Volo and Giratina
Unbeknown to most who knew him, Volo hailed from an old, wealthy family based in western Hisui. He grew up surrounded by old Hisuian faith, raised to believe not only in deities of time and space, but an overarching god referred to as (among many other names) Arceus. While the old faith was not necessarily uncommon among Volo’s generation, belief in Arceus had been declining across the region for many decades, largely oweing to the influx of individuals and clans arriving to Hisui from other Japanese regions.
Volo took a keen interest in Hisuian legends from a young age, which his family initially encouraged. His ancestry stretched back to the most ancient of Hisuian peoples, and so his family had at their disposition an array of records, relics, and artefacts ranging from centuries to over a millennia old. He was fascinated not only by Arcues and the governers of space and time, but by the banished deity of blights, destruction, and chaos, known now as Giratina.
The old Hisuian faith rarely distinguished the creation trio by their names; this is a more modern development. Instead, these deities were viewed principally as three of Arceus’s one thousand ‘arms’, which it had used to shape the universe. Each deity was an extension of Arceus’s will rather than independent being in its own right.
The legend followed that, before the universe was formed, Giratina’s purpose had always been to warp and destroy - to erase what Arceus was not satisfied with, so that it could be reshaped anew. Once the universe had been molded as Arceus chose, it cut off this third, violent arm, sealing it away in an abandoned realm. Volo became preoccupied with this myth in early adulthood, to the point of questioning and unpicking it. If Arceus had banished this violent arm, why did destruction persist in the current world? If Girtaina could destroy where Arceus could create, did this not make them opposites, and thereby equals?
And thus Volo grew to entertain an alternate interpretation of the mythos: that Giratina was not a subservient arm of Arceus, but a god in equal opposition, which presided over a distorted realm of its own. Even as a purely theoretical concept, it was impossibly blasphemous, and Volo’s views met with outrage. But he was too curious and too contrary to relent, even in the face of his family’s horror. He was ostracised by his local community, who believed him corrupted and turned to madness by Giratina itself, and his family ultimately cast him out.
Volo took to wandering Hisui in the years thereafter, never settling anywhere. He kept his family origins a secret, taking on the guise of a Ginkgo merchant, but continued to delve into Hisuian legends . Being cut off from his family only deepened his conviction in his own beliefs. He fixated increasingly on Giratina, convinced that it was his mirror, and that their fates were somehow twinned together. He had been treated as an extension of his family, not an individual, not an equal - just as Giratina had been branded as a mere arm of Arceus. He’d stood against his parents, his ‘creators’, and been banished for it. He was as Giratina was.
And so he set out to find it. There were places in Hisui where alternate realms lay a little too close together - he’d read about them in his family’s ancient records, and he had all the time in the world to seek them out. If he could only commune with Giratina, speak with it, then he might finally find what he was looking for - a being which understood him perfectly.