows. Go Maria. Find out what that strange set of sounds was.

Maria encounters some weirdo stranger downstairs and like any good little Maria would, she talks to the stranger. What a smart girl. The weird stranger says some cryptic stuff about a little girl suffering repeatedly before Maria finally asks where her mommy and daddy are. But the nice stranger tells her they’re in the basement and even gives some nice, sagely, cryptic advice before disappearing into the aether.


Going to the basement, she discovers daddy and mommy, doing a good ol’ traditional human sacrifice. What a picturesque family.

But as it turns out, it’s all a dream...or a memory? Hallucination? Whatever it was, it wasn’t real. Not, go see your daddy, Marianette. That’s your real name and this is your real maid. Go. Go.


She, being just as confused as we are, decides to just go with the flow after some resistance. And daddy…


Is doing another human sacrifice. Geez. This stuff has just become the norm for this little loli, huh.

“Mommy is sleeping with the lord now” Daddy says. Oh, god. This is one of those cults, isn’t it. Well, whatever. Daddy shows her little girl an exemplary human sacrifice by muttering in tongues...or some strange language and then making a maid disappear. Ain’t magic wonderful? Daddy probably believes she’s with the lord too, I bet.

Ah. Yes. Sacrificing your daughter so she can escape the rapture. Truly a quintessence of parenting. And like that, she’s sent to Hell or the Shadow Realm shouting for someone to rescue her.


What’s this? Difficulty mode? Well, I’ll pick filthy casual.

Oh. Hey. It’s the Pokemon intro spiel. Guess we really are in a Pokemon game. Skip. Skip. I’ll fumble around with controls. Skip. Skip.

Am I a boy or gril or androgynous as hell? A cute gril.

Left or right. Pink is cute. So, left.

Y-yeah. Totally.


Dominator of worlds, Aria. Actually, just humble young girl Aria for now. Now that Aria’s registered to take on the Pokemon league in this region and raise ferocious monsters like any normal kid in this world, it is time to go meet with mom…


Who is also pink-haired and looks eerily similar to Aria’s. What, did she reproduce asexually or something? Well, seeing as she’s on a nice ship, Aria decides to go on a stroll with her mom, see the entrance to the banquet hall, and just do what people do on a ship. But mom tells her to meet the captain first.


Aria meets Piano lady, and many more colorful (though not necessarily personality wise) characters on the ship. Oh, and she invades someone’s room, hides in it, and overhears of a secret terroristic explosion plan. But like a good girl, Aria doesn’t report it to the captain or anything. No, that would be the smart option. She meets the captain afterwards who gives some mini-lecture about this region and then moves on, telling us to hurry to the banquet. So, ravenous eater that she is, Aria decides to head over and runs into dear mother teasing her before entering the banquet hall.

The colorful lady still says …

But look at all that food.


Aria takes her seat and the banquet begins. The captain gives a celebratory speech before being interrupted by the three weirdos with the bomb. Who would have guessed they would have acted? Surely not Aria. She starts to regret her inaction. Probably.


They tell us all to stay still or they will blow up the ship.


Aria, both filled with regret and confusion is teleported away somewhere by ???’s Gothitelle. And the bombs explode. Whoopie. Good job, Aria, you idiot.


She wakes up in the captain’s room, which is completely wrecked, and strange tentacles begin poking out of the ground. Aria, confused, regretful, and wanting to avoid lewdness gets out of there and heads to the deck. She runs into piano lady who informs her and then moves on. The ship’s totaled, people are panicking and mother dearest is nowhere to be found. Some guys are trying to prevent more water from entering the cabins. She heads to the banquet hall to find the Captain who tells her that Mother’s gone missing. That’s not good. As she goes to see the guys who are blocking the door, they are taken away by weird tentacle monsters. So is this artist guy who’s blocking the Cargo Hold entrance. You know what that means~

Aria enters the forbidden zone, the Cargo Hold, with a hole in its shutter and finds her mother!


Mom offers Aria one of her Surf Pokemon to get her to shore but before she can force it onto her daughter, some weirdo appears!


She, too, says cryptic stuff—I wonder if she’s in the same league with the other strange weirdo who said cryptic stuff—before confining Aria’s mother with those tentacle monsters who look oddly like Deoxys.

And she’s planning to deal with Aria next. But BASED PIANO LADY drops a piano from three stories up.


Aria will definitely remember you and your song, Piano Lady who has been taken by the Deoxys things. As Aria escapes to the deck, she’s confronted by another stranger there as well. And the woman who was with Aria’s mother flanks from behind. Things can only go downhill from there.

But, suddenly a Talonflame swings down and pulls her off the deck and drops her off at the new region, Aevium’s, pier. Its owner, a fiery redhead named Tesla, comes to comfort Aria in her time of need, then directs her to the lab, informs her of the name of the terrorist group who attacked, and then heads off to find any more survivors. Team Xen. Aria will remember that name.

Aria, now left with no family, can only press forward. In order to exact vengeance on those who took her family, there is but one option. World domination. When the world is her own, nobody will be able to escape their just punishment. Especially not Team Xen. What an edgy name.

And she’d definitely have Piano Lady as her personal musician. Such a wonderful act of help towards the soon-to-be owner of the world cannot be left unrewarded after all.

Chapter 1-First Pokemon, First Badge, First Step

Left alone at the deck, Aria makes her way to the city. But curses, there be a gate in front of it. Luckily, her trainer card essentially serves as a passport into the region. Hallelujah~

After getting it into the system, she makes her way into Gearen City and towards the lab. Trainers stand on either side, so thar be no reason to go to there when she could be mugged. After all, it would not be wise for the future dominator of all to be mugged.


So, into the lab she goes. She’s met by the lady who gave the spiel earlier, Amanda. Amanda tells Aria to head up to the leftmost desk where she’ll impart upon her a first Pokemon. As she heads to the door, another girl suddenly crashes into her. R00d!


But, she apologizes so dominator Aria shall be lenient and forgiving. Come to think of it, she looks an awful lot similar to that Maria girl. Must be coinkidink. Aria goes up and meets the Professor, who is supposed to be giving us our starter. His name’s Jenner. But, he’s talking on the video-phone when Aria pops up.


Realizing that keeping Aria waiting would not be in his best interests, he hangs up and directs her to the area where the starters are kept.

Apparently, Aria can choose from 21 possible starters, fire, water, and grass type. So many worthy candidates. But what’s this? This rainbow machine? Apparently, it gives a starter at random. Aria, feeling like she might get good luck to counter the terrible incident from before, decides to go for it. After all, maybe Fate was the best decider for what would be her first partner in world domination.


Jackpot?

Riolu?

Aria likes this. Unfortunately, in her excitement, Aria forgets to name him. Ahh, well. You’ll be Hibiki when Aria finds a name rater.

Before she can leave with her newly acquired partner, she must test her mettle against registration manager Amanda. Apparently, she’s just competitive. Aria can respect that. She has a Litten and Riolu promptly Quick Attacks it to 0 HP. After Aria’s sound victory against a competitive foe, Amanda gives 5 Pokeballs and then Jenner comes up wondering why things are taking so long only to chastise Amanda when he realizes she’s at fault. Shortly after she leaves to get back to work, one of his assistants, Ren, who is dressed in all black like an edgy teenager would be, decides to test you out as well. Jenner obliges on the condition that he get back to his next assignment when it’s over as well. A surprisingly reasonable guy. Good. Good.

Edgy Ren and his Froakie go down just as easily, thanks to Riolu. What a wonderful partner. After exiting the sanctum with all of the starters in it, the Professor decides to have Aria keep an eye on his cute daughter, Melia, who he sent to Route 1 on a little research assignment.

Aria, despite her plans, realizes that it’s probably best to train up for the world conquest and helping the somewhat reasonable professor would be good training. Plus, he gives Aria a pair of running shoes, a Pokedex, and a PDA like thing called the Cybernav in exchange for her help. Seeing as he gave her useful stuff that could help her quest, she decides to accept the job.

After leaving the lab, she battles a few scrubs and makes her way to the train station to Goldenwood and Route 1, only to find out that technical difficulties were stunting a train.

Technical Difficulties. A truly evil thing.

Plus, the guy was there the whole day so he never saw Melia. In the end, Aria decides to search around town for her (and battle a few more scrubs for Riolu’s experience). She makes her way eastward and passes by the market before passing by a strange house. In said strange house, a purple-haired girl named Veronica is kicked out for playing her terrible music too loud. Dramatically, said purple-haired girl lays on the floor, asking for food, a Pecha Berry specifically, like a hobo.

Aria, kind girl she is, decides to buy that berry for her. After giving Veronica the berry, Veronica decides to ask for more before giving up and admitting she was just pulling her leg and trying to get free food from people. Aria, reasonably pissed by her good will being taken advantage of, decides to mentally note Veronica—actually, she says her name is Venam, probably an edgy teenager thing—Venam onto her list of future political prisoners. Apparently, Venam does this whole thing weekly.

Venam tells Aria to come to the sewer with her and threatens to make her buy more free food for her if she doesn’t. Political Prisoner Rank UP. After beating some scrubs and finding some weird tent where she can change the difficulty should she get bored of casual scrub difficulty, she catches a Nidoran (Female) and names her Ao Jo-ou. Blue Queen, guys.

She then heads off to the sewer entrance. But, she finds Venam trying to pull the same routine with Edgy Ren. Fortunately, Ren doesn’t fall for the act and gets her to stop by calling her Veronica. Classy. Aria’s impression of him has improved. Venam tries clamoring to Aria for help but Aria is having none of it. Venam, unable to find favor just tells them to follow her into the sewers. Ren, drops the intel bomb to Aria that Melia had actually headed into the sewer to find the backup generator for the city.

As Ren and Aria enter the sewers, Aria can only think one thing: what idiot put a backup generator in the sewers?

Poor urban planning aside, Ren proves to be helpful to Aria, healing her team after each battle. Carpe Diem Syndrome sets in and Aria goes on a catching spree as they progress through the sewers. Her first catch: a Woobat who she calls Eros Bat. Suddenly, a shiny pink Gulpin appears. Not missing the chance for wonderful color coordination with her hair, Aria catches it and names it Pinky. No dominator can even be caught dead without good fashion sense. Eventually a Noibat who she names Niddhogr (a dragon would be a great mount for a dominator) and a shiny Trubbish.

With a full team of six, she storms the sewers, plundering wandering trainers and picking up useful items (and Chinese Food, apparently). She makes it to where Venam is. Venam beckons her through the door but right before Aria and Ren can follow, the power drops and the door shuts. But, worry not! Aria had been to a generator room during her plundering and easily returns the sewer’s power. After going through the door, they find the r00d gril who crashed into her. So, that was Melia. Aria had definitely guessed that but she likes having suspicions confirmed. But, apparently, said poorly placed backup generator is failing to work.

So, Melia and Venam decide that they wanted to check on an experiment they started a while back. Apparently, they left some garbage around wondering if it would mutate into Trubbish. Oh yeah, and apparently Melia can attract Shiny Pokemon and they wanted to test that too? You ain’t got anything on Aria. She just attracted two in the span of 20 minutes. And what? AND WHAT?

