Chapter Text
Granite cave was a mess. Just getting there involved crossing through a narrow sandy valley where the tide pooled into an unappetizing sludge, where angry looking Murkrows turned to scream at them for disturbing their captive fishing spot, and the bones of beached fish were still being picked clean by all the other scavengers.
And then there was the sign. The Dewford Gym’s symbol was a boxing glove, and it sat prominent on a side jutting up out of the sand. Beneath it, a bright white skull. The sign was recent, simple, and got the message across. Roxanne shook her head.
“Do they really think this’d keep out the teenagers?” Roxanne asked.
But they didn’t stop to talk about it, because there was still a bit more of a hike, and someone was in danger now, active danger.
Or more likely dead.
Then there was a small wooded area, a tangled groves of trees, mangroves or some other plant that loved the salty sand and had done long tendrils into it. Adelei found Abby’s hand on her shoulder, and Roxanne flanking her other side, walking her pointedly through the woods in a direct and straight line.
She flushed, somewhat humiliated in having to be babied- and then the smell hit her.
She made a face, holding up the sleeve of her jacket over her mouth, and Roxanne tossed her a small face mask instead which she snapped into place.
“Ugh, what is that?” Abby whined.
Roxanne looked around, and Abby looked up, waited for a few moments, then pointed where she could see Murkrow circling. “Over there,” she said.
“Come on,” Roxanne said.
They hurriedly made their way over. It was strange, despite how the mangroves were tightly wound together, and thickets and brambles and tangled vines turned it into something tragic, dark, twisted- their path was not stopped by it. It was a seamless path from where they’d been standing to where they’d gone and-
“Do you smell that?” Roxanne said, shaking her head. “Just on the other side, if my map’s right.”
Roxanne remained quiet, though her lips pressed together into a grim line.
The rest of the path was uphill, moving from the brine pools to the cliffside proper, some hundred feet up until they could turn around and see Dewford, or at least the gym and lighthouse attached, rising overtop of the mangroves and salt.
And then, set in the wall of a path that was remarkably well formed, lay a second sign. The mark of the Dewford Gym, and the skull.
And beneath it, a sign that’d been twisted and torn into a near metal pulp. Roxanne raised her other pokeball and threw it. “Armaldo, watch our backs. I don’t like the looks of this.”
What came out was a tall armored creature. It looked less like a pokemon Adelei would ever see near a city, and more like it was clad in heavy bullet proof armor, complete with a broad sweeping chitinous shield across its back. Roxanne reached out and gently rubbed the massive creature around the neck. It turned eyes, eyes protruding from either side of its head in fact, and glanced at Abby and Adelei before nodding.
“Ugh, what is that?” Abby whined. The smell got worse as they moved through the grove, worse, and worse, until it was all Abby could think about.
Roxanne looked around, and Abby looked up, waited for a few moments, then pointed where she could see Murkrow circling. “Over there,” she said.
“Come on,” Roxanne said.
A Murkrow landed in front of them, slipping out of the cave, beak glistening with fresh gore, and stared at them. Adelei made eye contact, searching it for any sign of intelligence.
Roxanne’s hand drifted down to her belt, drawing out a single pokeball, but before she could throw it, the Murkrow screamed, and from just the clearing over, a dozen Murkrow fled with griseled prizes, dappling the cliff side with refuse. The stench grew worse, wild, hellish in the air.
Roxanne wasted no time, throwing out her pokeball. A spiked creature with oversized claws landed in front of her, glanced at her, and nodded. “Keep us safe,” Roxanne told it.
The Sandslash walked alongside them as they walked up the hill. Then up, taking careful steps, the smell getting worse until Adelei’s eyes were water- and then up the mountain side, where she could see the mouth of a great cave.
They glanced this way and that, and then they stepped inside. The darkness of the cave was all consuming right up until Abby lit a flare, hot and wild, which illuminated a good distance from them.
