Days blurred into weeks as the Slowpoke herd remained by the lake, slowly migrating down its shoreline.
With each passing day Leo ventured further and further away from the herd, practicing his skills and exploring the world of pokémon in its rawest form.
He had seen quite a bit, from herds of Stantler to a lumbering Ursaring, to even a Stunky as it wandered through a patch of wetlands.
But most importantly he had started to climb up and over mountains, exploring more territory on a daily basis.
This led him to his current activity – he was going to explore a cave.
The six-foot-tall cave entrance situated at the base of a small, twenty foot tall cliff was a solid half day’s worth of travel from the lake, and though Leo didn’t know all that much about spelunking, he also wasn’t planning on going in too deep.
But his curiosity had been peaked, so he had to check it out.
He’d stumbled across the Tyranitar tracks a couple days ago – unmistakable as they were – and in a moment of insanity had decided to follow them.
They led him to this cave not once, but three separate times as the Tyranitar travelled in circles near the entrance.
Not once, however, did the behemoth of a pokémon enter the cave.
It just…stood outside, if the tracks were anything to go by.
It peaked Leo’s curiosity, and he decided he had to find out what was in that cave.
Leo double checked his torches, tapping the sticky ends of the three short sticks, and nodding to himself.
He was proud of his creations, mostly because it had been quite the process to make them.
Normally he’d use a can or something to melt pine sap, thus creating a gummy, flammable material he could put on the end of stick to use as a torch (or use as glue, but that was beside the point), but with a lack of said can or any container that might work, Leo had…struggled.
He’d made it work eventually by melting the sap on the flat of his big Skarmory feather, but it was still an annoyingly tedious process.
“Right, let’s get in, then back out,” Leo said, standing and igniting one of his torches in the small fire he had built off to his left before kicking it out.
A small curl of smoke rose from the ashes, but quickly vanished.
Gripping his spare torches in his spare hand and rolling his shoulders, his pack shifting to a more comfortable position with the action, Leo boldly delved into the cave.
The entrance quickly narrowed from a six-foot-wide hole in the mountainside to a four-foot-tall and two foot wide passage that left Leo crouching to pass through and immediately worried this cave would turn out to be nothing.
The cool air of the cave sent goosebumps running up Leo’s arms, his footsteps echoing down the chamber as his torch cast flickering shadows on the wall.
He was already lamenting the fact that he didn’t have a smokeless light source – the smoke had nowhere to go here, which forced it into Leo’s face.
Still, even through watery eyes and the dim, almost unreliable orange glow of his torch, he did manage to spot the Geodude as it sat perfectly still in the middle of the cave floor.
For all intents and purposes it looked like three lumps of stone sticking out of the ground, but Leo could see the almost too-uniform curve of its arms and fists, and the evidence of it having moved recently in the form of scrape marks on the ground.
“I see you,” Leo grumbled, gingerly stepping around the unmoving pokémon.
After his first mishap with getting punched by a geodude, Leo made a point to learn how to identify them from regular rocks.
While he wasn’t perfect – mistakes which had cost him a few more bruises – he was getting the hang of it.
Grinning to himself, Leo waved his torch back and forth in front of him, almost putting the tiny flame out with the aggressive movement.
He panicked as it flickered dangerously, freezing instantly and praying that the flame wouldn’t die.
At least he could still see the light from the entrance from here, though, as it was just fifty feet back, but he still didn’t want to stumble in the dark.
“Just a little further, then I’ll head back,” Leo whispered to himself, taking a deep breath to calm his nerves as the torch flame settled.
Forging ahead once more with only a foot or two of light to guide the way, he swiftly came up on a small bend in the cave, which, when he rounded the corner, came to a dead end.
A cave-in was what it looked like, with rocks all piled up on top of each other in a sloping wave.
A wave of disappointment washed over Leo as he stared at the cave in and frowned, shaking his head sadly as he turned to head back the way he came.
His foot bumped against something solid and sent it clattering along the floor, and Leo furrowed his brows as he turned to look at it.
The sound it made was distinctly…metallic.
Crouching down, Leo lowered his torch to the floor, searching for what had made that sound.
It took a little bit to find, mostly because the metal ball had been completely encased with rust by this point and thus blended in better with the dusty, almost sandy tan ground, but find it he did.
The large ball was split open down the middle, revealing a hollow interior and a hinge that connected two sides, almost like a chest.
A strange design swirled up the sides and a large button-like appendage resided on top of it.
Leo inspected it closely, setting down his spare torches to pick it up.
It was heavier than he expected.
“It can’t be.
This can’t be a pokeball, can it?” Leo mused aloud, looking back at the collapsed wall.
He could vaguely remember seeing something similar to this ball in one of the old pokémon movies, the one with Celebi and Ash time-travelling, but he wasn’t certain.
An idea began to take root in Leo’s mind and he sighed, carefully moving forward and sticking his lit torch in between two rocks, so he wouldn’t have to hold it.
Then he lit another one in the fire of his first torch, and found a new place to put it so it illuminated the wall further.
He saved his last torch just in case and took a deep breath, carefully examining the cave-in.
When he found the skeleton hidden off to the right-most side of the cave wall, its bones covered in grey dust and cracked almost beyond recognition, Leo felt neither joy nor surprise.
He just sat back on his haunches and stared at the empty eye sockets of the deceased human skull, unsure what to feel.
“Poor sap,” he muttered.
The lower half of the person’s body was crushed beneath a stone easily the size of Leo’s torso, and if it hadn’t been an instant death, it was most certainly fatal.
Glancing at the ancient, opened pokeball, Leo felt something strange bubble up in his stomach, almost like respect.
If his suspicion was right, then the person who was killed here had released his pokémon prior to their death and said pokémon might, potentially, be the same Tyranitar that paced in front of the cave.
Leo brushed aside those thoughts and began searching for more items on his hands and knees, feeling bad that he was looting what was essentially a grave, but also knowing that if there was anything else here, it could be a huge help.
Even the pokeball, rusted though it was, could be used for a variety of purposes.
Creating pine pitch, for example.
It’d make a fine substitute for a can.
His hands flew with a desperate fury as he worked, eyeing his torches and praying they would stay alight long enough for him to complete his search.
Though his time was short, he did manage to find two more similarly opened pokeballs and the tattered remains of a backpack, tossed a few feet away from the skeleton and half-crushed by another fallen rock.
It was mostly useless, the fabric moldy and decayed and anything potentially useful most likely drug away by scavengers, but Leo did find something interesting.
Stashed away in a side pocket that was miraculously intact was a decent sized leather-bound book with yellowing pages and smudged ink.
Excitement coursed through Leo’s veins as he gathered up his finds, shoving them in his own backpack and lighting his final torch.
The other two were tossed carelessly to the ground, where they fizzled out on the cool ground as Leo hightailed it out of the cave.
He accidentally kicked the Geodude on his way out, and though it leapt from its resting place with an angry grunt Leo was already too far gone, all but sprinting out of the cave and stopping next to the smoldering remains of his fire, breathing heavily.
“I don’t ever want to go in a cave again,” Leo said, shuddering at the thought and putting out his torch.
The skeleton only confirmed everything he feared about going underground – the cave could and would collapse and kill him.
“But in the meantime, lets get out of here.
I don’t want to be around if the Tyranitar comes back,” With a grunt of effort Leo rose to his feet and double-checked his heading, making sure he was heading back to his camp based on the position of the sun and his relative position to key landmarks on the mountainsides, before heading off at a brisk pace.
…
A/ N: The Story Needs More Power Stones 😉