Fifteen minutes later I was in a chair, on a porch, with a cup of iced barley tea in my hands, and my head pinging back and forth like a tennis ball between the two old married men as they bickered good-naturedly with each other.

  I was convinced now - this was not the Volo from the game, unless he had gone through a complete personality change.

  Which, I suppose, could have been possible, depending on the time that had passed. But I wasn’t getting the same megalomaniacal vibes from the old man who was grumbling about the benefits of hot versus iced tea.

  But still, his name was identical to the Volo from the game, surely it couldn’t be a coincidence?

  Eventually, the two men stopped bickering, and turned their attention towards me.

  “So, Alina.” Volo said, eyes glinting. “Where are you from?”

  “A little island, off the coast of Unova.”

  “Oh? Why did you come here to Sinnoh?”

  “Uh, I did some work with Professor Rowan and-”

  “Rowan! Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I remember when he was just a little pipsqueak!”

  “Bah, you couldn’t have been much older than a kid yourself.” Hiro said.

  “So you’re calling me old?”

  “Look in a mirror dear, you are old. So am I.”

  My smile was plastered onto my face as I despaired if I would ever get out of this conversation.

  “So,” I said awkwardly, trying to get a word in. “Were you all born here?”

  “Me? Oh no.” Hiro said with a laugh. “I was born all the way over in Solaceon Town. Moved here about sixty years ago to live with this old rascal.”

  “Rascal? Why, I remember you were the one to-” Volo cut himself off with a sigh.

  “I’ve lived here my whole life.” He said primly. “Celestic Town, born and bred.”

  “When they say somebody was raised in a barn, they’re talking about Celestic folk.” Hiro said in a faux-whisper, earning himself a smack on the arm from Volo.

  “You’re sitting on the porch of the house where I was born.” Said Volo. “Does it look like a barn to you?”

  I took a drink of my barley tea, because the shape of it was in fact fairly barn-like.

  Desperately trying to get the conversation back on track, I smiled and put the tea down. “So your family’s been here a while then?”

  “Hm? Oh yes, basically forever.” Volo said. “Have you ever heard of the Ginkgo Guild?”

  Eagerly I nodded.

  “Well apparently my family used to work for them. I don’t know exactly what happened but one of my ancestors made enough money to settle down here.”

  “Really? How? When?”

  The two men shared an amused look.

  “Easy there.” Hiro said.

  “Like I said, I don’t know a lot about it.” Volo said with a frown. “I wish I did. I mentioned that I’m interested in genealogy, but there’s a rather suspicious gap. About two hundred years ago, the family records just stop.”

  “Dear, I keep telling you - it’s not a conspiracy.” Hiro sighed, and looked at me to explain. “My dear husband here believes that somebody went through and destroyed the records of his family tree back then.”

  “How else do you explain it then?”

  Hiro rolled his eyes, and laid a hand on his husband’s arm. “It’s not a conspiracy. The reason there’s no records from back then is that they just simply didn’t keep records.”

  “But they did! There’s plenty of records from the Ginkgo Guild about their sales and profits!” Volo turned to me. “You asked about my name. Well, the reason I said that my family apparently used to work for them was because I found a piece of paper that was one of their records, back from when the Galaxy Team first arrived.”

  My stomach twisted as I thought about the Galaxy Team and their modern, evil incarnation. But there was nothing I could do about it now.

  “The paper I found was actually a receipt from the Galaxy Team, and it’s a bill of sale from the Ginkgo Guild, signed by one Volo. I’ve never seen the name anywhere else, and I’ve checked with the records office - it’s not a common name in Sinnoh at all. Only a handful of people have it, and they’re all from my family.

  “But whenever I look up old Ginkgo Guild records? Nothing. No Volo. It’s like he never existed, never showed up in their documents. No other mentions of him selling anything to anybody, whether it be the Galaxy Team or not.

  That… could be because he didn’t actually spend all that much time trying to make sales. I thought, with some guilt at the fact I couldn’t explain his family’s history without looking like a maniac. Instead, he was more concerned with trying to control Giratina.

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  And how would I explain that to current-day Volo?

  “But genealogy and family history? They just didn’t keep track of that, not like we do today.” Said Hiro.

  Volo sighed, and slumped a little in his chair.

  “And so we come to the crux of the issue. My family has lived in Celestic Town for as long as I’ve been able to figure out - even before it was known as Celestic. In this house, even, although it’s been added onto and repaired over the years. But nobody, not even my grand-niece, has been able to figure out why we’ve lived in Celestic Town.”

  I frowned. “Does there need to be a reason?”

  “Well… no. But it’s odd - when everybody else in that time period was settling down either in Jubilife Village, or in one of the two Clan holds, why choose Celestic? Why a little settlement out in the middle of nowhere that didn’t even have a name? It’s suspicious, is what it is.”

  Opening my mouth, I was going to comment on it, but something else he said caught my attention. “I’m sorry, Grand-neice?”

  “Oh yes.” Volo had a twinkle in his eye. “She’s quite the spitfire. Obsessed with history and archaeology like me and my sister. Her name’s Cynthia, perhaps you’ve heard of her?”

  /^\

  The next hour or so passed in an awkward haze of small talk.