Anyways, conveniently, two Trubbish and a Shiny Garbodor show up. So, it worked. Aria wants to question the statistical significance of this but they’re all hostile and while the others just sit there staring, Aria has to take care of it herself—or with Ren. Respect points UP. But, Aria being the dominator she is, sweeps~

It is at this point that Aria also starts to wonder whether scrub mode was a good idea or not.

Apparently, though, Melia has a magic suitcase that has some weird stuff that would have kept them safe were it not for the dominator’s presence and skill. Anyways, after defeating the Garbodor crew, Melia finds the source of the problems. How convenient. Some engineers should be fixing the issue soon so she can go to Goldenwood. Damn, Aria has to do her job now.

So, everyone splits. Aria takes the opportunity to roam into a nearby casino and get some coins, but knowing when not to give into vice is also important in life. So, she decides not to gamble her life savings of 3000 yen. She definitely needs more funds.

After some wandering, she makes her way to the train station and runs into Tesla. Tesla, being a nice lady, decides to pay for Aria’s ticket to Goldenwood Forest. Tesla definitely has a future as Aria’s psychiatric counselor/mother figure.

Before going on the train, she runs into some old man who seems to have lost his granddaughter in the forest. Aria notes that and then heads off to the forest. After a short date with Melia (where she finds said missing granddaughter, they decide to head into the cave. Though, not before Aria could beat all the scrubs and catch a couple of new Pokemon. Scatterbug’s final evolution is pretty, so fashion conscious Aria catches one. Then, she battles everyone. EVERYONE!

Aria then follows Melia into the cave and teams up with her to beat all the trainers in the cave and make it to the end. In the process, Riolu evolves and gains like 3 moves at once. Neat. Scatterbug also evolves and gets some pretty good moves as Vivillon. After making it to the end of the cave, a miniquake makes the back of the cave collapse and reveal a new path. Aria and Melia, feeling adventurous venture into the cave and find a clearing with an Arceus statue. The two have a nice picnic and a casual Pokemon battle. Though her team is fully shiny. Aria is partially convinced that Melia is a hacker.

Such fun. But, the desire to dominate the world still burns in the back of Aria’s mind.

Melia reveals that she’s going to start as a gym leader in some far of City in the region called Grand Dream City tomorrow and was glad to have enjoyed this last day. Unfortunately, Aria aware of the power of jinxes, is hardly surprised when an explosion happens in the forest on the other side of the cave.

Melia decides to leave the picnic blanket behind (poor lonely blanket left there forever) and book it to the site of the explosion. SMART. As Aria follow her and enter the cave to get back to the forest, an Absol drops by in front of her at the entrance and says ‘sup. Probably knows of its future ruler. Absols are psychic like that or something. It runs off and Aria gets back into the cave. On the way back to the front entrance, she battles a strange red-head who is offering some trial by using the Sewaddle line. Through the power of cheesy strategies and poison, Aria reigns victorious, takes her reward, heals up, and returns to the cave entrance.

Guess who’s back. It’s Team Edge, I mean Xen. They’ve got Shadow Pokemon. But don’t worry, apparently, the magic case does really have everything as it opens up to reveal a snag machine witch Melia gives to Aria, unaware that she has literally given Aria, future world dominator, the power to steal Pokemon at her whims. Still, Aria makes a demonstration of it and the Team Xen grunts flee. Aria plows through the swathes of grunts, snagging their shadow Pokemon in the while, and getting healing support from Melia till she makes it to where the highest person in the ladder for this operation and his direct bodyguards are.

Though, his bodyguards are an apathetic girl and a foreigner who can’t do English good (Me fail English? That’s unpossible), so they practically just give Aria the win. Suddenly, Garbodor shows up and apathetic girl (Sharon) decides to take it as a threat and drag the foreigner (Eli) to chase after it and pretend they’re working.

Grateful for Sharon’s apathy, Aria goes up to the mastermind, who calls himself Zetta. He questions why Aria’s name was so stupid and whether her parents hated her. Aria restrains the urge to reflect the question back to him.

He’s not seeming that dangerous. What is dangerous is that big purple orb portal thing behind him. Apparently, it’s a dimensional rift that he’s using on some Pokemon in the lake. He tries to battle Aria himself but fails miserable and watches as his Shadow A-Grimer is snagged by the dominator. Seeing the dominator for the true threat she is, Zetta speeds up the Dimensional Rift’s process, makes it mutate into a giant purple Gyarados, and have it suck Aria in and devour her.

Idiots. You can’t suck Aria i—Oh, he sucked Aria in. That’s a problem. Aria wakes up in some distorted  red-purple world and notices Magikarps flopping all over. She throws them back in to the lake. However, as she throws the last one in, the Mutated Gyarados (called D-Gyarados from now on), attacks. Aria surmises she’s in its soul or something. Melia’s voice breaks through and says she’ll help. But, no worries. Aria’s got this. D-Gyarados goes down thanks to wonderful cheese strategies and Melia teleports her out of there and next to her with her Togepi. She then proceeds to do the same to get them all back to the lab.

At the lab, Aria and Melia overhear Jenner talking to the lady who was on the comm before. Apparently, Melia’s not really Jenner’s real daughter. Oh, and apparently Team Xen gave her to him as a baby just to raise and then take back when the time was right. Melia, reasonably pissed about this whole development, screams at Jenner in rage. She tries to teleport Aria and herself out, but the red lady intervenes and they only teleport themselves out. Red lady surmises that she could not have gone too far and probably only got as far as Route 2. She gives Jenner the whole ‘we don’t tolerate betrayal’ line before running to Route 2 and alerting Zetta to head there. Jenner tells Aria that he tried to use her to get Melia out of that situation. Apparently, he did grow attached.

Ren drops by but before the situation can progress, a Gothitelle appears and decides to kidnap Jenner. She talks about practicing mercy on us, underestimating the dominator before telling us not to follow Melia and then disappearing.

But, Aria don’t listen to no psychic voice, so she decides to go after Melia anyway. Ren informs Aria that she needs Rock Smash to progress on Route 2 and Aria can’t use that without the badge from the gym.

Needless to say, she storms the gym. After quickly dispatching the simple puzzle, she stands in front of the entrance to the leader’s room and decides ‘Casual scrub mode is too easy and boring’. So, she runs to the tent and switches difficulty to normal before proceeding to return to the gym leader.

Venam, Political Prisoner AA Rank, stands before her as the gym leader….and gets swept thanks to Eros Bat and Patternfly. Aria proudly takes the badge before Venam asks why Aria is even going after Melia. It was a surprisingly reasonable question but Venam says that she’ll understand Aria’s answer when she gets to Route 2. A moment of sagacity is not enough to reduce her political prisoner status, though.

After heading out of a room, a silhouette of a hobo-looking girl hovers over Venam just stood. Unfortunately, Aria doesn’t have a sixth sense so finding these astral projections is not exactly part of her skillset.

After healing her Pokemon and leaving the gym, Aria is ambushed by some mad scientist who wants to use her as a guinea Pignite. Aria would like to refuse but the creepy scientist insists and drags her to his lab and asks her to take a nap in the bed.

Apparently, he wants to push people into their past memories or something. Seeing that he’s just a mad scientist and not a creep, she does it since he probably wouldn’t let her go if she didn’t. Aria enters her memories of the Goldenlead incident. She uses this opportunity to take her frustration out on memory Zetta by pummeling him repeatedly. After breaking stress, she leaves the lab and does various requests at the Help Center. Because rewards are useful.

One involved getting a girl her stolen Pidove back. Aria fights a biker gang but then a magic woman chanting in some weird tongues skewers their getaway boat and makes them her slaves. Her name’s apparently Karen. Aria puts her under the threat list.

There were also things like finding the location of a hidden library. Delivering some guy’s love letter for him. It was mostly stupid stuff (except for the library. Aria likes those) but she got rewards so she couldn’t complain for the most part.

But, there was one that brought forth her first subject to face public execution. In a hunt for wild Pokemon who were terrorizing the docks, one wonderful person did something so wonderful, Aria could not even describe it in words.


After facing a possibly rabid Arcanine and Growlithes, she dominated once again and even got one of the Growlithes to join her. But, she looked to the future corpse in disdain.


Afterwards, she beat up members of the local gang to join them and get the TM for Rock Smash. Networking through the underground would definitely pay off...somehow.

Satisfied with Gearen City, she headed off to the train where her next step to world domination awaited. Oh yeah. There was that Melia girl as well.

Chapter 2-Muggings, Ghosts, and Psychics

Aria, ready to go find and protect Melia, a girl who she bonded over a fun picnic with, finally gets of the train and stands on the platform for Route 2. Realizing that she probably should use that TM for Rock Smash, she teaches it to Nidorina who did evolve from Nidoran at some point before.

But, only a few seconds later, something strange happens. A hobo-looking girl crashes into her and runs past her. If she had a sixth sense, she would have noticed that it was the same hobo-looking girl from the gym. But, she passes by. Only one problem.


After being so careful to not be mugged, Aria has finally been mugged! That 2000 yen was like 40% of her life savings! If this were a scientific study, that would have been a significant statistical difference. Verdict: Hobo girl is going down.

Aria gives chase, but runs into a line of three rocks blocking her way. The mugger stands across the rocks, bragging about how we can’t move close to her without Rock Smash and how we can’t touch her.

*ROCK SMASH*

Without an inch of hesitation, Aria channels the power of Nidorina and uses Rock Smash before standing eye to eye. Mugger girl, seeing as she has failed to keep Aria at bay, runs off. Aria once gain gives chase only to find a tree on a bridge. Aria is hardly so dense as to not realize the obviously out of place tree is likely the mugger disguising herself.

The tree runs away and Aria gives chase...or decides to beat all the trainers in the area before giving chase. A girl’s gotta train her Pokemon after all.

After breaking a sweat, she looks around for the out of place tree and finds one that’s speaking and trying to tell her to go away. Aria, dominator that she is, decides to punch the tree, who subsequently drops its disguise and teleports to the entrance to the nearby cave. After catching her at the entrance of the cave, the girl admits how great Aria is and introduces herself as Nim. She just admits that she just moved Aria’s money from one of her pockets to another. Feeling up her pockets, Aria lets out a cute blush of embarrassment, a face not fitting of a dominator. She also explains that she was watching Aria’s battle [read: Sweep] against Venam and our style just caught her eye.

Nim challenges Aria to a battle and teleports her into some weird pocket dimension where her Psychic Power is stronger than usual. Oh no. Oh nooooo.


She’s a psychic/rock user. Oh no no no. This is not good for Aria.


Notice how that combo of types pretty much screws Aria over. Aria loses—ksssht—The battle starts and Aria loses—ksssht—The battle starts and Aria, through sheer force of will and manipulative strategy comes out on top of Nim who has seen faces of the conqueror she dare not deserved to have seen. Lose? No such thing happened to Aria. You must be tripping.

Nim admits Aria to be too strong for her and hands over a Twisted Spoon in apology for screwing with the conqueror. She still has a long way to go to gain forgiveness, but this useful item will be a start.

