"How familiar are you with paleontology?" asked Hal as he scaled the hillside, a big, tan bag slung over his back. "Do you consider yourself a fan?"
I tilted my head back and forth, "I read articles, sometimes. I'm not an expert by any means, though."
"Okay," Hal said. I thought that might be all he was going to say to me until he said, "So, the rock formation we're about to visit is about 340 years old."
"Only 340?"
"Oh, jeez. I forgot the million. It's 340 million years old. Anyway, during that time, early Pokémon were undergoing an explosion in diversity. Although it's usually true that the further back in time we go the less information we have, we're lucky to have a few formations like this one that are unusually abundant with fossils." Hal stopped walking and admired the view of Oreburgh from where he stood. "So, yeah, if you're going to find a fossil here, you're probably going to find one there."
I followed him further up the hill, until we overlooked Oreburgh Mine. The walls of rocks had chunks missing from them, and an area was sectioned off with yellow and black tape. Hal dropped his bag on the ground and began rifling through it. He pulled out a hammer and a chisel and handed them to me saying, "You'll want these."
I hefted the hammer a bit. It felt unbalanced. The head was too heavy. "This seems a little… brutal for fossil finding. I feel like I'll break the bones."
"Pokémon didn't have bones 340 million years ago," Hal said absently, as he pulled out equipment of his own. "That's a big reason why we don't know much about early Pokémon. Usually only the hard parts of an organism fossilize. Bones didn't really develop until a bit later. So, uh, with that in mind, your best bet for finding a fossil is going to be something like a Kabuto."
"The Pokémon with the shells, right?"
"Right. They're very common and we know a lot about them because they fossilize really well."
"But, anyway," I said, raising the hammer, "I feel like this might not be the best tool for digging up fossils."
"Oh, no, don't hit anything other than regular sediment with that. Use it to clear away some room to look for stuff. But be careful. One of our guys was using that very hammer when he smashed a fossil a few weeks ago. He blamed gravity, but I think he was just being stupid."
I looked down at the hammer and said, "I'll be sure to keep that in mind."
I wasn't sure what to do or where to start. Hal pretty quickly went off into his own sphere of existence while I looked around, testing the weights of the tools he'd given me. I felt like I wasn't supposed to be here. I felt like I'd be fined a million dollars if I dug anywhere. I approached one of the areas missing a chunk of dirt and swung the hammer. Chunks of earth fell away and slid to the ground. I looked over my shoulder at Hal, who was closely examining the dirt while hovering his chisel over it, ready to strike whenever he found something. I looked back at my wall of dirt and scratched my chin. Maybe I was too close to another fossil, I thought. I wandered away from Hal, keeping an eye out for unusual rocks. I wasn't sure what exactly what I was looking for.
I decided to approach the nearest slope, bash it with my hammer, and see where that got me. Nowhere. I moved a few inches to the right and tried again. I kept doing this until I found something interesting in the loose dirt. A dark, conical shape, protruding from the side of the cliff and tapering to a rounded end. I took my chisel and excavated more of it. It was segmented, each segment larger than the one before it. I separated the rock it was in from the rock around it and brought the fossil back to Hal. In all, I had three segments of some sort of small creature.
Hal turned the fossil over gently in his hands. "This is… hmm… hmm…" He looked up at me. "This is really something."
"And I am supposed to give that to you, for some reason, so…"
"I guess now that you've come this far, I can tell you what I'm working on that's such a big secret," Hal said as he pulled a sheet of plastic wrap from his bag. "I've built a machine that can revive Pokémon from the dead using their fossilized remains."
"… What?"
"It's pretty much exactly what I just said." Hal carefully wrapped the segmented fossil in the plastic. "It revives ancient Pokémon from fossils."
I tilted my head. "What I'm trying to say is, how is that even possible?"
"Sorry, that much is still a secret. And, no offense, but I think if I were to try to explain it, you'd be even more confused. I can show you, though. Come with me."
I followed Hal back into the city, and then back to the OPRC. He led me to a laboratory in the basement, a surprisingly organized room for someone like Hal. At the back of the room, connected to a huge monitor suspended on the wall, was some sort of device. It was cylindrical, topped with a glass dome with a slowly-blinking red light on top of it. Hal approached the device and placed my fossil on the table next to it.
"Is that the machine?" I asked.
"It sure is." Hal hastily unwrapped the fossil and pressed a button on the machine's control panel. "I worked on this thing for seven months straight. It might possibly be my greatest contribution to science, as well as one of the greatest advances ever made." He placed the fossil on the tray, and with a press of a button, the tray pulled it inside the machine. The light on top started to glow as Hal and I looked over it.
"And now…" Hal trailed off, his voice full of pride.
"And now?" I asked.
"… We wait."
I checked my watch. "How long?"
Hal shrugged. "I don't really know. We're reconstructing a living being from some rocks. It's going to take a while. You don't have to stick around, if you don't want to."
"Well, you've got me invested now. I'm not going to just leave before you can prove yourself right."
We sat in Hal's lab, Hal spinning slowly in his chair while I doodled mindlessly in my notebook. I considered letting Missy out, but the room was too small, and had too many loose papers.
"Do we have any way of knowing how complete it is?" I asked, putting my notebook in my backpack.
"Yeah," Hal said, his foot hitting the desk and stopping his lethargic spin. "There's a bar on the control panel screen that measures the revivification percentage."
I stood up and approached the machine. A rectangular bar flashed in the upper left corner of the screen. "Is it supposed to be flashing like that?"
"I thought I fixed that," he muttered. "So, I guess we don't know how long we have."
