The faint rumble, interspersed with a few cracks of breaking rock, didn’t last long. Just long enough for Hobbes to dash back to my side and for me to question every decision that led me to that point. We stood silently in the tunnel, one of my hands pressed against the rock wall and the other barely grazing the back of Hobbes’ disguise.
“…I think we should head back to Merraga,” I said a minute later when the rumbling finally quieted down. Potentially dangerous pokemon were one thing; a cave-in was something entirely different, a danger I had exactly zero ways to predict or survive should I stumble into one. Which meant the best option was avoidance.
But when I turned to hurry back up the tunnel, I was stopped by a purple tendril wrapped around my leg. I pointed the flashlight back at my pokemon and raised my eyebrow.
“Di, di di…” he mumbled, staring off into the darkness further down into the tunnel, and I frowned.
There was more to the connection between a trainer and his pokemon than just a pokeball, and I could more often than not understand the gist of what Hobbes was saying. But more complicated conversations required more than just my ‘trainer’s intuition’, as some people called it.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t get that,” I admitted. Hobbes paused in thought before nodding resolutely, taking a step back, and then transforming into his mimicry of me. He opened his mouth as I stared at him, wondering if his transformation had somehow allowed him to master human speech, but I was disappointed when his mouth opened and closed soundlessly. He then pointed into the darkness further down the tunnel, continuing to flap his mouth, and realization finally struck.
“You hear voices coming from further ahead,” I guessed, and Hobbes nodded in satisfaction.
“Di!”
I turned the flashlight from my partner to the darkness obscuring the way forward, illuminating the next twenty yards of bare rock with a pair of cart tracks along the ground. “Can you understand what they’re saying?”
“Di…” he responded, deflating, and I nodded.
It was suspicious to hear human voices in a place so cut off from the rest of humanity, and my first instinct was to retreat. Someone was unlikely to make it this deep underground unintentionally, and anyone intentionally hiding in a place like this was equally unlikely to appreciate visitors.
But…what if they needed help? We had just recently heard what might have been a cave-in, and I couldn’t exactly throw stones from within my glass house of exploring places I shouldn’t. If it turned out to be some other hapless fifteen-year-old trainer who managed to trap themselves under a ton of rock…
I wasn’t sure what I would be able to do to help them, but I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself if I didn’t at least try to help.
“Let’s go check it out,” I decided, and Hobbes responded with a nod as he turned to lead the way into the darkness. But before he could get more than a step away, I reached out and caught the edge of his disguise. “Let’s be careful, though. And quiet. No need to advertise our presence until we know who and what we’re dealing with.”
Hobbes gave me another, slower nod, before turning back down the tunnel. And pushing past the foreboding feeling in my stomach, I followed.
----------------------------------------
Our pace was faster than it had been before we heard the rumbling, but not so fast that we made any loud noises. The acoustics of the cave were weird.
For the most part, the only things I could hear were the faint trickling of water and my own footsteps. And near the entrance, where the tunnel was smoothly carved with few protrusions to break up the sound, I could hear a long ways, much further than if I were outside in the open air. Yet as the tunnel got narrower, the walls rougher and I was forced to duck under and step over medium-sized embedded boulders, the sounds were a bit more…confusing.
Sometimes it still seemed like all the sounds were magnified, like every brushed pebble was echoing like thunderclaps in my ears. Yet then I would step around a particularly large rock protrusion and encounter a small pool of water, droplets steadily drip-dripping into the pool with loud drops, but impossible to hear on the other side of the protrusion.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
In the end, I learned that I couldn’t trust my ears. Luckily, I had Hobbes with me, and his hearing was much better than my own. Every few minutes, after I’d send him a questioning glance, he would nod in encouragement, assuring me that we were still on the correct track to find the source of the voices.
Until finally, we came upon the source.
It was a tiny crevice in the edge of the tunnel. If I weren’t feeling so paranoid, I might have missed the split in the path, dismissed it as nothing more than a slightly deeper shadow. But with Hobbes leading me, I pointed the flashlight into the narrow passage.
“It looks tight,” I whispered.
