The Wrong Shape

Chapter Sixty-Four

The Wrong Shape

Candice stared at the archival plate for several seconds after Gray said the name.

“Ursaluna.”

The word settled over the table differently than Ursaring had. Ursaring was a modern problem, something Rangers knew how to classify, avoid, relocate, or manage even when an individual was unusually large or aggressive. Ursaluna belonged to older reports, museum drawers, and the kind of regional history that had survived mostly because people like Gray kept insisting old ecological records still mattered.

Holt clearly recognized the name, though not well enough to hide the surprise that crossed her face. Lyra reacted differently. She looked from Gray to the illustration, then back to the notes from the forest, and the concern arrived almost immediately. Gray appreciated that more. Surprise was easy. Lyra understood why the identification created as many questions as it answered.

Candice leaned closer to the plate. “As in historical Ursaluna?”

“Yes.”

“I thought those were gone.”

Gray shook his head before she had even finished the sentence. “That is not a statement I would make.”

Candice looked over at him.

“Gone from modern Sinnoh records is not the same thing as extinct,” he said. “We have preserved remains, old ecological surveys, field observations, clan-era descriptions, later museum collections. Enough independent material that the historical presence isn’t controversial. What we don’t have is a confirmed modern wild population wandering around south of Snowpoint.”

Holt had already moved to the adjacent terminal. She searched the archive while Gray spoke, pulling up a list of recorded sightings, specimen notes, and later retrospective surveys. “How recent is the last good record?”

“That depends on how strict you want to be about good.”

“Very.”

Gray glanced toward her with approval. “Then old enough that this should still be a problem.”

Candice folded her arms and looked back at the illustration. “How old is ‘old enough’?”

Gray pulled one of the better-documented records onto the central display. “The later material gets messy. Some reports are secondhand. Some are based on tracks that could have belonged to unusually large Ursaring. Some are people seeing what they expected to see after reading older natural histories. If we restrict it to evidence I’d be willing to defend in a paper, we’re not talking about anything recent enough to make this feel routine.”

“That is an impressively long way of saying ‘a long time.’”

“Yes.”

Candice looked between the old plate and the modern map still spread across the conference table. The excitement that had appeared when Gray first named the species gave way to something more thoughtful.

“But if it is Ursaluna,” she said, “that explains the wetland.”

“Possibly.”

“There’s the word again.”

Gray ignored her.

The problem was that she was not wrong.

Ursaluna explained more than he wanted it to.

The old environmental boundary had bothered Gray from the beginning because the unknown Pokémon seemed to behave as though part of the forest was fundamentally different from the surrounding terrain, even though modern maps treated the whole region as one continuous system. The attack sites had clustered near a line that no longer existed administratively, and the places where pursuit stopped had made more sense against an old hydrological boundary than against any current trail.

If the Pokémon in the forest really was Ursaluna, that strange loyalty to an obsolete landscape suddenly became less strange.

Historical records repeatedly associated Ursaluna with wet ground, peat-rich soils, broad marsh systems, river margins, and terrain that modern Sinnoh had lost through drainage, agriculture, road construction, settlement, and simple ecological change. The old records did not describe the species as somehow dependent on one precise habitat type, but they showed a strong enough pattern that Gray had spent years using Ursaluna as an example whenever he lectured about how badly modern maps could misrepresent historical ecology.

The forest south of Snowpoint was not a marsh anymore.

That did not mean it had never been one.

Gray pulled another survey from the archive and overlaid it against the modern map. Older drainage zones spread much farther through the southern forest than the current watercourses suggested. Seasonal wet ground had once occupied a broad irregular band running through the same region where the recent attacks were concentrated. Several of the smaller channels had vanished entirely from modern maps, either redirected or drained, while others survived only as shallow depressions and patches of wetter soil beneath the forest floor.

Candice leaned over the table while Gray adjusted the transparency. The overlap was not perfect, but it did not need to be. Enough of the confirmed incidents sat along the old environmental zone to make coincidence increasingly uncomfortable.

“So if one somehow survived here…”

“It might still be responding to terrain features we stopped recording decades ago,” Gray said. “Soil structure. Water movement. Seasonal saturation. Vegetation patterns that persist even after the surface changes. Pokémon do not consult municipal maps before deciding where their territory begins.”

