"Thinking about cutting to the chase, eh?" Henshin said wryly over his shoulder to the pair (but eying the curious shark a little longer). "Well. I can't blame you. That stone is too dangerous to be a prize," he grimly declared.

"I was hoping it'd be as simple as detecting it and swiping it, too," the moth explained as he scooted things around, and plugged what looked like some sort of microscope into an outlet on the workbench—busywork largely unrelated to the discussion, basically. "It's actually kind of interesting. These new emeralds have erratic wavelength properties... At some moments, they're producing chaos rays, others, gamma rays, x-rays, UV rays..."

He shuffled over to a suitcase and started digging for something.

"That said, it's extremely hard to track them. The only reason we were able to before was because there were two of the emeralds directly side by side—the one Hoji found, and the one your human friend made off with." He stood and turned around, holding a cube-shaped box. "It's kind of complicated, and I don't fully understand it myself, yet, but, in simplest terms: the emeralds' patterns are random, but they're also synchronized, so when two are close enough to interact, a sort of cancellation occurs that leaves only a stable, strong, more easily traceable signal."

This in no way answered Sheffer's question, and he knew it. He nonetheless held out the small, glossy-orange, round-cornered 10cm x 10cm plastic box to the hedgehog as if it would help. It had a single flip-latch and push-button release on the front, and could open like a clam shell.

"Well, for starters, open it," Henshin instructed. "And give me my box back. It's expensive."

If Sheffer did as asked, he would find what looked like the yellow Chaosol Emerald within. It was kind of odd, perhaps, since Henshin was supposed to have left it in his vault back on South Island.

"It's a fake," the moth quickly added. "I tried to synthesize it from the real one in hopes of better understanding its radiation, but it didn't quite come out ... right. But!" He raised a finger with an excited look. "It reacts viole—vuh-vrr... very... obviously when it's close to the real deal. Get slightly under a hundred meters from the real emerald, and you should feel a slight tingling sensation from the stone."

He quickly dug something else out of his luggage.

"You can keep it in this fashionable-but-sensible Wild Fanny Pack," he declared proudly and thrusted the shameless Wild Badge merch toward its surely-equally-proud new owner.

"Nonsense, child...!" dismissed the doctor, fluttering up next to him and giving him an awkward pat on the shoulder in hopes of being comforting. "The security on Vince's property is so high that not only is it virtually impossible for you to get mugged, but you'll also be lucky to even get to search for the emerald at all!"

Well, that was a new obstacle. It seemed that the thought just struck Henshin at about the same time as he said it. He fittingly adopted a constipated expression and frowned in consideration of their new challenge.

Dr. Henshin scratched his forehead and wondered. It really was slightly complicated.

"As I'm sure you know, this entire resort is on top of a huge building," he explained, albeit a little quietly and slowly, as if thinking it through as he talked. "A lot of the infrastructure is below the surface... You just need some way to get down there."

He hovered over to his nightstand and sat on the edge of his bed. There was a brochure with a map on it. "I noticed earlier that there's a large section of the resort that's off-limits. It looks like a storage facility or something," he pondered aloud, tapping buttons on his wrist computer. His goggles lit up soon afterward. He was surfing the web.

"Mm... ah. It's a warehouse. Used to store fireworks... Seems there was a well-publicized accident a few years ago that shut it down! Perhaps there's a way to access the underground through there," he concluded hopefully.

Not yet done foisting things upon them, he soon rifled through his suitcase and produced yet more goodies: Little handheld radio communicators... branded with the Wild Badge logo. Of course.

"Take these Wild-Talkies with you. I'll have some sort of distraction ready so that you boys can get to the warehouse without being detected. Just say the word whenever you have your party together and you're in position."

((OOC: Hope no one minds the small jump forward here.))

It wasn't long before the trio arrived at the bottom floor of the hotel, walking through the busy lobby and out onto the street. Instantly, the sights overtook Sheffer once more, but they lost some of their significance, the light of the day having dimmed the lights from the night before.

Relying on his memory, he lead the other two through the streets. Soon, a large fence that stretched out in both directions faced them at the end of a road barely walked upon. Beyond it, Sheffer could see the standing structure of the warehouse, the windows cracked and a majority of the top half of the highest story simply gone. Scattered remains of fireworks surrounded the area beyond the fence, some even still littered about the street nearby. The words DO NOT ENTER repeated themselves dozens of times in the form of yellow strips, wrapping around the fence in warning.

"We're almost there, doc," said Sheffer, lifting the Wild-Talkie to his mouth, connecting with the moth on the other side. "Big mess too. Looks like this place was bombed..."