- Ruins of Alph -
Alexa and William both met up with Ginny early the next morning. "So, is this going to take a while? I still have things I want to do in town, and personally I planned on visiting the Ruins on the way out," William questioned the researcher. He glanced over at the Lobasalt that he had decided to travel with, and kind of hoped he would be allowed along anyway.
"You didn't think I walked to work, did you?" Researcher Ginny asked in reply and let out a Xatu of her own. "Those of us who live in Violet City either fly or teleport."
"I hope you don't expect me to teleport this whole group," her Xatu complained. "And I really hope you don't expect me to carry them all." The bird added and looked directly at Alexa's bulky form.
William sighed and nodded at that. "I can fly there myself," he half complained and shifted his illusion into a Pidgeotto. His Scyther wasn't exactly an alternative to carry him around, and the shape had worked for Kanto as a flying form. He took a moment to go over his illusionary feathers and how the natural magic interacted with the air as a pre-flight check.
"Now I think I get what Falkner is talking about," Alexa complained at his change in illusion. "That seems much easier than having someone else carry you." It really wasn't, William had taken weeks to learn to fly as a kid and there was a bit of a risk of the illusion breaking, but he didn't have a bird pokemon on his team for this League yet. "But Rhydon is next to learn, and he wants to stick with Grass/Flying for a few more days, so I'll be going with Charizard along with him."
"What type is your Charizard?" Ginny asked with an uneasy tone that William could fully understand.
"Unless he changed while I wasn't paying attention he should be Fire/Flying," Alexa answered as she changed herself back into her human form and let out her two currently Flying typed pokemon. "Hey, Charizard, would you mind if I was a Mephagic for a flight?"
"Yes, I don't want to drip all over everywhere with toxins," her Starter immediately replied with a shake of his head. "We can work on that if you try to be a flying frog." Charizard pointed at her bag and then Rhydon.
"Okay, I'll hold off until we find a way for me to do it myself," Alexa said with a smile.
"So, does she just understand pokemon, or is that something else?" Xatu questioned dully. "Don't answer, I can already tell." Then the Psychic did something that had both Alexa and Ginny nod at him.
"I'm a Dark type," William had to grumble to the bird. "Please say things out loud as well as in the humans' minds, because I can actually understand you." Psychic types that could transmit to humans were the worst to meet. It was almost impossible to keep up the appearance of being human around them.
"Oh? You learned to hear pokemon to make up for it?" the Xatu asked, which was a first. "I suppose all Dark typed human mages aren't that bad then. Any idea what type your friend is instead?"
"It depends on her mood," William chirped deliberately to not be heard by the humans, and a bit too loudly as Charizard and Rhydon both laughed at the statement.
"That's true for the whole team honestly," Charizard said as Alexa and Ginny started flight preparations. "But I'm going to be busy with Rhydon for a bit."
"I'd like any help I could get," Rhydon suggested and looked directly at William.
"Alright, I'll try and explain what I can, but I don't actually change under this," he replied to the other pokemon, and then they were off in a loose formation behind Xatu. "The key to travel flight is endurance more than speed. Your current form looks like it could be good for it actually."
Alexa spent the slower than normal flight considering the other side effect of the Fly HM. The devices were specially made to train the complex task of keeping a human on your back when you flew. That meant that she wanted to join in the conversation between William, who missed a lot of details, Rhydon, who she couldn't understand the questions from, and Charizard, who might already be saying what she could point out.
"Now I kind of wish I had thought to try Fly as a Vespikiln. I'll have to do that next time," she mumbled and looked forward at the unnatural looking stone structures of the approaching 'ruins'. There were actually quite a few theories about the strange places where Unown and Unown script were everywhere, and some were more frightening than others. For one thing the movie about a rogue collection of them had in actuality been the first official mission for Champion Ketchum, and from what her father said was uncomfortably accurate.
"We are going to set down at my lab first, but I don't think this is going to take all day so you should have time to get passes for the ruins themselves," Ginny shouted from Xatu's back before the researcher and totem bird took them down towards one of the several buildings at the site. The structures were larger than what Alexa remembered from old pictures.
"There we go," William said to Rhydon as they all landed and the Zoroark returned to a human illusion. "That's about the pace you want for travel. Any faster and you would need a trainer who is an expert on how to fly themselves..." the pokemon-trainer trailed off as he finished. "Your trainer has used a Fly HM. She quite possibly knows more than I do. Okay, Alexa, you probably were taking things too fast with Rhydon."
"You did leave out quite a bit," Alexa said while Charizard grumbled something, possibly the same thing from the unhappy look William gave both of them.
"Oh, accidental TM use. I have a great uncle who used one of the really old Surf HMs on a dare," Ginny sympathetically said and returned Xatu. "He could teach a pokemon how to do the move in general, but wasn't the best at the travel part." The researcher quickly motioned them towards the door. "We're going to the far end of the hallway. That is the lab we use for finds located at other sites with Unown script to use as a reference for unknown languages. This one was found at a site that we know harvested evolution stones. We have a partial translation for the text, but what we can understand hasn't really made sense."
