Ten hours just not seem like a lot of time when you're playing Pokemon. Unless you're entering Super Contests and losing, which is a gigantic waste of time. I did some multiplayer poffin-twirling and found it equally as annoying, but at least you get more poffins out of it. You made two level 8 Bitter Poffins! Hoo-freakin-yay!
With the Hearthome Gym Leader ignoring all callers, I went east and followed the path to Veilstone City as urged by Wedge. The route takes you through Solaceon Town (and Sinnoh gets it's own unpronounceable city name, just like Pacifidlog in Hoenn!)
Solaceon Town is noted for two key locations, the daycare center and the ruins. The ruins are rather shabby, but they do serve to hold Pearl's collection of Unown. I have already captured about a third of them, and, although the out-of-the-way locale of the ruins makes me think that the Unown will have absolutely nothing to with the game's plot, they do provide an explanation of the Ball Capsule menu item that has gone unmentioned since the first time you turn on a Pokemon Center PC.
Once you capture some Unown, you have to show them to the boy who lives in the house closest to the ruins. (He is actually wandering around the ruins initially, so you first must talk to him so he goes home.) The annoying bit is that he can only see the pokemon in your party's lead position, so you must jockey them around to get him to identify multiple Unowns in your possession. But once he does, he gives you letter seals that correspond to the Unown you have shown him.
The seals are added to your Seal Case (which you also get in Solaceon Town) and that activates the Ball Capsule option. It lets you custom the effect when a pokemon hops out of a poke ball. Since I had captured the "J" Unown, I made a custom capsule that displays "J"s everywhere. I hope there's more seals to be found, other than letters, although I will enjoy collecting enough letters to form entire words.
As far as the daycare goes, I dropped off a male and female Meditite. They started making eggs almost immediately, which is worthless since it just makes more stupid Meditites. You also pick up a cute Poketch upgrade that operates as a daycare webcam. Look at 'em go!
I yanked the lovers out of there and left a Pichu and a Skuntank. What are the chances they'll get along?
I found a fossil in the underground and turned it in at Oreburgh, and after a few days of "research," they gave me a Shieldon. Caught a Chingling in a cave somewhere... is that a pre-evolved Chimecho? And, funniest GTS trade yet, I just got a Mime Jr. from Hokkaido, Japan, who was named Booger.
I lost miserably on my first shot at the Veilstone Gym Leader (the hell! A Lucario!?!), so I did some more exploring. First I avoided pokemon altogether by hanging out at Veilstone's casino, where I turned 100 coins into 2200 coins on the slots. There is some kind of weird Clefairy Bonus thing that goes on, but I don't know you achieve it. All I know is that you get an extra-awesome prize if you do ten bonus rounds, and I could only get nine. Crap. A couple times, the Clefairy that showed up to torment my slots game was actually a Ditto in disguise.
After that, I checked out that dead-pokemon tower that, for some reason, I never entered before. You get HM Strength in there, but you can't use it in the wild until you get a couple more badges under your belt.
Speaking of that, here's my second (successful) fight against Maylene, the Gym Leader of Veilstone City. Watch for some really clumsy mistakes against Lucario.
