Notes: I've simplified the unsealing methods for the golems, for reasons of laziness and to reduce the gimmicky nature of the process.

~.~.~

#9 Registeel

"May! Over here!" Brendan called out, waving both arms over his head vigorously. It wasn't particularly necessary — Pacificlog was so tiny it barely qualified as a town, and May was hardly going to miss him standing there in front of the Pokemon Center.

"Thanks for meeting me here," she said, slipping off Latias's back and making her way over to him. "And for helping with this."

"It's no big deal. I'm curious too," Brendan said, despite grinning happily. "I was checking the seafloor to see what new Pokemon had turned up, with the whole Kyogre thing — some Finneon and Frillish, actually — when I found it. It's kind of hard to reach, you have to dive down a pretty long tunnel, but there's place with lots of markings like that."

"Do you know what they are? I've never seen anything like that before," May said. "It's not like the carvings in the Ruins of Alph. And I don't think it's from the Draconids either. The Sky Pillar and Granite Cave didn't have it either."

Brendan shrugged. "I'm not really big on ancient history. We should probably take some pictures and give them to Devon or something... after we check it out ourselves, of course!"

Going new places, discovering secrets — that was also part of being a trainer, in May's opinion, and in Brendan's too.

"You've got scuba gear, right? We can both ride my Wailord," he suggested, clearing his throat a little. "He's, uh, pretty big, so it'll be easier. You gotta go through the currents the right way to get where you can dive down, so..."

"Why don't we just fly on Latias?" May interrupted. "She can dive too, straight from the air."

Still hovering behind him, Latias made a cheerful sound of agreement. Stuff like that — being perfectly willing to serve as an all-terrain vehicle for two teenagers — was precisely why May kept forgetting that Latias was technically a legendary Pokemon too.

"...Yeah, that works," Brendan said. Shooting Latias an uncertain look, he added, "It's gonna be a bit tight though. We'll have to... sit close."

May shrugged. She and Steven had fit, after all. "I don't really care," she said.

Oddly, Brendan seemed to slump a little at that. "You... Sometimes I wonder if you're really a girl," he muttered under his breath. She certainly had no sense of romance.

~.~.~

The first set of carvings was actually underwater. It was only a short series of dots, which May could barely feel under her water-wrinkled fingertips. She glanced at Brendan, sitting behind her, but he only shrugged and pointed up, into the darkness overhead. As Latias slowly ascended, the faint glow she was obligingly giving off with Flash lit up the stone ceiling of the underwater passage — and an opening leading upward, into a sealed chamber full of slightly stale air.

Pulling off her scuba gear, May looked around. "What are those?" she wondered, nodding toward the rows of stone slabs that lined the chamber.

"Dunno," Brendan said. "They all have dots on them, lots more than in the water. There's some on the back wall too — a bit less there. Nothing else though, just this one room. That's why I just kinda left it."

It had been a bit disappointing, finding something so obviously secret and purposefully hidden, only to get nothing out of it. He'd been left feeling like he was missing something, but he hadn't been able to figure out what it was for the life of him.

But May — well, she had a way of getting caught up in weird things. Maybe her strange luck would come through for them.

(It was a good thing May didn't know his thought process. It would have ended in tears — whether his or hers.)

Walking past the engraved stones, May squinted at the dots, but they made just as little sense as ever. Just as Brendan had said, the back wall was also different from the rest of the roughy carved chamber, unnaturally smooth just like in the ancient tomb May had found outside Fortree. Just like then, she reached out without thinking to run her fingers across the engravings—

Bright light flared suddenly from her pack, red and blue.

'Not again,' May thought dully, with nothing more than a sense of disgusted exasperation.

"What's going on?!" Brendan shouted, being far less accustomed to this kind of thing. "What is that?!"

It was the orbs, which she was still carrying around with her. How many times was that going to cause her problems? The whole chamber trembled as something activated, and a deep, dull sound echoed all around them.

But just as abruptly as it had started, everything stopped.

"What... what was that?" Brendan wondered, looking around nervously.

"Dunno," May admitted. "It sounded like a door opening, somewhere far away..."

She had a sudden, sinking suspicion. An open door, with her luck... 'Did we just unleash some other super powerful Pokemon on the region?'

She hoped not. Otherwise, Wallace was going to yell at her again. He still hadn't shut up about Groudon.

~.~.~

It was with some trepidation that May returned to Route 120 and the ancient tomb there.

The engraved slab in the back of the cave was gone. Sighing, May ducked through the opening and waited.

In the darkness beyond, something stirred. Seven small lights flashed in a quick pattern, and something large and heavy took a step toward her.

"Uuuuuuurgh," May groaned and palmed her face.

Sometimes, she hated being right.

~.~.~

"You figured it out already? That's fast," May said, genuinely impressed.

"We didn't decipher it from scratch," the Devon researcher demurred. "You see, this kind of writing has been previously recorded — in the northernmost reaches of Sinnoh. We simply cross-referenced the records from those cases."

May nodded slowly. So they just managed to find some probably obscure research about a small part of a region on the opposite side of the country with nothing to go on except "it looks like dots." Devon really did do absolutely anything and everything necessary. Well, historical research was probably small potatoes compared to space travel and interdimensional warping...

"That's still cool," she said. "So what do those rocks say?"

Clearing his throat, the researcher peered down at his tablet and read out, "Long did we live here in this cave. All thanks to the powerful Pokemon living alongside us. Yet, we sealed that Pokemon away, alone in the dark. We feared it. If you have the courage, if you still hold to hope, open the door. For beyond it, the eternal Pokemon waits."

"That... was an awfully small cave to live in," May said dubiously.

"Yes, it's quite puzzling," the researcher agreed. "The translation may be imperfect. There's some details we're still working out. In particular, we're not certain whether the Pokemon referred to is singular or plural."

May's eyebrow twitched. "...Plural?"

"In Sinnoh, the local legends refer to three titans of steel, rock and ice that helped and protected humans. The Pokemon you captured, Registeel, seems to be one of those titans," the researcher explained — unaware of the tic developing under May's eye. "They are universally treated as a set, so it is possible that these inscriptions refer to all three..."

"There's two more," May muttered. "Uuuuurgh."

"Oh, and the writing on the back wall," the researcher added. "It says: Bring together the power of land and the power of sea, and everything will be opened. Perhaps they were only willing to entrust the titans to someone who held the power of Kyogre and Groudon."

Great. Now she couldn't even pretend this wasn't her problem.

~.~.~