Even after the floor had collapsed, stones and pebbles still occasionally clattered to the ground from the hole in the earth above us.

“Okay.” Ted groaned. “Who’s still alive?”

“Here.” Lucas said in between coughing fits.

“I’m still alive.” I said. “This time anyways.”

I’d never really bothered too much to question how I’d ended up in the Pokémon world. My wishes had been answered by Jirachi, bringing me to this world and exchanging my old body for the one I was in, but… there were some memories from right before I had been brought here that I would rather not think about.

“Well that’s good. Anybody hurt?”

“My whole body hurts.” Lucas said.

“In a “broken bones” way or in a “I’m covered with bruises” way?” Ted asked.

“Um… I’m not sure?”

“Okay, this is ridiculous.” With a groan, I sat up, wiping away the dust that had settled in my eye lashes.

The cavern we had fallen into was completely dark, and I couldn’t see any light coming from the hole in the floor. Or rather, I guess it was the ceiling now.

I fumbled around in my bag until I managed to find my flashlight, but it didn’t help that much. The problem with the Pokémon World was that since so many Pokémon could learn Flash, and the TM for it was so cheap, people had never really invested in making decent flashlights.

Embarrassingly enough, out of our combined eight Pokémon, the only onethat could have learned the move was Zetian. I wish I could have had a good reason for not investing in the TM for Flash, but I hadn’t even thought about getting it for Zetian.

After all, with all of my previous experiences going spelunking, I didn’t think I would be doing it again.

The dim light of the flashlight only barely illuminated the cavern we had found ourselves in, but I was too occupied with being impressed that we hadn’t died during the fall.

God, or Arceus, must have been looking out for us.

A dark corner of the room was briefly revealed by the flashlight, revealing the edges of a further tunnel down, but I quickly moved the light away.

“You look how I feel.” Lucas quipped, and I looked down at myself to see what he was talking about.

I was completely covered in dust, my once-nice clothes now completely gray and brown. There were some rips and tears in the cloth, but thankfully nothing too serious. I had bought a sewing kit a while ago, after all, and I was sure they could be patched up. There were more than a few small cuts and bruises that I could feel forming, but nothing life-threatening.

Then I shined the light on the younger man, and winced as I saw what he meant. I would have said he almost looked like he was lounging on a pile of rubble, except for the fact that ‘lounging’ implied comfort, and his position looked anything but comfortable. He was as covered in dirt and rubble as I was, but he hadn’t been quite so lucky in terms of injuries. A small stream of blood was dripping down his face from a cut hidden by his hair, and half of his face was covered in a large red mark that I knew would develop into a massive bruise.

“That bad, huh?” He asked.

“Can you move your toes?” I asked, more worried about the state of his spine than his face.

His face twisted in concentration and fear, but then his foot wiggled, and he sighed in relief.

“Oh thank Arceus.” He said. “Yes, I can. I can feel both of them.”

He winced again.

“Although to be fair, I’m not sure I want to feel both of them right now. My entire body feels like a bruise.”

“Well I’m glad that you don’t seem to be paralyzed.” I said, and swept the beam over to Ted.

“How about you?”

He gave me a somewhat shaky thumbs up. “All good.”

My shoulders slumped, the tension draining out of them.

“One second, let’s get some real light in here.” Lucas said, and pulled out a Poké Ball. “Maggy, come on out.”

The temperature of the cavern almost immediately started to rise as the Fire-type appeared in a flash of light.

“Can you get a fire going?”

The Magby nodded, and started rooting around in Lucas’ backpack.

“Do you have firewood?” I asked incredulously.

“Of course! I like Fire-types, so I always have stuff to make fires, just in case!”

I shook my head, but soon enough the Magby had pulled out some thick tree branches that had been cut down to size, and with a single heavy breath had lit them aflame.

With a little assistance from Maggy, Lucas removed himself from the pile of rubble he’d been ‘lounging’ in. Ted brushed himself off before helping me up, where we proceeded to gingerly flop in front of our new light source.

“So,” Lucas said, face lit by the flickering flames of the impromptu campfire. “What happened?”

“The Plate.” I said tiredly. “You grabbed it and it must have collapsed the tunnel.”

I could just barely make out the confused expression on his face. “The Plate?”

“The… thing you grabbed.” Eloquence was still a little too far beyond me right now. “It’s a relic, lots of power. Related to Arceus and all that.”

“Wait wait wait.” Lucas said. “Back up. Arceus?? Like, the god Arceus?”

“Yeah. Way back when, I don’t actually know specifically,” the games had never mentioned a specific time frame. “There were these eighteen, er, nineteen Plates, each representing a specific Type of Pokémon.”