She takes Aria back to the cave entrance and then tells Aria to go save Melia and that she’ll be watching like Santa. Creepy. Truly creepy. Anti-stalking laws will be heavily enforced under Aria’s eventual rule.

Hardening her soul once again after that experience, Aria enters the cave, Amethyst Cave, and runs into Political Prisoner Class AA and Edgy Ren. After Venam acknowledges the choice Aria’s made to tackle Melia out of genuine care, the two ponder which way Melia could have gone. There’s a fork in the road. One reads to Sheridan Village, a nearby village. The other, deeper into the cave. On one hand, running to the Village would have been optimal. On the other hand, there’s the possibility Melia took the wrong path in a panic.

Before the group could head up to the village to check, a pretentious bowl cut stands in the way and gives some monologue about fear to tell them she took the wrong way and that it’s best to go check the wrong way first.

After justifying it, the group heads down east to get to the deepest part of the cave. But, as they go down, they see Team Xen. Aria, seeing a chance to vent her frustrations, plows through the Xen grunts and makes her way to the deepest part of the cave to find Zetta.

Aria’s only met him once and she’s already tired of running into him as anyone sane would be. She is an example of sanity, right?

The rest of the group coalesces as Zetta delivers some pretty bad news. Melia is dead. Killed and devoured by a Galvantula. His evidence? Her bag which was being eaten by said Galvantula. Something smells fishy.  

Zetta, in as much of a good mood as Aria is, decides to battle the group (Aria and Venam tag) and crush  him handily. Political Prisoner Class AA’s sentence has been lightened by two months as thanks. But, Zetta, being a sore loser sucks the group into a Dimensional Rift casually sitting behind him. Casually.

The place is filled with odd-colored Joltiks and touching them makes them disappear...or teleport to a patch of grass in the back. After making all of the Joltiks teleport to the back patch, Aria moves into it. Unsurprisingly, following the same pattern as before, a gigantic black and red Galvantula drops down and attacks. Once again, Aria tag teams with Venam as they deliver a beatdown. D-Galvantula has the terrifying Parental Bond ability but it can’t do much to Aria. Sentence lightened by another two months.

After wiping out the Dimensional Rift Pokemon, the rift splits them all out and they corner Zetta. But, the colorful lady from the boat and her Gothitelle suddenly appear and kidnaps Zetta. Aria is starting to get annoyed at how much the villains she faces get kidnapped by some third party. She names herself as Crescent and once again warns everyone else against following this path any further and books it. Shame, Crescent. The Dominator’s quest for revenge is far from over.

But, first, Aria needs to loot the belongings of a supposedly dead girl and finds an ID card. Noting a locked door in the lab that was likely where the ID card connects to, she plows through the rest of the cave, though she encounters depressed bowl cut once again later on. He tells Aria that they will meet again before leaving. Aria, undeterred by cryptic nonsense, just continues onward and finally enter Sheridan Village.

Right at the exit of the cave/entrance of the city, she sees a purple haired girl arguing with the village elder. The sensei/gym leader of the village has become a hikikomori. Unfortunately, this clashes with the community feel the village is supposed to have. The purple-haired one, named Aelita, is quite harsh on that hikikomori nature, saying it’s causing people to leave, while the eldest wants her to be more lenient with him as the village has endured worse crises. The elder finally gets through to Aelita, but Aelita decides to try to talk to the sensei again and runs off. The elder, being a kind lady, somehow knew Aria would be there in advance (according to her internal dialogue) and greets the young conqueror before heading to her home.

But getting to the city is the least of Aria’s accomplishments. She has unlocked instant travel. A guy next to a truck is willing to auto transport her to any city she’s visited before. Future Transportation Minister found.  

After battling everyone in town, Aria heads to the sensei’s abode and finds Aelita having no luck with reaching out to him. She warns Aria about the hikikomori’s silence before getting Aria’s name and then heading off.

Aria enters the compound and finds the bowl cut guy. He changes his hairdo to something more rough but far less stupid and reveals himself to be Keta, the sensei of the village. He tells Aria to follow him into his meditative garden and goes there.

Aria decides it’s more fun to look around the house a bit, despite a camera apparently focusing on her, and finds a couple of books on a table about Mental Health and Psychiatric Problems. Deciding that it may not be best to tread any further, she just heads to his garden. Even Aria has her borders.

Aria heads into the garden and finds Keta staring at a scroll, muttering about how he finds smiling so hard to do. Depression hits hard, huh. He waxes philosophical about fate and how Aria could not have saved Melia even if she were stronger because fate. Aria, understanding of his depression decides to let him ramble on. People need those moments to vent after all. But, then he speaks of a way to save the supposedly dead Melia retroactively. The jury was still out on her fate, but for now, Aria wishes to take that chance and Keta, confirming from her firm gaze, tells Aria of a magical (wow, magic is everywhere) conspicuous red stone in the Amethyst Cave which opens up a secret passage to a place called the Amethyst Grotto in which an item called the Soul Stone can be found. Apparently, Aria should take that to where she found out about Melia’s death and something should happen. Afterwards, Aria is to return to Keta with the stone

It’s fishy and mumbo-jumbo-y, but Aria gathers that it’s worth a shot and heads to Amethyst Cave, but not before raiding all of the houses in the town for items and stuff. Su casa, Aria’s casa. She finds out that some girl’s boyfriend went to Amethyst Cave to meditate and that he hasn’t come back. Aria makes a note and heads towards the Route 2 entrance of the cave, saves the boyfriend who was being attacked by a Lunatone and makes a new friend out of it, and then finds the magical red stone. After touching it, a path opens five feet away from her and leads her into a grassy meadow where she meets...Keta’s twin? Ghost? Astral Projection?

The ghost tells Aria to follow him and then drifts back all spooky-like. Aria does as asked and finds a weird circular altar with five black circles on it and five monuments surrounding it. The ghost starts by saying “So, you’ve finally made it” much to Aria’s confusion. He then says he is the manifestation of Keta’s soul and emotions. What is this? Kingdom Hearts? Megaman Battle Network 6? Keta did some stuff he felt guilty about and that began wrecking his psyche so through some magic power in the village, he separated his emotions from himself. The revenant ponders what his corporeal self is up to before dropping the information that Keta is part of Team Xen.

Aria’s desire for revenge begins to peek out from its corner in her brain but suppresses itself in favor of hearing the ghost out since she can’t punch ghosts. Normal and Fighting attacks are ineffective on them after all. The revenant asks Aria to battle him and sway his mind back to the proper path so he can put something to an end. In exchange, he gives Aria the Soul Stone. Aria is beginning to like this trend of pre-payment for her services. So, she accepts. Before disappearing like any ethereal being should, the ghost adds on one last stipulation: to come back to the grotto when it’s all over.

Aria takes the Soul Stone down to the depths and finds...nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Fishy fishy.

Aria returns to Keta’s abode. On the way back, she catches two Shiny Meditites, which thanks to their color schemes, she names Hanbun. He asks to see the Soul Stone, makes an utterance about favoring the fool again and concluding Melia’s too dead to do anything about before returning the Soul Stone to her. Aria still feels like something’s just too off about the whole Melia situation, but keeps silent about it. He then requests a Gym battle with Aria so he can understand her. While a bit lewd and definitely a reverse of the leader-challenger protocol, Aria accepts since she was going to challenge him anyway.

But, first she needs to do a few things. First, she returns to Gearen and uses the ID on the lower floor door that was locked before and loots the room. She nabs the Exp. Share on the table and then equips it to one of her newly caught Meditites. She then finds the name rater and officially gives Lucario the nickname Hibiki.

With that, Aria makes her way back to the outdoor arena where Aelita is refereeing the match. Despite her original plan being using Eros Bat and Patternfly to sweep, she ends up using an entirely different dominating strategy. Having Pinky yawn his opener and then have Hibiki set up with Two Swords Dances and a Power-up Punch to pull his attack to +5. The rest is history.

The battle’s over. Aria, excitedly expecting a badge, is suddenly denied her reward as Keta comes to some revelation about kindness and stuff as he says he needs to delay giving Aria her badge to undoing some past error. Before Aria can suggest that he gives the badge first before taking care of that stuff, the man runs away and a confused Aelita chases after him after rearranging her team.

Aria, unable to see where they went hears from the elder that they went under the waterfall, somehow. She saunters under the waterfall like the classy dominator she is and finds an entrance to a cave and then Aelita at said entrance. Apparently, she was too dumbstruck at the state of the cave’s innards to proceed further. She explains that this cave, called Carotos Mountain, was supposed to be a serene place with streams of water. Now there are only pools and streams of lava.

Aelita asks Aria to help her find Keta and Aria, excited at the prospects of conquering a volcano, accepts. Our dear pinkette and purplette proceed north and encounter one of those weird tentacles from the ship. Aria, with a minor fear of lewd tentacles, meanders around it and continues further north to the lift and finds a small sleeping cylinder. The cylinder suddenly grows and grows and then introduces  itself as SEC, a Security Enforcer Component. Like any security system, it asks for a Team Xen ID. When the girls fail to provide it, SEC decides to use voice recognition to check, only to realize the duo are actually intruders. Feeling betrayed and informing the group that it was even about to offer complementary pudding, SEC attacks. Aria, disappointed that she could not get any pudding steamrolls and snags its Shadow Salandit. Shame it was a male, though.

After being defeated, SEC decides to act like Rival DOUCHE from Pokemon Blue/Red/Yellow and play his theme music before informing the girls that there are more of him which will have his memories, proclaiming that he will be Aria’s rival for the rest of the mountain. Aria refuses to even dignify the declaration with a response so SEC blows himself up. The supreme leader Aria faces her first attempted assassination/suicide bombing. It was a lot more anticlimactic than she expected.

RIP SEC. Aria won’t miss you.

The two proceed further down the lift and then find a Xen member complaining that he just got kicked in the face by a stranger, probably Aelita’s stranger. Aelita tries to ask but they attack. So, the girls reply with overwhelming force and then proceed onwards. In order to get down, they need a password (or so Aria assumes based on the signs) which is neatly given on various signs in riddle and smash into pillars to make rocks fall into the lava and make a path. Aria, understanding this child’s play, storms past grunts and makes some noise.


As Aria pummels numerous grunts, one of them even tries to make small talk after apparently getting her ass handed to her by Aria for a second time. Unfortunately, the world conqueror can’t put much effort into memorizing the face of every peon so she just walks on with full sass.


After opening a path to a new lift, Aria finds...a new SEC, sleeping on the job. Politely, Aria wakes him up steamrolls his non-shadow Flareon. SEC decides to blow himself up again, but Aelita takes the last few seconds of his life to interrogate him about the shadow Pokemon and why this one didn’t use one. He starts to say that production of the Shadow Pokemon line had only recently started but his stick of explosives blows him up before he could finish. No matter, Aria got the answer.

