Chapter 28 Ancient civilizations

Ash! Dexter said suddenly. I missed something big.

"What?" Ash asked, one eye on Riolu as the Emanation Pokémon volleyed yet another series of attacks into Muk. The big gooey Pokémon was something of a specialist and contrary to Ash's normal sweeper tactics, but by those very qualities he was good at stopping an enemy from taking out his team – the radical tactical shift could work wonders.

Of course, that meant getting him used to being a punching bag again, which was why over half of Ash's Pokémon had been taking turns doing it all day. Indeed, the sun was low enough in the sky they'd need to stop soon.

Something really, really big. Remember that archaeological dig site?

Ash did indeed remember, and went pale. "The one with the utterly enormous Pokémon? The Alakazam, Gengar and… Jigglypuff?"

Yes. Well, this is the day the dig reaches the place they found the artefacts.

"Didn't we reveal the site in the first place?"

Only of the Alakazam device. The Gengar one was discovered by other, unknown means, and if only that one emerges the result's almost as bad.

"Yeah, Pallet Town plays the role of the Tokyo Tower." Ash's eyes flicked over his Pokémon. "What do we have that can handle a Ghost type?"

Not much, those ones were approaching Legendary grade powerful. Numbers might work, and Bruno – but no, he won't still be in the area.

"Right." Ash sighed heavily. "Best to be pre-emptive about it, then. Go find all three artefacts, and make sure none of them activate – or alternatively all of them. Hey, Pikachu! We've got some work to do!"

Pikachu hopped to his shoulder, and he set off towards the dig site.

"Well, I have to say, Doctor, it was an inspiration to explore this side tunnel. We've found conclusive proof that this is some kind of ancient civilization." Gary said, holding up an artefact of two large black spheres with a smaller one in the middle.

Gary, Dee said suddenly. I feel nervous around that thing. I don't know why yet, I'm still searching for the reference, but it's… wrong.

"Why?" Eve, the Archaeologist, asked. "We can't just stop exploring because someone is nervous. If we did that in archaeology, then nobody would ever have discovered the tomb of Tutenkhamun, or the Terracotta army."

No, this is different. Let's leave. Dee pleaded.

The object twitched, and an invisible force pushed Gary solidly in the chest. He let out an oof of lost air, fell backwards and dropped the object… which stayed in the air.

"Doctor?" Gary wheezed out, pushing himself back upright, "I'm new to archaeology. Is this normal?"

"No…" As they watched, a shape began to solidify in the air. Becoming more visible and more solid with every passing moment, a huge Gengar began to form.

It looked like it was barely small enough to fit in the tunnel, and it was still growing.

I hate to say I told you so.

Gary grabbed the startled Eve, hoisted her in a carry against his front and turned to run. "Not helping, Dee! Mind giving us some cover?"

On it. Dee's form materialized from her projector. Set up. Zap Cannon.

Electricity slashed backwards, and the Gengar simply phased away from it. Warning: this Gengar possesses something that appears far more effective than normal Ghost typing. Conjecture is that it simulates Wonder Guard.

"Oh, just brilliant. And I'm fresh out of Dark types." Gary one-handed Dee's earpiece set into his ear. "Ash!"

A click, buzz, then he heard Ash running. "What is it, Gary?"

"Eve – an archaeologist I was working with – and I managed somehow to wake up a giant Ghost type in the caves to the east. It's got some kind of Wonder Guard ability, I can't touch it, and it's coming towards Pallet!"

Ash cursed. "Alright, I should have told you about this one. Wasn't thinking. Call your granddad and let everyone else know, I'll take over delaying it."

"Ash, you can't be thinking of-"

"If I have to, I'll use Shadow Ball again. But Pidgeot has a Ghost move, and if we can get Brock's Ninetales over here we have a chance."

Gary nodded, invisible to his friend. "All right, then. I'm heading straight back from the cave nearest the town itself."

"I know the one." Ash ended the call with a gesture on his end. "Pidgeot, get us in the air and over there!"

"I will."

Gary stumbled as a sudden gale lashed at him, rolling as he fell so he took the impact on his side rather than the more vulnerable back or front – where Eve was, to boot.