“But there’s only eighteen types.”

“Right, well, the nineteenth Plate was supposed to represent all of them. Or none of them? It’s confusing. Anyways, something happened, the Plates got scattered across Sinnoh, kinda standard stuff really.”

I was way too tired and sore to try and recount the lore of a specific kind of item that barely had any actual lore surrounding them. The Plates in the games were just supposed to be a way to change Arceus’ Type, but in the actual world of Pokémon… I had no idea what they were supposed to do.

A scratching noise filled the small cave we had ended up in, and I turned to Ted, who was busy scribbling in his notebook.

“Are you really taking notes?” I asked, blinking in wonder at him.

He started, then flushed. “I… ah, well it’s interesting! I don’t know much about Sinnoh’s history, and the Plates never came up before now.”

Ted frowned and muttered something under his breath, before continuing to write down what I was saying.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“I mean, I don’t blame you.” Lucas said. “Honestly, I’ve never heard of these ‘Plates’ before, and I’ve lived here my whole life! How do you know about them Alina?”

I laughed nervously and shrugged. “I read a lot?”

It was the flimsiest excuse, but I couldn’t exactly come out and say that I was from another world where all of history here was just the plotline to video games. Well, I’d done that before, but Professor Rowan had been an outlier.

“Do you still have the Plate?” I asked Lucas.

He frowned, dug around in the rubble for a second, then pulled out the undamaged Plate.

“Here.” He said, handing it over.

An electric spark ran up my arm as I reached out to grab the Plate. It was about the size of a trade paperback book, and lighter than I thought a stone slab would be.

The color of the Plate was the neutral gray of slate, and instantly I knew that it wasn’t any of the regular typed Plates. This one had intricate carvings on both sides, completely unworn by the passing of time.

“The Legend Plate.” I whispered in shock, turning it over slowly in my hands.

This… shouldn’t be here. The Legend Plate belonged on the top of the Spear Pillar - no, in the Hall of Origin itself. How did it make it to a random cave in Eterna City?

“Do you mind if I hold onto this?” I asked Lucas, who shrugged.

“Sure. I mean, you know more about it than I do.”

I reverently put it into my pack.

“I’ll tell you all more about it later.” I continued. “But first, we gotta get out of here.”

“How?” Lucas asked. “The hole in the ceiling is like, ten feet up.”

“Can we stand on each other’s shoulders?” I offered.

“Mayfly!” Ted said, and pulled out his Poké Ball.

With a flash of light, the Scyther appeared, turning around in obvious confusion.

“Can you go and fly up to the entrance of the cave?” He asked.

The green Pokémon nodded her head, and with a low drone of beating wings, flew up into the hole where we had fallen.

“I have some rope in my bag,” Ted continued. “If we’re lucky, Mayfly can try and secure it to a rock, and we can climb up.”

I had my doubts about how a Scyther could tie a rope to a boulder, considering how famously it had blades for hands, but I kept them to myself.

A few moments later, Mayfly dropped back into the lower cavern, shaking her head. With a quick motion of her scythe-like arms, she sketched a rough image into the dirt of the cave floor.

“Is that the opening to the cave upstairs?” I asked, tilting my head slightly.

Mayfly nodded, before kicking a bunch of loose pebbles onto the image.

“Ah.” Ted said darkly. “It’s been blocked off by the falling stones. Is it possible to move them at all?”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

My heart dropped. We were trapped down here.

Almost against my wishes, my eyes turned to the dark corner of the cave that we had all tried to ignore until now. This lower chamber had an entrance to a tunnel of some kind, and it loomed ominously in the corner. If we couldn’t go up… there was no choice but to go down.

/^\

Time passed strangely in the cave. If not for the fact that we all had watches or cell phones which could tell the time, the fifteen minutes that passed would have felt like hours.

We’d tried to call for help, of course, but the stone blocked the signal. Ted had spent a good couple of minutes fuming about Sinnoh’s admittedly rather weak cell phone network, comparing it against places like Mauville or Goldenrod City.

After Ted patched up his cut, Lucas had tried climbing the walls, to predictable results. He didn’t seem too worried about being stuck in the cave, and seemed inclined to treat it like one big adventure. Lucas, for all his intelligence and Pokémon training ability, was still a teenage boy, and his understanding about the possibility of his own mortality was… fleeting.

Me? I sat by the campfire while my two companions tried their best to find a way out of the cave.

I had pulled out my notebook with everything that I had written from my memories of the Pokémon games, and was going through each of the pages, trying to find something that would help us.

By the time Lucas had settled down, and Ted had stopped cursing out how rural Sinnoh was, I’d had a couple of bright ideas.

“Okay.” I said, taking a deep breath. “I think I know where we are.”

