Despite our anger, we didn’t immediately charge into the cavern and challenge the Rockets to battle. Aside from being likely suicidal, such a tactic wouldn’t even be particularly helpful; the sableye was no longer being punished, and it was unlikely that he would die if he hadn’t already.
Pokemon were remarkably resilient, ghost pokemon especially so — at least against physical and long-term injuries. While pokemon centers were an absolute necessity when this world’s culture centered around pokemon fighting against each other in battles to the near-death, most pokemon were hardy enough to survive all but the worst injuries on their own. But ‘surviving injuries’ was very different from ‘recover perfectly from injuries’, and pokemon centers ensured those pokemon who loved to battle could continue to do so throughout their (hopefully) long lives.
So the sableye would hopefully be okay for a while. Because as much as I wanted to punish the Rockets, I had no intention of sacrificing Hobbes’ or my own life to do so.
Hobbes and I explored until we found a depression behind a protruding rock against the wall of the tunnel, a nook large enough to hide the both of us should someone come walking through the tunnel even with floodlights. It took some flexibility and awkward contorting to fit the both of us inside the nook, but eventually we managed to get situated. And we settled in to wait.
----------------------------------------
Twenty minutes later, I was starting to go a little stir-crazy.
The light from the cavern didn’t extend far into the tunnel, and it was pitch black in our little nook, my eyes unadjusted even after twenty minutes of darkness. A rock dug into my lower back, and shifting only caused even more rocks to poke me from other angles. My left leg was asleep, and my right calf felt like it was starting to cramp. And next to me, Hobbes wriggled in his own discomfort, his little shadow-claws digging into my side.
“Quit fidgeting,” I told him in a low voice. I wasn’t too concerned with being overheard; I could only make out every third word that was said within the nearby cavern, and not even that whenever the geobat resumed his punching into the wall.
“Di, kyu!” he responded, wiggling his claws into my sides even harder, and for the next five minutes we jostled each other like siblings in the back of a car, only settling down after realizing how loud we’d gotten.
I sighed. I’d figured they wouldn’t be making non-stop trips to empty bags of diamonds in the crates, but with how rapidly the sableyes were finding diamonds during my peek, I’d worried they would be passing through the tunnel sooner rather than later. And with how difficult it was to get into our little nook, we couldn’t afford to wait to hide until someone was already marching toward us.
So, after sighing again, I accepted the discomfort and pulled out my phone to distract myself. Brick that it was, it still had over a forty percent charge from when I’d charged it before leaving home three days earlier, so I wasn’t too worried about prematurely draining it the rest of the way. I pressed a few buttons, navigating through the menu, until the game ‘ekans’ came up and I began to play.
It wasn’t the most engaging of games, barely a step above ‘pong’ in terms of entertainment value. But it was amazing what the human brain could latch onto when it was trying to distract itself.
Or rather, human and pokemon brains. Hobbes shifted until he could also see the screen, cheering after each successful berry eaten and jeering whenever I crashed into the wall or my own tail.
There was a lot more of the former than the latter. Two minutes in, I had already beaten my previous high score, and two minutes after that I was still going strong with double the previous number. Hobbes’ cheers slowly quieted as he looked at the phone with suspicion, but I didn’t give it any thought. I didn’t know what it was — the darkness of the tunnel, the stress of remaining hidden, the inability to easily move any other part of my body — but I was on fire, and I wasn’t about to let him distract me.
“Ya hear that?” I heard a voice, sounding as if it came from just outside of our nook, and I hurried to flip the phone shut before the sound of my ekans dying beeped out. A second later, I saw the beams of two flashlights illuminating the tunnel, and I carefully eased lower into my seat.
“Hear what?” another voice responded.
“I don’t know, it sounded like beeping.”
“Eh, I heard nothing. Yer just going crazy down here.”
The first grunt sighed. “Probably right. I need to get another post. Haven’t seen real sunlight in over a week.”
“Hah! Good luck with that. No way Temper will agree to that, not with the assignment not even half done.”
“A man can dream, can’t he…”
I released my breath in a whoosh of air, before hurrying to climb from the nook as their voices slowly faded down the tunnel. I’d counted four Rocket grunts in the next chamber — for the next several minutes there would only be two. I hoped I wouldn’t be fighting directly, but sneaking would be twice as easy with half the eyes and ears keeping watch.
And if I did have to fight…well, two grunts were better than four.
I shook the tingles out of my legs, quickly stretching to remove the kinks as I made sure my backpack was securely strapped and everything in its proper place. Then, I turned down the tunnel toward the cavern…and gestured for Hobbes to lead the way.
I waited at the edge of the cavern for him to scout. But almost immediately he returned and motioned for me to follow.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The geobat was still hammering away at the wall, though a different wall than he had when I’d observed earlier and with much less enthusiasm, each of his strikes looking perfunctory compared to his earlier excavations. In another corner of the cavern, the two remaining grunts were reclining next to each other on a large blanket, their arms behind their heads and their hard hats pulled low over their eyes.
It seemed that one of the two Rockets who’d made the trip down the tunnel was a supervisor, and these two were taking advantage of the lack of oversight. I wouldn’t complain — it made my job much easier. Sticking to the edge of the cavern, hunched over and stepping lightly despite the repetitive pounding of the geobat’s fists, I followed Hobbes through the cavern until we crouched behind the cage holding the sableyes.
The gremlin pokemon eyed me but didn’t call out as Hobbes began to talk with them with rapid squeaks of his name. I couldn’t understand anything the other pokemon said, but their responses were short, and as time went on Hobbes’ squeaks became more and more annoyed.
Until, one by one, the sableyes turned away from him to curl up in different corners of the cage. Leaving only a single sableye eying Hobbes speculatively.