They proceed to the next floor and find the next SEC who pretends to forget about the previous two incidents and ask for a password. Good thing Aria is a thorough girl. 2567. But, SEC, being the DOUCHE he is decides to try and shoo the girls off until Aria decides to be persistent. SEC finally lashes out and attacks in return. But, his Shadow Quagsire is an easy snag so SEC suicide bombs and the girls, scrubbing the memories of SEC out of their mind, pass into the lift and go up to the final floor  which looks far less like a volcano and far more like a research lab thanks to green fluids and giant test tubes.

Aelita examines the test tubes and finds Pokemon trapped in them. After she examines them, she hears Keta’s voice calling for her. She follows and finds Keta standing at a nearby door. But before a touching reunion or so can happen, Keta calls her an idiot, grabs her arm and pulls her through the door.

Aria, unfettered by this oh so predictable twist, does get fettered when two scientists fly in on Klingklangs and Red Lady (who’s real name is Madelis) walks through the doors, saying that thanks to SEC, they were ready for the two girls. Aria is clearly outnumbered here, so they take her to the holding cell! The Shame cube! The prison on the other end of the hall! Actually, it’s just a cargo hold. After they leave her alone (with her Pokemon for some reason), she examines the Cargo Hold and finds a Yellow Key. Strange.

She goes back to the locked cell door and finds a sort of brittle space. Before she can try to break it, Keta walks by and breaks it himself. No jail can contain Lord Aria!

Keta tells Aria to follow him and help him end Xen’s plans in the mountain once and for all. As they go into the lab, they realize they need four keys to get to Madelis. Luckily, Aria somehow has one of the keys. The Yellow Key...suspicious.

There are four doors, so Aria first enters the one on the lower right. In there she finds…


Yes, Eli. How the hell did you get in there? Sharon, in her infinite apathy decides to give Aria and Keta the Green Key.


Though, apparently, Madelis may actually want Aria and Keta to reach her. In other words, it’s obviously a trap. But, Aria can’t leave her purplette partner behind so she continues to scour around. She frees a Mime Jr, finds an Up-Grade behind a set of annoying warp panels, and then beats up the remaining two scientists for the last keys. After using the keys, a path extends.

Aria and Keta go up the path and into the next room and find a healing machine and PC. Knowing this is an obvious sign that something’s about to go down, Aria heals up and preps up before heading into Madelis’s chamber.

Aria and Keta go down a red carpet and reach Madelis who complains that they took too long. Keta demands Aelita’s release or else. Madelis taunts him about murder before telling Keta that his contract with Team Xen which somehow involved giving her a list of everyone living in the village and giving up the lives on that list for some favor is now null and void. Apparently, Aelita’s name wasn’t on it and Keta’s desire to save Aelita is a bit strange. Aria can’t really see how but it wasn’t her contract so what did she know. Somehow, Madelis comes to the conclusion that Aelita was Keta’s daughter. Aria, feeling the leaps in logic were too much doesn’t buy it, but apparently, Madelis hit the nail on the head. She laughs at her insipid genius before deciding to sic something onto Aria.

That can’t be. That’s--


Aria, always ready for a challenge, faces down this insurmountable wall—snag Mewtwo. Or so she would have liked, but Madelis does some weird techno stuff to disable the snag machine. Oh well. Defeating Mewtwo is just as wonderful a challenge. Thanks to Mewtwo going Hyper Mode, it defeats itself before it can wipe out Aria’s team.

Aria, smiles a wonderful, liberated smile as she watches the engineered strongest bow before her momentarily. Being a dominator is truly amazing. But, Madelis commands Mewtwo to stand up again and continue to rampage. With Aria’s team mostly down, Keta decides to wall of Mewtwo and tells Aria and Aelita to go destroy the generator to wipe out all of the lab’s information, data, and systems. Aelita pulls the reluctant Aria onwards and they make their way to the generator and find a strange sight.

Based on past experiences, Aria could only guess it was a dimensional rift Pokemon. Madelis comes in to confirm the conclusion and confirm that she murdered Keta.

Welp. This is going from bad to worse. Madelis explains that they’re basically using the Mythical Pokemon Volcanion to power their generator, turn the mountain into a volcano, and have a little explosive insurance to torture Keta and Volcanion with (aka Kaboom, bye village). Aelita decides to put up some resistance against Madelis and asks Aria to take care of the generator. Madelis tries to scare Aria with the fact that she would have to murder it to shut off the generator. But, Aria remains undeterred and pissed.

The Dimensional Rift opens up and swallows Aria. But, D-Volcanion, as intimidating at it looks, goes down quite easily to Poison Gas and Force Palm.

After exiting the rift, Aria finds Crescent’s Gothitelle blocking the way. A meltdown warning happens and Mewtwo is now seen restraining Madelis while Crescent stands next to an unconscious Aelita. It seems like Mewtwo’s pretty pissed with Madelis and who could blame it. Seemed like Mewtwo’s heart was opening back up.

Before Aria can say any more (she’s getting annoyed about this trend), Crescent asks Gothitelle to teleport the two teenagers out of the mountain. But, Gothitelle may have just decided to play a fun prank.

Somewhere in a land far, far away...or maybe not. Who knows. It’s a Xen meeting room. Big execs are everywhere. All three of them (except Madelis). While they’re all clamoring about their recent failures, the purple woman from the ship, called Nastasia (Geez, her parents must have hated her), calls Madelis in to explain what happened at the mountain. She does explain but suddenly--


Sudden Aria. Aria, seeing all of these familiar faces and knowing she’s outnumbered, does what she can do best in this situation. Flip the bird on both hands and give a scowl. It looks positively adorable. As the four Xen guys try to catch her, she’s teleported out.

Switch back to Aelita, who says it’s been a week since Aria was last seen...wait. A week…?

What?

Suddenly, Aria appears on the platform where she battled Keta, still flipping the bird. Realizing nobody’s there to see it, she stops and notices Aelita running up to her and giving her a big hug.

Aria must have raised a flag somewhere. Yuri for all!

Aelita explains that she suddenly woke up in Sheridan after being knocked out about a week ago and came to terms with her father’s death. She also explains that she wasn’t sitting around moping when she was waiting for Aria so she and the Elder did some research on Shadow Pokemon and found a way to purify them. She takes Aria with her to meet the Eldest who takes them to a closed off spring where they summon Celebi to bless the location and make it one where Pokemon could open their hearts.

Neat. Aria has a new tool. Shame her Snag Machine is still kinda borked, though. Luckily, the Elder explains that there’s some great engineer in a town off west called Akuwa Town who could fix the Snag Machine. Apparently her name is Saki Blackry...Blackory...Blakery…SAKI B. Aria decides to call her Saki B since the surname is too damn infuriating. How convenient. Well, it seems Fate truly favors the great leaders of the world.

The elder also recommends that Aelita head out with Aria as well, so Aria gains a new traveling partner/future waifu/haremette.  

Aelita heads out and Aria follows a bit after. But, right outside the secret space, Keta’s ghost appears. Aria suddenly remembered that the ghost did ask her to return to the Grotto after everything was taken care of. So, Aria follows along.

Keta’s ghost requests a final battle with him so he can finally pass on or something. Aria kindly accepts. After a long and fairly tough battle with totally no resets, Aria remains victorious, puts his spirit to rest, and attains the badge and TM. But before he goes he leaves one last message. He tells Aria that Team Xen will be stopped because if she doesn’t, all shall cease to exist.

Ominous.

Aria takes the newly found stretch time to do a few help center requests and even successfully finds a hidden magical library with satanic magic lady Karen’s help. Apparently, her magic is related to the tribe that built the library, some tribe called the Garooofa...Garufa. Garufa. Strange name. There was also a Mega Ring inside but Karen decides to call dibs and take it before Aria can. Aria will remember this. But, Karen gives Aria a book that can help her translate Garufa text so that’ll probably come into play later.

After doing a bunch of requests, Aria heads to the west gate of Sheridan where she runs into Amanda. Amanda, being the spunky battling girl she is challenges Aria with a full fire monotype team and loses. How predictable. Impressed, Amanda gives Aria the HM for Cut before moving on. With a new tool to clear the roads ahead in hand, Aria now looks to the gate to her next step in her journey for world conquest—finding that girl who can fix the Snag Machine. Saki Bla...Saki B. Aria should have known better than to try again.

Chapter 3-Of Creepy Mansions and Affluent Lolis

With the path to the gate’s exit now clear of any possible trainers who could come to battle her, Aria finally says farewell to Sheridan Village as she begins her travels to the next stops on her journey: Akuwa Town and the town in between called Goldenleaf Town.


After her first battle on Route 3, Pinky evolves and he’s even more pink than ever.


Moving further down the route, she eventually finds that it forks into a cave and a forest path. One has less trainers (the cave and it’s actually devoid of any trainers as she later finds out), but more wild Pokemon encounters while the other has the converse. For curiosity, she enters the cave and--


SHINY DIGLETT! Aria immediately tries to weaken it for capture but it goes full suicide bomber….


Mildly traumatized by a potential servant blowing itself up, she decides to go down the forest path. She encounters a couple of trainers


No, Aria does not wish to see your master combination, you pair of imbeciles. Problem is that you’ll probably try and show it anyway. After having their master combination ripped apart by the conqueror, Aria continues south, hoping to get to Goldenleaf without running into any more weirdos—


No. No.


No no no!


BAD TOUCH! STRANGER DANGER!

Aria, in her aversion to the lewd possibilities gives a nice, hard beating to this Rorrim B stranger, his Ludicolos, and Shadow Sudowoodo. The strange man acknowledges Aria’s strength before crying that he’s been dishonored and never wants her to see him again...and he’s somehow a father?

Aria, needing time to recover, returns to Sheridan to finish a quest she had yet to finish. In Gearen, she had met a nice wandering stranger who called herself Novae who wanted a battling partner as her first actual Pokemon battle.


Seems she wanted to battle again so, Aria decides to oblige her friend.


After a clean, though hard fought, battle, Aria dominates—her competitive spirit unbroken. Novae takes the loss in stride and hopes that she can meet Aria again some day. What a sweet girl.

Feeling nice and recovered, she explores Route 3 again and finds a location on the side called the Mirage Woods. Within it, there’s an odd Kingdra statue that’s missing a wing. The Hiker staring at it says he saw something that may have been the missing wing floating down the river on this route. Shrugging it off, she walks back down to Route 3 and saunters around until


Well, that was strange. But, she just decides to hold on to it and come back to it later. On her way down the forest route, she encounters something very strange.


Aria can only stare in disbelief at the girl for a few seconds before trying to get her to repeat. Unfortunately, Aria did not mishear her. But, it’s not like the girl could stop her so Aria moves on, eventually passing more assholes. They just seem to be very xenophobic. Aria was just passing through yet they’re telling her how much they sicken them or how much she should die.

Aria backsteps a little bit and decides to explore the cave that was supposedly on the other path. As she explores, she realizes: there were no trainers at all. Running through, she finds a little grotto with a JIRACHI! Aria, in excitement goes to it and


It’s only a Ditto. It runs/flies away and seems to be going north but it’s not in her direction so Aria can’t feel like pulling out the effort to chase it. She heads back down the cave and finds the entrance to Goldenwood and meets Aelita right in front of it. Aelita, being Aria’s first waifu, wants to have a little tete-a-tete with her and how could Aria decline such a benign request from her waifu?


