Several months passed.
Ethan was almost six now. Carolina had no idea what to do for his birthday—honestly, she considered herself lucky he hadn’t asked where his mother was yet.
He was still small enough that his feet didn’t quite touch the floor when he sat in a chair, still young enough that most people spoke around him instead of to him. The b had adjusted to her great-grandson in quiet ways—low stools added, fragile artifacts moved slightly higher, sharp corners padded without comment.
Eevee y beside him on the floor, curled into a warm, watchful ball.
Carolina was sorting artifacts when she noticed something wrong.
Ethan was sitting near the restricted shelf.
Holding one of the tablets.
Her breath caught.
“Ethan—” she said sharply, crossing the room and gently but firmly taking the tablet from his hands.
“Hey, Grandma! What’s the Royal Giant?”
Carolina froze.
Slowly—very slowly—she lowered the artifact she’d just taken from the boy’s hands onto the table.
“…What did you say?” she asked.
Ethan looked up at her, one hand still resting on the tablet, the other hovering just above it as if he instinctively understood he shouldn’t move too much right now.
“The Royal Giant,” he repeated. “It’s mentioned a lot. Is it a Pokémon? Or a person?”
The room went quiet in that deep, hollow way Carolina had learned to fear.
“That tablet,” she said carefully, measuring every word, “is written in a nguage no one has been able to transte.”
Ethan blinked. “Oh.”
He gnced down again, his fingers resuming their gentle tracing without conscious thought. “That’s weird. It’s pretty easy.”
Her heart stopped.
“Ethan,” she said, crossing the room in three quick steps, “tell me exactly how you’re reading that.”
He looked up, confused by the sudden intensity. “With my fingers?”
Carolina knelt in front of him so fast her knees protested. She took his hands—not pulling them away, just holding them still.
“Show me.”
Ethan nodded and pced his fingertips back on the stone. He moved slowly, sounding the words out as he went. Not perfectly—he stumbled once and corrected himself—but the meaning was unmistakable.
“‘The Royal Giant must rest between uses,’” he read aloud. “‘If overworked, even it will break.’”
Carolina felt dizzy.
That single line contradicted three published theories and an entire branch of myth-based interpretation.
“…Ethan,” she whispered, “…what nguage is this?”
Ethan hesitated.
Right.
To him, it was obvious.
To them… it wasn’t.
“It’s called Braille,” he said carefully.
Carolina frowned. “I’ve never heard of that dialect.”
“It’s… not really a dialect.” Ethan shifted slightly. “It’s a touch nguage. You read it with your fingers.”
Carolina stared at him.
“That is obvious,” she said slowly. “The entire academic community is aware it is tactile. What we do not know is what civilization developed it.”
Ethan blinked.
Civilization?
“It’s for blind people,” he expined.
The silence that followed was heavy.
“For the blind,” Carolina repeated.
“Yes.”
She looked down at the tablet as if seeing it for the first time.
A script carved deliberately into stone. Raised dots. Structured patterns. Uniform spacing. Designed to be read without sight.
“…No recorded ancient society is known to have developed an accessibility script,” she murmured. “Not one.”
Ethan immediately regretted opening his mouth.
Right.
To them, this wasn’t common knowledge. It wasn’t something a parent might casually teach their child.
This was—
Lost.
Carolina’s eyes snapped back to him.
“How do you know its name?”
Ethan’s brain scrambled for something believable. Then, because he was almost six and very tired of overcomplicating things, he just shrugged.
Carolina stared at him for a long moment.
No aura fre.
No psychic pressure.
No distortion in the air.
Just Ethan.
“…Psychic bullshittery,” she muttered under her breath.
Eevee tilted its head.
And that, officially, was what it was filed under.
“Alright, grandson. It’s time for bed,” Carolina said, her voice far too calm.
====
Carolina did not sleep that night.
She tried.
She turned off the lights. Lay down. Closed her eyes.
Her brain refused.
Because what Ethan had just done—what he had casually, absently, without realizing the magnitude of it—was crack the code.
Not partially.
Not symbol-by-symbol guesswork.
He had read it.
The “lost script.” The one carved into temple pilrs, etched into ruined tablets, pressed into fossil casing molds. The one schors had beled Pre-Sinnoh Glyphic Pattern Type-3 because no one had the faintest clue what it actually was.
He had run his fingers over the raised dots in her archive and said, in a voice halfway between bored and curious:
“The Royal Giant must rest between uses.”
She had stopped him there.
Stopped him.
Because her hands had started shaking.
Royal Giant.
There was only one entity in Sinnoh’s mythological corpus that fit that description.
Regigigas.
Carolina now sat at her desk, surrounded by transcription sheets.
Raised six-dot clusters that had once meant nothing now aligned cleanly into structure. Repetition. Grammar.
It wasn’t decorative.
It wasn’t mystical abstraction.
It was a tactile writing system.
Designed to be read by touch.
“Why did I stop him?” she muttered, dragging a hand down her face. “I need more than a sentence to go off of…”
She looked at the clock.
“I need to call Cynthia.”
====
Ethan was cuddling Eevee in his bed.
From the outside, he looked perfectly peaceful—small hand buried in warm fur, bnket kicked half off, breathing slow and even.
In truth, he was staring at the wall.
So.
Something kind of crazy.
He could, in fact, summon his legendaries.
That part wasn’t the problem.
The problem was the rules.
He had to meet them first.
Which meant—
“So,” Ethan muttered quietly, “I need to convince Aunt Cynthia to take me to Snowpoint Temple.”
Eevee stirred in its sleep, mildly offended at being disturbed.
Ethan sighed softly.
