[Game thread] Skull Ruins Pokerole

[Iron]

Liverwort is an interesting town! It has been half-subsumed by the surrounding thick pine forest. This town is high elevation and nestled in a pocket of the Great Divide. Most every tree is an evergreen, many twisted and gnarled by harsh winter weather. Thick lichens droop from tree boughs that stretch like hands over the small stone houses of Liverwort. It's perpetually shady in this town, which is nice in the summertime but makes it quite cold in winter, and limits visibility in the thickest areas. The stone houses often have patterns of brightly colored bricks, but anyone who doesn't maintain their house soon finds their walls coated in lichen and their lawns turned to Stantlermoss. That's the favorite food of Stantler, and this area is the source of most of the Stantler you see during a Running.

There are a lot of rocky landslides that formed encircling mountainous arms around the town. You've heard that some sort of protector spirit (presumably a Pokemon) helps to keep landslides from impacting the town. The cast off rocks form a protective barrier of their own. Only one entrance road is maintained through the rocky hills.

As you FLY lower, you're seeing a lot of alpine and sub-alpine Pokemon. Snover, of course. Noctowl is common, though never any fragile Hoothoot. Conversely, you can find extra-small, tough licheny Shroomish here, but they never evolve into Breloom - too tall and willowy for a fungal life form here. Signs of Shiftry habitation, their bowers formed of bent pine trees growing in cultured shapes. Obviously plenty of rock mons visible among the actual rocks. There are a few tame Donphan in huge rocky paddocks, and they grow sparse woolly fur with moss in it. Small mammalian mons may exhibit a white winter morph here. It's a good place to catch a mon with an unusual pattern.

Where the town burrows deepest into the encircling mountains, there's a second, smaller valley. No buildings are there, but at the center of the valley is a sizable rock covered in particularly strange moss. No trees grow in this valley, only smooth moss that looks very comfortable underfoot.

Nathan has heard about traditions where someone might travel to Liverwort to seek advice on big life decisions - which of two girls to marry, what career to pick, which starter Pokemon to request. There's a chapel, a constant career faire, some indoor or outdoor taverns, a big rec center where events are held, and if all that fails, you can just ask an elderly person sitting on their porch.

All this to say, the residents of Liverwort are quite used to answering questions. No one seems to have seen Kelda, but they've seen a Noivern returning to the northern cliffs every morning, beyond that mini-valley.