Beyond my pokemon there were a few noteworthy pieces of news during this time. The first was that Orre had finally gotten it's own pokemon professor in the form of the young professor Crane. The few pieces of information about him I found were interesting as his field of study was the metaphysical impact of emotions on pokemon of different types. The leagues file on him said he was starting to study the forced shadowfication of pokemon thanks to the data recovered from Cypher as well as the donation of a shadow pokemon by Wes at the mans request.-
The good professor was working on a way to purify pokemon through technology in inverse of Cyphers way of turning them into shadow pokemon via the same line of thinking. Speaking of Wes, that guy had went and caused a storm in Hoenn after leaving Orre with his ridiculously large collection of pokemon. The gym leaders suffered big time by thinking his normal team was all they had to plan for which I found quite amusing. Next up was that team Rocket had been making a nuisance of themselves in Kanto and Johto more than usual since I had vanished.-
It wasn't hard to figure out why as once speculation that I had perished started circulating the criminals came out the woodworks as if to make up for lost time. The smart ones waited to see if I would pop up to hammer down these protruding nails and only started acting when I didn't. I wasn't particularly pleased to see that the shift in the war on crime had come nearly unobstructed. Don't get me wrong I understood why this had happened as I was the sort of mascot for sending the criminal packing and thus while I was here others followed my lead. -
Once I vanished however those same followers likely felt that they had no direction and just stopped doing what they were doing. There were a few exceptions, the "true believers" if you would but their impact was far from enough. Hoenns league had been keeping the criminal side there down since I had cleared out most of it and they just had to keep others from getting established but some still slipped through the cracks. There was simply nothing for it as expecting the criminals to ignore a whole region that held a lot of opportunity for profit was just not going to happen.-
Beyond the criminal resurgence double battles had exploded in popularity across the world with all the regions starting to imitate my colosseum in Hoenn. I found it funny how much popularity colosseum tournaments had gained in the double battle format. I was also quite proud to have been the one who created this trend that made things just that much more interesting. Speaking of colosseum tourney's that had been something that the league in Hoenn had officially added to the annual pokemon league season.-
There was now an official double battle challenge in all the gyms in Hoenn that ran parallel to the normal battle style challenges. At the end of the season a tournament was held in my colosseum out of everyone who completed the challenge with special prizes for the top three. Last year the top three had consisted of Wes, Brandon and Gregory. As I had expected when I trained them previously Wes and Brandon outclassed Gregory even though his Tyranitar was quite powerful and well trained. Without understanding the guy most people would just assume Gregory was simply a worse trainer than the other two but I could tell from the recording that wasn't the case.-
His problem was one I had long predicted as he had clearly been forced to stop training at one point to learn the secondary aspects of high end training. Since he neglected it early unlike Brandon and Wes he had to play catch up with them so his team fell behind ever so slightly. May hadn't even participated in the tourney since her path as a trainer was more to help her dad in his research. Birch himself was not a powerful trainer and thus needed one to help him with aspects of his research that involved less than friendly pokemon in the wild.-
Other than all this I couldn't really find any news that was worth mentioning. Sure there was new trends, a couple new medicines and that sort of thing but nothing I would really need to bother with. With the catch up done I finally moved on to the less than pleasant task of letting everyone know I was back. Not that I really had much trouble with that as the ping my accessing my account sent out had quickly been reported all throughout the league.-
When I actually went to call Cynthia she answered immediately like she had been waiting for my call the whole time. "About damn time! Where the hell have you been for the last two years!?" she demanded angrily. "I was talking with god, time flowed differently there. Nothing I could do about it." I said with a shrug. "The worse part is I think you might actually not be messing with me right now and that's quite concerning." she said with an exasperated tone. I chuckled "I do tend to be involved with things far above my station." I said with a smirk.-
"So what did you even talk with this god about anyways?" she asked curiously once she calmed down. "Not much to be honest. Most of it was about my impending ascension to godhood and my life so far, nothing too important as far as you are concerned." I said casually. "GODHOOD!? Since when!?" she exclaimed in shock. "Quite some time now actually, right after dealing with Cyrus on Mt. Coronet in fact. I only reached the threshold of ascension just before I went for my chat two years ago though." I said honestly since I saw no reason to lie.-
There was no point really as my ascension was far beyond the point it could be stopped by any mortal force. Unless Cynthia could get a godly legendary to try and stop me my rise to godhood was guaranteed. "How do you even achieve something like that?" she asked with a tone that made it clear the headache she must be feeling by now. "A few ways actually but I went with the one that happened when your aura was pushed as far as possible" I said calmly.