Candice followed one of the old drainage lines with a finger. “That sounds like a yes.”

“It sounds like an ecological possibility.”

She let out a long sigh. “I am going to start keeping a tally.”

“Of what?”

“Every time you almost answer a question.”

Gray went back to the map.

For about ten minutes, the entire problem seemed to become simpler.

He did not trust those ten minutes at all.

The identification explained the wetland. It explained the quadrupedal body. It explained why an experienced Ranger team kept failing to fit the evidence to modern Ursaring. It even gave Gray a plausible framework for why the Pokémon might defend a landscape humans no longer recognized as distinct.

All of that was attractive.

Too attractive.

The trouble began when he stopped asking whether Ursaluna fit in general and started asking whether the specific Pokémon he had seen fit Ursaluna in detail.

Gray closed the map and reopened the first archival plate.

Then he pulled up another.

Then a third.

The sources varied wildly in quality. One drawing came from a naturalist whose proportions were good enough that Gray trusted the body but not the finer facial structure. Another had been copied from an older clan illustration and stylized enough that almost every contour needed caution. A later museum plate was far cleaner, though it had been reconstructed partly from skeletal material rather than direct observation.

Different artists.

Different decades.

Different reasons for making the image.

Different levels of anatomical competence.

The broad pattern remained consistent.

A heavy body carried low to the ground. Powerful forelimbs. A wide head and thick neck. A posture built around quadrupedal movement rather than Ursaring’s more flexible transition between upright and four-legged locomotion.

Everything that had made Gray reject Ursaring in the forest was there.

That should have reassured him.

Instead, the longer he looked, the less comfortable he became.

Lyra noticed before Candice did. She had been reading through one of the accompanying ecological reports when Gray switched between the same three images for the fourth time.

“Something wrong?”

“Maybe.”

Candice looked up from the map. “That sounded worse than ‘maybe’ usually does.”

Gray enlarged the cleanest anatomical illustration and rotated the display slightly. “The identification still makes sense.”

“That is not what she asked.”

“I know.”

Candice waited.

Gray traced the shoulder line with one finger, then pulled up his handwritten notes from the sighting and set them beside the archival image. His field sketch was crude because it had been reconstructed from memory, but the important relationships were there: chest depth, shoulder height, angle of the forelimb, approximate head position.

“The thing we saw was built like Ursaluna,” he said. “I’m comfortable with that much.”

Candice’s eyes narrowed. “Comfortable enough to tell the League?”

“No.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Of course not.”

Gray ignored that. “The broad morphology fits too well to dismiss. But the proportions are wrong.”

That got Holt away from her terminal.

“Wrong how?”

“Not dramatically.” Gray switched between the field sketch and the historical plate. “If it had been dramatically wrong, I wouldn’t be calling it Ursaluna in the first place. But the forequarters seemed heavier. The chest looked deeper through the front. The head sat differently relative to the shoulders, and the gait transferred weight farther forward than I would expect from these reconstructions.”

Holt came around the table and studied Gray’s sketch beside the archival plate for several seconds. “Could that just be the angle?”

“Absolutely,” Gray said. “The sighting was brief, the ground wasn’t level, and I was looking through trees. Perspective alone could distort more than I’d like.”

Candice pointed toward the sketch. “And it was standing downhill.”

“That could account for some of the shoulder height.”

Lyra leaned closer to the display, eyes moving between the historical illustration and Gray’s notes. “Individual variation?”

“Possible. Sex difference too, depending on how much dimorphism there actually was.”

“Age?”

“Also possible.”

Candice swept one hand toward the collection of archival images. “And some of these could just be bad art.”

Gray glanced at the oldest plate. “Very possible.”

She stared at him for a moment. “So we currently have at least four completely ordinary explanations for why it looked wrong.”

“Yes.”

“And you still look unhappy.”

Gray closed one of the illustrations and replaced it with a skeletal reconstruction. “Because illustrations are easy to distrust. Artists simplify. Witnesses misremember. Old naturalists occasionally drew what they expected to see instead of what was actually in front of them.”

He brought the skeletal plate into the center of the display.