Aelita, despite not expecting to win, seems to be satisfied that she did better than she thought she would. Aria gives her a quick headpat and then Aelita says she’ll head into Goldenleaf. After going into the city, though, Ren suddenly pops out much to Aria’s surprise and much to his surprise. He explains that the town is filled with a bunch of residents who hate outsiders and that he used to be one of them but left so he could one day come back and fix things. He barricades out of the town, saying that he knows that if she shows up in the town, she will somehow change things for the better, but…


He mentions off-hand that Venam could probably melt the bars but then tries to pretend he never said that and asks Aria to wait for him. Aria can only clench her fists and watch as he walks off. She wants to push him down her respect ladder, but frankly, his tortured existence seemed to be punishment enough for him. After being stunned into silence for a few minutes, she takes matters into her own hands and heads all the way back to Gearen with help from the Transport Minister. She can’t help but feel guilt for leaving Aelita behind in that town but there’s not much she can do if she just stands and waits.

Quickest place to locate Venam from is her mother. Her mother tells Aria that Venam/Veronica is screwing around with her friends in the sewers before questioning why Venam couldn’t just stay in her gym and do her job.

Realizing she was in Gearen, she decided to rendezvous with Karrina, the leader of the local gang that she beat up. Karrina’s group is readying themselves for a gang fight against a local evil gang at Amethyst Cave and she want Aria’s help. Wanting to understand the inner workings of the inner city’s gang culture, she joins in and goes to the cave.


The leader’s a bit of a klutz though and she fell off the side of a high rock process.

...Why?

Anyways, she asks Aria to finish up the job. Aria, shrugs and goes to the guy on a bike. She’s not feeling too motivated but--


IT IS ON, YOU OVERSIZED PIECE OF TRASH! Aria completely wrecks the biker and the biker, realizing just how SOL he is, decides to have his entire gang retreat. They can’t touch Aria, after all. Karrina even gives Aria a new Houndour as thanks. Now that Aria’s forays into the world of gang violence are over, she begins to explore the sewers trying to find Venam only to find nothing but a weird looking glowy opening in the wall.


Aria, questioning her memory and trying to remember if it was there before stands in front of it to let it marinate in her mind. Certain things would need some time to set in—and time’s up. Aria, having completely accepted the weird sight before her eyes, jumps through the hole in the wall and finds herself in a grassy field in front of a gate with Venam and a couple of her friends gawking at it.


Venam seems to have zero idea of what it’s doing there and decides to break in to collect taxes or something since it’s illegally placed into her sewers. Aria notes illegal immigrants as an issue to deal with in the future. Venam suddenly notices Aria and asks her why she’s there before cutting off that line of thought.


Venam puts Aria on recon duty. Aria wants to drag Venam out of what is clearly a suspicious location and have her melt down the barricades to Goldenwood but she keeps silent about it seeing as she doesn’t own the world yet and Venam would probably not want to leave before she exerts her dominance over the house’s owners (or loot it if it’s empty).

With a little furtiveness, Aria breaks through two levels of gates without a sweat and the group eventually finds out that the front door is locked. Shocker.


But, Venam points out that one of the windows is open and that there’s a path in the hedge to that side of the building so everyone follows suit. The group finds that the mansion has quite the lavish interior. After taking a bit of time to marvel at it, someone comes to find out what the noise is and confronts them.


It’s blonde naked Sephiroth with clothes! Or...he says his name is Indriad Theolia. He commands the group to get out of the mansion and his property. Hmm. Yeah. Anything but that would be deviating from the norm. But, Venam decides to be persistent that Indirad owes her something. Aria slams her palm into her face, feeling that she may be getting an aneurysm from the sheer stupidity of it all. Since Venam refuses to leave, Indriad mutters something about a prophecy of sorts and says that he will make sure they do not escape anymore and calls his maid posse.


He tells them to take everyone away and get them ready for the ceremony. Each of the group is teleported off one by one until Aria is the last one left. He stops the maid for a second to get a good look at Aria for some reason. Maybe because he realized Aria’s just as annoyed at this whole situation as he is or maybe he’s recognizing the regal aura of the dominator Aria is—or not. He just says never mind and tells the maid to take Aria away.

An unspecified amount of time later, Aria suddenly wakes up inside some weird bedroom next to a box after hearing the words “Set them free”. Aria looks around and sees some little blonde girl who said she went through some trial in the room to release her. She tells Aria to get the hell out of the house before Indriad finds out about any of this and then leaves. Unfortunately, Aria can’t leave without Venam since she needs some corrosive poison to get to Goldenleaf.

So, she goes around the house and finds the little girl, explaining that her ‘friends’ are still trapped and she ain’t leaving without them.


The little girl agrees to help her find the others and introduces herself as Marianette.

Wait...that name seems familiar.

Well, that’s beside the point. After offering to help Aria, she tags along and since Aria has a partner, she now has someone who’ll heal her Pokemon when needed, huzzah!

Aria and Marianette find a maid on the second floor blocking a door which seems to be Indriad’s study or room. Either way, that maid refuses to let Aria in unless


A trial. The maid says that she’ll let A&M in if they find a maid who’s been slacking off and tell her to get back to work. Marianette explains that this is kind of a thing in the mansion to the point where some of the trials can get pretty absurd. It’s essentially a series of mini-games for her.

They search around and find the maid lazing around behind the dining room and ask her to get back to work but…


Another trial. Aria starts realizing that this is going to be her life for the next few hours and sighs. The maid asks her to find an important bracelet given to her by Indriad. With minimal effort, A&M find the bracelet and return it to the maid but she decides to do one last trial. She sees some potential in Aria and she wants to bathe in it (aka BATTLE ME, FOOLS!). After a quick battle, the maid feels disappointed. Apparently, Aria had more untapped potential, but it was never released. Mildly disappointed, she says she’ll keep her word and goes back.

When A&M go back they find the door left unattended to since both maids’ trials were completed.


However, before they go back Marianette stops them, saying she’s afraid of confronting Indriad. Apparently, she’s tried and it did not end well. Aria stifles the urge to punch Indriad and they walk into his room.


They demand Indriad let everyone go but he says they’re his property now because they didn’t leave when they had the chance. Aria shivers at the thought. Despite her fear, Marianette stands up to him and demands that they (her included) be allowed to leave if they complete a trial. In a shocking twist of events, he agrees to it. He asks Marianette what happens if they fail and she says he can do whatever he would like with them.

After Indriad agrees to the terms, he tells the two that the three have their souls trapped in the shadow realm in three locations in the hedge maze, pool area, and entrance area and that the trial is to release all their souls.

After exiting, Marianette says she feels a bit off about how easily that all went but they move to the lobby to decide what to do next. There, they find a maid that gives them an optional trial. If they can beat three maids posted throughout the area, she will give them an interesting reward. Aria decides to tackle the interesting reward first since there seems to be no time limit on Indriad’s trial. She finds a maid in the hedge maze, one in the pool area, and one in the garden and proceeds to beat them all.


Mildly amused by DEANDRATHENEWGIRL, she makes her way back to the maid in the lobby/foyer.

The maid proclaims that all the doors that had been locked, with the exception of one are now open to her and she can do with them as she will. She proceeds to loot two of the doors and find useful stuff before going to the door at the back of the room she woke up in. She walks through it and finds a gate with a panel.


However, the panel says there are too many people and shuts down. Disappointed, Aria decides to move on with the remaining trial and come back later. Aria first goes through the hedge maze since that one seemed like it would be the most annoying and finds a room where one of them, the sole guy, was sealed. After unsealing him, he seems eager to nope the hell out of there but is told to wait in the mansion while they rescue the rest. They then go to the poolside.

After pressing a few buttons in a control shack near the pool, a secret passageway to underneath the pool opens up.


The secret passageway has a small passageway in the wall and Aria is to big and fashionable to pass through so, Marianette decides to go in. Well, it’s not like it could be anything super dangerous. What could possibly—


…

No. Just no.

JUMP OVER THE LAVA, LITTLE GIRL?! What kind of sadistic bastard thought...right. Never mind.

Marianette steels herself and makes it through the lava puzzle and frees the second ‘friend’.

Once they’re freed, some mechanism teleports them to the other side of the small hole. In retrospect, that would probably be necessary since the ‘friend’ would probably have trouble fitting through the hole.


You and Aria both, Luca. But you have zero right to speak since the guy Aria saved before was the only one who held any objections to entering this Arceus-forsaken mansion.

That’s 2/3 down so Aria heads to the entrance garden and finds a hole in the Absol statue. A&M go in and find...an empty room with a non-reflective mirror. After interacting with it for a second, the room becomes foggy and a voice tells them to seek the truth.


The two start to exit but suddenly, four Venams appear and say four different things. Aria starts getting a headache. Dealing with one Venam was more than enough. But, Marianette and Aria come to realize that they’re being asked to pick the one displaying her true feelings.


Luckily, all of them had the same tone except one of them, the bottom right one. After picking that one, they understand that the answer was correct. Aria realizing that Venam’s probably been beating herself up for the Amethyst Cave incident for a while resolves herself to pat Venam on the head when she gets the chance.

Next comes Ren. Just like before, only one is singing a different tune.


And last is Aelita for whom the same applies.


Aria also resolves herself to pat her waifu on the head the next time she sees her. With that ordeal over, the mirror shatters revealing a staircase. A&M walk down it and find a room where they found the previous two friends. After interacting with the box in the center, Aria is released.


Venam, realizing what happened begins beating herself up for acting without thinking of the consequences and then needing to get saved all the time. Marianette recommends that she take it as a learning experience before telling Venam to go wait in the mansion.



Marianette suggests to Aria that Venam may just be rough around the edges and Aria, out of tact, decides to not to question that possibility. The two head out through the statue and realize they’ve completed all three trials but Marianette reveals that all of the little holes and broken walls that Aria had snuck through were her fault. It was because she had tried to escape many times but she had failed all the time because there was some sort of barrier in the way. Aria reassures Marianette that she did nothing wrong before two maids come and take Marianette away, saying she’s needed for one final trial that will take place behind the one locked white door in the front lobby.


Seeing as she’s now alone, Aria decides to take care of one last loose end before heading to that final trial. She heads back to that door from earlier with the panel, which now asks for passwords. The ever observant Aria, however, remembers the passwords she saw inscribed into various bushes for some reasons and inputs all of them leading the door to open.


Aria hears moans of someone repeatedly talking about how cold it is. How trapped they are. She walks further and further in and finds—a woman?


She mutters, asking how long it’s been, how the world around them is, and how her friends (named Vivian and Nymiera) are. Hearing no response, she chuckles, saying that silence is an expected answer from the person who she thinks is behind her (and the person who likely entrapped her).


She screams that she’ll kill Indriad, turns around, and goes full Κοσμικη Καταστροφή on Aria but just barely misses when she realizes that she’s not Indriad.


