The girl's name was Marissa. Her brother was Mateo. The two of them ran this shop alone. It had belonged to their parents, but their parents were gone now.
Mateo had inherited the family trade, but not, in his own estimation, his father's gift. He knew the techniques. He'd studied every manual his father had left behind. His hands could produce glass Pokémon that most people would call beautiful.
He didn't put them on display.
To Mateo, his work was technically competent and spiritually dead. The Pokémon his father carved had looked alive. Not "realistic" in the way a good copy looks realistic, but alive, as if the glass itself remembered what it felt like to breathe.
Mateo couldn't reach that. The gap between skill and soul was one his father's notes couldn't bridge.
The few items in the shop, plain bottles and bowls, were the only pieces Mateo considered honest. Functional glass that didn't pretend to be art. Everything else sat in the back, unsold because he refused to sell work he wasn't proud of.
Ash's group stepped inside and met Mateo. He was a few years older than them, around Brock's age. Earnest eyes, calloused hands, and the specific weariness of someone who knew exactly what excellence looked like and couldn't produce it.
"If your father had the skill, didn't he leave behind instructions? Technique manuals, sketches, anything?" Ash asked it like it was the most obvious question in the world. A heritage craft without documentation was a heritage waiting to die.
Mateo shook his head. "He did. I've studied everything he left. I can reproduce his methods down to the smallest detail. But I can't reproduce the result. The life in his work came from something he saw. A Pokémon. If I could see it too, I know I could reach his level."
"What Pokémon?" When the conversation turned to Pokémon, Ash's posture changed. Glass carving was outside his expertise. Pokémon was not.
"The Crystal Onix."
Ash searched his memory. Shiny Onix was gold. Regional variants didn't include a crystal form. Nothing in his extensive catalogue of species and subspecies matched the description.
"What makes it different from a normal Onix?" Serena leaned forward, curious, her gaze wandering between Mateo and the glass displays.
"Its entire body is transparent. Like it was carved from living crystal. Other people's glass sculptures look like Pokémon. The Crystal Onix looks like a Pokémon that is glass. It moves. It breathes. It exists as the thing my father spent his life trying to capture in his art."
Mateo's voice carried the intensity of someone who'd been chasing a vision for years. "If I see it, I'll understand what he understood. I'm certain of it."
"Where is it supposed to live?"
"The Crystal Cave, somewhere on this island. But we've searched for a long time. Never found it." The defeat in his voice was old and familiar, a weight he'd been carrying long enough that it had settled into his posture. "Most people on the island think it's a myth."
"Your father saw it, though."
"He did. And his work proved it."
That was enough for Ash. He'd seen what Mateo's father had created through Mateo's descriptions and the quality of even the "failed" pieces sitting in the back room. If the Crystal Onix had inspired that level of artistry, it was real. Legends didn't produce craftsmanship.
"We'll find it for you." Ash tapped his chest.
Misty poked his side and whispered near his ear. "Did you forget why we're here? We don't have time for detours."
A fair point. Lugia. Cynthia. Team Galactic. The mission list wasn't short, and Ash had already skipped the Southern Cross to save time.
"One day," Ash said. "We were going to rest here anyway. One day won't change anything."
He'd thought about this. The journey to Shamouti Island was long. Without flying, they'd be stopping at islands regardless. And the pace of travel had shifted since Lapras and Serena joined.
Ash needed to train Lapras, and Serena needed exposure to what a real journey looked like. Rushing to Shamouti in a single flight might save time and find nothing. A slower pace through the archipelago might surface information about Lugia or Team Galactic that a flyover would miss.
And helping people was what Ash did. He'd never been capable of walking past a problem that had a solution.
Besides, there was a secondary motive. If the Crystal Onix was real and they found it, Mateo could carve Serena's Fennekin sculpture as thanks. She'd refused to let Ash pay. This way, she'd get what she wanted without either of them spending a coin.
An hour later, the group stood before the mouth of a cave. Ash had mapped every rumoured sighting location with Mateo and Marissa's help. This was the last one.
He closed his eyes. Faint azure light traced across his skin as Aura Power expanded outward, filling the cave's interior with invisible perception. Every tunnel, every chamber, every living thing within range resolved in his mind like an unfolding blueprint.
Serena watched with open fascination. The first time Ash had done this, she'd been confused. He'd walk to a location, close his eyes, stand still for a few seconds, and then describe the entire area as if he'd spent hours exploring it.
