"But can you believe it! Ruins! Right here in Kodo!"

"Calm down, Whittaker; you're setting yourself up for disappointment. The last time these miners said they found something out here, it turned out to be wreckage from a modern aircraft. ...No offense, Mr. Heffner."

The middle-aged man at the head of the small group waved a hand nonchalantly near his shoulder, speaking in his gruff voice without turning around, "None taken. Wudn't me or my boys what were involved in that affair. Think you'll be singing a different tune once you see it for yourself, though - just you wait."

Indeed, the tunnel, at the very least, looked to be legitimate, at least to Whittaker's optimistic eyes. Ever since he had started his career in archaeology, the only discoveries he and his team had made were of fossilized pokemon. And as interesting as fossils inherently were, they weren't exactly why Whittaker had chosen this field of work. His interests leaned more towards the anthropological, and he had pined after the discovery of theretofore unknown artifacts that would tell them more about how their ancestors had lived. After about a year working in the region, however, he had decided that his ambitions were little more than a pipe dream; Kodo just didn't have the long history of human civilization that was necessary for things such as ancient ruins.

At least, that was what he had thought before news came in that Sagestone's mining operation had found something peculiar in the mountains. Apparently, the tunnel they now passed through was unearthed accidentally as the miners had searched for untapped veins of evolutionary stones. The entrance seemed to have been concealed by fallen rocks at some point in the distant past, and the path beyond appeared to have been carved out intentionally and methodically. There were even little shelf areas in the walls all throughout, presumably made as places to store torches or other lighting devices. As they approached the tunnel's wide mouth and the daylight beyond, Whittaker could scarcely contain his excitement.

"Here it is," said the miner guiding them to the site, flicking off his bright lantern. "All these trees around, wouldn't never see it from overhead."

Before the man had even finished speaking, Whittaker, almost skipping, made his way to the front of the group to look out into the place the tunnel had led them. Indeed, the area was thick with evergreen trees, the ground carpeted in both their needles and inches of snow. Interspersed with the other species of foliage were an overabundance of berry trees, though most of them were dormant due to the season. Despite the crowded feeling the forest gave it, it was a relatively large area, gently sloping as though a giant had reached down and scooped a single, whole mountain out of the Skypeak range. Furthermore, Whittaker noted that the majority of the trees were quite slender, indicating that the area hadn't been so heavily forested for very long. It was no stretch of the imagination to think that the land was once much more open than it was now.

"Hey, check this out!"

Whittaker's attention was drawn from the trees towards his colleague's voice, and what he saw put stars in his eyes. Large stones protruded partially from the ground here and there, their shape unnaturally geometric.

"Ruins!" Whittaker exclaimed, his voice reverberating off of the high mountains that surrounded them. The other members of the archaeological team looked to him, surprised by the sharp outburst. The young archaeologist shrank back sheepishly. "I mean, that's what it looks like, right...?"

"It's true," the head of the team, an older man called Rodel, said as he pulled at the ends of his gray mustache. "We won't know what's really here until we do an assessment, though. So." He cracked a wide grin and put his hand to his belt, removing and opening a pokeball that released an Excadrill. "Let's get to work!"

After excavating only a few test pits, the team was easily able to confirm that the area had seen human habitation in times long passed. With the assistance of their pokemon, they erected a large canopy over the area and began the long, long process of stripping away and sifting the topsoil bit by bit. Whittaker took up a place near the protruding cut stones, working together with a Sandshrew and Diglet to carefully search the earth. As other members of the team called Rodel over to view their discoveries - primarily they found large areas of dark, rich dirt that indicated places where there had once been wooden structures, the wood having rotted and fertilized the soil decades or centuries ago - Whittaker worked with a barely-contained sense of excitement and keen, careful attention. Eventually, he found something that made his heart skip a beat.

"Caref-- Careful, Sandy! Look, see? There's some kind of... Oh, I'm not sure. Here, let me get a look." The words were quick and tumbling, and the Sandshrew took a step back at the first exclamation, allowing Whittaker to move in with his tools and work on extracting what had been uncovered. What he found was an old terra cotta pot, its mouth closed with a partially cracked stone lid. A large, bright grin spread throughout all of Whittaker's features.

"Rodel!" he called. "Rodel! Everyone! I've got a pot here - a sealed pot! Oh, Arceus, just come and see!"

"Whittaker, I swear," the nearest person, Parks, said as she approached her colleague, shaking her head, "you've got enough energy to do this entire dig yourself. Let's see what you've got." As Parks leaned over beside the kneeling Whittaker and other members of the team gathered, Whittaker's surprise and excitement began to spread.

