Episode 3: Mystery of Mount Steel

After escaping Alakazam at the lake, the group took a moment to breathe near some cliffs overlooking Mount Steel. It was Scytti who noticed something floating above the cliff: a young Beldum, scared and alone, calling out for its mother. She flew up to meet it, and after a bit of cautious back and forth, coaxed it down to the group. The little one explained that it had no idea how it ended up so far from Mount Steel, that the beeping was giving it a terrible headache, and that it had tried praying to Arceus for help with no luck.

What it had done instead was draw Arceus's symbol into the ground nearby. When the group looked closer, though, something was off. The symbol had extra lines, three triangles, and a central dot that made it look more like an eye than anything they had seen before.

The Beldum couldn't explain the difference, only that this was how Arceus's mark looked around the mountain. That's how they were taught. Nobody had a good answer for that. The Beldum took a particular liking to Scytti and ended up clinging to her arm, somehow making her feel more solid and grounded in the process. With their passenger Combee to worry about and a mountain to climb, the group decided to find the frontier outpost Yunara had mentioned and drop off their passengers somewhere safe.

The guards at the gate, a Lucario and a Floatzel, gave them a bit of a hard time before letting them through. The group introduced themselves as Team ScarfShield. Inside, they met Mama Pouch, the outpost's Kangaskhan supply keeper.

She runs the trading post with the energy of someone who had seen everything and still somehow cared deeply about all of it. She immediately took the Combee in her care, literally, her little one pulling them one by one into the pouch. She made it very clear that everyone would be going to bed at a reasonable hour, no exceptions, not even for the outpost's commander and captain. Sir Toto managed to trade the special honey from the Honey Tree for a Rainbow Bean, after some firm negotiation and the addition of five gold pieces to sweeten the deal.

Captain Honchmire the Honchkrow filled them in on the situation. Every known entrance to Mount Steel was sealed off. The Skarmory were out of control, attacking anyone getting near the mountain. And Sir Galahad, who had gone to scout the waterfall bridge, hadn't come back. The group decided rest was the smart move before anything else.

They paid a visit to the outpost shrine to Arceus: a small, humble space looked after by Sir Brennan, a Poliwrath priest with a very round head and a very serious expression. When he saw Meloetta, he went quiet in a way that suggested he recognized something about her, not from meeting her but from having read about her. He brought out his own tablet, the Fire Tablet, and explained how they worked. Hold it, say the incantation, and whatever attack you make takes on that element. Seventeen types, seventeen tablets, and if all of them were ever brought together, the ancient texts said Arceus would return.

The group's Water Tablet was one. Sir Brennan possessed the Fire Tablet, another. One was believed to be somewhere inside Mount Steel. One had supposedly been kept safe in Kaleido Haven by Kingsly. And the slot under the Honey Tree had already been emptied: the Grass Tablet taken by someone, though nobody knew who.

To show them, Sir Brennan held the Fire Tablet close and said "Arceus, grant me fire!", then drove his fist into a training dummy across the yard. It exploded on contact. The incantation was simple. The catch was that the tablet had to be held in hand or pressed against you. No bag, no pocket. Direct contact only.

Meloetta tried doing the incantation silently with the Water Tablet, mouthing the words with no sound behind them. Nothing happened. But when she channeled the intent through a spell and followed it with a strike, something came out. Something was there, even without a voice to carry it.

As they were leaving, Sir Brennan watched Meloetta go with that same careful look. She doubled back on her own to ask what he wasn't saying. He didn't give her much, just a quiet suggestion that she think about the people she was traveling with, and that some things weren't ready to be said yet. It wasn't exactly reassuring.

Morning came and Yunara said her goodbyes for now. She was going up the mountain to commune with Articuno at the top. She couldn't take the whole group with her that way, but they agreed to meet at the summit regardless. The group's priority was to find a new shield fit for Aegislash, which they hoped to find inside the mountain. With the Beldum as their guide, Team ScarfShield headed for the waterfall path where Sir Galahad was last seen.

They heard the battle before they saw it. At the bridge, Sir Galahad was completely surrounded by Skarmory, holding them at bay with a gravity aura that kept the steel birds pinned to the bridge and unable to fly at him properly. What followed was a long and messy fight.

With Galahad's gravity field in play, Skarmory got knocked off the bridge through a mix of cold-imbued slashes using the Water Tablet, powerful smites from Sir Toto, and at least one moment where Meloetta grabbed a Skarmory mid-dance and simply waltzed it off the edge. Petal kept everyone on their feet through several very close calls.

