Pandora's Box

Inspired by Bound to Cheat and Bittersweet.

BtC: here

Bittersweet: here

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10/19

Hello hello, readers! Welcome to Professor Cacao’s Conservatory, where we cover all Pokémon events for the sake of preservation!

So, we have some news! While due to the temporary nature of Pokémon’s events we have to emulate most of them up to LGPE and SwSh, one I haven’t gotten to emulate right was the Colosseum Jirachi event. Maple says we’ve probably just gotten unlucky with the codes to inject the event into our games—which wouldn’t surprise me at this point.

(Side note: always triple check your GameShark codes. I keep finding ones that could’ve bricked my carts lately if not for testing them on our ROMs!)

However, thanks to a generous patron, we’ve finally gotten our hands on a physical copy of the disc! No pictures at the moment, hopefully soon. I will say that the underside of the disc is pretty scratched up, but we loaded it up on our GameCube, and it worked. I downloaded the Jirachi event to my Emerald cartridge, and surprise surprise, they turned out to be shiny!! So this may be going all the way to SwSh after all, lol.

Maple suggested we name them Pandora. In spirit, at least—I was going for a mythology theme with naming Swellow Icarus and Swampert Odysseus (And so on etc.), so naming them Pandora is only fitting. This file doesn’t hold any sentimental value, I mostly want to play around with Pandora’s default moveset, document any notable changes across the gens as we transfer them up into SwSh and HOME, and generally just see what we can do!

For reference, the Jirachi comes nameless at Level 5, with the OT WSHMKR as a nod to the movie, trainer ID is 20043, random Nature, Serene Grace as its ability, holding either a Salac or Ganlon berry, and it has the moves Wish, Rest, and Confusion.

For now, this ends the update, and I’ll see you all later!

-Prof. Cacao

10/20

Hello hello, readers. Welcome to Professor Cacao’s Conservatory, where we cover all Pokémon events for the sake of preservation!

So, last update, we got our hands on the Colosseum Jirachi disc, and we’ve named them Pandora. During the past few days, I’ve been running around Emerald with them and seeing how they do in battle. Given they’re a ‘fateful encounter’ Pokémon and therefore not the player’s, they gain EXP faster than Pokémon you do own. They’ve already hit level 10, but something’s off about them.

Here’s what happened: as I was shiny Absol hunting, to find a few more Pokes to transfer up to Platinum since this was long before the ease of needing two separate subscription services for bringing your Pokémon onto modern day platforms (/s) and you needed six mons to transfer at a time, I stuck the EXP Share on Pandora and went off hunting.

I KO’d the first few wild mons we came across, but...after exp was given, there was always a text box going ‘...?!’ right before it went back to the overworld. I tested with the rest of the party, and the text didn’t activate otherwise. So, the shiny hunt continued, and lo and behold, I found a shiny Absol. Caught her, and decided on the name Cassandra. Once I sent her to the box, I swore I heard a Jirachi cry? It may have been just my head repeating the sound—I once found myself playing Shaymin’s cry on loop in my head for a good week…

I don’t know if there’s an event tied to the Wishmaker Jirachi or not, I’m pretty sure Bulbapedia would have info on it or TCRF wiki if it got cut at some point. Maple hasn’t found anything at least… I will admit that this is an older cartridge, and it could be glitching for all we know. I’m not too concerned right now.

For now, that ends this update, we’ll be documenting if things change with Pandora. See you all later.

-Prof. Cacao

10/21

I’ll level with you all, I wasn’t sure whether to forgo the usual greeting or not. Things are getting weirder and weirder with Pandora.

They were holding a piece of mail. I don’t remember if I bought it or not? It was Yellow Mail, and it said:

‘HELLO?

FAINTED POKEMON

WHY?’

I asked Maple if she put the mail there was a joke, and she asked “What mail?”

''EDITOR’S NOTE: Seriously, wasn’t me. I’ve got my own Emerald cartridge to mess around with. -Prof. Maple''

I'd already put the berry they had in the bag, so I must have either bought some mail and forgot about it, or Pandora did it on their own.

Typing that out doesn’t make it make any more sense, but I don’t know how else Pandora got that mail. So...I’ve got a Jirachi that is now talking to me through in-game mail, can’t find any mention of an event like this on any reputable site, and unfortunately I’m not the best at datamining anything that’s not on a PC, so...best idea I’ve got is to write mail back to Pandora and hope I can make myself clear to them.

‘But Cacao, how do you know you’re not hallucinating or anything like that?’ you may be asking, and. Well, I showed the game to Maple, and she confirmed that the mail was real. That’s all I can really say?

So I wrote back:

‘DON’T WORRY

MAKING FRIEND

POKEMON STRONG’

I hope that made sense. I wish I could actually speak to Pandora and explain all this. No further updates today, that aside, been busy with IRL jobs and stuff. Will report back tomorrow.

-Prof. Cacao

10/22

Pandora...did not like my letter, it seems. Turned on the game this morning, and upon loading my save, they were holding Shadow Mail now, with this on it:

‘STOP!

WILD POKEMON

AREN’T SWARM

PLEASE RUNAWAY’

I...don’t know why they believe there aren’t more Pokemon out there. Maybe it’s to do with the fact it technically comes from Orre, where there weren’t many wild Pokemon to start with?

