Judging by the number of Pokémon in the waiting areas beside the various competition stages below, the Pokémon Cooking Competition seemed to have the fewest entrants, and most of them had Trainers accompanying them.
Even counting the Trainers and Pokémon together, there appeared to be fewer than half as many participants as in the other activities.
The Beauty Pageant and the other smaller activities, in particular, could only be described as packed.
"Looks like there still aren't many Pokémon who can cook, and they all have Trainers with them. Rillaboom will have to handle this alone."
Ye Lan spread his hands helplessly. There was nothing he could do. The judging panel included both Pokémon and humans, so joining Rillaboom onstage would only make things worse.
If Ye Lan dared to touch even a single ingredient while Rillaboom was cooking, it would be enough to deal a devastating blow to the entire judging panel.
Forget helping Rillaboom win—it was anyone's guess whether the cooking competition could even continue smoothly.
If things got serious enough to affect the other competitions, several of them might end up canceled too.
The only reason Ye Lan was thinking so much about this was that the other Pokémon entering the cooking competition had Trainers accompanying them, while Rillaboom stood there all alone. The sight was both distinctive and vaguely unsettling.
For some reason, whenever Ye Lan saw Rillaboom alone somewhere, those thoughts would surface.
Since Rillaboom wasn't fond of talking either, Ye Lan had long since told Whimsicott and the other Pokémon to keep a close eye on Rillaboom's training schedule back at the research institute.
They had to make sure Rillaboom didn't slip into training alone.
This was both to keep Rillaboom from overtraining and to help Rillaboom forget that past experience as much as