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She laid the Solaris breakwater stone by stone over nineteen years before anyone thought to build a gym behind it. The first badge is hers to give and she is in no hurry about it.
Eight gyms, then the Elite Four and the Champion. The gyms are not optional detours: a gym town stands in the road, and the route past it stays shut until its leader is beaten.
Walking into a gym town without its badge means the leader comes over and challenges you. You may say not yet — to rearrange your team, for instance — and they will wait in the gym for you to talk to them again. If a story scene is due in the same place, the story happens first.
You must also fight a leader in their own town. There is no challenging Aetheria’s gyms from a menu on the far side of the region.
The eight gyms↑
She still works the terrace gardens on the mountain twice a week. Says the gym is the easy part of her job.
Every light in the flooded caverns under Aquilion runs off his generators. He maps the tunnels in winter and rewires them in spring, and he has been waiting a long time for a challenger who makes him work for it.
Gravedigger Morris↑
Vent Warden · Vulkania · ghost
Vulkania sits on a live vent and somebody has to watch it. He took the job for the quiet and stayed for the company nobody else will admit is there. He digs by hand, and he is never digging alone.
He fishes the cold lake above the roost every morning and throws back everything that is not gold. Ask how many years that took and he will tell you, to the day. The Gyarados on his belt was one of the ones he kept.
She teaches at the Krystallia institute three days a week and wrote the standard text on dragon growth. She insists there is nothing mysterious about any of it, then fields the hardest four moves in the region on every Pokemon she owns.
She has never once been talked out of a fight, and she will tell you that strong and weak are things trainers invent to excuse themselves. Bring what you love. She will do the same.
The eighth badge is the one the League actually checks. He gives it to nobody he would be embarrassed to have sent on, and he has been forging the badges themselves for longer than most challengers have been alive.
The Elite Four↑
All eight badges are required before the League will see you.
She does not talk during a battle. Not for effect - she simply has nothing to say until it is over, and usually knows how it ends before you do.
He keeps the antidotes in his own pocket and hands them out afterwards, to anyone who lasts long enough to need one.
He fought in a pit before there was a League to fight in, and still opens every battle with a bow. The bow is the last polite thing that happens.
He collects what does not fit anywhere else: things dug out of a crater, things from a century that never happened, and things that were made rather than born. He will shake your hand first and mean it.
The Champion↑
The boy who picked the other starter, waiting at the end of it all. He has been one route ahead of you since the day you both left the lab, and he knows exactly how you got here.