Alexa returned her two pokemon and with a bit of regret decided to not use a pokemon form for this. It took too much time to explain herself, even if she really wanted to use Lobasalt today. Additionally the doorways here just looked a bit too narrow for that. The three of them went inside, waved through the reception area when Ginny was spotted and allowed past without any comment.
"It has to be some sort of local superstition. You get a pokemon nobody has seen before to rub against something, and somehow that tells you that you can find evolution stones somewhere else. How is that supposed to work?" a voice questioned sarcastically from the room they were heading towards.
"A Normal typed evolution stone might explain why it has an Unown script title, those pokemon are typically used to make sure the pokemon species is correct in these sort of documents. Normal stones are rare worldwide, but maybe more common in Johto back then. This might be some sort of Heracross evolution with one," another voice tiredly replied. "The few that are found are in the same kind of deposits as other type-leached minerals, and that would give a way to check for those without modern energy scanners."
"We checked with Professor Larch over in Kanto about that. He said that his daughter would know more specifics since she has one, but that he at least knew that those stones don't work on Heracross," a third voice said.
"Wait, the type Professor was named 'Larch'?" Ginny asked as they entered the room where there were five other researchers around a large monitor with a display of a stone table covered in writing Alexa mostly didn't recognize, and notably with an image of Heracross' Normal typed form. "Um, in that case I might have found his daughter. She has one of those Heracross."
"Hello, I'm Alexa Larch," Alexa introduced herself with a glance around the room. "Um, it sounds like you have something about Mundane Clay prospecting?" She let out Heracross. "Mundane Clay does transform Heracross like that when you use it on them, mine prefers the results."
The entire room was silent for a moment, and then the second voice, a younger man, responded. "Ok, I'll admit I probably shot down that option too quick in favor of the Normal stones, but it was an evolution stone harvesting facility."
"You rub mud on a bug, and if it turns into a rodent you know there are evolution stones upstream," the first voice, a tired looking older woman, sighed. "We have spent the better part of a month on this translation."
"I'm going to contact the modern evolution stone facility we asked about it before and see if they have records of this," another young man, who had not spoken before, said, and then Alexa found herself interviewed on the specifics she knew of the technique from her own investigations on Mundane Clay.
Chesnaught listened to the explanation of Mundane Clay through her pokeball's sensors and considered things. The strange tinny sound of those small quality of life additions to more modern balls was better than the watery sound her father had said older balls gave you from listening through the shell, but still was not how she heard when she was out of the sphere. Usually she didn't bother, just resting ready to go at a moment's notice when they weren't training or such, but this change to her situation required more investigation.
For one thing she had heard a long conversation between Chesnaught's trainer and a pair of pokemon about flight, and slowly realized that it might be something she could try if that cloud stuff worked on her too. Which honestly scared her more than excited her, being in the air wasn't fun. Honestly she didn't even like heights much. The Steel type was an interesting thought, but she didn't think it would be worth the extra training that Alexa's team was planing. It seemed a bit much for her tastes, and she had made it three Leagues without, a fourth would be fine.
Mundane Clay on the other hand sounded more and more terrifying the more Chesnaught heard about it. The Normal type was one she absolutely did not want to be, and the idea that there was just this dirt some places that could do that to her wasn't fun to think about. It sounded worse than ending up Water type in a pool with a part Electric type and being on a cliff edge combined. The main reason she had not turned the speaker off and curled her energy form even tighter was mostly that she was paralyzed by the idea.
Luckily it seemed that the easy answer was enough to get the part of this trip that was work finished quickly, and Chesnaught heard that her trainer and Alexa were outside again shortly after they arrived. With a quick motion she flicked open the latch on her pokeball from the inside. "Please tell me it is hard to have that clay stuff work," she asked quickly. "Please, I like river banks and now I'm worried about them."
"Is she worried about Mundane Clay?" Alexa asked before William could reply. "Because you really need to rub it in to get it to work, and it isn't that common. You can get it cheap because the places that have it have a lot of it, not because there are a lot of places that have it." Then Alexa let out her Starter, handed over their team's bag to the flying reptile, and used another of the little fragile vials they had too many of to become a Lobasalt again. "Was that what you were worried about?"
"Yes," Chesnaught managed to say at that display. "Yes, that answered my questions." She wasn't sure if she liked getting answers though.
"Alexa, what did I miss?" Charizard asked his trainer.
"A room full of people who didn't get enough information about Mundane Clay before we got here," Alexa replied simply, although with a bit of exasperation. "From the sounds of things my dad knew that I would be visiting the ruins after Violet City and figured I could explain better in person."
Chesnaught blinked at that, and considered what she had heard about Alexa so far. "I don't think I like your dad very much," she admitted to the trainer.
"Chesnaught," William criticized her. "You can't just say that."
"I'll admit, the guy is a bit careless at times, but he's nice enough when you get to know him," Charizard said in a joking manner.