Misty had explained Aura Power to her during a quiet moment at sea. The explanation hadn't made it less astonishing. A human wielding the same kind of sensory ability as a Lucario was the sort of thing you read about in legends, not witnessed on a Tuesday afternoon.
He's not just a strong trainer. He's something else entirely.
Ash's eyes snapped open. Surprise lit his face.
"Found it. Let's go!"
Found it? Does the Crystal Onix really exist?
The same thought crossed both girls' minds. Then Ash was moving, and they scrambled to follow.
The cave swallowed the light within the first ten steps. By twenty, the darkness was total. Misty couldn't see her own hand. Serena couldn't see the ground beneath her feet. Only Togepi seemed pleased, chirping with delight from Misty's arms, its small voice bouncing off unseen walls.
Ash reached out and took both their hands. Left hand, Misty. Right hand, Serena. He walked forward without hesitation, navigating by Aura alone.
Misty's fingers laced through his with the easy comfort of routine. They'd done this before.
Serena's heart nearly stopped.
His hand was warm. His grip was steady. In the complete darkness, she couldn't see whether he was holding Misty's hand too, but she could guess. Of course he was. He wouldn't leave his girlfriend unguided to hold someone else's hand. Both hands were occupied. It was practical.
Knowing that didn't stop her face from burning in the dark. Her pulse hammered so hard she was afraid he'd feel it through her palm. Her skin was heating up, and every step made the contact feel more significant than it had any right to be.
Ash noticed none of it. His focus was locked on the Aura map unfolding in his mind.
What Aura Power showed him wasn't colour or detail. It was shape, density, and energy. Three-dimensional models rendered in his consciousness, stripped of visual information, revealing only structure and the forces contained within. He couldn't tell what colour the Crystal Onix was. He didn't need to.
What he'd detected was impossible by every known standard of the species.
An Onix. Living in water.
Onix carried a quadruple weakness to Water. Even non-damaging contact with water was uncomfortable for the species, the way walking on hot coals was uncomfortable for humans. An Onix didn't just dislike water. It avoided water the way fire avoided rain.
And this one was submerged in it.
More telling was the energy signature. No Rock-type power. No Ground-type power. Instead, the body carried Ice-type energy, dense and cold. Whatever this creature was, it shared Onix's silhouette and nothing else.
A mutant. The Crystal Onix.
He led them deeper. The cave narrowed, then opened, and the darkness cracked.
It wasn't daylight. It was moonlight that had never seen a moon. The glow came from the walls themselves: massive crystals, translucent blue, jutting from the rock at every angle. They weren't the glass products from town. These were real. True crystal, the kind that would make a gemologist weep. Each one emitted a faint, steady luminescence that filled the cavern with cold blue light.
The space was enormous. Crystals carpeted the walls, the ceiling, the floor near the edges. Fist-sized pieces alone would sell for tens of thousands. The larger formations, some taller than Ash, were worth numbers that stopped feeling like money and started feeling like abstractions.
A hidden fortune, sitting under an island that sold glass souvenirs above it.
Misty took in the cavern with wide eyes. Then her gaze drifted sideways and found Serena's hand still clasped in Ash's.
A flicker behind her green eyes. She said nothing.
Serena caught up to reality a few seconds after the crystals stole her attention. She looked down, saw the hand that was still holding Ash's, and let go as if she'd touched a hot stove.
Her eyes found Misty's. Guilt was written across her face in bold font.
Misty smiled.
Serena smiled back. Awkward, apologetic, certain she'd been caught.
She definitely saw that. In Misty's position, Serena knew she'd have been furious. Holding hands with someone's boyfriend in the dark, regardless of context, was the kind of thing that started fights. The fact that Misty wasn't saying anything made it better and worse at the same time.
Before Serena could formulate an explanation, the lake at the centre of the cavern moved.
A ripple. Then a swell. Then the water erupted.
A shape rose from the lake like a living glacier. Massive. Serpentine. Its body caught the blue crystal light and multiplied it, refracting the glow through a form that was transparent from head to tail.
Every segment was visible through the surface, as if the creature had been carved from a single block of living ice.
It was an Onix. The shape was unmistakable: the boulder-segmented body, the horn, the heavy jaw. But that was where the resemblance ended.
This Onix was larger than standard. Its body held no stone. It was crystal through to its core, the same blue as the formations lining the cavern walls. Light passed through it and came out coloured, painting the water beneath it in shifting patterns of azure and white.
The Crystal Onix.
A living, breathing Pokémon that looked like every glass sculpture in town had been given a heartbeat and told to rise.
Misty and Serena stared in silence.