[quote=@Stale Pizza]
<Snipped quote by Rune_Alchemist>

The Azalea Gym Leader reminds me of Clay, from both the Pokemon Black/White series and Shaolin Showdown. 

Plus, I'm not quite sure playing a Gym Leader counts as taking a Trainer slot or not, or whether you can play a Gym Leader but not a trainer. 

Another idea I have is that we don't have to follow the Gym Leader sequence in the main game. Twenty years have passed, and surely they've added new routes and shortcuts all over the place with extra towns and cities. Maybe add some RP canon of what happened to the Gym Leaders, especially the younger ones (Faulkner, Bugsy, Whitney, and Jasmine are kids, if not teenagers in HGSS, so they should still be alive and doing their own stuff.) 
[/quote]

Now, I'm not Rune, so I can't really answer your question about whether you'd be able to play as a Gym Leader but not a trainer… but would you really want to? I mean, Gym Leaders don't tend to do all that much, because they've got their own battles to take care of, and we might not even get to your Gym for ages. xD

Also: while the gyms are listed in that order for convenience, Rune and I actually decided a while ago that the trainers would be choosing their own route around Johto. Adding extra towns and routes all over the place, though, while in theory an interesting idea, would require us to change the current map of Johto, which would be annoying since that's what we're using as reference and I don't have any photo editing skills. xP