Ted and Lucas leaned in.

“Have either of you heard of the Underground?”

Ted nodded, while Lucas scoffed.

“Heard of it? I’ve been in it! Where do you think I got Hardy’s fossil?”

“Well, have you ever heard of the Grand Underground?”

Lucas faltered at that.

“Uh, no?”

“It’s really just a theory I had, based around a few things I’ve heard and my own experiences. When I was in the Wayward Cave-”

“You were in the Wayward Cave?”

“What’s the Wayward Cave?”

Lucas and Ted said at the same time.

I sighed. “Okay, backing up a little. Ted; the Wayward Cave is a cave network under Oreburgh City. Think of it like… kinda like the Granite Cave I guess?”

His eyes lit up with recognition and he nodded.

“And yes, Lucas, I went there after I left Professor Rowan’s lab. No, don’t bother asking, I’m not going to tell you why.”

The kid slumped, but I knew better than to give away the location of the wild Gible to him. Knowing Lucas, he’d probably try to go there completely unprepared and get hurt trying to get a Gible.

The irony wasn’t lost on me, but I liked to think that I’d learned a few things after that particular experience.

“Anyways, while we were in the depths of the cave, we came across a strange series of tunnels, created by a Steelix. The Rangers, well Ranger Kimura really, afterwards told me that there hadn’t been a wild Steelix in the area in almost fifty years, and that he was concerned about strange Pokémon in the area.”

“So you think that the Steelix came in through the Underground?” Lucas asked.

I hummed for a second in thought before I responded. “I don’t think so. You have to understand, we were deep in the caves. Deeper than we’d ever been before, so deep we actually got lost.”

Ted’s eyes lit up with understanding.

“So you think that there’s not just an Underground, but an even deeper level to it.”

I nodded. “Thus the Grand Underground.”

It was a bit of a stretch, if I was being honest. The Grand Underground had taken the place of the normal Underground in the remakes of Diamond and Pearl. It had basically been a version of the Safari Zone from earlier games, allowing the player access to rare Pokémon that weren’t normally available.

The encounter with the Steelix could have just been a random twist of fate, and the deepest level of caves could have just been a lower area of the Underground… but I had to hope that I was right. Kimura had hinted that there was something going on with the caves, and the Grand Underground was in the games.

“Do you think that these caves connect to the Grand Underground?”

“They might.” I said. “But they very well might not. I kn- I heard that there was an entrance to the Underground and Grand Underground in this area. Whether this particular cave system connects or not… I’m not sure.”

Ted hummed, drumming his fingers against his leg in thought. “If we did manage to connect to the Grand Underground, do you think we could make it to Oreburgh City?”

“I can’t promise anything.” I said honestly. “These caves… if they exist they might be a nightmare to travel through. Or they could be simple and a relatively straight line to follow. I just don’t know. But I can promise that if we make it back into the Steelix caves, I can guide us back to Oreburgh.”

Even though the trip back to the surface had been confusing and I had gotten lost a few times, I was confident that we could do it again. Venus and Zetian were both stronger than the last time, and we now had Kōjin with us. Besides my team, Ted and Lucas were with me, and I was confident that the trip would be much easier.

“Honestly though, we should probably just wait here. The Rangers know where we went, after all, and I’m sure that once they don’t hear from us in a little bit they’ll send somebody to look. They should have a Pokémon that can get rid of the cave-in and lower a rope for us.”

Ted nodded wisely, then looked over at the other member of our party.

“Lucas? What do you think?”

The younger man smacked a fist into his palm. “I’m all for trying out the caves!”

I sighed as he continued.

“I mean, exploring a new cave system? One that might not have been explored by anybody besides us? What’s not to like!?”

“We don’t have that much food and water.” Ted cautioned. “It might be safer to wait here.”

If I remembered correctly, there were biomes in the Grand Underground that had water, and presumably food too considering the fact that Pokémon lived down here, but it would definitely be risky.

Lucas, however, simply eyed Ted incredulously. “It would be safer, sure, but I mean, come on! It’s an adventure! You gotta take risks every now and again if you want to find something worthwhile! That’s what my dad always says!”

I looked over to find a reckless smile growing on Ted’s face and I felt my stomach drop a little.

“I like that bit of advice!” He said, and stood up, brushing more dirt off of his clothes. “Sure we could sit around and wait for rescue, but why do that when we could explore a hidden cave network? Who knows what we’ll find!?”

“Yeah!” Lucas jumped up to his feet, fists held high in excitement.

“We’re all going to die.” I moaned as the two fed off of each other’s energy.

It looked like we were going to be going with the cave routes, and I mentally prepared myself to go into the dark.