“Bones are less accommodating.”

The room quieted after that.

The reconstruction was built from several preserved Ursaluna specimens recovered from different parts of historical Hisui rather than from a single individual being treated as representative of the entire species. The measurements were incomplete in places, but the major relationships between the skeleton’s structures were consistent enough to matter. Gray focused less on exact size than on the architecture of the body itself: where the shoulder sat, how long the forelimbs were relative to the torso, the angle of the spine, the depth of the chest, and the way the pelvis would have carried weight through the hindquarters. Those relationships determined how an animal moved far more reliably than an artist’s outline did.

He began comparing the reconstruction against his notes from the forest, changing the viewing angle and trying to reproduce the conditions of the sighting as closely as memory allowed. A downhill stance could explain part of what he had seen. Perspective through the trees could distort the apparent depth of the chest. Snow and branches could easily have made the head look broader or lower than it really was.

But every explanation only fixed part of the problem.

Lyra stopped reading and watched him work. Candice had stopped making jokes entirely by then, and Holt pulled up a second skeletal record from another collection and placed it beside the first.

The second specimen showed normal variation, but not enough to account for what Gray remembered.

He tried a third.

That one fit even worse.

By the time he sat back from the display, the discomfort he had felt while looking at the old illustrations had sharpened into something harder to dismiss. The historical Ursaluna material was supposed to make the identification cleaner.

Instead, it made the mismatch harder to explain.

Historical Ursaluna remains were frustratingly consistent where Gray wanted them to be flexible. Across multiple specimens, the relationship between shoulder height, forelimb length, chest depth, and overall body carriage stayed within a range that made sense for the species. There was variation, of course. No population was built from interchangeable copies. But there was not enough variation for Gray to dismiss what he had seen in the forest as a bad angle and move on.

He pulled a blank field sheet toward himself and started sketching from memory.

The first version irritated him almost immediately. He erased the shoulder, redrew it lower, then changed the chest because the new shoulder made the body look wrong. That forced him to alter the forelimb angle, which in turn made the head sit too high relative to what he remembered. He erased that too.

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Lyra watched him go through the same sequence a third time before asking, “Still Ursaluna?”

“Yes.”

The answer came out too quickly.

Gray noticed that as soon as he said it.

He looked back at the sketch, then at the skeletal plate beside it. “Probably.”

Candice lowered her forehead briefly into one hand.

Gray ignored her and kept working.

The problem was not that Ursaluna had stopped fitting. It still fit better than anything else he knew. The problem was that every time he tried to make the animal from the forest sit cleanly inside the historical anatomy, some other proportion pushed back. That left him with two possibilities he disliked equally: either the sighting had been too poor for memory to be trusted at this level of detail, or the Pokémon really did differ from the Ursaluna represented in the records.

Neither possibility could be solved by staring harder at bones.

So they went back to the camera footage.

This time Gray watched it with a different question in mind. He was no longer looking for the large Pokémon itself; the cameras had already failed to give them that. Instead, he watched what the smaller Pokémon did when something unseen moved nearby.

One Teddiursa crossed the frame shortly after three in the morning. Near the edge of the image, it stopped and looked off-camera for several seconds before continuing. Later, another small figure moved through the same area. A few moments after it entered the frame, snow dropped from the upper branches somewhere beyond the camera’s view.

Candice leaned in and pointed at the screen. “There.”

Gray replayed the sequence.

The fall of snow was small, little more than a brief cascade through the branches. There was no visible source and no useful vibration in the image. A gust could have done it. A smaller Pokémon could have brushed the tree. Something large could have moved just outside the frame.

On its own, it proved nothing.

What interested Gray was the Teddiursa.

It did not startle.

It did not freeze, retreat, or turn away from whatever had happened beyond the camera. It simply paused, looked in that direction, and continued moving as though the disturbance belonged to something familiar enough not to matter.

Lyra pulled her chair closer to the table. “That looks stable.”

Gray nodded. “The association?”

“Yeah. Not just overlapping territory.”

“Probably not.”

Candice smiled faintly. “You said probably.”

Gray looked at her.

She had the good sense not to continue.

By the time they were ready to leave the Ranger station, the plan for the day had changed again.

