Zekrom No Findings Please, Cannot Finding Zekrom

In a shocking twist, it turns out that Zekrom suffers from "princess is in another castle" syndrome as the journey through the Relic Caslte was a colossal waste of time--he was not there. At this point, it is obvious that no one in the entire universe has any clue what is going on--and Team Plasma's success in awakening Reshiram HAS to be attributed to blind luck...honestly: they were probably trying to do something completely unrelated (because who would want Reshiram? Its ugly at best) and just played it off as being part of their plans all along. I'm reminded of Team Plasma's mission to steal the Dragonite skull from the museum (a million gyms ago) and how fruitful that turned out for them... So the "Zekrom or Lack-Thereof Award" goes tooooo the Relic Castle! Congratulations and thank you for wasting my time!

However, the trip DID reveal a few things about Alder--apparently he's more of a washed-up champion than a legitimate somebody. The Plasma sage named Ghestis (another one of those characters who the art directors started drawing and just never stopped), the guy with the laser-eyepiece from the opening video, revealed that after Alder became the most powerful trainer in the world, his favorite pokemon got sick and died and he hasn't battled since. Honestly I like this turn of events--it brings some much-needed drama to the scene--and also it hints of some kind of back story besides the expected "I worked real hard to train the pokemons and I made it".

Ghestis said that the "dark stone", the dormant Zekrom, was not there, but that we definitely need it in order to defeat N. At this point, Alder muttered something about not liking it that we had to play into Team Plasma's plans in order to defeat them. This was quite the shock to me because we were already doing just that by coming to the Relic Castle to awaken Zekrom just like N asked us to not an hour earlier. I'm not asking for much, but a little consistency from moment to moment would be nice.

After leaving the castle, I was immediately called to the museum in Nacrene City. There, Gymleader Lenora (the normal-typed gymleader) presented me with the very item I had been scouring the Relic Castle for.

I'm not sure why Nintendo figured that they should withhold that item from me for an extra 3 minutes. I mean, nothing else happened between me not having the dark stone in the Relic Castle and me getting it in Nacrene City...except I had to withdraw Deedoon to allow me to FLY there. Was it really necessary to do this?

The way it was presented it seemed like they just happened to find this incredibly important item just lying around somewhere--like they found this "dark stone" at a flea market. So many of the events in this game just seem to be lucky breaks, this is completely ridiculous!

So after finally finding the dark stone, and a lengthy conversation with everyone involved (whom I have nicknamed Team Pup-in-Suds to counter Team Plasma) the pimp of the year basically says, "so...now what?"

My thoughts exactly...

Current Squad: