Mawiles brought out bad memories. When he was exploring Granite Cave back in the day, he had been dragged down into the bowels of the cave by a pack of the critters. He had been forced to escape by abandoning everything with saltine crackers and a mining helmet. Not a fun time.

"That's brave of you. Kids these days tend to avoid community service. Well, kids in general. I certainly did." Crumble levitated another Gible, before launching it next to Tsubaki's victim. If Team Rocket ever employed an army of Gibles against Dewford, Howard would have to consider defection.

"Sure. Lead the way." They left behind the Gible swarm to descend deeper into Granite Cave. Howard took out an electronic depth meter and flicked it. They were getting to the depth where the stone in Granite Cave got under more duress. By taking samples, they could check to see if the cave needed support to avoid more cave-ins. Someone had to protect Vortigern's brood.

"The battle fought here was a shame. So many murals were torn up and shattered, many of which were never properly archived outside century-old expedition journals. There's a lot of history we'll never be able to get from them." Howard shook his head, before glancing at Tsubaki's face. He kicked himself.

Dumbass. Have a heart. He looked away. "That was insensitive. I'm sorry. You all went through hell, and I'm rambling about rocks. That was rude." Distracting himself from his blunder, Howard checked his meter again, then the wall. "Let me grab a rock sample. Just a sec."

---

Hyakkaryōran Tsubaki

"Yes, the Draconids. The murals here are very similar in illustration to the ones at Sky Pillar. Trust me, I spent four months analyzing them." Howard shuddered as he remembered the time spent on the topic. Frankly, he'd rather fight in the Battle of Dewford than research the subject again. Faster way to die.

With several clinks against stone, Howard stood up and put the samples in his pocket. They had been extracted via scalpel and a rock hammer. With careful strikes and cuts, stone was extracted. Some of it was less durable than Howard expected. Stone rot. The cave had taken a beating. Not a good sign.

"The Draconids were a brilliant people. You're a smart kid. They understood astronomy better than we give them credit for, given they spent a lot of time looking up at their god. We use the charts they made and several of their methods for taming dragon-types even today. I bet even our loving sheriff used some techniques when taming his bloody Garchomp, even if he doesn't know it."

He was talking about the Draconids a lot, recently. They were quite the interesting group of people, and it was a shame that the group had died out. At least their god, Rayquaza, was still around.

How did that dragon feel, knowing the tribe it protected was now gone? Did it view Hoenn as its new tribe? Interesting questions.

Shoes clicked against stone as Howard stood behind Tsubaki, staring at the mural. Wordlessly, he took a photo of it for reference. Heb stared at it for a moment, before glaring at a Gible that had followed them down. It ran away back up the cave.

"People would be a lot wiser today if they learned from the past. And listened to our mothers." Howard added as an afterthought, before stepping deeper into the cave. "Were you in the battle? For Dewford?"

---

Hyakkaryōran Tsubaki

"Yes." Howard nodded. His mouth had tightened slightly at her quip, but it was nothing he hadn't heard before. Team Rocket hardly appreciated his abilities beyond allowing them to line their own pockets. What was the jab of a kid but another insult onto the pile? "Wholeheartedly. Why spend time discovering or learning things that we as a species learned before? I'm simply efficient. That doesn't give you freedom to stuff me into a locker, though. I won't fit."

Another foolish question. Howard should've just let it go. The Battle of Dewford was something that would affect the region for decades, if not centuries. Especially with what lied below Granite Cave. The town would be rebuilt, monuments constructed to the heroes of the time, and life would resume and the war would be nothing but a fading memory in old men and women.

Yet when the ground beneath your feet rotted, there was little you could do but run.

"Forget it. Seriously. Just call me a nerd or something." Howard sighed as they continued. Whether or not he was good with people depended on the day. He was just off. Hopefully this trip would go smoothly, so Tsubaki didn't tell Navy all sorts of fun stories about Howard and his idiocy.

"Seriously. Ignore what I said." Howard scratched his chin. "I'd like to get down to the chamber at the bottom of the cave. What's the quickest route down? The less Gibles, the better."

---

Hyakkaryōran Tsubaki

What did he say to that? 'I know' didn't seem fair, given he was the one who pried. It was simply in Howard's nature. He pried because it was his job to explore the past and glean knowledge to provide an accurate portfolio of the world, past and present.