Candice had assumed they would return to the inner wetland and try to get a cleaner look at the Pokémon. Gray refused almost immediately.

“We know enough to widen the closure.”

“I know.”

“We know where the Teddiursa are concentrated.”

“Yes.”

“We know the larger Pokémon is willing to warn us away.”

“Yes.”

Gray tightened one of the straps on his field pack. “Then I am not walking back into the middle of its defended area because I want a better photograph.”

Candice looked at him with something between approval and disappointment. “That is annoyingly sensible.”

“I have episodes.”

Lyra adjusted her own pack. “Rare, but documented.”

Gray ignored her.

The new goal was evidence they could collect without forcing another encounter. Fresh fur. Scat. A print worth casting if one appeared naturally. Shed material. Anything biological enough to test without approaching the Teddiursa core or giving the larger Pokémon another reason to escalate.

They followed the outer portion of the defended area instead.

Knowing what they were looking for changed the forest almost immediately.

A broad rub mark on one tree that would have been meaningless the day before now sat at a height and width consistent with something Ursaluna-sized pushing through the passage. A shallow depression beside an old root mass looked less like collapsed snow once Gray noticed the compressed surface beneath it and the way the vegetation had been flattened along one side. Neither clue was diagnostic, but together they began to build a more coherent picture.

The partial print near a drainage hollow was better.

Not good.

Better.

Gray crouched beside it and studied the structure before taking measurements. Part of the edge had collapsed and one side had been distorted by later snowfall, but enough remained to compare general proportions.

It did not look like Ursaring.

That much he was increasingly comfortable with.

The print was broader through the forefoot, the weight distribution different, and the overall shape much closer to what the historical Ursaluna material predicted.

Gray stayed crouched longer than the measurement required.

Candice noticed.

“You’re enjoying this.”

He looked up.

She smiled. “You are.”

Gray returned his attention to the print. “This may be a living Ursaluna in modern Sinnoh.”

“I know.”

“That is objectively interesting.”

“That is the happiest you’ve sounded since I called you.”

“I have not sounded happy.”

“You absolutely have.”

Gray ignored her.

She was right.

For all the injuries, closures, and uncertainty wrapped around the discovery, the scientific part was extraordinary. A confirmed living Ursaluna in modern Sinnoh would already justify years of ecological work. One occupying a remnant historical wetland, moving through terrain that still preserved parts of an older landscape, and apparently maintaining some kind of stable relationship with modern Teddiursa was the kind of finding researchers could spend an entire career hoping to encounter once.

Then Holt found the fur.

Only three strands.

They were caught on a rough section of bark where something large had squeezed between two trees, high enough off the ground that windblown debris was less likely to explain them. Holt stopped before touching anything and called Gray over.

He halted the others several meters back.

For the next few minutes, the discovery became almost absurdly careful. Gray photographed the strands where they had caught, documented the surrounding bark, marked the exact location, and only then collected each one separately with sterile forceps. Every strand went into its own container before being sealed and labeled.

Candice watched the entire process with unusual patience.

“You think that’s enough?”

Gray checked the last seal. “Enough for something.”

“What kind of something?”

He looked at the three tiny samples in his hand.

“Depends what the lab can recover.”

They returned to Snowpoint before dark, bringing the three strands of fur back in separate sealed containers as if they weighed far more than they did.

The Ranger station had a small field laboratory intended for routine evidence processing, injury assessment, environmental sampling, and the kind of identification work Rangers could reasonably perform without shipping everything south. It was not built for serious taxonomic work, but it was more than enough for Gray to start narrowing possibilities.

He claimed half the bench within minutes.

Candice watched him reorganize equipment with the quiet resignation of someone who had already accepted that asking permission was no longer part of the process.

“You know this is still technically my station.”

Gray pulled on gloves. “Then you should be proud of how efficiently it’s being used.”

“That was not permission.”

“It sounded supportive.”

Lyra set their field cases against the wall and gave Candice a sympathetic look that did not contain nearly enough sympathy to be useful.

Gray began with the least destructive work first.