“What is that smell?” Roxanne muttered, then took the flare from Abby and glanced down into a dark patch.
It was a cliff, next to the walking path down, some sixty feet down, where water sat rank and anachronistic, trapped and stagnant. Adelei kept herself firmly away from the edge, shuddering to herself. Little Creature sat protectively on her shoulder.
At the bottom, sitting in the midst of the brine pool, lay the corpse of a creature about half her size. It’d been yellow once, she thought, though the tide had dyed it an awful color.. Dozens of holes had been dug into its side as the scavengers had descended upon it over the course of days until Adelei couldn’t recognize it. Still, she flicked out her pokedex, pointing it into the pit.
Its humped back stores intensely hot magma. In rain, the magma cools, slowing Numel down.
“A Numel,” Roxanne breathed out.
“I’ve never seen one of those,” Adelei admitted.
“That’s because they’re only from around Lavaridge,” Roxanne muttered. “Must’ve been a trainer pokemon- but…”
Adelei, despite herself, took a step closer, and Abby’s hand came down, stopping her from going any further.
“No,” Abby said, flatly.
“We should inspect it to see-”
“I am not letting you play around with corpses,” Abby told her. “Do you even have training? Are you trained in autopsies or-”
Carefully, very carefully, the three of them made their way around the edge of wall of the cliff brine pool. The stench of metered death did not cling to them, though it made Adelei’s eyes water- and something about the procession, the way the Numel sat unattended except for scavengers that tickled the back of her head.
She couldn’t quite figure it out, but…
“...There’s no blood trail,” she muttered, watching the shadows dance in the light of Abby’s flare.
“You’re right.” Roxanne muttered. She drew out a more proper flashlight from her bag as the flare sputtered out.
“What does that mean?” Abby asked.
“I don’t know,” Adelei said. “Just… if it’d been trying to escape, there ought to be a blood trail, right?”
“Tide probably got it,” Abby said, hopefully. “I think, otherwise, the monsters would’ve just eaten it where it stood, right?”
“Alright you two, get ready for anything,” Roxanne said.
“Any chance I can stay in Dewford?” Adelei asked, worriedly.
Roxanne gave her a tired look. “Are you going to wander off and play on the island?”
Adelei scowled at her. “No, I was going to hide on the boat.”
“The safest place on the island is at our side. The second safest is if you can find where Brawly’s holed up,” Roxanne told her, grimly. “Otherwise- I don’t want to have to drag you out of whatever might happen here. It’s just a dead animal. Probably belonged to one of Magma’s workers.”
Adelei’s jaw clenched together.
She didn’t want to be here, but she got the distinct impression that Roxanne trusted her less and less with each passing moment.
“Wait,” Abby said. “Do you hear that?” She held up a hand. Adelei tried to listen, she really did, but there was too much corpse stench in the air and it was making her head spin.
“No,” Roxanne admitted. “What do you hear?”
“I hear people,” Abby said. “Or… just someone. Whimpering. They’re scared.”
Adelei held her breath and listened to the darkness at the edge of Roxanne’s flashlight.
“People?” Roxanne asked.
“I don’t know,” Abby said. “It’s faint.” Her eyes flicked back to the other two girls. “Can’t you hear it?”
“No,” Roxanne said. “Lead with Armaldo.”
Abby slipped up next to the armored behemoth. Nuisance hopped off her shoulder with a quiet clatter, taking point. Roxanne slipped behind Adelei to flank her.
“There,” Abby said. “I can hear someone crying. A girl, I think.”
Roxanne’s lips pressed together. She shook her head. “Let’s go, then.”
They pressed on into the darkness, but soon enough, after leaving the wider space of the tidal pools where the salt water had gouged acidic pools into the ground, they went to more winding paths in the darkness. Here and there, they found discarded old flares, trash, papers trampled into the ground.
“Which way?” Roxanne asked.
Adelei could still hear no crying.