I looked over the machine again, as if there were some aspect of it I hadn't seen over the last half hour. "So, the Pokémon is going to appear in this dome, here?" I asked, looking at the machinery inside.
"Yeah, it should."
"And, Pokémon from the Cambrian period all breathed underwater, right?"
"Already accounted for." Hal stirred his mug of coffee with a spoon. "I made it as a combination Fossil Reviver-Aquarium. When that boy is almost done being revived, the dome will fill with water to accommodate for him." Hal rested his chin in his palm and glanced at his monitor before saying, flatly, "So, what brings you to Oreburgh, Lucas?"
"I've never really traveled much, so I'm hiking around Sinnoh to see some sights and hopefully learn some history. I want to get in touch with the more spiritual side of things. Maybe find out where things came from."
"Well, let me know if you learn anything interesting," Hal grumbled, "I study the history of life and I barely have any answers." Hal spun in his chair to face me, his hand leveled in a half-shrug. "Paleontology is a two hundred year-old science and we still have no idea where people came from?"
"I did."
"Humans just kind of… appeared about 200,000 years ago. Nobody knows where we came from. We have no relatives or ancestors that we know of. And yet, we have such an intricate relationship with them. Nobody really understands it, and anyone who claims to is a crackpot pop scientist."
"How is that even possible?" I asked. "I would think that someone would have found something by now."
"Right?" Hal took a sip from his mug. "We're so far removed from every other living thing on the planet. Whatever evolutionary branch resulted in us somehow managed not to leave a mark on the fossil record whatsoever. It's unprecedented. It's also one of the many scientific things I'm angry about."
"It definitely sounds like you're angry about it," I said.
"You have no idea. We're able to learn so much from fossilized remains, but at the end of the day, we can only learn so much from them, and if we don't have them, we can't do much more than speculate. Paleontology is so interesting, but so frustrating at times."
"As someone who studies Evolution with a capital E, I can relate. Nobody knows how it even happens."
"I don't know how you and the Professor can do that to yourselves. Doesn't it get boring studying something so… vague?"
"Why do you think I'm here?" I asked. "No, in all seriousness, it's… frustrating, a lot of the time. We approach it with the knowledge that we're probably never going to make progress beyond speculation."
"That sounds depressing," said Hal.
"It kind of is, sometimes. The plus side is that I get to work with Bug Pokémon pretty often, since they evolve so early. I've thought a lot about which discipline I want to go into. I had a phase were I was seriously considering observing Pokémon in the wild. But I think I want to stick with Evolution. The lack of concrete information about it is what intrigues me so much."
"To each his own, I guess."
I raised an eyebrow. "You aren't much higher up the ladder in terms of speculation versus observable fact."
"… Fair enough." Hal cracked his fingers and stared up at the ceiling. "I'm hungry. If I ordered a pizza, would you eat some of it?"
"I don't see why not. I haven't ea—" I was interrupted by the high-pitched scream of Hal's machine. The light on top was blinking, and steam filled the dome, making a sound like a fire extinguisher.
"This is it!" Hal said, rushing to the dome and peering inside. "It's happening!" I stepped up behind him, looking over his shoulder. He clasped his hands to his chest and tapped his foot, occasionally looking back at me with the widest grin I'd ever seen.
The steam cleared, and in the newly-filled aquarium swam a Pokémon unlike any I had ever seen before. It was a gray, arm-length creature covered in an exoskeleton with red markings. Solid, feather-shaped appendages lined either side of it, and it swam by wiggling them. Its eyes were two round orbs on short stalks jutting from the sides of its head. Two segmented appendages curved from its face, passively curling and releasing.
Hal scrambled to his desk and fumbled for his notebook, knocking several papers and writing utensils onto the floor in the process. He was halfway down the page by the time he returned to the machine, muttering to himself.
"What… what does this mean for science?" I asked. "This is amazing. Think of what you could do with this. Paleontology could become…"
"As deeply understood as zoology," Hal said, continuing to write with his nose still buried in his notebook. "I'm not really sure where to start, or how I'm supposed to tell my peers about this. This is an actual, living Anorith. A Pokémon that hasn't been alive for almost 500 million years, and it's swimming in my lab."
"This didn't raise this Pokémon directly from the dead, did it?"
"What? Oh, no, it couldn't do that. It created an exact clone."
"Either way, it's amazing." I watched the Anorith swim around, its feelers touching the walls of the glass dome. "And can I say that I find this little guy adorable?"
"He really is," Hal said. "We were off about some things. We didn't realize the appendages on the sides of his body overlapped one another like that. We also had no idea what his tail looked like, so this is already paying off. And remember," Hal said as he clicked the pen against his chin, "this Pokémon belongs to Professor Rowan."
I said goodbye to Hal, then left Oreburgh an hour or so later, setting out for Hearthome City. Route 207 took me through Mt. Coronet, the mountain that split the Sinnoh region in half. Much of the Sinnoh's folklore centered on Mt. Coronet. It had long been revered as a holy site, and was apparently largely hollow and filled with a complex maze of tunnels and pathways. There were several paths branching off the main route, and although my curiosity insisted on following them and getting lost, I convinced myself to listen to reason.
I wasn't sure what exactly I wanted to do in Hearthome City, if anything at all. I didn't know much about my destination, beyond the domed Contest Hall at the heart of the city. Dawn's mother was a renowned contest star, alongside her Kangaskhan. She'd wanted Dawn to enter the Contest scene as well, but Dawn was much more interested in making Pokémon fight than she was in showing them off.
I did know that I wanted to sleep, and that was the first thing I did.