"I get my tendency to jump into things before I've considered all the fallout from him," Alexa said a bit more firmly. "If you mean the HM thing, then you should know he used it too while trying to work out what went wrong. The fact that humans can change was also a genuine surprise. There just have not been many people before who have tested more than one of these to see how that worked, so he missed that information."
That Chesnaught could understand. Her father had a problem with being too blunt that her mother always complained she picked up too well. "Okay, I can get that. Now, what kind of ruins are we here to look at?" she asked to change topic. "That almost looks like Unown script."
"It is," both William and Alexa said in the appropriate dark tone for a Thin Spot.
"Alexa, you still want to see one of these places up close?" Charizard questioned good naturedly. "Because I felt how off it was from the air."
"Do you at least know if this one is natural or artificial?" Chesnaught asked her trainer, who should know better.
"Not yet, that's why I want to see it," William answered. "The other one we found in Unova was natural, the writing was just the stuff it used to be before reality got thin there. I want to see if this was someone's attempt to write something instead."
"I've heard things about the places," Alexa answered as well. "No idea which parts are true, but I had hoped to at least see this one since it is so stable."
"Well, it isn't the worst reason," Chesnaught said with a glare at William. "Not like you heard a rumor about a powerful Psychic type and wanted to prove yourself against it." She considered that maybe it was just that second Leagues were rough ones.
"These are definitely artificial," Alexa said when they arrived at the ruins proper. Most of her team wasn't interested in the place so it was just her and Charizard out on her end. "Someone built this and carved these." The dull orange stone was weathered and cracked, but also clearly was made to be the shapes it had been carved in deliberately. Alexa could with some effort read the Unown script covering the walls where there were not strangely segmented images, but not quickly enough to tell what they said about the images at a glance. Her own Rock type on the other hand was giving her other information she was still working out.
"For some reason that doesn't make me feel better," Chesnaught grumbled with a glare at an Unown that had spotted them. The letter pokemon looked at each of them, until it reached Alexa, and then flew off quickly. "What do the carvings say?"
"Lots of things," William said quietly, but Alexa was distracted by how the Unown had looked at her. "I think they were researching Unown here, or at least were investigating them. These are mostly, um, Unown script they decided to write about the Unown. That does not sound safe."
"Uh, guys," Alexa said as a number of variously shaped Unown came out of the ruins and moved to inspect her more closely.
"Strange," one of the letter pokemon said.
"New," another commented.
"Strange new pokemon, never existed before, recording Lobasalt," the whole swarm then said together, one word each, and Alexa felt a scan wash over her. "Recorded. Record indicates unknown minor Legendary, submitting record to appropriate sources for further analysis." Then the Unown simply scattered.
"William, please tell me that was just some sort of illusion," Charizard complained. "Hopefully that wasn't a bad sign."
"It at least says I'm a new species right now," Alexa grumbled and tried not to think about how the Psychic types had known what she had called the form. "Let's just keep looking around and hope it wasn't anything major."
They ran into a few more clusters of Unown that mostly ignored them as they looked over the various inscriptions. William was able to translate fairly quickly for Charizard and Chesnaught, while Alexa simply looked over some at her own pace. They were on a strangely wide variety of topics, but none of the stones looked to be different ages from what she could tell with her Rock typed sense of stone. It was eerie how some of the sentences were written in a clearly different style than others, but they all were uncomfortably uniform in how they were carved. It was almost as if the stones had formed with the symbols etched into them.
"The more I look at this place the less I think it was made by people," Alexa had to admit as they started towards the exit, with a glance at the Unown who might have been growing more common along the paths.
"Unown are usually more combative than this," William half whispered, and Alexa noticed that Chesnaught was ready to fight. "Don't rush, but we should get out of here."
"New Legendary and allies are safe," the Unown around them declared in the disjointed way they had spoken before. "Human origin shapechanger acknowledged. Records have been filed. Thank you for your prompt submission for documentation."
Six of them moved closer to her. "Usually takes longer for Legendary submission," they whispered to her as if they were a single pokemon giving her a secret.
"Ah, well then I'm glad I got it done while I was in the area," Alexa replied cautiously, and looked at Charizard to see her Starter wasn't happy with this conversation either. "We will just be leaving now." William went first, and Alexa nervously took the rear as they left the ruins as quickly as they could walk out.
"So did you have a good time?" Ginny asked them when they got out, and then paused at the look of them. "How many Unown did you see?"
"Did you know they can speak human?" William questioned quietly, and Alexa realized that she could not reliably tell the difference between someone speaking as a human or as a pokemon yet. There was a bit of a change between the two, but it was easier to alter her own speech between the two than to tell which was being used by someone else.
"Yeah, you should probably leave quickly," Ginny said with a deep cringe. "That means a Legendary is around and they are... pushy about some sort of cosmic paperwork. It usually turns into an 'argument'."
Alexa gave William a look that hopefully told the Zoroark not to mention the actual words of the conversation with the Unown. "Yeah, I think this is enough excitement for a day," she said to the researcher.
"Alright then. Thank you again for your help. You would not believe how often it turns out to be some small thing that got overlooked because the right person didn't get asked the right question," Ginny said.