Into the Dark - A Pokemon Isekai

The knock at the door came just as I was finishing packing my bag. Venus began pouting as I dropped the bag of poffins into the abyss of the dimension-warping backpack, and Zetian was busy trying to pluck at my guitar’s strings.

I’d already asked her to be gentle with them after she’d accidentally snapped one with her claws.

“Come in.” I said as the knock repeated.

“Alina!” Lucas called from the open doorway. “Are you ready?”

I sighed and turned to see the younger man bouncing excitedly on his toes.

“Almost, I’m just about finished packing.”

Lucas scoffed.

“What? No, not that, are you ready to go to the station?”

My head cocked to one side in confusion. “The station?”

“Yeah, from the Rangers! Didn’t you get the email on your phone?”

“No, my phone doesn’t get emails.”

“Ohh.” He said, nodding sagely. “I see. Well, you, me, and Ted all got emails asking us to come down to the Ranger Station later today.”

Now that was interesting. “Did they say why?”

Lucas shrugged.

“Not exactly? Just saying they’d like to speak with us since we’re associated with Pokémon Professors and the labs.”

“This isn’t an order, is it?” I had a brief flashback to the Dusclops situation, and I was desperately hoping we wouldn’t have to do something like that again.

It was now Lucas’ turn to look confused. “An order? No, they’re just asking us to stop by if we have the time.”

“Oh.” Some of the tension in my shoulders eased. “Oh okay, that’s not that bad then. When did they say we should stop by?”

“Like, eleven o’clock this morning I think.”

I looked at the clock on the wall, and sighed.

“Lucas, it’s already 10:45.”

The young man crossed his arms. “Well I didn’t know that you couldn’t get emails on your phone! I thought you were aware of it, and I just had to come and get you!”

I eyed Zetian warily. “If I let you stay here, will you promise not to break any more guitar strings?”

The Vespiquen looked rather sheepish, and nodded. Then kept nodding, and I sighed.

“Is she okay?” Lucas whispered.

“Yeah, she’s just never really had a head before, so sometimes she gets distracted by it.”

“Hasn’t it been like over a week already?”

I shrugged. “If you lived your entire life with no arms or a separate head, wouldn’t you be fascinated by them?”

Lucas frowned in contemplation, his eyes turning glassy as he focused on the question, and Zetian stopped nodding as she realized we were talking about her.

“Okay, Zetian, do you want to stay here or come with us?”

She considered for a moment, then deliberately pointed down at the floor with her hand, red eyes sparkling as she did so.

“Okay, well be careful please. Are you hungry? Want me to leave some food out? No? Okay.”

I turned to the Eevee on the bed, who was currently sticking her head into the opening of my backpack.

“Venus.”

Her head popped back out, and she tried her very best to look innocent.

“Do you want to come?”

She was about to make up her mind, then I added, “I’m going to make sure you won’t be able to get into the poffin bag if you stay, just as a head’s up.”

Venus’ ears wilted, and she padded away from the bag to jump down from the bed.

I eyed Zetian again, then made sure to close the bag up tightly before we left. I had the sneaking suspicion that now that Zetian had hands, she was trying to sneak snacks for herself, Venus, and Kōjin.

“Speaking of, Kōjin? Where are you?”

There was a dull thumping noise, and the Growlithe crawled out from underneath the bed on his belly, his fur covered in dust.

He borked happily, and didn’t seem to mind the fact that his fur was now mostly gray.

I resisted the urge to sigh.

/^\

“Whoops.” I said as I stared at the Eterna City Ranger Station.

It was a quaint little building, very much in the style of an old log cabin in browns and greens. A cheerful sign had been hung out front, urging anyone to call the posted number if they needed any help.

“What’s wrong?” Ted asked.

“I just remembered that I forgot to do something.”

He gave me a quizzical look, but I didn’t bother elaborating as we headed for the front door.

It wasn’t that important, surely, but I’d realized that I had never actually stopped by the Ranger station back in Oreburgh City. Ranger Kimura had been nice, but actually going to the headquarters had just completely slipped my mind.

I shrugged to myself, and followed Lucas into the building.

The interior was just as quaint as the exterior. Wood and metal tables had been set up in a rough outline of an office, with old clunky CRT computer monitors on most of them. Several lazily spinning fans were spread out on the ceiling, but they didn’t seem to actually do all that much.

A large map of Eterna City and the surrounding area had been laminated and hung up on the wall. Different colored tacks and notes scribbled in dry erase marker littered the map, pointing out different areas of concern.

In the corner there was a table set up with a coffee pot and several jars of snacks, including a whole row of jars with different colored lids. It didn’t take me long to realize that they were intended for the different types of Pokémon.

I took a deep breath in as I entered the building. It smelt of old, slightly burnt coffee, wood dust, and something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

A Ranger stepped out of a small back room, a mug of coffee in her hand.

“Oh, hi!” She waved tiredly.

She was wearing what seemed to pass for the Ranger’s basic uniform; pants and shirt that were so dark blue they were edging on black, and a bright hunter orange vest thrown on top. She also looked completely exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes and dirt smudges all over her clothes.