  In retrospect, it really shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise that Volo was related to Cynthia. The man he had been named after could have been her genderswapped twin, and fans had always speculated that the two were somehow connected.

  If both Cynthia and the new-Volo were related to the Hisuian Volo, then by simple logic they should have been related to each other as well.

  Still, learning that Cynthia, the most terrifying Trainer I’d ever met, had a doting grand-uncle? That was more than a little strange to learn.

  Besides that revelation, I unfortunately didn’t learn much else about Volo’s backstory. Or rather, I learned a great deal about his family’s history, but nothing that helped explain his unique name, or anything else about what happened after Pokémon: Legends Arceus.

  Mildly famous grandfathers, weird family tree quirks, and a couple of funny stories about Cynthia as a child.

  Most of what he said was interesting in a theoretical sense, but wasn’t relevant to me. Although I did keep a couple of those Cynthia stories tucked away, just in case she ever decided to surprise me again like she had back at Snowpoint City.

  Still, I walked away with a little bit of new information, and a stomach full of very good barley tea and snacks they had brought out.

  As soon as I stepped off of their porch, waving to the two kindly old men, I remembered something rather important about Celestic Town.

  Namely, that it only barely counted as an actual town.

  One of the buildings in the town doubled as a general store, and I managed to pick up some supplies for the road. It turned out that the shop itself was actually the bottom floor of a house, and the elderly couple who lived upstairs ran the shop in their free time.

  It seemed that houses doubling as civic buildings was something common in Celestic Town, because I also learned from them that not only did Professor Carolina, Cynthia’s grandmother, live here, but her home was the Celestic Town Historical Research Center.

  Which was, of course, closed because she was out of town on some more errands, so I couldn’t ask her any more questions about Fallers or the history of Sinnoh - or if she had any knowledge related to the original Volo.

  Something I really should have asked the professor last time I saw her, now that I think about it.

  As well as something I should have asked Cynthia, but I consoled myself with the memory that she had completely surprised me in Snowpoint, and I hadn’t even been thinking of Volo or Legends Arceus at the time.

  Much to my disappointment the Celestic Town Ruins were also shut down, mainly because the ruins were quite literally in Professor Carolina’s backyard.

  So with nothing to do, I rented a small room in the local bed-and-breakfast (which again was somebody’s house) and got to planning the next stage of our journey.

  /^\

  “Well, Celestic Town’s been a bit of a bust.” I said to Jira as she sat staring at the map I’d laid out in front of us.

  “Who knows when Professor Carolina is going to get back. I’m not opposed to the idea of waiting around for her, but…”

  I looked up and around me. The entirety of Celestic Town was before us… all ten buildings.

  Jira snorted, and I smiled.

  “Exactly, you get it. So I think it’s about time for us to move on. Ted and Lucas would make fun of me for not staying longer, but they don’t have to know, do they?”

  I rubbed her horn.

  “So I see us as having two options. We could either cross Mount Coronet at the pass here,” I tapped the map. “Or head back down to Solaceon Town, then continue south-bound until we get to Hearthome. It would be a bit of a hike.”

  Jira stared blankly at the map for another long minute, then leaned forwards with her mouth open.

  Sighing, I snatched the map back before she could shove it in her mouth, and began folding it up.

  My little Larvitar looked at me with a profound expression of betrayal, but I reached out and bopped her on the nose.

  “No.” I said. “Bad Jira. We don’t eat just anything, okay? Stick to food and dirt.”

  She grumbled. She’d been getting bolder recently, and while I was happy to see her exploring her horizons, I was also having to be increasingly wary about what she was eating.

  I’d already had to turn some jeans into loungewear because she’d snacked on the hems.

  Still, I’d rather not backtrack if I had to. I supposed that no matter which way I went, I would be going backwards. If I crossed the foothills of Mount Coronet, I would end up in Eterna City. Otherwise, I would be going back to Solaceon Town.

  The other option was to try and find somebody who could fly me to Hearthome City. Or teleport, but I preferred to avoid that if I could.

  Or…

  My gaze was drawn up to the top of Mount Coronet. The top of it was covered by the clouds, but I knew Spear Pillar was there. The ruins, waiting for… what? Me?

  I scoffed, and put the map back into my backpack. If the ruins were waiting for me to go up there, they would be waiting for a while. What did I know about climbing a mountain?

  Although… I had heard that you didn’t need any kind of oxygen for climbing Mount Coronet. It was tall, sure, but not insurmountable. Obviously people had to go up there in order to create the Spear Pillar ruins in the first place, and the ancient Hisuians didn’t have access to oxygen tanks.

  It would be stupid for me to try and climb a mountain without any preparation. But maybe there were paths already up there? Maybe if I did some more research, asked around, there would be people who had made the journey before.

  Hearthome City was actually one of the closest cities to the mountain, so maybe somebody there would be able to help me.

  Making the trip up would be like… a pilgrimage of sorts. Every protagonist in a Sinnoh/Hisui game had made their way up to the summit, so maybe I should as well.

  I was no protagonist, I wasn’t going to save the world, but something about it just felt right.

  Smiling, I looked down at Jira. “So, what about it?” I asked her, not even realizing that I’d made up my mind already.

  “Want to climb a mountain?”