But that, he knew, was only the scatter from the actual attack, and with a quick apology to his passenger he pushed himself up to look.

Ash's Pidgeot swept past, barely ten feet over the enormous Ghost's head, and her Ominous Wind attack actually checked the monster's striding advance.

Ash himself ran over to Gary. "Are you okay?"

He winced. "Yeah, they'll bruise but I'll be fine. Will you be okay?"

"Yeah, get out of here – and bring back support. I can't fight this thing alone, not and work out how to stop it."

The Oak pushed himself up again, and Eve slipped out of his arms. "I'll stay here – maybe I can help."

Gary glanced at Ash, who didn't seem to be objecting. "Fine. But both of you stay safe."

With a nod and a jerk of his head, Ash reminded Gary to get going.

"Okay, any ideas, Doctor?" Ash asked as Pidgeot swept in again with another Ominous Wind.

"I found a tablet earlier, in the ruins." Eve replied. "I wasn't able to decipher it, though, it's in a very old variant of the language." She shrugged. "I haven't had the time, what with everyone else from the trip being occupied elsewhere – that's why I asked Gary to help me."

"Okay." Ash flicked Dexter's core into the air, and the Porygon materialized. "Do you have any record of it on you?"

"Yes, on the memory card of my camera."

"Right. Dexter, have a look."

Eve brought up the image on the back screen, and Dexter's eyes flashed. Analyzing… language identified as Late Jomon, Kanto variant. Message is as follows.

Beware the two great powers of destruction,

the shadow of the dark device will grapple with the prisoner of the unearthly urn.

The sacred city will be no more as day is swallowed up by night.

Darker still for you when they return to lay waste to the world,

but no human knows the secret to soothe the powers and guide them back to the shadow world.

"Now that," Eve muttered to herself, "Is irresponsible. What was the point?"

Ash frowned. "Arms race with Pokéatlantis?" At that last, a snatch of memory he never suspected he had rippled in front of his eyes – the rulers of Pokémonopolis and Pokéatlantis arguing heatedly about one another's plans to use the maiju of the lands as weapons.

He shook the echo of a long dead king and his grandiose dreams of capturing a Legendary from his mind.

"I suppose it does make sense." Eve was saying. "But in that case, how did they make this Pokémon so powerful?"

Pidgeot sent another Ominous Wind at the enormous Gengar, noting that this time its' attacks actually would have hit her were it not for her Normal typing. That couldn't be good, it was only a matter of time before it turned out to know some other kind of attack, and if it had her attack patterns deciphered enough to predict her, that other kind of attack would hit.

A warmth ran through her. At least the repeated use of the Ghost type attack was strengthening her, making her attacks more powerful and herself faster.

Her keen eyes spotted something on the ground that shouldn't be there. What's she doing here?

Gary ran into the lobby of his grandfather's lab, supported himself with hands on knees for a moment, and made for the Poké ball room. He'd have to check where the Pokémon he wanted were, but he could build a fairly competent Psychic and Ghost-attack based team.

Brock was already there. "I thought you'd be coming here. Misty's headed out already – she's got some Psychic types. But you should know, there's a big Alakazam that could turn up as well. So remember to add in Bug types."

The younger boy nodded, eyes flicking over the shelves. "Thanks." Oh, Grandad had labelled them. That was nice.

Brock suddenly pointed at his belt. "So, who's in use?"

Gary glanced down at the six holsters almost everyone used. "What do you mean?"

Then he saw it. Of the six, five had the full light lit. The other one was not.

"Oh, no. Eevee must have decided to fight!" Gary snatched up his hurriedly decided-upon team and was off and running, Brock a pace behind him.

"Right. It mentions an 'unearthly urn' as well as a 'Dark device'." Ash pointed out. "Apart from being awesomely alliterative, that suggests that there's another around here."

The nice thing about time travel was all those lines you thought of the next year that would have been really nice to come up with on the fly.

"If we could get it out as well and set them to fighting, at least we'd have more time to think of something. That and Pidgeot can't keep that up forever."

"Right." Eve looked around. "How are we going to find something like that?"