“Di, di di,” Hobbes responded, just as quietly.
I paused, listening. “…I can’t hear any voices, but I can definitely hear something.” It was repetitive and sharp, almost like what a brass bell being struck might sound like — the noises of what I’d imagine a mining operation would make. “Can you scout the passage? Make sure I don’t get stuck?”
“Kyu!” Hobbes answered, then disappeared down through the rocks.
It didn’t take long for him return, but it was long enough for me to get nervous, sitting alone with only my flashlight to keep the darkness at bay. I startled at his reappearance but had the self-control to not make too much noise.
“Di, di,” he explained, reaching for my backpack with his purple tendrils.
I handed it over, wincing. It was good that I was unlikely to get stuck, but if the backpack were to make that big of a difference, I was sure to be in for a claustrophobic few minutes.
I led the way with Hobbes and my backpack following behind, moving slowly and carefully to keep from bumping my head, elbows, or knees too heavily against the rocks. And a few minutes of awkward climbing later, it opened up just slightly, and I realized I could finally hear the voices Hobbes had alerted me to so much earlier.
“…could you lose control like that!?”
“I’m sorry sir, it won’t happen again.”
“It better not. If it does, I’ll be finding someone else who can actually handle the geonix, and you’ll be stuck with the rest of the grunts with the sableyes!”
“…yes sir. Sorry sir.”
“Now get back to work! We need the west passage cleared for excavation by the end of the day if we plan to make this month’s quota.”
I leaned forward as I listened, struggling to make sense of what I heard. This certainly sounded bigger than just a stupid trainer causing a ruckus at the bottom of a cave. It sounded like there was an entire operation of people working in the cave system.
If there were, I could probably just leave — it was unlikely that they would need help, and even more unlikely that I could offer any meaningful assistance if they did need help. Yet something caused me to hesitate.
On the practical side, they probably had a faster way out of the cave than trekking all the way back through the mine tunnel I’d walked down. Surely they’d allow a teenage trainer to make use of their exit, which would save me hours or potentially even days of travel time to the next stop on my journey — even if I didn’t know where that next stop might be.
Yet I hesitated to call out or climb any further from my tiny passage of rock. The mine was supposed to be completely abandoned. Wouldn’t there be a sign posted somewhere if it was started again, even if it was only barely connected to the primary mineshaft? Wouldn’t I have found something online about the new operation in my research into Merraga?
Although, with how narrow and hidden the connection between the mineshaft and these peoples’ operation was, a sign or information online perhaps shouldn’t be expected. And I’d traveled far enough through the mine that I doubted I was still anywhere close to Merraga anymore. But I couldn’t get rid of the niggling feeling of suspicion in my stomach.
So once I realized there was enough light emanating from further down the passage for me to see, I flicked off my own flashlight and slowly — carefully — resumed my climb down.
Until finally I encountered a small opening in the passage and looked out into a massive cavern.
Large floodlights connected by extension cords were placed sporadically around the chamber, illuminating the massive room. Three larger tunnels branched off in almost equidistant spacing around the cavern, a strange amount of geometry for a cavern that looked much rougher than the mine shaft I had just left. Aside from a small section off to the side where there were a few tents set up, the ground was exceptionally rocky, as if the entire cavern had been only recently dug out of the earth with no intention of making it permanently accessible for humans. A few planks of wood had been laid out in lines over the rougher portions, and there seemed to be a generator next to the tents that…was it powered by voltorbs in cages?
I couldn’t see the entirety of the chamber from my vantage point, the opening to my passage in a shadowed corner of the room about fifteen feet above the ground, and despite having so recently heard voices, there weren’t any humans or other pokemon besides the voltorbs in my field of view. I slowly scooched my head further out the passage, as quietly and slowly as I could manage, until I caught sight of a man wearing a dirty suit sitting at a desk on the other side of the tents. And I immediately froze.
Because despite having never seen the logo in this life, I immediately recognized the symbol sewed into the fabric of his suit’s chest pocket: a large, red, capitalized ‘R’.
The symbol of Team Rocket.