Desert Stream

Desert Stream is a random person on the Serenial discord, who has attained the Serenial Dragon Rank.

## Background

### Gaming

#### Beginnings

Desert Stream has been gaming for quite a while- at least 10 years. Her first game was New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS. Many of her first games were nintendo games, such as Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart Wii, etc.

She wasn't particularly good at gaming back then, and was quite unorganized and prone to losing things, and so many of the games she owned never actually got finished. Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart Wii, and Mario Party 8 were all games that either got lost or stopped working.

#### First RPGs

Because these events took place so long ago, they may not be in chronological order. Desert's first RPG was either Pokemon Soulsilver for the Nintendo DS, Final Fantasy X for the Playstation 2, or Oblivion for the Xbox 360. Desert put quite a lot of time into all three games, but never ended up finishing any of them for various reasons. It's safe to say that these three games combined are what really got Desert into gaming for real, and solidified RPGs as her favorite genre, although she tended to stick to those series and didn't branch out into other RPGs for a while.

#### Pokemon Soulsilver

Desert's first experience with pokemon wasn't actually with Pokemon Soulsilver. Her friend gave her two pokemon cards- a Goldeen and a Dunsparce. After getting these cards she proceeded to get more and more and built up a small collection. When she realized there were video games about pokemon, she knew she had to play them. One day while in a gamestop, she found a few. Not knowing which to get, she chose soulsilver because "silver is less valuable then gold, so clearly that means it's the first in the series". Desert wasn't very smart back then. And she still wasn't good at gaming. She chose chikorita because it was the first choice, so clearly that meant she should use it first (another example of really flawed logic). It did grow to be one of her favorite pokemon, but it was admittedly a horrible first choice. She played as Ethan at first, because this was before she was trans, although she always liked Lyra more. She had a crush on both playable characters and the rival.

The first gym went pretty smoothly, and she defeated Falkner without much trouble. The second gym however, was a lot tougher. If she walked north to the forest, her rival with the type advantage blocked her path, so she could only grind to the south where the pokemon weren't as good. After 107 attempts (yes, seriously...) she decided to train her pokemon, now a bayleef, using the pokewalker. Upon transferring it back to the game, it was sent to the PC. Desert didn't know what a PC was, and thought she had lost the pokemon forever. She restarted.

The second time through, she chose cyndaquil, and things went a lot smoother, although for some reason she restarted after the second gym and chose chikorita again, and proceeded to get stuck... One day her cousin came over and beat the gym for her. Once she got past the gym however, the rest of the game went by pretty fast. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth gyms may have been a bit of a problem, but since she can't remember it, they clearly weren't too bad. Yes, even whitney's infamous miltank. Desert has exceptionally weird luck when it comes to pokemon genders, and despite starter pokemon only having a 1/8th chance of being female, she's actually had more female starters then males. Because of this, Miltank couldn't use attract and the gym was trivial.

Now, onto more memorable stuff. Desert Stream had never seen a gyarados before, so upon encountering the shiny one at the lake of rage, she proceeded to... defeat it... thinking it was just a normal pokemon. And then she stumbled upon Entei in the wild, after tracking it down accidentally, and defeated that too. This time though, she knew it was a special pokemon because of the different battle music, she just was really bad at catching things and didn't have a save to go back to... The seventh gym may have taken one or two extra tries because of it's strong type, but it wasn't much of a problem. The last gym however, was another barrier. Desert had made a common rookie mistake- only training one pokemon.