I'm speaking, of course, about the Center that you find north of Route 223, the waterway that connects Sunyshore with Victory Road. Surfing is always a drag, since you're prone to getting jumped by Tentacools and such, so after finishing the route and healing up, I flew back to Sunyshore to buy some Repels and Potions... and then realized that I could not Fly back. Nonsense.

So I used one of those Repels on my surf back.

I also was pretty liberal with the Repels inside Victory Road, which, again, ought to be called Victory Big-Ass Cave. This edition seemed less obnoxously twisty than in previous games, but I'm sure the Repels made it more bearable. And once you clear it, THEN you find a spot you can Fly to, so you'll never have to do the Route 223/Victory Road trek ever again.

So anyway, here's the fight against my rival. It's blurry because I was testing one of those little mini-tripods and it sucked.

I've put some time trying to get a love connection going for both my female Turtwig and my female Piplup (both recent GTS acquisitions), but no luck as of yet. At least, I'm assuming that they will not breed based on what the old man outside the daycare tells me. So I defaulted back to breeding more chimchars... my Empoleon and Infernape REALLY like each other. They create a baby Chimchar egg every five minutes.

I bought the Prima Strategy Guide Volume Two... the one that has the complete Pokedex and "post-game" guide. It's the Pokedex stuff that interests me, because, aside from hunting and pecking on the internet, there's NO WAY you'd decode the complexities necessary to catch some of these guys. For example, Spiritomb.

As commonly reported, in order to get a Spiritomb to appear, you need to have chucked the Old Keystone into that ruined dirt pillar thing, east of Eterna. Then you have to go talk to 32 people in the Underground! 32! Not NPCs, either! Real people!

Thankfully, we discovered a trick - and yes, I did not read this part online and no, the strategy guide does not spell this out. My sister and I noticed that our "people met" count kept going up as we kept greeting each other in the Underground. So you can artificially inflate your count by talking to the same person 32 times. You just have to keep going inside your base or wherever each time; you can't just stand in the same hallway and Greet. So, after about half an hour of Greeting, walking inside, Greeting, walking outside, etc, we both had counts higher than 32... and when I ventured back upstairs to that pile of dirt and clicked on it, the Spiritomb appeared. Easy catch.

TIME	BADGES	POKEDEX SEEN
MONEY	SCORE	POKEDEX OWN