It was hard to tell on the dark blue pants, but the smudges on the bright orange vest made it extremely obvious.

“You must be the Lab Trainers, right?”

“That’s us!” Lucas chirped.

“Oh, good. Coffee?”

She gestured with her mug at the coffee pot, making sure not to let any of the liquid spill.

Lucas passed, and so did Ted, but I edged over to the pot and poured myself a mug of the dark liquid.

“There’s Alcreamer in the fridge.” She offered, and I opened the small mini-fridge to find a motley assortment of food scattered about.

There was also a light blue and white blob in there, casually munching on some strawberries.

I blinked at it, closed the door, then opened it again.

“There’s a Snom in your fridge.” I said, still a little unsure of whether or not I was imagining it.

The Ranger let out a long suffering sigh, placing her mug down on the edge of the table a little harder than necessary.

“Not again.” She muttered. “Not today.”

Stalking over, she gingerly moved me out of the way, opening the fridge door and kneeling down to get closer to the Snom, who froze as it noticed her.

“Clecle, you know you can’t be in here.” She said sternly.

The Snom melted a little, beady eyes staring up at the ranger mournfully.

“Nope. Not going to work on me today.” She continued, and pulled out a Poké Ball. “Come on back, we’ll talk later.”

The Snom vanished, and the Ranger shook her head.

“Sorry about that.” She reached in and grabbed a bottle of coffee creamer with a stylized Alcremie on it. “Here you go.”

“So,” Ted began. “Ranger…”

“Oh, sorry. It’s been a busy day, my name’s Machiko, nice to meet you all.”

“Ranger Machiko, nice to meet you too. What can we do for the Eterna City Rangers?”

She ran a hand through her hair, and walked over to a desk, beckoning the three of us over.

On the desk there were a series of maps, and she sorted through them before coming up with two different sheets of paper.

One was a map of the foothills of Mount Coronet and the outskirts of Eterna City, and the other looked like a scene from a disaster movie.

“This is an image taken from the back of a Staraptor after the mudslide.” Machiko said, tapping the second image. “And this one is what the area looked like before the mudslide.”

We all winced, it wasn’t a pretty sight.

“Most of it is bad, I’m not going to lie. Thousands of Pokémon have been displaced thanks to the disaster, and it’s wreaking havoc on the local ecosystem.”

“What do you want us to do?” Lucas said bravely, puffing out his chest.

Machiko laughed hollowly. “There’s nothing you can do about that, but thanks for offering. The Rangers are stretched to the limit just trying to keep things from getting bad enough to alert the locals.”

Ted frowned. “It’s that bad?”

“It’s close. We’ve already seen a huge uptick in battles between wild Pokémon as they try to get to the best food and water spots. The local Sneasel population, for example, has seen a ton of infighting as different groups who didn’t interact with each other are competing for more limited resources. Don’t even get me started on the Bug-types, they’ve taken a huge hit from all of this.”

Lucas started to open his mouth to say something, but Machiko cut him off with a finger.

“One second, where is- ah, here it is.” She pulled out another sheet of paper, a closeup of the side of a hill. “Do you see what’s wrong with this image?”

The three of us bent our heads over the image, trying to puzzle it out.

“Is it missing a lot of the dirt that used to be on top of it?” I offered, noting how one side of the hill was a lot more bare than the other.

“A good start, but if you look here-”

“There.” Ted said, pointing at a slightly darker section of the hill.

“You got it. That right there is the opening to a cave that one of our Rangers spotted while on patrol. And this-”

She pulled out yet another image, this time of a much healthier looking hill, although it was a bit hard to tell because of all the rain in the image.

“Is the same hill two days before the mudslide. A tourist took the image because they liked the way the Berry trees were arranged, and were kind enough to let us have a copy.”

I winced. There were no Berry trees on the hill after the disaster, and I doubted they would be growing back anytime soon. Then I frowned, and looked closer at the image.

“There’s no cave there.” I said, comparing the two.

“Exactly. Sometime between the mudslide and now, this cave appeared.” She tapped the image. “And we don’t know why. I’d like the three of you to go and check it out.”

My blood froze a little at the thought of going down into another cave.

“Why us?” Ted asked. “Isn’t this the purview of the Rangers?”

“Normally the answer would be yes. We don’t like calling on Lab Trainers to do our dirty work for us unless it’s an emergency and we need the extra hands, but right now we’re so short staffed it’s not even funny.”

Machiko ran her hand through her hair again, and she looked like she was on the verge of breaking down.

“There’s just too much for us to do. Trying to get conflicts between Pokémon settled, making sure the paths are safe for travelers, rehoming Pokémon that lost their territory during the mudslide, there’s only ten of us for the entire Eterna City region, and that was short-staffed before the disaster. Now? We’re barely keeping our heads above water.

I’d like to temporarily deputize you three as Assistant Rangers, just long enough for you to check out the cave. We’ve been seeing Pokémon that haven’t been spotted in this area in decades, and we’re pretty sure they’re coming from here.”