So I just pocketed the mail for now, replaced Prometheus in my party with Cassandra, and ran around Mauville for a bit. I wish that that would have been that, but unfortunately…

First wild Pokemon I ran into, Pandora used Teleport. They don’t know Teleport, as far as I’m aware they can’t learn it either naturally or otherwise, but they used it. I went ‘okay, whatever’ and tried to fight another wild Pokemon, and even when I told them to use Swift, Pandora just used Teleport again. This...went on for a good few minutes before I gave up and swapped Pandora out with Cassandra and did grinding with her for a while. And then. Well.

Something happened. I set the game down for a moment to grab a quick snack, and then I heard the beeps and boops of the game. Maple was out of the house at her job. When I came back, the screen was on the Pokeball section of my bag, and it was empty. No Pokeballs, no Great Balls, no Ultra Balls, nothing.

I wasn’t super mad, but I was still annoyed. Y’know, the kind of annoyed you get when you have a younger sibling and they play a really lame prank on you? A Jirachi cry played and confirmed my suspicions, and I swapped back to the party menu. Pandora was holding Bead Mail, and it said:

‘GO HOME NOW

NATURE POWER WILL BE HERE

WILD POKEMON

WILL BE HERE ALONE’

I was not in the mood to entertain Pandora right now, so I marched over to the nearest Pokemon Center and stuck them in a box. And, of course, I felt bad seeing Pandora by themself there, so I decided to put Cassandra in there too so they could at least be together.

I’m gonna have to put Emerald down for a few days. The Crown Tundra DLC comes out soon for SwSh and I know you all will want to see that more than me struggling with a Jirachi of all things. Hopefully this will sort itself out by the time I’m done with Crown Tundra.

-Prof. Cacao

10/29

...so, for any of you curious about how Pandora took being put in time out, they did not take it well. At all.

Loaded up my game this morning, and there was no tall grass. You know how in older games you could use Cut to cut down tall grass for until you went into a building? Imagine that, but across an entire region.

Pandora thought of everything, it seems--went into a Pokemart, and the clerk said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t have any items right now aside from potions and repels. Our stock disappeared overnight…”

It was like that for every Pokemart I flew to, even the Pokémon League’s! Checked my bag, and it was almost completely stripped of items entirely, only leaving the repels. Couldn’t go to the desert because no goggles, couldn’t fish, I’d already caught the legendary Pokemon on this file...and whenever I tried going into caves, I was just greeted with the text that ‘fallen rocks block your path’ and shoved out. So, I went back to the nearest Pokemon Center, and checked the PC. The box I had stored Pandora and Cassandra in was completely empty, which...didn’t really surprise me, if they were able to cause this much havoc to the file already. There was, however, one new piece of mail, written on a Bead Mail:

‘SORRY BUT

WILD POKEMON

WILL NOT

BE GOTCHA

ANYWHERE!’

Okay. I know this file isn’t a big loss, but it still ticked me off that this one Jirachi messed with my file so much. I wandered around Hoenn for a bit, talking to any NPCs I could. No one offered anything new until I went back to Littleroot and talked to Birch.

“Cacao, you’re just in time! Something cut down all the tall grass, and it isn’t growing back! No one’s been able to encounter any wild Pokemon...I did hear reports of a Jirachi and an Absol to the north. Could you check it out?”

Looked at my map quickly to see they were directly north of Oldale, so off I went. The two were in the middle of cutting down more grass as I approached, and turned to look at me once I got close. Their respective cries played as a textbox warn me, “[Pandora] and Cassandra are raring for a fight...do you want to fight them?”

I hit yes, and was launched into a double battle with them. They were both now level 50 (probably from eating Rare Candies…), and I led with Prometheus and Odysseus. Now, you’d think with Prometheus having type advantage over both of them, Odysseus being part-Ground, and Jirachi being vulnerable to Ground-types, this should have been a walk in the park. It should have been, but when I gave the two their orders, they ignored me and fell asleep.

I watched as Pandora and Cassandra whittled down their HP, and I’ll be honest, at that point I was just so tired of this nonsense that when the game prompted me to switch to different Pokemon, I hit cancel. The screen faded back to the overworld, and I was greeted with more textboxes.

‘...Pandora and Cassandra dropped your Badges! Cacao retrieved the Badges!’ Pandora looked toward the water before turning back to the player. ‘...Pandora and Cassandra are going away. They don’t want you to follow them.’

I just shrugged. Fine, whatever, this file is a bust by now. The screen went dark for a moment, followed by the ‘running away’ sound, and then they were gone.

‘The game has been saved.’ I just shut the game off after seeing that. Maple’s trying to get into contact with the person who sent us our Colosseum Jirachi disc to see if she can find anything, and I’m just going to keep playing Crown Tundra. Covering that’s the more outstanding issue for me than finding a GameShark or whatever and fixing this file.

I’m sorry to all of you who were hoping to see more coverage for Crown Tundra and wound up watching as my Emerald file fell apart like this. I will resume my guide on how to catch the roaming Legendaries tomorrow, and start comparing whether you should get the Dragon Regi or the Electric Regi.

-Prof. Cacao

10/30

I saw a shiny Absol with a shiny Jirachi in Crown Tundra.