Pikachu hopped down from his perch. "I can help. My electric sense is good enough that I can tell where there are spaces underground."

The archaeologist looked blank, so Ash translated for her.

"Oh, I see. Like geophysics scans, then. Yes, that would help." After glancing over her shoulder at Pidgeot playing the role of a Pika-dore, she set off after Pikachu with Ash bringing up the rear.

"What are you doing here?" Pidgeot called down to Eevee as she executed a wingover above her.

"I want to help! I don't want Gary, or his hometown to be in danger, and-", she was quiet for a moment, as Pidgeot's attacks caused the Gengar to ponderously turn away from her, "and this thing's the opposite of what a Pokémon should be! We're supposed to protect people, not to destroy!"

"At the moment, you're one of the people who needs protecting!"

"No! I won't accept that I have to leave you to fight alone! I'm a Normal type too!"

"Just hide! I'm sorry, but you're not powerful enough yet!" Pidgeot banked around Gengar, and one of the missed attacks hit a tree, blowing it into splinters.

Eevee spotted the effect and suddenly felt afraid. Her typing might make her immune to the direct effects of a Ghost's attacks, but the side effects were something else entirely. Shrapnel, concussive force and collapsing trees were all risks.

Well, if she had wanted to avoid risk she would have been a different person altogether. Focusing, she used a Quick Attack and dodged out of the way of a Shadow Ball-esque beam of Ghost type energy.

"What do you think?" Ash asked, holding up a strange, brown-camo-patterned object.

Eve examined it critically. "Not much of an urn. But then the meaning of words does shift over the centuries. How do we activate it, I wonder?"

Pikachu loped over. "Found another one. Looks the same kind of pattern as that, but it's a spoon."

"Hm." Eve murmured, before looking at it and asking, "Don't Alakazam use spoons? It'd make sense for Alakazam to be in the Unearthly Urn, they and Gengar are well matched type wise."

Ash took the spoon from Pikachu. "Well, no other way to check." He made sure his hat was firmly on his head, and slotted spoon to urn.

There was an audible click, and the urn began to levitate before flying off back down the tunnel.

"What did you do that for?"

"Well, we did want to get them fighting, right? If they're such rivals, they'd ignore everything else to focus on the other."

"Seems quite reckless, but alright." Eve shook her head. "But what now? Two Pokémon that powerful fighting one another could do serious damage to the Kanto region, or even destroy the world!"

Ash looked at her. "There are dozens of legendaries on the home islands. They'd stop it before it got that far. Remember, there are Pokémon like Lugia or Ho-Oh out there."

The mention of Ho-oh brought up another flash of memory from the king of Pokéatlantis, specifically of how jubilant he'd felt when the great maiju of his rivals had defeated one another and left the way open for his grand plan with Ho-Oh.

Ash frowned for a moment, and pushed the memories away again. Looks like that encounter left me with more than I thought. Must be Pokémonopolis stirring them up…

"Right, the world's not destroyed, there's got to be some kind of fail-safe for both of them down here. Pikachu, I need you to keep looking. Probably somewhere big – this thing would have been applauded, not hidden."

Eve nodded. "Makes sense to me."

Pidgeot disengaged from battle, relieved, as an enormous Alakazam began fighting the Gengar. As the fight was no longer creeping towards Pallet Town, she could leave to rest herself. Firing that many Ominous Wind attacks had nearly spent her.

Down on the ground, Eevee ran out of the way herself. She'd been using Double Team illusions to distract the Gengar, but couldn't honestly say it had been much use.

On spotting Gary and a small horde of reinforcements turn up, she headed over to him. He gathered her up and held her. "You shouldn't have done that… oh, don't do that to me again, okay?"

She knew what he meant, that he was concerned for her, and smiled slightly-

-but then a flash of light caught her eye.

One of Alakazam's attacks had deflected off that of its' opponent and was headed for Gary.

She reacted without thinking and jumped from his arms, straight at the beam.

"Eevee!"

Gary stared at the blast of multicoloured light that had, a moment ago, been his dear little Eevee.

Umbreon landed on the forest floor and briefly looked herself over, then gave a grin. "MY turn."

