Chapter 13: Smoldering - Part 1
"This place is actually pretty cool," Risa said as they walked around the Ruins of Alph. They had camped outside the entrance to the site, since while Risa had accepted Heat's proposal to go "beat up all the pokemon inside even though they might be scary and big because they were kind of a mystery", she didn't want to have to do it in the dark. So, when Heat woke Risa up with the sunrise, they packed up and headed in.
Now they were walking around the Ruins in a fresh, crisp morning with the rosy light of the sunrise still giving the tan rocks of the crumbling structures a pink tinge. It actually looked pretty cool, and Risa wished she had a camera.
Then she remembered her cell phone could take pictures, and immediately started acting the annoying tourist until Heat yelled at her to put the phone away. (She did.)
They walked around for awhile, exploring as much of the site as they could without going inside any of the structures. (Risa told Heat she didn't want to go inside yet until they had scoped out the entire site in case the wild pokemon were outside, though she really was just putting off the inevitable in case the pokemon inside the structures were big and scary.)
Then, finally:
"This is boring," Heat whined after about an hour of walking around the site. "Where are the pokemon?"
Risa shrugged, though she glanced quickly at one of the structures open to visitors. "Um, I dunno. Maybe they're in an area we can't get to - like one of those buildings, or something," she said, pointing to the buildings built into the hill and across the small lake on the site.
Her cyndaquil groaned. "There's gotta be SOMETHING we can beat up. If there isn't, then this was a waste of time, and that's just stupid, 'cause it's not like we're on a stupid school field trip, or anything. We," he added with a serious glance towards his trainer, "are future champions, no matter how much you wanna go back to your stupid school at the end of the summer. Which is stupid."
"Yeah, you said it was stupid, like, five billion times already."
Heat groaned. "I'm hungry."
"Fine." Risa sat down on the path, arms crossed. "Then we'll have lunch."
"It's too early to have lunch."
"I don't care."
"Fine!"
"Fine!"
And with that, Risa grabbed some trail mix and nutrition bars, since she didn't have it in her to actually try and put together anything else, and gave Heat a pack of pokemon food. He looked from the pack of food to her two nutrition bars, and back, then at her.
She sighed, mumbled a "whatever", threw him one of her bars, and ate her lunch in silence.
---
"Okay, so I think this was a waste of time."
"Shut UP, Heat, I don't care," Risa snapped. It had been two hours since their lunch, and they still hadn't found anything. They had briefly gone inside one of the buildings open to the public, but it had been pretty empty. Heat decided that meant the buildings weren't important on the insides, and that they should try to climb up one of them on the outside.
Long story short, that idea hadn't worked out so well.
With the sun high overhead, neither Heat nor Risa had great attitudes about the whole thing, either. "Why did you think this was a good idea? This is BORING," Heat said, trailing slowly behind Risa as they walked around the Ruins of Alph for what seemed like the thousandth time. "Nothing's HERE. Everything DIED. There aren't even ghosts because it's too BORING."
Risa glared at him. "Heat, this was your idea, so you can't blame me."
"I don't care. It's your fault."
"How is it my fault?"
"It is. You're the trainer. I'm just s'posed to follow you, so it's your fault," Heat snapped.
This kind of made Risa want to kick him, but since that was also kind of against the law and she didn't want to be arrested for pokemon abuse, she refrained. "Um, I let you decide, so it's your fault."
"No, it's not. It's your fault!"
"It's not my fault! It's all your fault!"
"Nuh-uhhh!"
"Yuh-huhhhh!"
"You're stupid."
"No, you're stupid!"
"YOU'RE STUPID AND LET'S GO INSIDE BECAUSE IT'S HOT," Heat yelled before stomping back into one of the buildings he had previously deemed too empty and boring to stay in.
Without answering, Risa stomped in after him, staring at the same bare-walls chamber she had seen before.
Heat was standing in the middle of the room, pouting near a stone wall with reddish tiles. Risa stood next to him, not talking but happy to be out of the blazing sunlight.
She leaned against the tile pattern and had to suppress a shriek when one of the tiles moved.
Turning around, she saw that the tile in question, the one she accidentally must have pushed with her head when she leaned against it, had a tan line carved into it. It was so covered in dust that the line looked almost invisible against the red tile back, but it was there in a curve arcing from the top right to the middle of the left side.
Peering closely at the other tiles, she saw that there were similar lines on each of them. Two of them even had lines that matched up, making their tan arcs into a full semicircle opening right.
Risa frowned, then looked down at Heat. He didn't return her glance, and just kept staring at the entrance to the building. It seemed clear to Risa that Heat wasn't opening his mouth anytime soon, which she didn't find disappointing whatsoever.
So, instead, she turned back to the tiles. "I wonder if it's some kinda puzzle," she muttered, then glanced down at Heat. He either hadn't heard her or had and decided to ignore her.
Either way, she didn't care. She liked puzzles. Possibly more than her stubborn cyndaquil, in fact.
Placing her hand on another tile, she slid it downward, matching it up with an arc on the one below. It seemed to be making a sort of circular picture with lines in the middle...
Focusing on the puzzle on the wall, since it had to have been the most interesting thing she'd come across all day, she kept sliding the tiles back and forth, up and down.
"Risa?"
She ignored him, trying to make the picture instead. Slide, slide, slide went the tiles as she moved them around.
"Hey, Risa?"
Slide, slide, slide.
"Hey! Idiot!"
Slide, slide - done!
"RISA WHAT DID YOU JUST -"
He didn't have time to finish. The ground had already started to rumble, and as the finish picture caused a flash of recognition in Risa's mind - a fossil of some sort, one found in Kanto - the stone slab she and Heat had been standing on fell away.
They were falling through a stone chute, one covered in strange letters.
As they fell, the letters peeled off the wall, growing and crying out, swarming around them and separating them.
Risa and Heat landed in a stone chamber they recognized from before as one they had briefly explored - a stone maze deep underground.
But just before they fell through the chute and into the maze, something happened - something that shouldn't have happened.
The chute and the chamber should have been connected.
But they obviously weren't, because just as Risa fell from the chute to the top of the maze chamber, she saw a break in the stone, one that looked out onto the Ruins of Alph from an angle that didn't make any sense.
They had gone inside the stone room when it was around noon, and there had been a few tourists walking around.
Those same tourists, wearing the same clothes they had been before, were now exiting the ruins. The sky was dark, and the sun had almost set all the way.
When Risa hit the floor, she realized four things. That wasn't a good sign right off the bat - four was an unlucky number. It meant "death".
One of those things was that she couldn't see Heat.
The second: there was a cloud of letter-shaped pokemon all around her, brimming with energy and not looking too happy.
Thirdly, because of the fact that a too-long amount of time had gone by since they entered the puzzle room and came out in the maze room, she only had sixteen days left of her adventure.
And last - and fourth, the "grimoire" book seemed unusually heavy in her backpack, and that was perhaps what scared Risa most of all.
---
Disclaimer: I do not own Pokemon.
Author's Note: So the four/death thing: the number four is considered unlucky in Japan because the word "shi" can mean both "four" and "death". Also, this is the first part of a three-part story arc in the Ruins of Alph - I wasn't sure how long each section would be, and they seemed to break apart into three sections pretty well, so I thought splitting it into three chapters would be a good idea. They will all have the same title, though, "Smoldering", because they are the same arc.