She tapped the image again.

“You’ve helped us out before.” Machiko said, pointing at Lucas. “The whole thing with the stone in the forest - I remember you.”

He blushed and awkwardly scratched the back of his head.

“And you two helped during the Dusclops affair. I wasn’t there for it, but I heard about it afterwards. Good job, by the way.”

Then Machiko fixed me with a look. “And we’ve got a small file on you too. Ranger Kimura in Oreburgh said you were experienced in caves, and I trust his word.”

I mentally cursed Kimura.

“So, would you all be willing to help us out? You’ll get paid for it, and we desperately need the help. Just get in, take a look around, and come on back. If everything goes well, it should take you an afternoon, if not less.”

The other two members of my party looked at each other, and there was a spark in the air as they both nodded, obviously fired up over the idea.

I sighed, and nodded.

“Sure. You got yourself a willing horse.” I muttered. “What’s one more mile?”

/^\

“Well,” I said, staring at the cave mouth, hands on my hips. “It’s not from an Onix or a Steelix, I can tell you that much.”

Lucas and Ted looked at me.

“Onix tunnels have notches cut out of the top.” I explained, “which sometimes spiral to help the Onix pick up more speed, like the rifling in a gun. Steelix tunnels are a bit wider, and you’ll see the metal streaks from their coats.”

“Wait, you know what Steelix tunnels look like but you didn’t know that there were Wurmple in Sinnoh?” Lucas asked.

“I’ve had a really weird couple of months, okay?”

He held up his hands defensively, and we all turned back to the caves.

“Honestly this looks pretty natural to me.” Ted said, scratching the back of his head. “It definitely was enlarged by a Pokémon or two, but not much more beyond that.”

I had to agree with him. The cave opening was more like a slit in the earth, with the ground around it scratched and torn up. There were claw marks and obvious footprints from where Pokémon had scrambled their way out of the cave, but besides that it looked pretty natural.

“We could fit in there, right?” Lucas asked, eying the entrance.

“You two could easily fit.” Ted said, sounding a bit sour. “And I could too, but it’d be a tighter fit.”

“The perils of being tall. Welcome to the club.” I said, patting him on the back as I stepped forwards.

I heard his sound of confusion, and smirked to myself. I really was enjoying my new body, even if it was hard to get things off the top shelves every now and again.

If I was being honest with myself, I was being a bit more glib because I didn’t want to go into the cave. My last experience in spelunking hadn’t exactly gone well, and I wasn’t looking forward to repeating the process.

A flash of light caught my eye, and I frowned as I leaned forward, looking deeper into the cave.

“Do either of you have a flashlight?” I asked.

There was the sound of shuffling, then Ted offered up a sturdy metal flashlight that had clearly seen some use.

“Don’t you have one of your own?” He asked as I took it.

I flicked the flashlight on and shone it into the cavern. “It’s in the bottom of my bag, I wasn’t expecting to need to use it so soon.”

We had gone to the cave entrance after our meeting with Ranger Machiko, only swinging by the Pokémon Center to pick up our bags and Pokémon who had stayed behind.

The three of us had joked around as we walked to the hillside, laughing about inconsequential things as we tried to keep our minds off of the destruction of the town around us. The area we walked through had been hit hardest by the mudslide, after all.

“What is that?” I muttered, trying and failing to get a closer look at the mysterious object without entering the cave.

“Let’s go see!” Lucas said, and scrambled his way into the entrance.

“Lucas!” I called, but the boy was gone.

I shared a commiserating sigh with Ted, but Lucas’ voice soon echoed out of the opening.

“You guys need to come see this!”

Ted shrugged and crawled his way inside, grumbling the entire time.I took a moment, breathing deeply before following suit.

The cave wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, which was a relief. It opened up a few feet past the initial small entrance, and Ted was barely able to stand at his full height in the cavern.

Both Ted and Lucas were crouched down something embedded in the wall, staring intently at what I had seen reflecting the light from outside.

“What do you think this is?” Lucas asked, poking at the object.

I couldn’t answer, having locked up entirely as I stared at the slab.

What is that doing here?

The object in question was a stone tablet about the size of a paperback book, intricately carved with a series of reliefs.

That shouldn’t be here.

It was mostly gray, but as the light from the flashlight caught it, it reflected multiple colors in a rainbow. Eighteen colors, to be precise.

How can this be here?

I didn’t recognize which Type it was, but I could feel its power thrumming through my entire body.

The world seemed to shift as I stared at one of the Plates of Arceus, and my entire being felt numb.

“I wonder who made it?” Lucas asked, leaning forwards.

“No, wait!” I called, but it was too late.

His hand grabbed the Plate, pulling it out of the pile of dirt and rubble it had been buried in.

The cave shifted - no, not just the cave, the entire mountainside rumbled.

“Watch out!” I called, and threw myself forwards.

Ted and Lucas were both bigger and heavier than I was, but my sheer desperation let me tackle both of them to the ground.

The world quaked, and with a crack of splintering stone, the floor of the cave collapsed.