I hurry through the streets of Virbank City towards the ferry terminal, my eyes darting left and right, ever-watchful for Stu Deeoh’s accountants, whose wrath shall surely follow me to the ends of the earth.  As I safely draw near to the docks, however, I am confronted with an obstacle: a six-way Pokémon battle in the open streets.  To my surprise, Jim, Hugh and Roxie are all involved, and are being pressed hard by a trio of ginger ninjas.  No, really; I mean actual ninjas who happen to be ginger.  I realise that I know one of the ginger ninjas – the fellow who lobbed a DVD at me back on Floccesy Ranch – and reason that this must be Team Plasma.  I briefly weigh up in my mind the relative importance of following Pokémon League rules, helping my friends, my distaste for Roxie, fighting crime, and my own massive laziness and apathy.  Eventually I realise that Hugh, Jim and Roxie are battling with Pignite, Falk the Magby and Whirlipede, respectively, and that Pignite and Falk will be absolutely fine if I tell Barristan to scorch the area.

When they realise they’re outnumbered, the Team Plasma goons quickly recall their Pokémon and scatter.  Hugh, not missing a beat, chases after one of them, screaming something about never forgiving them.  Hmm.  Forgiving them for what, exactly?  Come back, Hugh; I think we’re on the verge of a real breakthrough here!  No, never mind, he’s gone.  Well, now that that’s taken care of with absolutely no negative consequences, I guess we’re off to Castelia City now, right?  No… no, Jim wants to help Hugh look for Team Plasma.  Come on; are we running a charity here now?  I elect to wait at the ferry terminal for him to get bored.  Jim, meanwhile, pursues the Team Plasma goons out of Virbank City into Route 20.  He manages to track down one of them, about halfway back to Floccesy Town, and knocks him to the ground with Elisif’s Thunder Wave.  As he flops around helplessly, Jim manages to extract a little information – the man was trying to come around and head back to the coastline.  Unfortunately, the Team Plasma grunt manages to flail onto a hillside and starts rolling before Jim can get anything else out of him.  He disappears into the bushes at the bottom of the hill, and has recovered from the Thunder Wave and scarpered by the time Jim gets down there.  Still, he and Hugh agree that the man’s comment can only mean Team Plasma are travelling by ship.  They return to the ferry terminal and are met there by Roxie.  Roxie thanks both of them on behalf of Virbank City and presents them with a pair of Cut HMs.  She presents me with a death glare and a silent threat to break her guitar over my head if I ever return to her city again, then departs.  Well, it’s not like I wanted that particular HM anyway.  The three of us board the ferry at last, and reach Castelia City before the day is out.

Castelia City is as absurd and wonderful as I remember from Black and White – the largest city in Unova, possibly in the entire Pokémon world, teeming with people and packed with businesses as absurd as they are numerous.  I pay a visit to the Battle Company, a huge corporation whose workers are devoted entirely to having Pokémon battles with each other and with visitors to their building, and Passerby Analytics, a group whose name, I can only assume, comes from the fact that they do absolutely no work themselves, but instead enlist random volunteers to conduct surveys for them.  We indulge in a few battles in the city, and little Tyrion evolves into a Whirlipede.  Eventually Jim suggests that maybe we should try to hunt down Team Plasma, and decides to seek the assistance of the Castelia Gym Leader.  I grudgingly agree and we head for the Gym – only to find it closed for business.  Luckily, help is at hand, in the form of… good grief, is that Iris?  The Opelucid City Gym Leader from White version?  What on earth is she doing here?  Is she after Team Plasma too?  Oh, whatever.  Iris confidently explains that she knows exactly where everything shady goes down in Castelia City (I can only presume she’s involved in half of it) and leads us to the easternmost pier of the city docks, where one can enter…

…the sewer level.

Why is there always a sewer level?

I refuse, point blank, to enter the sewer level.  The Virbank Gym was bad enough.  Jim and Hugh can muck around down there with the rats and the sludge monsters and goodness knows what else; I am going to the Café Sonata for antipasto and a glass of sweet white.  Iris doesn’t want to enter the sewer level either but she tries to hide it by claiming she’s standing guard on the surface, the sneaky little brat, so I do not invite her to join me.

Jim and Hugh enter the sewer level and, in fact, find Team Plasma remarkably quickly.  There are only two grunts in the area, who fall very quickly under their joint assault and flee the scene.  Burgh, the Castelia Gym Leader, emerges from the tunnel near where the goons were standing and declares that there are no other suspicious characters in the area.  Hugh’s thirst for vengeance is slaked for now, and he leaves, as does Burgh, who is returning to his Gym – well and good, but it leaves us no closer to finding their damn ship.  What kind of Bug Pokémon Master doesn’t keep a String Shot or Spider Web handy for just this kind of situation?  Immediately after Burgh leaves, having declared that there are no other suspicious characters in the tunnel, an extremely suspicious character steps out of the tunnel – the blonde white-coated scientist fellow who appeared in the games’ title sequence.  He reveals that he had been watching Jim and Hugh battle, and was impressed by their power, but slips away before Jim can call out a Pokémon to detain him for further questions.  Since Burgh has now been revealed as just about the most incompetent Gym Leader in the history of ever, Jim elects to remain in the sewer level for a while to make absolutely sure there’s no one else suspicious down here.  In fact, he finds that there are a great many suspicious people in the sewer level, though none of them seem to be affiliated with Team Plasma.  The tunnel, which is known as the Relic Passage, turns out to have been built by an ancient civilisation and links up to… somewhere, but Jim isn’t able to get very far inside.  He does find an extremely dodgy scientist who asks him, apparently in total seriousness, whether he is part of the sewer.  As fascinated as Jim is by the Relic Passage, he leaves as quickly as possible to search the sewers, making a mental note to report the scientist to the nearest asylum.

The sewers turn out to be full of Pokémon trainers, one or two of whom appear to have legitimate reason to be down there, though most of them just like hanging around in sewers.  Jim finds no trace of Team Plasma, although in one room, he finds a female scientist who claims to be attempting to create medicines from the venom of Poison Pokémon and other substances from the sewers.  She proclaims her day’s experiment a minor success, and hands Jim an oddly murky-looking Potion to test.  Jim smiles charmingly at her, saying that he’ll try it out later, leaves the room as quickly as possible, and promptly tips the Potion back into the sewer water from which most of it probably came.  He elects to get the hell out of this hive of madness and returns to the surface, where Iris congratulates him on whatever it was he just did and wanders off.  Jim scrapes the sewer muck off his shoes and decides to find me.  I have just finished my meal, and meet him on Narrow Street as I head back towards the Pokémon Centre.  We take a moment to discuss recent events before turning in.  Team Plasma is back, clearly, and they seem to have discarded their former facade of a movement for social change and Pokémon rights; now they’re just perfectly standard Pokémon thieves.  That’s fine by me; it makes them someone else’s problem.  Let the police deal with them.  Jim points out, not unreasonably, that teenaged Pokémon trainers are the closest thing this universe has to a police force.  I mutter that this is clearly the public’s own fault and the inevitable price of their low taxation, and propose returning to Aspertia as soon as we can use Fly to bypass Virbank City.  For now, though, we’re in Castelia… so we may as well stay long enough to take on that cloud cuckoo of a Gym Leader…