Something interesting happened to me at my weekly Boy Scout meeting. I challenged one of the kids in the troop to a pokémon battle next Friday. I heard him boasting to the other kids how he was undefeated in his school and how he has a Darkrai and Arceus. I must admit, I was filled with petty anger at his arrogance. I was even close to getting involved in a debate about the legitimacy of the Darkrai and Arceus he boasted of having.

But Instead, I politely asked him if he wanted to battle. At this time, a couple of his evil underlings gathered and began telling me how dead I was going to be and how many level 100s he had. In the kid’s defense, he accepted the challenge gracefully, without so much as a boast to my face. Though after I left, I overheard him plotting what kind of awesome tricks he had in store for me.

I’ve never scheduled a battle before. It’s different because I have an idea of what I’ll be fighting in advance and can take measures against it. Or perhaps I should just stick with my team as is. In any case, the troop is abuzz about the battle and I like to see that.

Before you chide me about challenging a kid to a game like this, I might remind anyone reading this that in the several battles I had with the listeners of our podcast, I was bested nearly every time with sound strategy and frightfully close results. Truly, the beauty of pokémon is that anybody can pick it up and achieve mastery if they try hard enough.

I spent this week leveling Jowy’s Bronzor from level 1 to 100 in as fast an order as possible. I stuck to the elite four exclusively for this job. Always equipped with the Lucky Egg, I had Bronzor come in first, then switched him out with the one other pokémon in my party: My level 100 Bith (Dusknoir). I got Bronzor to level 50 in this way within a couple of hours. Then I was able to increasingly let Bronzor, who had now become Bronzong, take on enemies without Bith’s help. By level 60 I left Bith behind and let Bronzong live and die by his own strength. Things moved slowly at this point, until he finally was able to take out most enemies in one hit. But by level 75, it was smooth sailing and I was able to finish off the last levels to 100 by the next time Jowy and I recorded.

With that complete, Jowy gave me a set of Riolu that I asked him to breed according to my specifications. To get a better idea of who had the best individual values, I leveled them all up to 15 at the day care center so there would be no effort values to alter their stats. I compared and found one to be the best, but something was amiss. My Riolu had forgotten the moves I had bred into him! I forgot that while at day care, they learn new moves over old ones without your approval. Since I was dumb enough to save, none of them served my purpose anymore.

I immediately began breeding again on Jowy’s game and was lucky enough to get the natures I wanted pretty quickly. This time, when I traded them to my game I saved before I raised their levels. I also gave each one a different plate to hold so I could tell them apart. After leveling them all up, I compared stats, found the best one and noted he was holding a dread plate. Then I reset and stored all of them except the one holding a dread plate. He will be the one I train, but not until he is fully trained in EV and levels will he be allowed to bear the name Apieron.