Shalin, too, was picking up the pace with her own meal while Alex's onslaught of questions continued. "Exactly. I'm no fossil expert, but from what I understand, that's why they're so rare in the wild now. The world was just a different place back then. All the ones in the wild now descend from the first of their kind revived from fossils." She stopped to take a drink of her milk, which was getting low. As much as she wanted to order a second glass, she didn't have enough food on her plate for it to be worth the trouble. "If you're curious about it, Fallarbor Town is the place to go. I'm sure you could find out more there."

Then Alex asked a question that had been burning in her mind ever since she set foot in the Halls of Origin with SASHA LIVINGSTONE. "Alex, that's the million dollar question," she sighed. "I'm sure there are other places like this in the world, but I haven't been able to find evidence of a power so dangerous that it had to be locked behind eight... keys, for lack of a better term, each of which have been pretty life-threatening to retrieve. Whatever is in those Halls of Origin better be important in thwarting Meteno... or we may not have a Hoenn to defend. We might not even have... us. But to answer your question, I really don't know the answer."

"Absolutely," Shalin answered with confidence, finishing the last of her milk and a few more bites of food. "What choice do I have? Die? It's not a choice. It's survival." The explorer, being comfortable living in the wild, knew all about survival instinct. She would have gone to all these dangerous locations on her own, but this simply sped the process up. When asked about Hoenn's craziness in recent times, she admitted it could be related. "You may not be wrong. It might be worth looking into. I am beginning to wonder if what might be sealed in the Halls of Origin is in and of itself a wormhole too difficult for the League to close."

"You're not wrong there, either," Shalin replied to Alex's remark. "I've noticed some red flags about the Medallions'... last lines of defense. Remember how that Pidgeot could Mega Evolve on its own, without a Mega Stone? Well, inside the Seviper's Remains, there was a large wild Pokémon that fired a Z-Move at me. No crystal, nothing." She pushed her plate aside, procuring her phone and showing Alex a photo of Letheia, her saddled, alpha-sized Alolan Ninetales. "She came from the bottom of the Crystal Trench. Every single one of the Pokémon at the back of these dungeons was frighteningly powerful, and there was something unusual about each." The wild rider breathed a deep sigh. "Wow, that filled me up! I can't finish this or I'll be miserable."

Before Shalin could answer Alex's final question, their waitress returned with their tab and a box for her leftovers that she would have tomorrow. Heating it would be a bit of a challenge, given her Petalburg Woods abode did not have electricity beyond what her Pokémon could supply, but she would make do. "Great service," she complimented, leaving a generous gratuity. "The change is yours." Once Alex had taken care of his business with the restaurant, she answered his question at last.

"You think that's bad? Wait until you hear what Julia Davis and I found inside Mirage Palace. Invisible Pokémon, fake walls, fake floors, the whole nine yards. Without her Laprasite LAZULI LENS, we would never have done it." She went on to explain what the Palace's final guardian was like. "Fighting that was a handful. I thought I was gonna die. Anyway, let's get out of here. Thanks for hearing me out. I might call on your help again; couldn't have done it without you. Might have to come visit you in Fortree again." Once she was outside, she hopped on Starr's back, the Espeon bounding north toward her home in the woods.