“Eye,” the last sableye said. I wasn’t familiar enough with the species to recognize injuries, especially not in the low light against its purple skin, but I would guess this was the sableye that had been ‘punished’ earlier, both from its demeanor and the rasp to its voice.
“Di! Di di, kyu, dimikyu,” Hobbes replied, his voice a bit less frustrated than it was earlier, before he turned to me. “Di, dimikyu dimikyu.”
I frowned, concentrating on my partner. Not on the sounds he made — while pieces of the tone and meaning could be understood through his pitch and inflection, it wasn’t enough for a nuanced conversation like this. No, I focused on the bond between us, the intangible connection between a pokemon and their trainer.
“You’re saying…something about the nets on their heads. It’s what’s keeping them from being able to escape?”
“Di!”
I looked at the sableye in the cage, stepping until I was practically pressed against the metal bars, but the sableye shrunk back.
“I’m sorry, I won’t hurt you,” I said, keeping my voice calm and level. “But if I’m going to get you out of here, I need to look at that net around your head. I promise I won’t hurt you.”
I forced myself not to twitch as I waited for the sableye to respond, staring into its diamond-looking eyes without blinking. We were on the clock, but nothing could be gained if I didn’t have this pokemon’s trust; I couldn’t rush this.
Slowly, the sableye moved to the edge of the cage, positioning itself within easy reach of my hands, and I breathed out a sigh. I noticed a couple of the other sableye watching on curiously, but none of them approached, and each of them looked away after they saw I’d noticed them watching.
I turned my focus to the net surrounding the sableyes head. It was extremely fine, closer to a mesh than a net — I supposed it had to be if it was to prevent the sableye from eating any of the diamonds. But how was it able to keep them from phasing through? I’d never heard of anything that could prevent a ghost from phasing. Coming from Lavender Town, I would’ve thought that would be something I’d know about, if it existed. But the wire mesh seemed completely mundane to my senses, feeling like nothing more than a simple, light metal. I frowned.
And then the sableye shifted, and I noticed the collar the mesh was attached to. It was pitch black — blacker than anything I’d ever seen, as if it was sucking in the light that touched it, which was the reason I hadn’t noticed it earlier in the dim light of the cavern. But looking at it now, I instinctively knew this was what was preventing the sableyes from phasing. I reached out and placed a single finger against the collar, the sableye twitching as I did so.
The collar was cool and smooth to my touch, and I felt around it until I found the front, where there was a latch with a small keyhole on it.
“…don’t think that’ll work,” I muttered to myself before looking at the sableye. “I’m going to bring out my pocketknife now, to see if I can cut your collar.”
The sableye stared at me for a full three seconds before giving a slow nod.
I reached and pulled out my small multi-tool from the pocket of my backpack, flipping it open to the wire cutters. The collar was snug around the sableye’s neck, so it took some finagling as the pokemon tensed under my touch, but I was able to get the collar wedged between the cutter’s blades. And then I squeezed.
It felt like I was trying to cut through solid stone. There was absolutely zero give, even after I shifted to get better leverage. Something I did must have annoyed the sableye, though, because it flinched back and became intangible for a few seconds, and I dropped the multi-tool in surprise.
It hit the edge of the cage with a metallic clang, and I ducked low.
“…settle down over there!” one of the grunts called toward the cage without lifting his helmet, and I released my held breath. But then I frowned as I retrieved my tool and turned back to the sableye.
Wasn’t the collar supposed to prevent it from becoming intangible? Yet I’d just seen evidence to the contrary, its entire body becoming momentarily translucent and intangible, and I stared at the collar in bemusement. Until suddenly, realization struck.
“…you can’t phase through the collar,” I mumbled. “You can phase through the mesh and everything else just fine — just not the collar. And it’s just there to keep the mesh attached, so you can’t get at any diamonds or escape the cage.”
The sableye nodded, giving me a look as if it were obvious, but I ignored it, my focus returned to the mesh around its head and the cage that contained the sableye. The bars of the cage formed a grid, each square of the grid barely big enough for me to slip my forearms through — certainly not big enough to fit the entirety of the wire mesh encircling the sableye’s head. But the collar around its neck was much narrower. And the mesh didn’t feel especially robust when I’d examined it earlier…
“One more try,” I muttered to the sableye, who reluctantly stood within my arms’ reach at the edge of the cage. I once again positioned the wire cutters, but this time just above the collar, against a small fold of the wire mesh.
…and cut through it with a quiet snick.
“Yes!” I whispered and pumped my fist before returning my focus to the mesh. It took a bit of time, and I had to ask the sableye to rotate several times throughout the process, but finally I snipped through the last wire — and the sableye was free.
Or at least more free than it had been. It was still trapped in a cage, in an underground cavern entirely populated by enemy Rockets. But hopefully one of those was about to change.
“See if you can phase through, now.”
The sableye nodded before turning slightly translucent. And while the collar stayed put around its neck, snug against the sableye’s intangible skin, the sableye was able to move through the bars of the cage with the rest of its body just fine, the collar slipping through the gap in the cage’s bars.
“And you’re out!” I called out in an excited whisper, before turning to the rest of the sableyes. “Now who’s next?”
But none of the other pokemon so much as glanced in my direction, each of them staring at the ground outside the cage where they huddled.
“Di, di…” Hobbes sadly muttered from where he’d been keeping a lookout, and I frowned.
“…are you sure? Even with proof I can get them free?”
“Kyu.”
I sighed. It seemed the rest of the pokemon were more cowed than I had expected. Although…perhaps it was for the best. Cutting through the mesh wasn’t quick, and I hadn’t been keeping close watch on the time as we’d worked to free the first sableye. The other two grunts could return any minute. It was regretful, leaving so many captive pokemon behind, but there was nothing I could do for them if they refused to accept my help.
It was time for us to get out of there.