Next quest

"Oh? Well before we can even think about working together on something like that you'll need to defeat me in a battle, can't have my business partner be weak after all." she said excitedly before taking her place on the floating platform. I totally forgot to mention it but the Mt. Battle platforms were all strung together with metal walkways and otherwise just floated in place thanks to some sort of science I wasn't knowledgeable in. It made each and every battle iconic in it's own way as it was like you were truly battling above the clouds.-

In truth the only time you actually got above the clouds in Mt. Battle was after area eight as area nine and the summit were at the top of the volcano itself. Anyways the battle if you even want to call it that was a joke to complete since her pokemon were only level sixty to sixty five. Even with a type disadvantage Tank alone was all I would have needed to chew up her whole team, she didn't have that anyways since her team was comprised of a Wobbuffet, Wailmer, Ariados, Azumaril and Wigglytuff.-

Four tanky pokemon and a toxic staller was her whole battle strategy which was fairly good in this scenario when there was no limit to switches unlike league battles. As she quickly found out though Hades and Tank were the worst possible pokemon to try this strategy on. Tank could literally shed off the poison and return it to sender because of his innate ability and Hades just had to withdraw his smoky body back into his keystone to get rid of the poison. Not that it would have made any difference to begin with as in pure stats Tank and Hades had her team beat by a landslide.-

"I should have guessed that I wasn't ready to take on an elite trainer, much less one with variant pokemon like that. Well whatever, so you wanted me to give you information when I got it right?" She said before we swapped contacts and my quest notified me on it's completion. I walked into the rest area between area six and seven to register my place before directly flying off Mt. Battle on Rune to head back to the Hub. I accepted my quest rewards in the form of two item tickets, one skill ticket and one ability ticket.-

I went ahead and used the item tickets which netted me an ether and yet another pokenav which was entirely useless for me since I already had one. 'Well I suppose I can trade it to Makan for some stuff since he'll no doubt be eager to take it apart and see what makes it tic. Who knows if I'm lucky he'll even figure out how to upgrade the PDA with what he figures out.' I thought with a shrug before moving on to the skill ticket.-

'Hieroglyphics? Really? Looks like RNGESUS wants me to specialize in ancient writing and archeology it seems.' I thought mirthfully at the result. I would like to point out that at this exact moment I had three out of the five league documented ancient writing systems and was only missing ancient Hoenn and Unknown runes to complete the set. Out of all of them however the only one I actually wanted was the Unknown runes as they held actual power when written properly. Nobody was sure why but the strange letter shaped pokemon had a deep mystical power in groups that was recorded to even terrify godly legendries.-

Unknown runes were the result of ancient people learning how to harness some of that power by writing down the image of the pokemon in a special way that no one alive remembered how to. Yes it wasn't as simply as just writing down the pokemons likeness and boom, special effects. If I could learn how those runes were written and master the skill I could easily create items that bordered on the miraculous. The best known example of such an item is the Sinnoh plates that each hold a deep connection to Arceus itself and had Unknown runes written on the back that spoke of creation.-

In the hands of a pokemon or person that held the plates typing the plates showed their worth as that pokemon or person got a not inconsequential boost in power. You might then be wondering why no one uses the plates like this most of the time then and the answer was simply that the plates had this weird mystical ability to choose their owners. If a plate didn't want to belong to someone it simply used a moment when they weren't being observed to vanish like they weren't there to begin with.-

This strange property of the plates meant that the vast majority of them were lost to time as they simply vanished after getting dug up. Moral of the story, Unknown runes were something awesome and I wanted them. I saved the ability ticket for when we got back to the Hub which would only take an hour or so so I turned my attention to the next part of the chain quest in the meanwhile.

[Chain Quest conditions established!

Description: You have established yourself in Orre and set up a rudimentary information network but more work yet remains!

Objectives: Discover regional anomalies (2/3), Find the lost ruins in the desert(0/1), Investigate the Relic forest shrines Guardian, Investigate the secret of Cypher.

Rewards: 2x item tickets, 1x ability ticket, 5x Exp ticket, Crime upgrade+, (complete all objectives to unlock the next chain quest)]

To be honest this next part of the chain quest was rather bothersome as it wasn't even slightly cut and dry in what exact it wanted me to do. The objectives looked straight forward but they weren't in truth as I had no idea what counted as an anomaly yet clearly I had already found two of them. Finding a set of ruins was also not as simple as just flying over the region and looking for anything that stuck out. The relic forest shrine Guardian objective I had expected so I ignored it in favor of frowning at the last objective.-

'Who or what is Cypher? Is it the shadowy group making moves on the region using shadow pokemon? If so why would my quest want me to investigate them when as far as I know they have no connection to the quest at all?' I pondered in confusion. It made no sense but an objective was an objective so I'd still do it.

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