“That way,” Abby pointed.
“You have good ears,” Roxanne said.
“Thanks,” Abby said.
It was only after another five minutes of walking that Adelei felt like she could hear what Abby was hearing. Roxanne held up a hand. “Do you hear a radio?”
A radio?
Abby listened deeply. Adelei could barely hear whispers, or sobbing in the darkness- but amidst it, she could hear a radio’s chirp as the signal cut off. Then a crackle as it started to play again, followed by another chirp.
“That way,” Abby pointed.
This time, the tunnel emerged into a large clear expanse. In the center lay a half finished encampment, or maybe a staging ground, Adelei wasn’t quite sure. Floodlights dimly lit up the center, hooked up to enormous batteries, and a circle had been made out of equipment and computer banks and sandbags. Brandished over it all on a few of the larger pieces of equipment was a large, prominent red M, a mountain rising through the mists.
“This must be where Magma was setting up,” Roxanne muttered.
“Weird we haven’t seen any of them,” Adelei replied. Her arms were crossed as she struggled not to shake in the pale darkness.
“They might’ve just abandoned everything,” Abby said.
“Then who’s crying?” Adelei asked, concerned.
“Hmm,” Abby murmured. Adelei glanced back at Roxanne, only to see her peering into the darkness, flashlight over every surface.
“Looks like it’s just as I thought,” Roxanne said. “Magma showed up with their normal lack of care, startled something, and had to pull out.” Then she started to walk towards the encampment, so Abby and Adelei swept up behind her, careful to keep in line of sight of the gymleader’s two powerful pokemon.
The encampment itself was well lit as Adelei had seen earlier, but the lights crackled. It wasn’t hard to see why- half of the lights were covered in spiderline cracks, and the other half just didn’t work at all. Roxanne swept through with clear training, inspecting this way and that.
It gave Adelei just enough time to take notes of her own. The tents had all been sacked or destroyed or shredded, but the crates marked food hadn’t been touched once. “Abby, find the radio,” Roxanne barked. Her voice echoed across the cave.
“On it!” Abigail saluted, listening into the darkness.
“Sandslash, find blood.” the pointed beast lumbered into the darkness surrounding the camp and began to track, inspecting bits of cloth and fabric here and there.
“What should I do?” Adelei asked.
“Stay in the camp and don’t touch anything,” Roxanne said without looking up.
Yeah. Okay. That was fair. Adelei could do that.
“You’ve gotta keep me safe, little guy,” she told her Shuppet, idly poking her way through the camp. She wasn’t touching anything, persay, but… What’d they even been looking for here?
From what she knew of Dewford, all of the mines were on the other side of the island, far away from the rest of the people, so what’d drawn them over to here? She puzzled over it before emerging towards a bank of servers still hooked up into a working battery.
Judging by the occasional thrum, they were still working. She looked up, and around, glancing here and there-
And her eyes settled onto a camera, perched in the middle of the camp.
“They’ve got a camera,” Adelei said.
Roxanne looked up. “They do?” Then she followed Adelei’s pointing. “Interesting. Do you think they caught what happened?”
“I think it’s still on,” Adelei said.
Abby furrowed her brow.
“Are you any good with computers?” Roxanne asked Adelei.
“She’s a computer scientist,” Abby informed her.
“If you can, see if you can get at that camera. I want to know what happened here,” Roxanne said. “If anyone gives you trouble- you’re part of an active league investigation as one of my deputies.”
“Aren’t you supposed to get an actual ranger for that?” Abby asked.
“Do I look like I have a ranger to spare?” Roxanne replied, annoyed.
“Okay,” Abby said. “Point taken.”
Adelei slid over to the servers, glanced this way and that, before sluggishly picking her way to a laptop that’d been knocked over. Hmmm…
She cracked it open, resting it on the server racks, and plugged it in, hesitating on the login page. This was definitely illegal somewhere.
