Caligo Plot

It's a wide world out there, but everything has its place.
Everything is in balance... life and death, man and Pokémon, water and air.
There are roles we all must play. Play well, and the harmony keeps.
Don't, and the balance breaks like waves on the rocks.

Ten years ago, an esteemed expert of archaeology, Professor Horace Clancey, hit the newspaper headlines with a discovery. Evidence, he claimed, of an ancient Pokémon which could change the world. He told the world he had found a fragment of a fossil buried in the Forbidden Desert which was one of several that could, if correctly rebuilt, produce a magnificent long-dead Pokémon.

Two months later the professor disappeared and his colleagues informed the region his findings had been a complex hoax from which he was now on the run, having earnt a lucrative amount of money from the publicity and publishing. Everyone assumed the professor was now living a life of luxury abroad from his ill-gotten gains and eventually the police gave up the search for him. Meanwhile, the fossil was dismissed as a mere rock implanted with Pokémon matter to fool the researchers, but was still kept in a museum warehouse while the whole story was quickly buried and forgotten.

One year ago, that museum was broken into and the professor's long-forgotten artefact was taken. The police found no leads but, due to the now-established worthlessness of the rock, it was considered no real loss. There were, after all, plenty just like it on the Ithiel mountainside. Yet a small team within the police force did not let the matter go despite the dismissal of the case by the police bosses, and spent many hours investigating the theft. The break-in was largely labelled as a petty theft by treasure hunters who still believed the fossil was real, but one determined detective maintained that it went deeper than that.

The Eight Diamond syndicate was on the move.

Dogged across the decades by the authorities, the Eight Diamond organisation was a slippery criminal gang who'd always managed to escape the long arm of the law. For years they'd made their blackened name through typical crimes - Pokémon theft, bank robbery, tournament rigging, black market sales - but then, eventually, several of their bosses were caught and, largely leaderless, the group seemingly shut down and vanished for good.

Except after the break in, pinned to the wall of the museum was a playing card. Not the eight of diamonds, no. A single black joker. Most dismissed it as a joke. Detective Inspector Rhodes saw it as a connection too provident to ignore. His theory was the Diamonds had been reborn.

Lately, crime in Caligo has been on the up. Pokémon thefts are high, robberies are more and more frequent in and what's more, strange geological movements are being detected all around the region. For months, nobody could work out how they were connected - the few culprits caught seemed to have no link to any criminal network. Yet Detective Inspector Rhodes remained convinced that the crimes and the museum theft had something to do with the Diamonds. But he, heavily outnumbered by sceptics within the police force, was forced to dedicate only his own time to working on the case.

Scouting around, Rhodes received a tip off a couple of months ago. Apparently, not only had the Eight Diamonds restarted, but they had been reformed as the Black Jokers, and simple profit-making petty crimes were no longer their lifeblood. Rumour had it they were after something much, much bigger. But still the rest of the force maintained that the group had disbanded for good, and Rhodes's efforts were frustrated.

So Rhodes mounted a campaign himself. Trainers, breeders, shop owners and rangers are all being called upon; anyone who might have information regarding the resurrected Black Jokers. He's convinced the Jokers are going to strike again, but nobody knows just what it is they're after.

Now it's your turn to help.