She asks who Aria is. She feels like she’s seen Aria’s face somewhere, but she can’t remember at all because of the cold or something. She asks Aria to come closer but Aria is still recovering from her life flashing before her eyes and is still kinda terrified. Luckily, her sympathetic nervous system kicked in, otherwise things may have been a bit more messy.

The woman introduces herself as Anju (she thinks) and wants Aria to just honestly answer a few questions.


She asks if the world is still safe. Then Sheridan. Hearing yes, she sighs a sigh of relief. She then asks of a third town, Hiyoshi, which Aria had never heard of and she couldn’t remember seeing on the map. Aria answers that it’s gone, but Anju seems accepting of that, saying that they were long past help anyway.


She thanks Aria for answering honestly but tells her that she’ll be staying behind and that she wants Aria to let her family know she’s still alive with some ancient heirloom. Aria decides, it’s best to accept since she does not want to incur a frozen wrath.


Aria then moves through the big white doors for her trial and after a long platform, she finds out that the final trial is a battle with Marianette before giving Aria some information about Marianette’s team and battling style.


Marianette is not feeling happy about this in the slightest as she is quite strong and Indriad would know if she were holding back. She can only hope this doesn’t end badly. The peanut gallery (aka Venam and friends), are reasonably pissed at Indriad and think they’ve been ripped off but he is having none of it. So, the battle starts. (After numerous failures, Aria reset time to before the battle and ended up going through a training montage done to demonic sheep tunes.)


Marianette’s team is Heliolisk, Cinccino, Pyroar, Chatot, Porygon-2, and her signature member Snuggles the Bewear.


The battle is long and tough. Aria has to switch through every member of her team to win as simply playing to type advantages is not enough.


But, Aria eventually defeats ‘Child of Light’ Marianette 2-0. Marianette, feeling happy with how the battle turned out, passes Aria something.


She gives Aria the Normality Badge. Venam, reasonably, questions if Marianette is actually a gym leader, but Indriad cuts that line of interrogation off and says that the group is now free to leave. However, he teleports everyone onto the battle stage.


He claims that he is going to allow them to leave but whether that is alive or whether it’s because their souls no longer are there holds no difference to him. Essentially, he’s going to use the battle arena as a giant altar for a human sacrifice. Aria is wholly regretting not punching him in the face when she had the chance.


But, then Marianette remembers some cryptic words from a certain stranger and begins to be more defiant. Marianette apologizes to Aria saying that she’s going to have to go back on their deal to escape together and that she has to stay back.


She tells Aria that their time together was something she cherishes and despite the short time she spent with Aria, that it feels like they’ve been friends for an eternity. She says she won’t forget Aria again. Before Aria can question the meaning of that, Marianette magic-teleports the group out of the mansion.


She then teleports herself and gets all up in daddy dearest’s face. She asks if he’s grown silent now that she can fight back and then says that they have a lot of catching up to do and that he has a lot of answers he needs to give before fading to black.

Aria wakes up later in some abandoned generator room, likely in the sewers and finds a TM there. After taking it, she walks out of the room and finds Venam having a fallout with her friends. They keep complaining about how she put everyone in a bad spot and while the guy has a right to complain since he’s been against the whole mansion invasion from the start, the girl’s just being a hypocrite since she was just as enthused to loot the place.

They leave, and Venam  punches the wall in frustration.


Aria gives the head pat she said she’d give and Venam starts to feel a bit better. She questions what the hell the mansion was as it’s no longer there anymore, but there’s not much they can do at this point. She then asks why Aria came and Aria finally gets the chance to explain about the barricade issue that had been forgotten.

Venam happily agrees to help and takes Aria to Route 3 where she proceeds to melt the gate and then get straight where Aria’s going. She understands that Aria needs to go to Akuwa Town.


Saki Blasherbaberb.


Exactly.


Or she just really doesn’t like this Saki B. She just says she’s muttering to herself and leaves.


With the gate ordeal finally over, Aria can now continue on her quest to get the Snag Machine fixed. Next stop, Goldenleaf Town.

Chapter 4-USURPER OF THE THRONE OF HELL


As Aria walks through the gate, she talks to all the nice people in it. They seem to have reasonable disdain for the people of Goldenleaf Town to the point where the receptionist even wishes they had a tunnel that would burrow through the town and go straight to Route 4 so people don’t have to deal with the headache the town is. Is it perhaps worth wiping off the map in the future? Dictator Aria entertains the thought as she heads into the town.

The moment she enters, though, she hears a cry of help from someone telling people to let go of them.


Public executions. Such a barbaric practice. It should probably be stopped. Aria’s rule would still be a rule of civilized law, after all. Public executions would not fit that.

But, Aria wants to do some exploring in this town. Luckily, her presence seems to distort time enough that she has plenty of time to explore before taking a look at the execution. The first thing she does is talk to the stranger at the front of--


…


Yes, and she has quite wonderful fashion sense.


…



Yeah. Anything aside from that would be deviating the norm.


Seriously, what is wrong with the people of this town? Aria’s already been assaulted and threatened. Frankly, she begins to wonder whether she should just move on, get the badge and leave without making a scene. These guys are not worth her effort.


Right. Public execution. Aria really did not want to let that slide, so she decides to confront the self-inaugurated executioners who are hardly that keen on Aria’s intervention and one of them, Sariah, attacks. However, Aria can repel her ghosts quite easily. Taken aback by the defeat, Sariah’s open enough for the girl they were about to hang to push her out of the way and break for it. In stereotypical fashion, Sariah proclaims she’ll be back, but Aria goes full smug as they run for it.

Aria stares back at the statue of Giratina at the center that’s apparently the guardian of the town. A town of Satan worshippers, huh.

Keeping her smug, she walks up to the building that is supposed to be a gym and encounters a lady standing in front of the gym.


Why yes, lady. Yes, she is.


This town will burn. It will burn and it will be made an example of what happens to those who cross Aria’s wrath.

The woman, Narcissa (that name, really?), claims that outsiders are not given that right and those who are outsiders must be granted special exception or...something. She says she’ll let Aria battle her if she deals with all of the rowdy outsiders in the Pokemon Center and then says she’ll be waiting at a building to the east called Wispy Tower for Aria. While leaving she mutters how she seems to be the only one who remembers and respects the dead.

Aria walks into the Pokemon Center and talks to the obviously disgruntled outsiders who have shacked themselves inside there to not have to deal with the villagers. Majority of them are annoyed that they can’t have their gym battle.

But,  they’re hardly rowdy so Aria begins to head out and--


Aelita! Aria rejoices at finally seeing a familiar face in the town. Aelita was looking all over for Aria after Aria suddenly disappeared (no thanks to Ren), but got her Pokemon hurt by the villagers. She heads to the healing counter to heal her Pokemon but they’re interrupted by a disgruntled trio of villagers claiming they’ll force everyone in the center out of the town. Aria, Aelita, and one extra random trainer sitting on the side decide to push the villagers back.


Sariah...or Sarah? Whatever her name is, she gets her ass handed to her a second time. The angry villagers run away in fear of the awesome powers of the illegal immi—tourists while proclaiming they’ll be back. Aelita tells Aria that she should go and find Narcissa at Wispy Tower so they can get her to try and fix this issue while she waits at the Pokemon Center in case the villagers come back.


As Aria walks out, however, she’s triple-teamed by Sar(i)ah and the gang who think triple teaming her at the entrance is smarter. Relatively speaking, it is. But the difference is marginal. Aria doesn’t go easy on those who try and tread on her path, after all. Needless to say, their triple teaming strategy fails as each of the first two fail to even substantially whittle down Aria.


But Aria is saved the effort of having to beat the third one into a bloody pulp as a Pangoro shows up and chucks two of them into the air. Aria nods, impressed, and watches the third one take the opportunity to run away. The Pangoro stares for a second and then runs off.

Aria makes a note for whoever owns that Pangoro to become a part of imperial security or something. She has her guesses bit decides it’s best to make no assumptions.


Moving eastward, she encounters a breeder lady who says she’s willing to battle at any time and comes packing three Audinos. Any trainer worth her mettle knows how much experience Audinos tend to give.


Taking the opportunity, she trains up her Pokemon and evolves Hanbun and the Houndour she had gotten earlier, replacing Ao-Jouou in the team. With that, she finally moves westward towards Wispy Tower.


Aria quickly finds herself in front of Wispy Tower and walks in to find Narcissa standing near a bunch of graves. Narcissa muses over how much she wants to change the town but is afraid of being burned like a witch for suggesting the idea to the village. She says that since Aria has come back, she assumes Aria took care of business at the Pokemon Center. Narcissa heads out, saying she’ll meet Aria in the gym for the gym battle she promised in return.


Life complicates her reality once again, though as Aelita comes to admonish Narcissa in front of the gym for her adherence to the isolation. Narcissa interjects to explain what she did to Aria that even hinting at wanting to end the isolationist natures of the people would have them calling for her head on a pike. She’s not a dictator.

Aelita suggests that Narcissa hold an assembly to try and start things off and that Aria and Aelita can function as bodyguards in case of a riot. Aria’s mildly displeased with this idea as fixing the town would make it unworthy of wiping off the map and her anger needs to be directed somewhere. Narcissa, thinking it might work, decides that they can discuss about this after Aria’s gym battle.

The group heads to the gym but they see something strange.


A familiar edgy-looking guy in black is standing on top of the gym’s awning. Narcissa, like a reasonable human being, asks what he’s doing up there. Edgelord McGee tells her to shut up and sics a Haunter on her...and Aelita for good measure, right at their necks.


He turns to Aria and confirms that she’s the one who warped into the Xen Executives’ conference room and flipped the bird at them. Aria finally remembers who he was—the edgy guy on her left in that incident. Aria would laugh, but Geara’s holding hostages. He claims he’s pretty pissed about her warping in and disappearing. She’ll face consequences yada yada.

Geara states that he’ll choke Narcissa and Aelita to death as revenge. Aria then laughs a bit. Just a bit. He was truly Edgelord McGee. Unfortunately for him, though some of the villagers hear something going on. Geara, not wanting to be seen, disappears (or just becomes transparent) and leaves the two girls he wanted to choke to death unconscious.


Sariah and one of her posse show up and assume that Aria’s the one who attacked Narcissa. She decides to have Aria locked up in the local prison while they get rocks ready for a public stoning. She has officially put herself in a political prisoner class greater than that of even Venam’s. Aria didn’t realize that was possible but even she surprises herself. Class AAA+.


You’re not really one to talk, but you’re right, Geara. Geara mulls over how much things are favoring him before looking off to the side and remembering Wispy Tower exists. He wonders if a certain something is still there and then ponders how he may be getting revenge sooner than he expected before disappearing. Ex-Death Row inmate from before hears everything and heads to the prison where Aria’s being kept after Geara runs off.

After being talked down by Sariah, Aria’s left inside the prison. Aria can only hope that this doesn’t become a recurrent theme in her journey but frankly, chances seem to be growing slimmer. After all, what are the odds she won’t be thrown into some huge island prison later down the journey. How ridiculous.