Under magnification, the fur was immediately interesting. The strands were coarse and unusually dense, built for cold weather in a way that fit the environment well enough. Pigmentation ran darker than most of the preserved Ursaluna material Gray had handled before, though he refused to make much of that. Historical samples faded. Preservation chemicals altered color. Museum storage altered color. Sunlight altered color. Comparing fresh fur from a living Pokémon against material collected decades or centuries earlier was the sort of thing that could produce a very confident mistake if someone wanted an answer badly enough.

Gray did not.

He measured shaft diameter, checked the scale pattern along several sections, documented the medullary structure, and then pulled up archived reference images for both Ursaring and Ursaluna.

Lyra remained beside him through most of it, watching him compare one sample after another.

When Gray finally leaned back from the microscope, she studied his face for a second before asking, “Well?”

“Closer to Ursaluna.”

She leaned forward slightly. “How much closer?”

Gray turned one of the reference images toward her and tapped near the measurements he had just finished checking. “Enough that I’d stop treating Ursaring as a serious alternative unless something else forces me back to it.”

Candice had reappeared in the doorway with coffee and caught only the end of that sentence. Her expression brightened immediately. “So it is Ursaluna.”

Gray glanced toward her. “Morphologically, yes.”

That answer was apparently not satisfying enough. Candice waited while Gray returned to the microscope, then kept waiting long enough that the silence itself became pointed.

“That sounded like it had a second half.”

“It does.”

Candice sighed and came farther into the room.

The problem was not that the fur looked wrong enough to suggest another species. It didn’t. The overall structure matched Ursaluna too well for that to be the obvious conclusion, and the differences were subtle enough that Gray would have ignored them if he had only found one.

But the sample refused to fit cleanly.

The strands were slightly coarser than the preserved references he trusted most, while the pigment distribution differed enough to stand out under comparison. A few of the structural measurements also sat near the edge of known variation rather than comfortably inside it. None of that was dramatic. Any one of those things could have meant age, preservation bias, individual variation, or simply the limitations of the available reference material.

Taken together, though, they kept bothering him.

Gray reran two of the measurements before adding them to the record, then compared them against the same references a second time.

Lyra noticed. “You don’t trust the first result?”

“I trust it enough to check whether I still trust it.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“It prevents embarrassment.”

Candice took a drink of coffee. “Has that ever worked?”

Gray ignored her.

The station’s equipment could not answer everything, but it could give them a broader biochemical comparison. Gray prepared one of the strands for a basic protein assay, leaving the remaining material intact for later testing. He also submitted a sequence request through the League laboratory network for whatever genetic material could be recovered from the follicular tissue.

They were not going to get a complete genome overnight, and Gray did not need one. At this stage, he was not trying to reconstruct ancestry or establish where the individual had come from. He only wanted to know whether the broad biological relationship matched what the morphology was already suggesting. If the recovered markers clustered with Ursaluna rather than Ursaring, that would eliminate the increasingly strained possibility that they were dealing with an unusually large modern Ursaring whose appearance had been distorted by distance, snow, and expectation.

The wait took long enough that Lyra eventually put a container of food directly into Gray’s hand without interrupting what he was reading.

He looked down at it, then at her. “I am working.”

“You are also going to eat.”

“I can do one of those things much more efficiently.”

“You can chew while working.”

Across the room, Candice had abandoned any pretense of doing paperwork. She sat with her boots off and one ankle crossed over the other, watching the exchange with open interest. “Does this usually work?”

“Yes,” Lyra said.

Gray looked between them, realized the argument had already been decided without his participation, and opened the container.

Candice nodded thoughtfully. “Good to know.”

He pointed the fork at her. “Do not collaborate.”

Lyra looked entirely too pleased with herself, while Candice made no promise at all.

The preliminary lab result arrived later that evening.

Gray saw the notification before either of them did and opened it immediately. The recovered sequence was limited, exactly as expected, but the clustering was not subtle. Across the usable markers, the sample sat substantially closer to known Ursaluna material than to Ursaring.

He read the result once, then went back through the methodology before reading it again. He checked which loci had survived, how much confidence the lab assigned to each comparison, and whether contamination had been flagged anywhere in the sample notes.

By the time he reached the end a second time, Candice was already moving around the table toward him.

“So now you have to say it.”

Gray did not look away from the screen. “Say what?”

