Chapter 276: Give Me That Plate — I'll Even Fight the Black Shiny Rayquaza!
"Please help me! Dialga!"
A faint radiance rippled across Sheena's body, mysterious energy stirring around her.
There was no mistaking it — she was reaching out, calling to Dialga!
Dialga?
Both Cynthia and Caitlin froze. What did that mean? Was Sheena somehow connected to the legendary Dialga?
"The Empathic Gift — it's an extraordinary mental power. It lets a human commune mind-to-mind with Pokémon, even across different points in space and time," Mammon explained quietly to the two women.
Both of them looked faintly stunned at that. How incredible. This world really was full of surprises. Neither of them had ever heard of this Empathic Gift before now.
As the power kept pouring off Sheena, visible ripples of time itself began rolling through the sky above Mt. Michina. A low, resonant draconic roar sounded, and a Pokémon shimmering with diamond-blue light slowly emerged from a swirling vortex in the air.
"It's here!" Cynthia's eyes went sharp. It had actually worked — she'd really summoned it?!
The dragon's cry rolled on around them as the massive blue Pokémon hovered in midair, its dignified, draconic eyes sweeping over the small group below.
Dialga — the mythic embodiment of time itself.
Its form was enormous, resembling some kind of deep-blue sauropod, its body plated with metallic sections and marked with pale blue stripes, wreathed in a soft blue radiance that gave it an unmistakable air of divinity. A vast, quiet pressure hung heavy in the air around it — and this was clearly Dialga already holding itself back; otherwise an ordinary person might have struggled just to breathe.
"Dialga. Please, help me."
Sheena seemed no stranger to Dialga — she bit her lower lip and spoke to it directly.
Dialga's eyes settled calmly on her — then, seeming to notice something, flicked briefly toward Mammon.
This human...
"The Jewel of Life — Arceus's Jewel of Life is missing. Can you help me find it?" Sheena asked, hope plain in her voice.
She truly had no leads to go on — she didn't even know when, exactly, the Jewel had been swapped. Which generation, even? All she could do was turn to Dialga and Palkia, and hope these two mythic Pokémon had some way to help.
Dialga tilted its head slightly at her words, a faint, mysterious light flickering briefly in its eyes before fading away. It seemed to be relaying something to Sheena through their mental link — her expression brightened.
"Well?" Mammon raised an eyebrow.
"Dialga says it can sense it — the Jewel of Life is still somewhere inside the temple!" Sheena said, overjoyed.
Thank goodness! Oh, thank goodness!
Finding out the Jewel she'd devoted her life to guarding was a fake had genuinely felt like the sky caving in.
"Well, that's good news. Now you just need to go find it," Mammon said, smiling.
"Right! Thank you, Dialga." Sheena let out a long breath of relief.
Overhead, seeing that Sheena had no further questions, Dialga began turning to head back to its own dimension.
"Please, wait. Dialga."
Dialga turned back, its gaze settling on the young man who'd called out.
A flicker of genuine interest crossed its eyes. Honestly, out of everyone present, this human boy was the one it found most intriguing. The only reason it had bothered to answer Sheena at all was that her ancestors had once had contact with Father Arceus, and her line had continued guarding one of his Plates ever since — otherwise, the Empathic Gift alone wouldn't have been enough to earn Dialga's attention.
But this boy was different. He carried the weight of an astonishing number of Legendary Pokémon on his shoulders — Kyogre and Rayquaza among them — and even Dialga found that a little remarkable.
Seeing Mammon call out to Dialga, the other three all turned to him, puzzled.
"May I ask you a question?"
Dialga didn't answer — just kept watching him. But the lack of any movement was answer enough in itself; if it hadn't been willing, it would simply have ignored him and returned to its own dimension without a word.
"Has anyone ever traveled back through time before? To the past?" Mammon asked, after a moment's thought.
Time travel? Was that even possible?
Cynthia blinked in surprise — then caught herself, glancing up at the mythic embodiment of time itself hovering above them. Somehow, the question didn't seem so strange after all.
Dialga's gaze bored deeply into Mammon.
"Time is the heaviest substance there is. No one may touch time."
The low, distant telepathic voice echoed in all their minds at once — unmistakably Dialga's own. Both a statement of fact, and a warning.
As the Pokémon embodying time itself, no living being understood the "weight" of time better than Dialga did. It had watched over the river of time since the dawn of creation, had witnessed the full, sprawling history of this world unfold. No one understood better than it just how heavy — and how fragile — time truly was.
Time travel sounded mysterious and wondrous, and in truth it wasn't impossible. But Dialga would never permit anyone to attempt it. Because the moment someone succeeded, even the smallest change to the past or future could send history and the future spiraling into drastic upheaval.
"Not even the future?" Mammon mused.
Dialga was being awfully absolute about this, as if it were some kind of hard line it would never cross. But Mammon happened to know better — this time-dragon was, in some sense, an absolute hypocrite. Unable to defeat a rampaging, deranged Arceus, Dialga had once sent a group of humans back a thousand years specifically to change history and alter the present. Granted, that had been a last resort born of sheer desperation.