But, in typical fashion, her prison stint ends up being cut prematurely as the girl she had saved from public execution comes in and threatens the warden with her Pangoro if he doesn’t give the keys. The warden man, not wanting to deal with all this hands over the keys and the girl frees Aria. She introduces herself as Mosely (pfft) and tells Aria everything she overheard Geara saying something about Wispy Tower and recommends that they head over there.


As they walk out, they run into AAA+ who is reasonably pissed at Aria walking freely. But, Mosely has a Pangoro. And she commands Pangoro to devour Sariah. Pretty extreme, no?

Sariah runs off in fear being chased by the fighting panda. Mosely gives the evil eye to all the townspeople who decide to just turn the blind eye to them. A bit extreme, but still a nice command of authority and force. Imperial Guard Captain get.

Mosely says she should go off and check to make sure that Pangoro didn’t actually devour AAA+ and tells Aria to head to Wispy Tower ahead of her.


Aria heads east towards the path to Wispy Tower and finds herself jumping out of the way of a familiar-looking truck. Given the edgy design and the red Recusant’s Sigil on the side, Aria can only deduce that Team Xen is doing something for their executive Geara. Aria plows through the two grunts that are stationed on the path and enters the tower to find…


An open trapdoor where that shrine used to be? Weird. Aria enters and finds her good ol’ pal, Geara, musing over things, in the first space she enters.


Geara is mildly annoyed by Aria’s appearance, tries to throw a quick insult at her but fails to phase her.


What?


Well, you’re not wrong but it’s for all the wrong reasons, really.

Geara says he’ll entertain her but he needs some time to prepare what he’s working on so he goes through the corridor and shuts it. Shortly after, Mosely joins the party and the two go on a wonderful quest to beat up Team Xen and open up the doors.


The troops don’t seem to have any morale so steamrolling them is actually quite easy.


Going through all the locations and pressing a few switches didn’t turn out to be all that trying of a task.

Throughout the place, she finds various diaries detailing what happened to Wispy Tower. A guy named Siruis who got involved with the Radio Tower wanted to experiment with its influence over people. Somehow, that led to him deciding that they should capture Giratina and use it to recreate the world. The leaps in logic are almost Olympic-class so Aria decides to not entertain them any further.

She and Mosely return to the corridor and find that Narcissa had gone through it already and is standing next to the staircase, wondering what this strange basement is. She seems to be fine now though she left Aelita at her house to recover. She and Mosely decide to go down the stairs and towards Geara.

Aria follows after a minor delay in thought and finds that Mosely and Narcissa have been trapped by her good ol’ apathy buddies Sharon and Eli.


Knowing they’re next to a staircase, Aria questions to herself why they can’t just go on ahead and let her catch up to them, but logic seems to be a scare resource nowadays. Sharon and Eli battle Aria and subsequently lose. In Sharon’s regular apathy to anything but her name being constantly mispronounced and misremembered, she opens up the door and bails.

Narcissa and Mosely reason that if they tried to stop the group here that Geara must be close. Aria finds too many errors with that logic but decides that wasting her precious gray matter on this was not worth it. Mosely gives Narcissa the nickname Narcy before running off. Aria, liking this nickname decides to co-opt it.

After going down a few more corridors, she encounters Narcy and Mosely facing off against Geara and is that...Satan?


It’s Satan! That Sirius guy was actually serious about using Giratina. But, Giratina’s pissed off about being restrained underground for a long time. Geara’s pissed off about...everything, it seems. Narcy tries reaching out to him, as he is apparently from this town, but everyone knows that you can’t reach out to these kinds of guys.

Geara, who’s real name is Gregory according to Narcy, rambles about the story behind the basement lab in the tower but Aria frankly care about this guy and his inane ramblings. All it boils down is that he wants his petty revenge on Aria and Aria will subsequently deny it to him.

The act of denial will be a true step on her path as the dominator or the world. After all, what greater accomplishment is there than standing triumphant over Satan?

Beating him up. Just beating him up and standing over his unconscious body. Unfortunately, Gregory is too stunned to take the picture of her triumphant victory over the forces of Satan for the history books. What a shame.

After her victory, Narcy tries to talk some sense into Gregory but he’s too far gone to want to come to his senses, so Narcy does the only logical thing. Spirit him away.

That escalated quickly.

With it all over, Narcy takes Aria and Mosely to her house and offers a nice, cooked meal. Mosely happily obliges and Aria silently accepts.

The cooked food is actually pretty nice. Aria feels like it’s been forever since she last had a home-cooked meal. It feels warm. But, Aria stifles her tears. A dominator can’t show her softer side. At the very least, not to the world at large.

While Mosely continues to gorge on food, Aelita walks in from up the stairs. She seems to be chipper albeit a bit regretful that she got taken out so quickly. She pledges her loyalty to Aria (at least that’s how Aria interprets it) and then gets back to Narcy about the assembly idea. Narcy says it’s crazy enough to work, but she has a better idea—a play. She wants to use her talents as an actress to create a narrative to make the masses be more accepting of outsiders.

Aria likes this propaganda idea and gives her full support, as does Aelita.

Narcy sends Mosely off home before heading to her gym/theater with leftovers and then takes Aelita with her to the gym, telling Aria to go when she’s ready.


On her way towards the gym, the Shadow Quagsire she caught a while back is finally purified. But, she ignores that in favor of heading into the gym.


She interacts with the advice panel at the front and the person on the panel tells Aria that she should have Flash handy so she can shift the field effects in her favor. Taking this advice, Aria does something fun.


Gambling! Slots! Roulette! Voltorb Flip! The stakes are high! The prizes are great! So she gives in to TEMPTAAAAATION~

After racking up over 100 coins, she teaches Flash to Eros Bat and then makes her way into the gym.

As she goes in, Narcy’s about to tell Aria her role in the propaganda piece but something abrupt happens.


Ren shows up. Apparently, he’s ready to try and complete his dream of beating Narcy. Ren’s quite insistent so Narcy decides to give Ren a shot.


Narcy says that Ren and Aria will compete for the chance to be the one to battle are at the end of the play. Aria’s to go to in one direction and Ren in the other until one of them gets to her. Whoever gets there first wins.

Narcy tells Aria that Ren is also prey to the issues caused by the town and that she should make sure to try and save him as well. With that vote of trust, she heads off and leaves Aria to her task. Aria takes a breath and walks into...one of the most infuriating gym puzzles ever.


Words cannot describe the level of annoyance it holds as it teleports Aria back and forth and leaves her walking in loops. After trial and error, she eventually finds her way towards the final area


Where she encounters Ren. Ren won’t back down and challenges Aria. Unfortunately, he is fated to lose just like all the others. With another victory in her hands, Aria watches as Ren is downtrodden. She  feels sorry for the guy but pity is not going to help him in the slightest. Even as he asks to let him battle Narcy, Aria rejects him. Mildly accepting of his failure, he gives Aria one last vote of confidence before heading out.

Unfortunately, Aria knows that she’s not at a state where she can deal with Narcissa yet, so she returns to the Pokemon center and replaces Niddhogr (temporarily) with the purified Quagsire (who she names Quags) and starts another training montage with the Audino filled with all the best demonic sheep tunes.

With her Quagsire now Level 36 and in possession of the move Earthquake, she heads back through the mirror and finds herself in the theater.


Aelita is supportive like the wonderful waifu she is


The rest are not so supportive. Aria’s walked into a nest of devils, hasn’t she.

Undeterred, she is determined to finish off her glorious propaganda performance and takes stage opposite Narcy.


With her toxic and defend strategy, she defeats Narcissa’s ghosts, not even needing the Flash TM she won through gambling in the first place. Ah well. At least she enjoyed the thrills of succumbing to the whims of fate for some time.

AAA+ is outraged that Narcy lost but Narcy tells AAA+ off for her unreasonable behavior. Aria feels this may have been a bit too heavy handed and notes to make propaganda more subtle in the future.

Narcy declares the isolationism of the town to be over and the play comes to an end. Narcy gives Aria the badge as thanks and tells her and Aelita that she’ll show them the entrance to Route 4.


Meanwhile, Gregory is wandering around the Shadow Realm (looks more like a Purple Realm to me) and, after complaining about wandering for hours, runs into Zetta and Jenner. The three contemplate that they’ve likely been transported to another dimension as they’re pretty much looping and nobody’s come to save them. The Purple Realm truly is a scary place. However, they turn around to encounter Nim, sitting and eating snack—wait...Pokemon food? Just why, Nim?

As Aria follows, the group ends up in front of the Giratina/Satan statue in the center of the town.


Narcy says that the R in Region is a bit out. If she pushes on it, a secret passageway opens to Route 4. How convenient.

Well, convenience is hardly something Aria will question when it happens. Luck is for the greatest of conquerors and whatnot.


Narcy tells Aria and Aelita that she has to stay back to supervise the transition of the town so this is where they’ll part. With one last thank you, she leaves the two to their business. Aelita, ever feisty heads into the statue’s passageway and Aria follows suit.


Meanwhile, Ren leaves the gym and begins angsting over his failure and how everything he was working for ended up being meaningless. Crescent shows up on the roof to goad him on for a bit before telling him she’ll give him some answers.

Bidding farewell to the town of Satan worshippers, Aria now heads to the next stop: Akuwa Town and Saki B.

Chapter 5a- The Prison Bitch Returns

Well, the next town and Saki B can wait. Aria takes a bit of a detour and heads west  towards the gate she never got the chance to go through and finds…


Weirdos.


Shit. It’s the coppers and they’ve roped her in. The cop goes by the codename C and it seems like he...she...Aria can’t tell at all but the cop claims to be blind. If it weren’t for the two lackeys behind C, Aria could bolt out of here and C would be none the wiser. Seems like they don’t want to offer her the Witness Protection Program package and instead decide want her to deal with a certain dimensional rift that happens to be on the other side of the door...wait a minute.


This place looks oddly familiar. A wave of...nostalgia? No, that’s too positive a feeling. Dread? Nostaldread? A wave of that hits Aria as she realizes she’s in Goldenwood Forest. Honestly, she should have made the connection between Goldenleaf and Goldenwood, but the incident in Goldenwood Forest was stressing to say the least. Then that means the Dimensional Rift was the one she had left behind.

Well, let nobody say that Aria was one leave business unfinished forever.


Once again, the power of cheese triumphs. Truly, none can stand up to Aria’s notorious pink blob and its Toxic. Though the taste of another conquest and job well done is reward on its own, C claims to have a reward for her! Unfortunately, C points out that that he? She? The Cop doesn’t have the reward and says that Aria should get it when they meet again before getting the hell out of the forest.

Delayed Gratification. Wonderful. She’ll have to learn how to deal with this nonsense. But, that can come later.

With that little detour out of the way, Aria finally walks into the hole under the Satan statue that Narcy had opened up.

As expected, it was a cave, the bane of all humanity. Luckily for her, the cave seems to be nothing more than a short obstacle as she finds the exit rather quickly.

Luckily, Aelita is there, marveling at the colorful sights and beckoning her on. Truly, she is a ray of light in this cruel, cruel world.


Unfortunately, as Aria is all-too-aware of, the light can get easily snuffed as a certain hobo mugger girl appears out of a present box, blocks her path and tells her not to go to Akuwa Town.


