Groudon (Hoenn)
"We have always molded the world to our will. Agriculture, deforestation, urbanization: what else can you call these? My proposal is simple. Our species will continue doing what it has always done. Our innovation, our drive to conquer the limits nature has imposed upon us, these are not to be feared. They will carry us into an era of prosperity the likes of which has never been seen before."
-Dr. Seiji Matsubusa, Geoengineering in the Third Millenium
Overview
Groudon, The Flesh of The Earth, The Unceasing Flame, The End of Our Age, was a fairly minor god in Hoennian folklore and mythology. He was most notable as an agricultural god in the mountainous regions of Hoenn and as an example of The Slain Earth-Giant. Cultures on five of the six inhabited continents spoke of the chief god, usually a sky god, slaying a primordial giant and using its corpse to build the world. Groudon was not the most famous of this archetype. He was not even the primary god of fire and magma in Japan. Most of his notoriety came from a very loose adaptation of his myths in mid-century Japanese cinema.
On February 15th, 2012, Groudon and his counterpart, The Blood of The Seas, Kyogre, met in Rune City, Hoenn. Groudon summoned earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and heat waves in an attempt to defeat his rival. The two killed over 180,000 people and leveled much of Hoenn's infrastructure before Rayquaza intervened and drove the two back into slumber. They still wait beneath the surface, very much alive, waiting for someone to awaken them again. The two may not even be aware of the destruction caused as it was not their primary goal: every high-level analysis of the incident has concluded that the two titans were far more concerned with killing each other than anything else.
Interest in mythology soared after the attack as a fearful world sought to learn what obscure myths might kill them next. Aqua-dan and The Magma Organization have had scores of imitators, some of whom did successfully capture or at least provoke an extraordinarily powerful pokémon. Legendary pokémon were increasingly regarded as major security threats to be treated with more fear than reverence. Governments the world over have repeatedly assured the public that they are developing countermeasures for extremely powerful pokémon.
Perhaps this stems from the same arrogance as Matsubusa and his ilk, that we can defeat or control even the embodiment of the world we live on.
Appearance
Groudon's depictions in early temple mosaics show a mountain-sized beast with brown or black skin. These are his smaller depictions. Other artists depicted him as being the rough size and shape of Hoenn itself, with the Mishiru peninsula being his legs and the eastern peninsulas being either his head and arm or just his head with open jaws. Sometimes Hoenn was only his head and the rest of his body was submerged beneath the waves.
In post-war Japanese cinema Groudon was reimagined as a giant, bipedal, black lizard that controlled heat, fire, and radiation. The level of realism depended on the budget for the stuntman's costume in the film.
Groudon is bipedal with an arched back and a wide tail resting behind him on the ground. The core of his body seems to be white-hot magma with plates of red and black scales cooling on the surface. In time a fully solid body may have developed. Some have posited that the groudon observed was a mere avatar of a much larger being, potentially one that is the size of Hoenn or even larger. The physical form was more of an illusion akin to substitute. This is supported by Groudon's apparent ability to restore up to 40% of his body in moments after it was blasted off by a particularly powerful attack. Kyogre, in turn, demonstrated an ability to dissolve into water and reform from it without lasting damage.
In Hoennese Mythology
Religious sects in Hoenn have always been split over one fundamental question: is our collective existence actually real or simply an illusion? The side that rejected a physical, permanent reality has always been dismissive of Groudon's existence. He has been far more important in the physical reality sects.
These sects believe that at the beginning of creation Groudon and Kyogre warred endlessly. Their fight was put to an end by Rayquaza slaying both. She formed Groudon's flesh into the land and Kyogre's blood into the seas. She herself provided the breath of the world and allowed life to flourish. In time, however, the souls of Groudon and Kyogre stirred and waged war once more. Kyogre won the battle before being slain by Rayquaza once more. Almost all life perished during the brief struggle. In the new age there was far more water than land. Life rebounded and civilization rose once more. Then the primordial gods woke and clashed, tearing civilization apart once more. Groudon won this fight and there was more land than water in the third era. The cycle continued hundreds of times as worlds of water alternated with worlds of earth. The current era, the 984th, began with Kyogre's victory. It would end when the titans reemerged and ended human civilization. Groudon would expand the land and be slain. Civilization would someday reemerge only to be destroyed by Kyogre.
Groudon does not appear in any stories outside of the Hoennese origin myth. He was not a particularly prominent or important god. He was not a character in the myths of Hoenn so much as a force of nature that simply was. There was no stopping him. He would someday end the current era and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Some scholars theorized that Groudon and Kyogre were representations of the inevitability of death or the wanton destruction of a natural disaster.
Worship
Groudon was not widely worshipped in Hoenn. He still had regional cults. These cults mostly agreed that he would someday awaken and kill almost all humans, but in the meantime his sleeping soul could be appealed to in order to end droughts, improve crop yields, and stave off volcanic eruptions. Ritual sacrifices of livestock were thrown into Hell's Chimney to feed the god. Human sacrifices may have occurred but were very rare, likely limited to the terminally ill and convicts sentenced to death. They may not have occurred at all. In any event there is no reliable evidence of any occurring in the last three centuries. Most alleged sacrifices either have no evidence to support them or were probably suicides.
There were two holy sites to Groudon. Hell's Chimney was considered to be the resting place of his body. This is where most sacrifices were made and the place where his cults were the strongest. Gurandopaya was said to be where Kyogre and Groudon fought at the end of the last age. It was believed that the souls of the titans rested on the mountain. A temple and graveyard was constructed there to honor all those who perished at the end of the 983rd age. The temple was maintained by the priests of Rayquaza but was also seen as a sacred place by the cults of Groudon and Kyogre.