"This is in remarkable condition," Rodel commented. He gestured to the handle-like parts of the lid where some tattered material resembling rope lingered, "Look, some of the tie keeping it shut is still intact. Hey, Herschel! Get the stuff over here! We're gonna document this and get it up!"

The right pokemon made the job much easier than it would have been normally, and before too long, the pot was fully photographed, documented, and extracted from the ground. Whittaker placed it gingerly on one of the collapsible tables they'd set up and began looking it over, taking notes on various aspects of the exterior. "Oh, Sandy, Doug, just look at this," he murmured, as much thinking aloud as he was speaking to the Sandshrew and Diglett. "This style is... What do you think? The 1400s? Maybe a little later... We'll have to compare it to Jinko's collection when we get the chance." As he spoke, he removed the lid and set it aside on a soft cloth, peering into the pot's dark interior.

From elsewhere in the site, Parks announced that she'd found another of the containers, but Whittaker was too transfixed on his find's contents to go and see. He exchanged his dirty gloves for a fresh pair made of a more delicate material and carefully plunged his hand into the darkness. The item he retrieved was a rolled up piece of parchment, and in a state of fascination, he meticulously pushed it flat enough to have a look at the surface. What he found was what was recognizable as an old system of writing once used in Kodo, though he wasn't well-versed enough to read it himself. "Rodel," he called over his shoulder, not removing his eyes from the page, "there's writing! There are papers in here!"

Rodel, who had been working in Kodo for much longer than his young colleague, was able to glean some meaning from the writing on the parchment after a good look at it. "Says something about a Rapidash," he said, tugging at his beard as he peered over the rims of his glasses. He pointed a finger to the paper, the tip of it hovering just over the surface, "See this word here - technically it says 'sun,' but when it's written this way, it actually refers to something so large that the size is indescribable. So this phrase, 'snow sun,' it sounds very poetic and all, but essentially it just means white and big as hell."

"A huge, white Rapidash?" Whittaker pieced together, his brow furrowed in awe and confusion. "Does it say what the significance is?"

"It came to this place when it was... Hm, hard to read. Looks like it could be 'fire' or 'red,' and each could be read in different ways depending on the context..."

"If it's a Rapidash," Whittaker contributed, "wouldn't 'fire' be the most logical reading?"

Rodel shook his head, "Well, that makes sense, yes, but this line down here, this means-- Well, it doesn't translate very well, actually, but it's something like 'to offer hospitality,' in the sense of giving sanctuary to one who is in need. So I'm thinking this word up here is 'red' in the context of 'having suffered great injury.'"

Whittaker blinked, mildly stunned. "...This language is awfully complicated, isn't it?"

At this, Rodel laughed aloud and heartily and wagged a finger at his companion, "My boy, you don't know the half of it. Now, let's get back to work. We can get this stuff translated properly once we've got all of it up."

For the rest of the day, the team searched, mapped, and documented the site, working until sundown when the loss of daylight prevented them from continuing. They'd already found more caches of parchment, among other artifacts of anthropological value such as religious icons and cooking utensils. That evening, the team gathered together in the tent they set up just inside the tunnel and reviewed the things they had found. Whittaker and Parks each sat diagonally across from Rodel, their legs crossed and granola bars in their hands, as their more experienced colleague attempted an interpretation of the documents they had found. Herschel sat at the nearby table, listening to their conversation and writing down a summary of Rodel's findings.

"This one's pretty badly damaged," the archaeologist commented, gently teasing the aged parchment open, "but let's see what we've got... It looks like-- Hm. Something something gift unto the land, speak and listen to unlike blood..."

"Unlike blood?" Whittaker repeated, his inflection begging an explanation.

"Ah, that's... It's kind of complicated," Rodel offered in reply. "Native Kodoans thought of pokemon as equals because of their intelligence and ability to understand human language. They thought of them sort of like humans in another form - 'same of mind with unlike blood,' or able to think the same way but with different bodies. So in most instances, the phrase 'unlike blood' refers to pokemon." As he spoke, Rodel allowed the parchment to roll itself back up, and he reached for the next paper. "'Speak and listen,' though, I'm not sure I'm reading that correctly. It's not very-- Oh, holy hell. My friends, this is no Rapidash."

Whittaker and Parks exchanged a befuddled look before leaning forward to see what had the older man so surprised all of a sudden. Upon the parchment was an illustration: Rudimentary though it was, they could identify it as the bowl-shaped valley that they were now examining, and standing in the center of it was a creature that could not be interpreted as anything but the deity pokemon, Arceus.