Little Creature swam out of her clothes and peered at the screen.
“I don’t suppose you know how to hack in?” she asked the ghost.
The ghost replied by facerolling against the screen, forcefully getting the password wrong, and then sat on top of the server bank behind it.
“That’s a no,” Adelei muttered, quite relieved it didn’t magically know how to hack.
Still, it popped up the password hint. Favorite pokemon.
Corporate security really needed a workover. Granted, there were over a thousand of them…
Adelei stared up at the ceiling. Hm… Um…
“Roxanne?” she asked.
Sandslash had found something very interesting in the corner and was sniffing at it. Roxanne looked grim, and Adelei purposefully did not look at the splotch of blood, especially when Roxanne’s voice echoed about it being human. “Yes?”
“That pokemon- from the entrance,” Adelei asked. “What does it evolve into?”
“Camerupt,” Roxanne said.
Adelei tried that after looking up how it was spelled in her pokedex, and it failed.
Squinting, she tried Camerupt1, and then computer took it and opened up into the laptop’s page. There were dozens of little files.
“Oh this is so illegal,” Adelei whined.
“League investigation,” Roxanne told her. “Find the cameras.”
“Oh! I found the radio!” Abby said, from the opposite side of the room.
“Where is it?” Roxanne asked, turning her far more powerful flashlight on the taller trainer. Abby was on the opposite side of the room, at the mouth of a passage rimmed with stalactites and stalagmites like an open mouth. Nestled into the narrow ‘v’ made by two of the stalagmites was a tattered scrap of red cloth- and a radio, which Abby plucked up. It chirped again.
“Bring that here,” Roxanne said.
While that was happening, Adelei made her way to accessing the surveillance footage, ignoring the dozens of files scattered about on the screen in no particular order. Then came the other problem, looking through the footage the spanned weeks for anything of interest. With a sigh, she started from about a week ago and started playing it at five times speed.
The camp was a blur of motion, workers trickling in and out of the darkness, bringing in rocks to be scanned in a makeshift lab at the back that was now nothing more than shattered and smashed glass. The people themselves were just… people. One or two wore lab coats, and others were a red uniform, not too far from Abby’s, though Abby’s lacked the M over the left breast. Then there was a third, normal workers and cavers. She thought she might see them among the locals of Dewford if they asked around. She could figure out the hierarchy pretty quickly. The science team was being protected from wild pokemon, the people in red were protecting them, and the cavers were guides as they took samples. What they were looking for exactly, Adelei didn’t know, and didn’t care.
They were here for the doctor, after all.
Actually.
“Where are the wild pokemon?” Adelei asked aloud. The Shuppet’s eyes remained locked into the darkness, tracing things she would probably never know about. She was perfectly happy to never know about it.
This was already far out of her comfort zone, even if Roxanne insisted this was the safest place on Dewford.
“Found someone!” Roxanne barked. Adelei looked up from the laptop, and Armaldo walked towards the camp, carrying a bedraggled looking man- and even from a distance, Adelei could tell that he wasn’t one of the ones on the footage. “Armaldo, show me- Oh! It’s the doctor.”
“Is he alive?” Adelei asked. He looked so limp in the armored beast’s grip.
“He’s got a pulse,” Roxanne said. “And-”
Armaldo dropped the man back down at the edge of the camp- and the lights flickered, popped, crackled, and went out, plunging the entire camp into darkness apart from the lights of the server banks and the laptop. The servers probably had a separate back up in case of power flickers. Still-
Across the cave wall where Roxanne had come from, a set of bright pink eyes flashed in the distance. Now the only source of light being flashlights, they both swung over to that wall, where the mouth of the cave rest.
“f*ck,” Roxanne muttered under her breath. The cave still made it echo back to Adelei. “Abby, guard Adelei. We’ve got company.”