Today
Groudon has always been a symbol of a fiery apocalypse. This took on new symbolic importance in postwar Japan. A series of films centered around Groudon being awakened by nuclear testing and attempting to end the world. The first film had a decidedly somber tone and focused on mankind's path towards self-destruction, an end as inevitable as Groudon's rise. The film even posited that Groudon was not a physical entity so much as an ancient prophecy of nuclear annihilation wiping out civilization. The prophets had no context for what they saw and attributed it to the work of an external monster rather than the true horrors of manmade weapons. The film ends with humanity descending into infighting rather than uniting to ward off Groudon. The titan stops to watch in confusion before venturing back under the earth's surface. In the film's final lines a character played by the director posits that Groudon realized that he was not needed: humanity would end the current age without him having to lift a finger.
Future installments would center on Groudon returning and playing a more heroic role in fights with various other gods and monsters. The films were increasingly lighthearted. The change in tone was explained by Groudon befriending human children and fighting for him as he waited on Kyogre to awaken. Until then he saw no need to destroy humanity and would instead fight to protect them.
The Magma Organization emerged in 2002 as a collective of scientists interested in the possibility of using controlled volcanic eruptions to expand the available land in the densest metropolitan areas in Japan. Another proposed application was to use the volcanic ash harvested from remote eruptions to fertilize soils and increase the food independence of Japan. Internationally ash redistribution could allow for revitalizing depleted soils and potentially growing crops in the desert. Down the line volcanic eruptions could create new landmasses for refugee resettlement or dim sunlight to reduce the effects of industrial greenhouse gas pollution.
The organization was widely written off as deeply unserious in both popular and scientific media. Still, they retained some relevance through the extensive funding from their founder's own personal fortune and a hedge fund manager interested in using the organization's research to inspire more practical inventions. They later gained positive media attention by hiring mercenaries and forming their own security corps to fight Aqua-dan, the yakuza, and petty criminals.
The Magma Organization ultimately shifted research towards awakening and controlling Groudon for use as a terraforming engine, and to negate Aqua-dan's pursuit of Kyogre. Under the guise of countering Aqua-dan's assault, The Magma Organization stole an artifact tied to Groudon from Gurandopaya and moved something from Hell's Chimney to Rune City, where they awakened Groudon and set him on the newly awakened Kyogre. Few details about what Aqua-dan and The Magma Organization stole or where those artifacts currently are have been released.
This escalated Kyogre's behavior from torrential rain across Hoenn to the cataclysm that would nearly destroy the region. Rune City was lost to the waves when the caldera it was built upon collapsed, nearby cities built on coral reefs or mangrove swamps were washed away, and the eruption of Hell's Chimney nearly destroyed the communities around it. Earthquakes, heat waves, and flooding damaged every city in the region. The clash ended when Rayquaza descended to the ruins of Rune City and drove the beasts back underground. The Japanese government claims to know their locations based on sonar and seismic readings but has refused to disclose any more information.
Dr. Matsubusa insisted on his innocence and fought his conviction through years of appeals. His attempts were unsuccessful. Japan unbanned the death penalty until Magma's founder had been executed and then promptly prohibited it once more. Even years after the disaster Magma has its defenders. The remaining proponents of geoengineering insist that they could have controlled Groudon if Kyogre had not also been awakened. Others defend the spirit of the organization but not their exact methods. Modern geoengineering advocates prefer purely technological solutions to ones involving powerful pokémon. Some far-right activists contend that Dr. Matsubusa's more extreme actions were justified by his fight against anarchists and criminals. Had he not awakened Groudon then Aqua-dan would have drowned the world unopposed, just as they had intended. Most of Magma's defenders live outside of Japan. Polling after the disaster consistently shows that Magma has a 0 to 3% favorability rating.
Groudon still sleeps. He could still be reawakened. His location is unknown, but his presence still looms large: one recent study showed that anxiety spikes tremendously in Japan following even minor earthquakes, a phenomenon not observed elsewhere in the world.
Origins
Groudon is real. That much is no longer disputed. What is less clear is how humans learned about him. Now that scientists know what a clash between Kyogre and Groudon looks like, they have attempted to find evidence of past events. Geological records show that the most recent clash likely occurred around 14 million years ago. Homo sapiens had not yet evolved. How, then, did humans learn about something so ancient with so much accuracy? Moreover, how did cultures as far flung as the Norse and the Mexica end up with similar stories? Are Ymir and Cipactli just other names of Groudon? Or are there separate monsters of similar power resting beneath other continents? The majority view among anthropologists is that at least Cipactli is another name for Groudon given the Mexica's insistence that Rayquaza was the one to slay him. However, the Mexica have no equivalent for Kyogre.
The leading theory at present is that the pokémon of Hoenn, and potentially the rest of the planet, remembered the clash. Its effects would have been felt on a planetary scale. The event may even have separated Japan from mainland Asia. Psychic-types or human elementals may have then relayed these stories to the newly settled humans. These humans, in turn, passed the legends down to their children. The accuracy with which the story was preserved is still very odd for a myth based on events from over ten million years in the past. Even the longest lived of rock-type pokémon were unlikely to have been around long enough to tell humans. This means that either long-lived pokémon have their own oral traditions repeated with minimal deviation across many generations or that there are pokémon far older than previously imagined. Either outcome would revolutionize the field of pokémon studies.