And in the anime, when Team Rocket from a parallel timeline had trapped the twin gods of space and time in a red chain, the time-dragon and space-dragon hadn't exactly focused on escaping — they'd spent their time inside the chain brawling with each other instead. The ripple effects on space-time had rocked the entire world, causing both humans and Pokémon to be dragged backward through time — Pokémon regressing into eggs, people reverting to their childhood selves. A special case, sure, given they'd been trapped by the chain in the first place — but the two of them turning that into a brawl was still more than a little cringeworthy. As if they'd never stopped to consider how catastrophic their combined power could be to the world around them.
And besides — what if it was his own father-god, Arceus, who wanted to send someone back in time? Mammon figured Dialga wouldn't dare lay a hand on someone Arceus had personally taken an interest in.
At that, mysterious light flared in Dialga's eyes once more, invisible ripples of time spreading outward. Then Dialga seemed to "see" something — and fell silent.
"Dialga?"
"The future... is a different matter."
After a long pause, Dialga sank into thought, and the way it looked at Mammon afterward turned distinctly strange.
In truth, even as the very embodiment of "time," Dialga couldn't see the future clearly in full — but it could catch faint glimpses. Especially now, having lost even the Origin Orb, it could only make out the faintest fragments. But whatever it had just glimpsed made Dialga suspect it simply hadn't wielded the power of "time" in so long that it was starting to hallucinate.
"...?" Mammon looked at Dialga, baffled. He couldn't shake the feeling Dialga was looking at him with something less than respect.
"Human. Do not meddle with time. This world needs its history to remain correct, its progression correct, its workings correct."
With that final, distant telepathic pronouncement, Dialga gave Mammon no chance to respond, turning and vanishing back into the vortex of time. The swirling portal slowly rotated, then faded away entirely.
But that parting remark left Mammon distinctly annoyed.
"What was that supposed to mean? Does it think I'd go mess around with 'time'? What nerve — I'm a perfectly upstanding guy, thank you very much."
Mammon decided, then and there, that this dragon had no idea what it was talking about. Everyone knew he was a man who loved and respected history! And did Dialga seriously think he didn't understand how important "time" was? As if he'd ever go time-traveling around causing chaos. What if some butterfly effect wiped him out of existence in the process?
If he ever did travel through time, at most he'd just go catch a few Pokémon that didn't exist in the modern era, and then—
...ahem. Okay, fine, at most he'd also go indulge his curiosity about Wusi a little.
"..." Cynthia said nothing.
Caitlin simply wore a faint, elegant smile and stayed quiet.
"Mr. Mammon, it feels like Dialga's attitude toward you was rather unusual," Sheena said, watching him curiously. Honestly, she'd genuinely sensed something off about the whole exchange. She could commune with Dialga herself, could even call on it for help — but she knew perfectly well that whether or not it deigned to respond was entirely up to Dialga's own will. Yet here it had not only answered Mammon's questions, its whole demeanor toward him had been oddly pointed.
"Who knows. That dragon's just a little rude, honestly." Mammon shrugged. He'd already decided — next time he made a deal with Palkia, he was handing over the Lustrous Globe. Let it go full Origin Forme and give Dialga the beating of its life. That'd feel great.
"Anyway, at least we got some good news out of it. Now you just need to go find the Jewel of Life, Miss Sheena."
Mammon turned to Sheena with a smile.
"Yes — that really is the best news I could've hoped for, but—"
Sheena turned to look back at the ancient shrine behind her, and her expression fell again. The Michina Ruins weren't exactly enormous, but they weren't small either — finding the Jewel of Life somewhere in there, especially after it had been lost for who knew how long, wasn't going to be easy.
"Actually, it's not that hard, if we already know it's somewhere in this general area." Mammon pulled out Dark Mewtwo's Poké Ball.
The ball opened, and Dark Mewtwo emerged.
"Mewtwo, if you would — sweep this whole area and locate anything giving off an unusually strong energy signature."
Mammon said to it. Dark Mewtwo nodded, a deep violet psychic glow igniting across its body, invisible psychic energy spreading instantly across the whole of Mt. Michina.
And then—
"Waaah! It's here! It's really here, thank you, Mr. Mammon! Thank you, Mewtwo!"
Sheena stood clutching the Jewel of Life, its faint green glow shimmering, her whole body trembling with barely-contained emotion.
Sure enough, under Dark Mewtwo's relentless psychic sweep, the real Jewel of Life had been found in no time at all — submerged in a small lake behind the shrine.
Getting the Jewel of Life back after believing it lost forever meant more to Sheena than words could say. If it weren't for the fact that Mammon apparently already had a girlfriend, and for her own sense of propriety, she might have thrown her arms around him in a full-on hug.
"No need to thank me, Miss Sheena. Would you mind if I took a proper look at it?"
"Of course not!" This time Sheena didn't hesitate for even a second, handing the Jewel of Life over to him.
Mammon took it, studying the divine object carefully.
So this is it — the treasure formed from five fused Plates.
He couldn't help but marvel at it.
"Kyogre, come take a look at this Plate."
"Not looking. Not touching it."
"You could actually use this one, you know."
"Of course I could use it! If I got my hands on that Water Plate, I'd take on that Black Shiny Rayquaza myself, no problem!"
The fat fish's voice rang out, bold as ever.
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