After asking someone to relieve hell, how could Howard ask them to describe it, only to then reply with the verbal equivalent of a cudgel to the knees? He already knew everything that Tsubaki had suffered from. He knew what was in the depths. He had seen the monsters that lurked in the dark. He had seen the monsters they helped create. He and Navy had gone down there to save a trinket from behind lost forever.

He couldn't say anything about the hundreds of people who had been locked in that ship to die. Nor could he mention the paper on Dewford that he was writing to shed light on the island's past and conditions. In a rare moment of Howard Slayte's life, he couldn't simply bestow more knowledge onto people. It was simply best to remain quiet. Leave the people of Dewford to their demons.

And this girl was simply one of the many who had suffered in the battle. The wheel of history was always turning. There would always be those like Tsubaki who fought in battles to protect their homes, only to suffer the grim recollections of what had happened. Those memories? They'd never get better. They'd always claw at the back of the mind.

They certainly clawed at the back of Howard's. So he faced her angry expression with one of weariness and familiarity.

"Let's go."" Howard nodded to her, his face think and gaunt, before quietly muttering to himself. "History is a wheel. Unet gri joregnu." A swear in a language long dead.

It didn't take long for the cave to begin morphing under the duress of what lie below. Howard took samples of the mutated stone as they descended.

---

Hyakkaryōran Tsubaki

"If it's lost, that's fine. I'll simply find it again. In a way, I'm a detective, too." Illyn smiled grimly as he followed Tsubaki into the bowels of the cave. Her logic was one that Illyn found intriguing, but not acceptable. It was too pessimistic for his tastes. If you went about your work with such a lack of passion and apathy, you would never enjoy anything.

Yet he worked for Team Rocket to fuel his passion for the craft. Was he one to talk? Was anyone? Who could dictate their will on another, no matter how qualified?

No, it was simply best to have some modicum of hope. Even as that hope was choked by ropes that dragged behind Howard as he marched forward.

"We will never lose our past again. If I die, someone else will take my wisdom and pass it on. I know over seventy languages. Most of those are no longer spoken, but I've used them to keep certain tomes from going extinct." Languages were born out of necessity, not desire. It was why, in all languages but Kalosan, the word empêchement did not exist. A word designed as a justifiable excuse for not wanting to interact. This was something only a region of a developed social climate could conceive.

To communicate was the lifeblood of the world. History was no patchwork of the future, but language was a patchwork of the past.

"Hm... Howard frowns under the pressure of the rift, even though he doesn't see it. His nerves were made of bubble wrap, after all, and they were going pop! The murals on the wall are magnificent, but something else catches the archaeologist's attention.

"Huh." He tapped the wall he was facing, frowning at it.

---

Hyakkaryōran Tsubaki

"No, no. That's all the other people who control living parts of history. I'm just a scholar with a fascination for things people don't care about anymore." Howard said as he tapped the wall again. Tsubaki was right, in a way. Howard had written several papers, but not everything he had ever learned was written down. He was contradicting his own logic.

When he was younger, Howard had considered writing a lexicon of every language he had ever learned, preserving his knowledge for epochs after his death. It had been his goal, before Team Rocket had sucked him in. All that potential, redirected towards making money. It'd be sad if it wasn't so common.

He kicked the wall again.

"This wall isn't uniform with the rest of the cave. It's slight, but this wasn't formed by a natural cave formation. I thought it'd be a result of Ultra Deep Sea eating away at it, but why this wall specifically? Plus, it sounds hollow. Actually, it smells hollow."

If Tsubaki took a sniff, it would not smell hollow. It'd smell live cave. Cave marinating in the souls of the damned and Nihilego venom, but cave nonetheless. Something was off. Taking his chisel and mallet, Howard attempted to tap away at the wall, only for it to quickly crumble into dust. "Strange. Collapsed in on itself? Possible... Maybe a mix of collapsing walls and Deep Sea distortion?" Howard groaned and crossed his arms. "I hate dimensional distortions! They make everything fucky!"

Truer words had never been spoken.

"I'm tearing down the wall. Let's back up, Miss Guide."

---

Hyakkaryōran Tsubaki