“That it’s Ursaluna.”

He let out a quiet breath. “It is almost certainly Ursaluna.”

Candice leaned back with the satisfaction of someone who had spent two days extracting that sentence from him one qualifier at a time.

Gray did not share it.

The identification had become much harder to dispute. Between the body plan he had seen, the partial track, the hair morphology, and now the preliminary sequence data, Ursaring had effectively fallen away as a serious explanation. Yet the original problem had not disappeared with it. The animal still did not match the historical material as neatly as an Ursaluna should have.

That was what finally pushed him toward Cynthia.

He called her a little after nine.

She answered on the third ring and immediately narrowed her eyes at the screen. “You look tired.”

Gray frowned. “Hello to you too.”

“You called me after nine at night while sitting in front of what appears to be half an archive. I’m allowed to establish conditions.”

Gray turned the tablet so the camera caught the Ursaluna plates spread across the conference table behind him.

Cynthia’s expression changed before he said anything else.

“That’s not subtle.”

“No.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Snowpoint archive.”

“I meant why are you looking at it.”

Gray gave her the condensed version, though even condensed it took a while. He started with the attacks south of Snowpoint and the old wetland boundary, then moved through the concentration of Teddiursa sign, the dead Ursaring female whose death clearly predated the recent incidents, and the unidentified large Pokémon that seemed to be keeping humans away from the same area. He described the sighting, the way the body had immediately stopped fitting Ursaring once he saw it move clearly enough, then brought her through the fur sample and the preliminary sequence result.

Cynthia did not interrupt once.

That was one of the reasons Gray liked discussing complicated problems with her. She did not rush to fill pauses simply because silence made most people uncomfortable, and she rarely tried to solve a problem before he had finished explaining what the problem actually was.

When he was done, she sat back slightly. “You think you found a living Ursaluna.”

Gray glanced at the sequencing result still open beside him. “I think I found something that is morphologically and genetically much closer to Ursaluna than Ursaring, while still refusing to match the historical material as cleanly as I’d like.”

“That sounds like yes.”

“Mostly.”

A faint smile appeared on her face, but Gray kept going before she could join Candice’s campaign against qualifiers.

“The reconstructions are off.”

Cynthia’s amusement faded enough for her to lean closer to the screen. “How far off?”

“Not far enough for me to call it something else. Far enough that I keep noticing. The forequarters looked heavier, the posture was different, and the proportions don’t sit comfortably inside the skeletal material I’ve checked.”

“Age?”

“Possible.”

“Regional variation?”

“Possible.”

“Historical reconstruction errors?”

“Yes.”

“Sexual dimorphism?”

“Also possible, though I don’t have enough data to make that useful instead of speculative.”

Cynthia considered that for a few seconds. “Then why call me?”

Gray pulled another document onto the screen and turned it toward the camera. “Because I need mythology that hasn’t been cleaned up into something modern field guides find comfortable.”

That changed her expression immediately.

The amusement disappeared.

Now she looked interested.

Gray had access to scientific archives, old ecological surveys, museum records, and the enormous body of historical material attached to fossil and regional research. Cynthia had spent years working inside a different category of evidence entirely: shrine records, oral traditions, religious texts, village stories, myth cycles, and folklore collections assembled by people who had no interest in taxonomy but sometimes preserved behavior, geography, and appearance more accurately than later scholars expected.

A lot of academics distrusted that material because metaphor made them uncomfortable.

Gray did not.

He shifted the tablet slightly and said, “Anything involving unusual Ursaluna outside Hisui. Especially solitary individuals. Different morphology. Different behavior. Anything where somebody wrote down ‘bear Pokémon,’ and later scholars started arguing about what they actually meant.”

Cynthia leaned back in her chair, already thinking through possibilities. “Region?”

“I don’t know.”

“That is extremely unhelpful.”

“I’m aware.”

“Time period?”

“Also unclear.”

She closed her eyes briefly. “Wonderful.”

Gray waited while she looked away from the screen, clearly sorting through years of material in her head. After several seconds she stood, reached for something off-camera, and said, “Give me an hour.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know.”

The call ended before he could say anything else.

Candice stared at Gray from across the room. “You just assigned the Champion homework.”

