[Game thread] Skull Ruins Pokerole

[Dragonstrike]

Valder is not with Ventus. He's vanished with his Gengar.

Figured that was the case.  Ventus and the rest of the party has his phone number though, so assuming he still has the same phone, contacting him should be doable...it's not something Nathan will do, though.

Spoiler

You journey an hour north/northwest, avoiding the Skull Ruins. As you approach the promised location of the Ancestor Cave, set into the Great Divide, you start seeing crumbled Sarimanok statues. Each is painted with one large eye instead of the two normal human eyes he had in life.

Nathan knows Sarimanok marked locations that were important to him in this way. The eye is supposed to warn intruders that there are consequences for their intrusion..."the King always knows!"

The entrance to the small, nondescript cave looks like nothing special. Just a craggy hole in the rock, about head high. However, a smooth apron in front of the entrance has been scooped out by a meteorite long ago. There are little flashes of nickel and meteoric superconductor in the ground, but mostly it has all eroded long, long ago. Predictably, the holographic Deyo flowers grow around it, but sparsely.


Ten yards above the cave entrance is a multi-forked little waterfall. Each individual stream is small and muddy, but there are half a dozen separate streams streamin' down the mountainside. Their source is a broad ledge, which seems to be filled with water and perhaps a small spring. You can see a Starmie up there, perched on a salt boulder, holding court with a small clan of Staryu. Though they are in the water, they stand on two legs at a time and are all facing Starmie, blinking their lights in the dawn. Starmie glows with the same color.

Decorating this entire area, you see little crafts made from Staryu limbs cracked and fused together into geometric shapes, usually set quite firmly into the ground.

Where the streams meet the ground is a crusting of salt. Must be mineral salt in the rock here.

Ancestor Cave: Aegis Cave - Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky

"...Sarimanok's Eye...the closer we get to the Ruins, the more of them there are..."  It's a disturbing thought...particularly since he wouldn't be surprised if they encountered working ones at some point...Nathan is treating those eyes with extreme caution, even though they're supposedly not a concern right now.

The sight of the starfish pokemon around the crater reminds Nathan of his own Starmie.  'Starmie would have loved to come here, I bet,' he thinks to himself.

And the salt reminds him of...

...the one pokemon he has that's super duper difficult to use and evolve.  It is raining, so using her might be feasible this weekend, but...how in the world is he going to manage raising a fish pokemon on land?  Particularly if she gets incredibly violent and irritable after evolving...not that he expects her to evolve any time soon, given that she's not living in salt water...and Carvanha also hate living in salt water.  Maybe that's part of the reason why Sharpedo are seemingly so angry all the time...

...well, that's a series of questions for another time.  Maybe later today.  Or later this weekend  They have a cave to visit, and he has a job to do.

--------------------

Notably, Nathan's ignoring the Deyo Flowers for now.  There's not enough of them around for it to be meaningfully useful, and given that they've already seen the group of cosmic starfish, that answers the question of which rare pokemon are hanging around the area.  As usual, though, Gallade is eyeing the flowers very, very intently.  He does cast Shiva a brief glance when she goes to pick one of the strange flowers, but that's all.  He continues focusing on the flowers until it's time to continue into the cave, a reminder that these flowers and what they're related to...they have a special meaning for him that nobody else quite understands yet.