“Company?” Adelei squeaked. Little Creature’s eyes shone brightly in the darkness like two bejeweled teardrops, and she glanced down at the footage. In the time she’d looked up, half the camp in the image had gone dark, and the lab had been smashed.
She’d missed whatever’d happened. A cold sweat started to drift up her back and she flicked the footage to rewind.
But the man let out a groan, and Adelei turned to glance over at him, walking to his side instead. She put a hand against his neck, feeling over his pulse. He was icecold from laying on the cave floor for so long, but his pulse was steady, if weak.
Nuisance scurried over to rest at the foot of the camp, and Little Creature flanked from the other side.
“How’s he look?”
“My head hurts,” the man complained.
Adelei checked over his scalp for any blood, found nothing. Thankfully. She didn’t want to be cold about it, but if the doctor had a concussion, her mother would go without diagnosis for weeks longer.
“How do you feel?” Adelei asked. “What happened?”
“Those idiots stirred up the Sableye,” the man complained, pushing himself to his feet. Then he lurched, clamping his hands around his side. “Broken rib,” he whined.
Adelei hissed. “Can you walk?”
“How far into the cave are we?” he asked.
“You’ve been missing for a week,” Abby said. “How are you not-”
He jerked a hand towards the crate of food in the corner. Now that Adelei had gotten closer, the lid had been lifted slightly.
“What happened?” Adelei repeated.
“I got lost,” the man admitted. Abby shined the light near him, drawing a hiss from him as he frantically covered his eyes. Adelei could see a rust covered splotch across his side, dried blood. Not wet.
No wonder he hadn’t been able to find his way out.
The way to here had been through a series of branching caves, and only the sound of the radio had told Abby where to look. And with that broken rib- and no signal on the pokedex now that they’d left the opening…
“I found Magma and tried to get help- and then the pokemon came for them. It was awful,” the man said, wheezing. “I think I saw a few die. You’ve gotta get me out of here- I have a job, I’m a doctor-”
“Yeah, we know,” Adelei muttered. “You’re the lead diagnostician for the pokemon related injury wing in Rustboro, right?”
The man blinked, then looked her over. “Are you one of my patients? I wasn’t expecting- that was Roxanne’s Armaldo, huh? Did I really rate that big of a rescue?”
“Just… don’t strain yourself,” Adelei said, weakly, glancing back at the laptop. She’d missed the moment that it’d all gone to hell and back again, but Roxanne was back from the darkness. Weakly, Adelei pointed to the screen.
“Just take the harddrive,” Roxanne told her.
“That’s stealing.”
“League investigator,” Abby said, though her voice was weaker. “Pokemon died here. Maybe people, too. Someone needs to figure out what happened here.”
“The rest is Brawly’s job,” Roxanne said, bluntly. “I’ve got my person, and-” Adelei walked over to the laptop, downloaded the files from the server, then snatched the entire laptop, shoving it into her backpack, where it got to be cushioned by half a dozen bags of carefully packed trail mix.
“Did you find whatever was watching us?”
“No,” Roxanne replied. “I think it just wanted us to know it knew we were here. It could be anywhere, waiting to make another decision. We should leave.”
“The Sableye won’t bother us if we don’t go further into the caves,” the doctor said. Adelei glanced at him, raising an eyebrow. “I did my research before showing up.”
“They might be willing to let us go if we leave immediately. Doctor, can you walk?”
The man stood to his feet, clutching at his side. He winced, holding up a hand. “Really dizzy. Low blood pressure, I haven’t been eating the best, and it gets so cold down here.”
“Abby, carry him.”
Abby shrugged and walked over to him- then, just as easily as she’d done for Adelei, slipped him into a bridal carry.
“Ho- holy- you’re a strong one,” the doctor said, dizzily.
Adelei glanced around the rest of the camp. “Do you think they’ll come back for this?” she asked Roxanne.
“Maybe,” the gym leader said. “It depends on whether or not Brawly throws them into the sea.”
