Those who take, those who give.
It is, perhaps, a bit much to pay exorbitant amounts of cash to rent out a set of paintings from the museum. He claims charity, offering to pay for their usage and to cover the cost of the scans he wants to do, but he realizes he may be a touch too eager.
A little wild, a little strange. The museum sent a curator with the paintings to keep them safe.
It's a little silly, the King intones. He, they, are regents and ancestor/descendant of those who donated these paintings. Beautiful, large canvases of the rarely seen gods of Life and Death, poised from what he thinks are life sketches. There is ragged sketching underneath, noting colours and laying of shadow, as if done in haste. Then came the paint, the shading, the bits of charcoal and lost fibers of a Tepig-bristle brush used.
The two gods are nose to nose, separated by canvas edges, looking at eachother. Life stands at the edge of a forest and Death floats at the edge of a desert. Maybe they're talking. Maybe they're arguing. Maybe they're mourning.
It doesn't matter. The tiny paint chips he takes from the corners, easily hidden by a frame, tell him where the pigments came from. The bristles imbedded give him a local species to work off of. The paintings tell him a location, lost to hundreds of years of ignorance but laid bare before his sight.
Paldea. Northern Paldea, Southern Kalos, a strip of mountains that drift between biomes. It isn't exact, can't be with a 200 year old painting, but it is closer.
Later, after he returned the paintings with all his findings, he catches sight of himself in a piece of glass. His smile is terribly ugly. But it keeps creeping out, staining him in truth, because he is nearly giddy.
He doesn't sleep for two days. He just keeps planning, organizing, and plotting. Closer, closer, closer. He is so close.