“She likes homework.”

Lyra was still eating and did not bother looking up. “That may be the most Cynthia thing you have ever said.”

Gray returned to the records.

With the species identification becoming increasingly difficult to deny, he shifted away from appearance and into ecology. If this really was Ursaluna, then there had to be some way to make its presence south of Snowpoint fit the region’s history, even if that answer was ugly.

He pulled old Ursaluna distribution records first, then peat deposits, northern specimen sites, historical wetland surveys, and climate data from the last several centuries. The broader picture became more plausible the longer he worked. Ursaluna had once occupied habitats that no longer existed in the same form, and northern Sinnoh had changed enough that a surviving individual would not necessarily be living in terrain a modern field guide still labeled as suitable.

That was helpful.

Then he ran into lifespan.

Gray had not wanted that question yet.

The modern data was poor almost immediately. Captive observations were too sparse to establish a meaningful maximum, and historical accounts rarely followed individual Ursaluna long enough to tell him much. A few sources implied that established adults could occupy the same territory for decades, but even those records were frustrating. Later sightings might refer to the same Pokémon, or to another Ursaluna taking over the same range, or simply to storytellers collapsing several individuals into one familiar local figure.

He found no credible reason to believe an Ursaluna should live for centuries.

He also found no clean upper limit that let him confidently rule out unusually long life.

That irritated him more than he wanted to admit.

Unanswered lifespan questions made every continuity claim dangerous. A village story might describe one Pokémon across three generations. It might describe three Pokémon that looked similar. It might compress seventy years into two hundred because stories did that. Or it might describe one genuinely long-lived individual nobody at the time had the tools to age properly.

Gray leaned back and rubbed at one eye.

Candice looked up from the paperwork she had been pretending to finish. “Find something?”

“Mostly uncertainty.”

“Your favorite.”

“No.”

She smiled and went back to pretending to work.

Cynthia called forty-eight minutes after the first conversation.

Gray answered immediately.

She had changed rooms.

Behind her were shelves. A lot of shelves. Not modern office shelving either, but tall wooden cases packed with binders, old volumes, archival boxes, and several uneven stacks that looked as though they had been organized according to rules understood only by Cynthia.

“I found three things,” she said.

Gray sat straighter.

“Two are probably useless.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“One might annoy you.”

“Better.”

“It’s outside Sinnoh.”

That got Candice’s attention immediately.

Gray looked at the screen. “Where?”

“Kitakami.”

The name sat oddly against everything he had been thinking about. Not because Kitakami was impossible, but because nothing in the evidence had given him any reason to look there.

Cynthia glanced down at something off-screen before continuing. “It isn’t a scientific account. It’s a later regional folklore collection compiled from older local stories. The author knew about historical Ursaluna and tried to compare some of those descriptions against Hisuian records.”

Gray leaned forward. “What descriptions?”

“A solitary bear Pokémon. Ursaluna-like, but repeatedly described as not matching the familiar Hisuian depictions.”

Gray stopped moving.

Candice came around the table without being asked.

“How similar?” Gray asked.

“The source is frustrating.”

“Of course it is.”

“It was compiled too late for the original witnesses to be interviewed, so the writer is relying on older stories, local retellings, and secondhand descriptions. But several details repeat often enough that I wouldn’t ignore them. The animal is described as unusually dark, solitary, and distinct enough that later readers apparently argued over whether it was actually Ursaluna at all.”

Gray opened a blank search field while she spoke.

“Any indication there was more than one?”

“None that I saw. Everything points either to a single animal or to one recurring figure in the stories.”

Gray stared at the screen for a second.

That was worse.

Or better.

He had not decided.

Candice was standing directly behind him now. “What’s the citation?”

Cynthia read it out slowly.

Gray entered the archive reference and waited while the catalog loaded.

A holding record appeared.

No local copy.

No full scan.

Only a secondary citation and a catalog entry for a regional folklore volume housed outside Sinnoh.

Lyra leaned closer to the screen. “Kitakami?”

Gray nodded.

Candice looked from the record to him. “You think it came from there?”

“I think someone there may have described something that looks like ours.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No.”

Gray opened the archive request form.

“That’s why I want the original.”