"Please, Arceus — let it be something good."
David muttered under his breath, watching the screen cycle through its sequence.
He had developed a rough sense of the system's patterns over time. First draws tended to lean toward better results. It was a tendency, not a guarantee, but it was part of why he had been willing to commit ten thousand points to a single legendary pull. Whatever came out, this was his first legendary-tier draw. Something reasonable had to come of it.
Ten thousand points on a single pull. The number sat uncomfortably in the back of his mind. If this somehow went badly wrong, that would sting.
The screen flashed faster than usual. Legendary draws seemed to take longer than the standard ones — or maybe it just felt that way when the stakes were higher. David waited, watching.
Then the flashing slowed.
A beat of silence.
And then gold — brilliant, overwhelming gold — flooded his entire field of vision.
David blinked against the brightness. Then he let out a breath.
Gold. Whatever it is, gold is fine.
"Yes!"
The light faded, and David looked at what had appeared.
He stared.
Floating before him was a stone — dark, almost entirely black, its surface studded with jagged orange-red crystals that caught the light in a way that seemed almost alive. It was roughly the size of his fist, irregular in shape, and in most other circumstances would have looked like an unremarkable piece of ore.
Except for the faint halo shimmering around it. And the crystals, which were too perfectly formed, too precisely arranged, to belong to anything ordinary.
What is this?
David's first instinct was confusion, and then, almost immediately, a flicker of genuine indignation.
Ten thousand points. I saved ten thousand points for a rock?
He turned it over in his mind, searching his memory. It wasn't a Mega Stone — the colouring was wrong for that, and Mega Stones had a different feel to them entirely. It wasn't a Z-Crystal. It wasn't anything he could immediately place. It didn't look like the kind of treasure that justified a gold rating. It certainly didn't look like something that should be sitting above the Sacred Ash he had just drawn.
He pulled up the item description before his frustration could go any further.
Origin Stone: An ore of extraordinary power. According to legend, this item contains a fragment of the divine power of the Sinnoh Lord — Arceus himself. A Poké Ball crafted from the Origin Stone, known as the Origin Ball, possesses the ability to subdue even the deities who govern time and space.
David read it twice.
Then he read it a third time, more carefully.
The Sinnoh Lord. That title — used by the ancient people of Sinnoh to refer to Arceus, the Creator Pokémon, the one said to have shaped the universe from the void. In the lore of the Pokémon world, Arceus sat at the apex of everything. No Pokémon, no force, carried more weight than that name.
And this stone, according to the system, contained a piece of that power.
The Origin Ball. A Poké Ball crafted from this stone would be capable of capturing Dialga and Palkia — the deities of time and space respectively. If that claim held any truth, then the Origin Ball sat well above a Master Ball in terms of what it could accomplish. The Red Chain, which Team Galactic had constructed from the power of the three Lake Guardians — Mesprit, Azelf, and Uxie — to summon and restrain Dialga and Palkia, was considered one of the most powerful items in recorded history. An Origin Ball operating on Arceus's divine power would be in that same tier, if not beyond it.
Master Balls existed in this world. But they had their limits. Against truly legendary Pokémon — proper god-tier entities — a Master Ball could restrain them temporarily at best, not permanently. The Origin Ball, by contrast, was supposedly purpose-built for exactly that situation.
A gold rating was not excessive. If anything, it might have been understated.
David exhaled slowly and let the indignation go.
Alright. Fair enough.
Still, he found himself in an awkward position.
Both items from this draw — the Sacred Ash and the Origin Stone — were genuinely remarkable. And neither of them was something he could actually use right now.
Sacred Ash was a last resort. A life-saving item. He would hold it and sincerely hope he never needed it.
The Origin Stone was more complicated. Making a Poké Ball from it wasn't a matter of handing it to the nearest craftsman and waiting. Standard Poké Balls were made from Apricorns, shaped and treated through a specific process. Using raw stone as the base material instead was an entirely different discipline — one David was not equipped to attempt himself, and one he couldn't easily explain to someone else. The origin of the stone, why he had it, why he needed a ball made from it specifically — none of that had an easy answer. He would need to understand Poké Ball crafting far more deeply before this stone became usable.
He thought, briefly, of the GS Ball from the original series — how Ash had brought it all the way to Azalea Town to consult Kurt, the Apricorn Ball craftsman, and even Kurt had been stumped. A Poké Ball made from unusual materials was apparently not as simple as it sounded, even for specialists.
David shook his head.
"So after all that, I walked away with some very impressive items — and the only one I could actually use today is the Dragon Fang, which I already have plenty of at home."
He smiled despite himself, the expression somewhere between wry and genuinely amused.
It wasn't a loss. He knew that. Both the Sacred Ash and the Origin Stone had real value — extraordinary value, in fact — and they would matter enormously when the right moment came. But timing was everything, and neither of them was the immediate power boost he had been hoping for.
With that complicated mix of feelings settled somewhere in his chest, David put everything away and turned toward home.