Inhaling briefly, she shot out a Dark Pulse at the battling titans.

"Giant paintbrush." Ash sighed. "This is just getting silly. What do you think? Smeargle?"

"What's a Smeargle?" Eve asked.

Ash held up Dexter, screen displaying one of the artistic Pokémon. "They can copy moves. They're pretty diverse in their possible moves, though do suffer from the way they're relatively physically weak."

"Okay, that's quite impressive. I didn't spend much time on Pokémon when I was younger."

Ash blinked, thrown off track. "You're, what, a year older than me?"

"And do you have any idea how hard it is to become a Doctor of Archaeology by nine? I barely had time to eat."

Pikachu flashed a spark of lightning to catch everyone's attention. "Shouldn't we be stopping the rampage of enormous Pokémon now?"

"Sure." Ash shrugged. "Well, I may as well do what worked with the last one."

Eve looked concerned. "And that is?"

Ash grinned.

With a quick yank, he pulled the enormous brush from the altar, and it activated.

"That was anticlimactic." Gary grumbled. Umbreon rubbed against his shin, and he reached down to caress her. "I thought these fights you kept getting in were impressive."

"Against those things?" Ash waved a hand. "No way am I going to go for impressive if something simpler works."

Misty snapped her fingers. "Hey, Ash? Remember all those cloned Pokémon? Well, these have similar markings. I wonder if there's some sort of relation?"

"Not like we can test it." Brock shrugged.

Now, where are you? Ash asked himself silently, meditating. He'd felt the alien presence twice today, and he wanted to find out what the deal with it was.

He was delving deep into his memory, searching for the mind of who could only be the King of Pokéatlantis.

Ash gave a mental snort. Maybe it is poetic justice, but I sort of wish Ho-Oh hadn't made him immortal in the process. I really should have chucked the damn orb in the sea or the Reverse World or something.

Suddenly, something flashed. A shard of memory that felt like it was his, but one he didn't remember. Could it be what he was after?

Battle. Betrayal. Familiar scene, but unfamiliar participants. Absence of friends. Loss, pain, exhaustion, witnessing of battle. Hopeless charge.

Death and renewal.

Ash staggered back. So that was what happened on New Island last time? There was an uncomfortable parallel of events there – and it added one to the list of prophecies he'd fulfilled. But it was good to know, especially as it filled in a lot of gaps about his second meeting with Mewtwo.

On examining it more closely, it looked like it had turned up at the same time as he'd restored Mewtwo. Something of a backup, from Mewtwo's memories rather than his own.

Right. Now, where's that thing I was originally looking for?

Something else twinkled in the distance. This one was a darker, purple colour. Colour? Something gave that sensation, anyway.

More hesitant this time after discovering how overwhelming a rush of memories could be, Ash gently reached out for it.

Rage. Megalomania. Frustration. But they were faint, and there was no king here. Just memories, like an echo of the real sociopathic monarch.

Which is, of course, a good thing. Ash relaxed, and scanned over what was there.

A few arguments. Diplomatic stuff, mostly. Three or four battles, though only one with any Pokémon in at all – and not many of them. And a more vivid section about the build-up to the king's imprisonment.

Makes sense. It's what he'd have been thinking about when he was possessing me.

Ash locked away the alien shard and came out of his trance, to drop into sleep instead.

AN: Okay, so this set isn't a complete run of breather chapters.

Why is it that ancient civilizations always seal away their weapons of mass destruction so insecurely that a random bloke touching it is enough to trigger its' release? Modern equivalents don't detonate if you drop them, set fire to them, shoot them, crush them, pretty much anything. They're made that way.

Also, Umbreon. She evolved earlier, but then Gary is nicer earlier. Though apparently the douche that we know and... tolerate, from the anime, isn't actually the original version. Like Kasumi(Misty) and Takeshi(Brock), Shigeru was very different to his English-language version - he and Ash saw one another as honourable rivals.

Kasumi, meanwhile, was very self-confident, flirty and thought she was the hottest thing in the room. And Takeshi often asked people when they were going to be eighteen and made suggestive comments.

You can probably see why they changed them for the US and English in general.