By the end, Sir Galahad was battered but standing, and deeply grateful. He confirmed the shield may be inside the mountain, near the Metagross, the Beldum's mother, who was not doing well. His advice was simple: if she's asleep, work around her. Do not pick a direct fight.

He also mentioned almost in passing that the Steel Pokemon inside had been drawing an alternative version of the Arceus symbol all over the walls and muttering that Arceus had come back, which nobody could explain. Then he pointed them at the waterfall and fired them through it with a push of gravity.

Inside, the mountain was warm and humid, the walls threaded with faint glowing minerals. The group rested briefly in a natural hot spring near the entrance, then followed the Beldum upward through the passages. It took the better part of an hour. Several spike traps got Petal repeatedly, jolting her awake just long enough to look confused before she nodded off again mid-walk. A pair of Aron spotted the group at one point, stared, and quietly disappeared into the dark. Their eyes were blue. The group left them alone.

Eventually they reached the main chamber. The Metagross was huge, sleeping heavily on a raised stone platform ringed with the same Unown symbol pattern they'd seen at the Honey Tree. The slot in the center was empty. The Steel Tablet was already gone.

Scytti carried Meloetta up to the platform without a sound. Meloetta placed the Water Tablet into the slot. The vision came back, sharper this time. Something at the very top of the mountain was pulsating outward in all directions, on purpose. The mountain was the center of it. She pulled the tablet out and signaled to Scytti, who moved immediately and sliced the Aegis shield free from the cavern wall in one clean cut.

The Metagross shifted in her sleep but was left undisturbed. On the way up through the higher passages they crossed paths with a wandering Metang, disoriented and complaining about a headache. It latched onto Petal for an enthusiastic and slightly alarming hug before the group managed to carry on without making things worse. A few more spike traps later, light appeared ahead.

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They came out onto the open summit and found Yunara standing in front of something none of them had any words for. A massive metal structure hovered above the plateau: ancient, clearly mechanical, and covered in script that none of them could read. A giant dish jutted from one side. The alternate Arceus symbol was carved into the ground directly beneath it. Meloetta's Detect Magic picked up evocation energy from the dish and a faint transmutation signature. Whatever this was, it had traveled here from somewhere else.

A good hard knock on the underside popped open a hatch with a ladder. Inside was a sealed room full of screens, blinking lights, and buttons none of them understood. The screens showed live images of places they recognized: Kaleido Haven, the Forests, the Ruins, the Outpost, the Honey Tree, all apparently being observed from above.

In a back room, Meloetta found four small spherical capsules she couldn't quite place, which put her in mind of the Combee and the Vespiquen, and sitting on a desk as though someone had simply left it there: the Grass Tablet, stolen from the Honey Tree. Here, inside this thing.

Sir Toto, not quite sure what else to do, settled into one of the strange chairs, closed his eyes, and quietly said a prayer to Arceus. To everyone's surprise, a voice answered. Systems flickered on across the room, lights blinked to life, and the red button started pulsing.

When Toto tried to get it to shut the research down, it asked for an override password. When he asked who could give him one, it said "Operative." When he asked who the operative was, it told him the researcher wasn't available. Every question led to another dead end.

At some point during the back and forth, Meloetta started pressing random buttons and accidentally triggered something that started a countdown from sixty. That was more or less where things stopped being a conversation and started being a problem.

Everything after that was a mess. Scytti cut through cables. Sir Toto sprayed water across the control panels and put out a spreading fire at the cost of shorting out half the systems in the room. Meloetta tried to freeze critical components with a cold blast from the Water Tablet.

Doors started slamming shut one by one as more and more fire broke out. Sir Toto smashed through a glass panel near the end and made just enough of a gap for everyone to scramble out as the structure locked itself down around them. They made it onto the plateau as the countdown hit zero. One of the strange metal dishes fired a beam of deep purple and red that tore outward from the summit and arced straight toward the frontier outpost below.

The machine pulsed out a strange wave of energy that rolled across the entire plateau. Meloetta and Sir Toto were able to resist, but Scytti, Miss Petal, and Yunara were not so lucky. Team ScarfShield stood at the top of Mount Steel with the Aegislash shield recovered and the Grass Tablet in hand, watching the red aura creep over their three companions.