What a pain in the ass. Why does she have to keep doing this--

Come to think of it, Aria wasn’t mugged this time. The crazy girl just told her not to go to the Town. She could always just ignore…


And the path to the town is blocked by some nurse...or...what is this? What actually is this? Aria cannot even fathom what the hell she has just witnessed. Why is she blue? Did Aelita get past it?

She seems to show no signs of moving any time soon. So, Aria takes the high road (of not beating her up) and moves back to possibly indulge Nim. Life could not be any dumber than it was at that moment.

As she goes back down the road, she spots a familiar face—the crazy girl with the Pangoro who broke her out of jail.


Apparently, she lost her keys somewhere on the route and can’t get back. Claims it would be easier to find if she had an itemfinder. She asks Aria to pass her the keys if she happens to spot it at some point. While Aria doesn’t have an itemfinder, she agrees. It’s the least she could do after all.

As she backtracks through the route, she comes to find Nim..multiple copies of Nim...that say nonsense before disappearing.


As much as Aria wants to say something, she can’t. She refuses. She will not let herself dignify this nonsense. Also, the clones disappear after saying their nonsense one-liner. There was no way she was letting herself sink low enough to retort to empty air.

As she moves back to the place where the nurse...thing was, she finds that Nim has taken its place. Ultimately, she isn’t sure which of these situations was worse. But, she has learned from her past mistakes. It is obvious what will happen next. So, rather than taking the bait, she high-tails it out of there to make preparations.

Last time, she barely made it because her team was weak to Nim’s Psychic Monotype team. But, this time, she needed countermeasures. So, she finds two new companions for the road to domination.


And with her team ready, she heads back to beat up a hobo…

Probably not the best way to phrase that.


Well, discounting all the attempts that never happened, that battle went surprisingly well. Aria could do without the ominous warning though, but she did get a bike voucher from all of this so maybe Nim’s not all that bad.

Well, she can’t truly redact her annoyance just yet.

But, in the meantime, she can finally go to Akuwa Town...or she would if she didn’t have a bike voucher to redeem. So, without hesitation, she runs back to Gearen City to get her fresh new bike.


Now that that’s out of the way, she can head back to Akuwa Town and find that behind the elusive gate that she had been barred from passing until just now is...nothing.


Completely empty. And the town itself is no different...well, aside from two people. Aelita, who it seems did make it through, and some unconscious old man.  


Guy is clearly unconscious and Aelita suggests using a defibrillator considering he’s the only person in the town. Though, that’s not exactly what a defibrillator is indicated for, Aria accedes to the plan because she’s a conqueror, not a doctor. After exploring the town a bit and even going into the gym to find that every location is completely empty, she enters the Pokemon Center and picks up a defibrillator that’s just lying there on a table.

Not one to question a helpful coincidence, she brings it back to Aelita who (in adorable fashion) uses the defibrillator. Much to the author’s surprise, it works in bringing the old man back to consciousness. Unfortunately, that old man decides to go into some senile tirade, brought swiftly to a halt when Aelita plays the orphan card.  


However, the old man has zero idea of what happened so Aelita and Aria decide to move on and look elsewhere. The old man does leave behind some clue, saying he needs to say something about the gym but can’t remember, but Aelita is already long gone by that point.

With the motormouth left behind, the search yields the same results as the cursory search Aria had done earlier. As such, Aelita tries to make one last attempt by searching the gym/aquarium.


Like before, the aquarium is empty. But the music is playing so Aelita deduces that there had to be someone there to turn it on. This is quickly proven wrong as the aquarium is emptier the further they go in. So, the pair keep going further in until they find a backroom with a giant screen.

Questioning a loud beeping sound they heard, they activate the computer and find a recording.


Oh hey, it’s that name. Saki.


It seems like the recorded distress call makes it through to a police station. The policeman immediately tells them to get out of the town as it’s too dangerous. As the power cuts out, the screen peters out and he leaves behind a cut up message.


Ominous.

The two make their way out, but they’re ambushed by…


Team Xen members with wings?

The two sneak out of the building only to find…


Aelita echoes Aria’s sentiments. Between the fact that their numbers get replenished no matter how much the two girls take out and the fact that they look utterly ridiculous, Aria can only wonder how they have THAT MUCH personnel on hand.

Within that battle of attrition, the result was patently obvious. The winged group abducts them and promptly leaves the place without a trace.


If only, you cantankerous old man. If only.

The girls are taken to a location called “Blacksteeple Castle” where they are subsequently imprisoned under a warden called “Neved”. Aria can’t help but find that name familiar, but it eludes her as the two of them are summarily tossed into a cell.

Prison bitch life.


Aelita gets reasonably annoyed and starts throwing a tantrum and as obviously, it works to no avail beyond getting the girl in the neighboring cell to tell them that their Pokeballs are jammed and their words or falling on deaf ears. She promptly introduces herself as…


Saki B. Though Aria has found the person she was looking for, she can’t really rejoice for multiple reasons. They’re in prison. She’s living the life of a prison bitch. Oh, and did she mention she was living the life of a prison bitch?

For a dominator like her, this was a poor showing.

But, all jubilant conversation is cut short as one of the guards questions Aelita’s origin and subsequently takes her to the warden for questioning.

Saki makes a point of how odd that is given the prisoners are usually left to their own devices but brushes it off since the guards aren’t usually barbaric. Aria highly doubts it, but there’s not much she can do at that point.

After waiting long enough, everyone is let out of their cells for what she can only assume to be prison labor.


Oh. She’s one of those kinds of people. Aria comes to terms with the fact that Political Prisoner Class AA may have been right about Saki, but refuses to downgrade her rank yet. Saki tells Aria to meet her by the quarry. Before Aria can even get a word in edgewise, Saki bolts out.

But, before she can go along with Saki, Aria decides to look around the place. There was no way that she was letting herself be pulled along by that motormouth’s flow, after all.


While talking to some of the other prisoners, she found out that there a woman who was in her cell before Aria had come in, but had disappeared one day. Suspicious.

But, she’d had enough of wandering throughout the prison section. Moving out, she finds her way to the throne room on the floor above and tries it out.

But, it’s unfortunately too...black? Gaudy? For someone like her, that kind of throne room just didn’t fit. Moreover, what was a throne room doing above a prison floor? Aria had several questions but frankly, it wasn’t like she was going to get them answered by sitting in the Throne Room, so she saunters off to


The library. Admittedly, Aria was hardly the most cultured person, but in these stone cold walls, the sight of oak and paper was nothing short of refreshing. As she makes her way around the library, she finds an open book on a table and decides to read it.


“Long ago in the Kingdom of Aevium, a lone queen looked over her land. The Queen had her own appointed knight of light. Which she kept safe from harm. At any point of adversity, the knight would protect the queen above all else. However, one threat they could not handle creeped up to their door. The Hero met his end and fell in battle. Leaving his sword lifeless. The enemy presented this sword to Her majesty as a symbol of their defeat. The Queen would not allow hope to cease. She strung back her bow and shot her final arrow. Thus ending the war.”

…

That was too vague. Aria walks away from the book just mulling over how vague that story was. But rather than focusing on the vagueness, she mulls over what her future title will be—Queen or Empress. Or whether she will need a knight of her own. As poorly written as that story was, it gave Aria much to think about. But, it was still enough for Aria to decide to give up on and head outside to the quarry.


On the way, she comes across a set of turrets standing in front of the paths in the prison. One guy, clearly fed up with imprisonment, tries to break past a turret into a path to the fields (which are apparently closed off) and ends up getting zapped by it. So, Aria takes the path to the quarry, which is open. No point in getting herself burned.

Within the quarry are people who are mining rocks. Needless to say, they’re all annoyed with the situation and who could blame them? But, Aria is not one to concern herself with the worries of small fry...yet. She has bigger fish to fry.

As she makes her way to the coast, she finds Saki and...some other guy named


Adam talking about a Valerie (who probably was the same Valerie in charge of the town’s gym before...Team Edge’s arrival). Supposedly, she’s the type to swim in cold water to calm her nerves. Aria can’t empathize with that. Turrets don’t seem to reach out to sea since the distance from the island to any other land is too wide for a person to cross without a vehicle, so swimming doesn’t get her the zappy zap.

Valerie pops up, annoyed that the other two are pinning her as a freak who enjoys swimming in the cold before coming to terms with the fact that her actions are indeed at least weird. With all introductions out of the way, Saki brings up the issue of why their Pokeballs aren’t able to work. She once again explains that their activation signals are being jammed by antennae sitting around the island, albeit with her own quizzical mannerisms.


Without a hint of subtlety, she suggests finding one and damaging it to nonfunctionality. Needless to say, this is clearly an experiment for the eventual prison break. Aria definitely counts herself in. After all, it beats breaking rocks.

It doesn’t take long for the group to find one of those antennas, slightly north of their position. While debating whether or not to do something, Saki just pulls it out and tosses it out into the water. Unsurprisingly, an alarm rings and…


Without warning, they all jump away. Those bastards.

Aria, in a panic, tries to move too, but is quickly caught by one of the guards who takes her to the warden.


The warden introduces himself as Neved. Says he was on the SS Oceana on the day of the incident. As much as that seems to be nagging at something in her mind, Aria can’t honestly say he left any impression. She does remember that he was there when she was flipping Team Edge off, but even that still doesn’t really give her a concrete image.

After getting slightly annoyed that Aria has already caused trouble on the first day she got to the island (success~), Neved explains a few things. First, that Aria was kidnapped by a squad they call the Death Wings (snrk). Second, that kidnapping Aria was something that was intended for a later date, but ended up getting pushed due to the coincidence of her arriving at Akuwa Town at the time. Third, that he wanted to personally hunt Aria down, but it seems their mysterious leader ‘Madame X’ (snrk) was pretty pissed by the Melia death issue, enough that he didn’t do that and followed her orders to keep her contained.

Realizing Aria had been listening patiently...


The lowly bitch was electrocuting Aria’s waifu.


After getting a rise out of Aria, he sends her out of the warden’s office. Pissed about Aelita getting shock treatment and about getting ditched like she was, Aria walks around until she finds…


It was hard to contain how much she wanted to gouge their eyes out with a rusty spoon.


Though it was getting slowly and slowly easier to quantify.

That being said, they decide that given the failure of the last escapade, they need to act a bit more furtively, considering the guards are keeping watch on them for their positions and their actions. Given Aelita’s torture, though, they do need to figure out where she’s being kept and how to escape. A tall order, but they decide to split to prevent from being found too suspicious.

The group decides to split and walk around before winding up back at the courtyard where they see


A new arrival. Supposedly, she washed up after a nearby shipwreck and is asking for...the necessities. Food, a roof over her head. The basic stuff. One of the guards takes her in for interrogation.


During said interrogation, she introduces herself as Emma and asks for a job as an assistant in exchange for food and shelter. You know? Basic pay for assisting an illegal prison.

The night approaches and as such, the prison bitch must take to sleep. A dominator can’t work exhausted and a girl like her needs her beauty rest.