A/N: Written for the random! AU competition on the Pokemon Fanfiction Challenges Forum. My random AU was dystopian…and this is popped out from my muse. :D
Explanatory notes are at the end. Feel free to skip them if you wish. Or if you're confused about something (like the Mt Silver layout), it might be explained there.
One thing you will need to know: if I say a pokemon name in lower case, it's the species in general. If it's upper case, it's a particular member of that species. Unless it's at the start of the sentence; those ones are inferable. I think. :D
Sedimentation
Chapter 1
The frost had sunk its great big teeth into his rocky hide, leaving jagged cracks that had whitened and crumbled at their edges. Larvitar remembered how the healing had felt the year before: how bitterly his thick skin had hurt as the unfitting ends grated against each other, refusing to join; how agonising it had been to cut back into those old scars to remove the useless rock; and how painstaking to crawl cautiously in the dark caves and rely on the zubat to feed.
In a sense, they were fortunate that the zubat were their friendly neighbours, as a species hibernating through the cold seasons and preserving their lukewarm flesh, and foraging for supplies as soon as the wind turned warm. Most larvitar by then were unable to move past their resting cave, limbs locked with pain and grinding rock as they were forced to chip further away at their own hides in order to heal.
But if the larvitar slept the colder months away, they would be nothing but a brittle shell incapable of a single breath when they awoke. It was something they could not afford; something no species that still existed on the planet could afford, but the rarer ones like the larvitar the least. The zubat could, but constantly surrounded by beasts of rock, they knew more self-preservation than that. And the few larvitar that lived were more than happy to trade protection during the coldest months for food and water in the tender ones that followed.
It did not suit the zubat to double-cross them, nor did it suit the larvitar, and over the long years of living in such symbiosis, the two species might have even become friends.
It was a word Larvitar could barely articulate; it was one he, nor they as a collective, barely said or heard. It was rarely said or heard in their god-forsaken world, and even less understood. It was a word that belonged in the old world, the world where humans and pokemon had, for a time, lived in peace. When their mountain hadn't been the cutthroat place it now was, but a place of beauty and liveliness, where the sounds that danced weren't battle-cries or shrieks of pain but rather chitters of excitement and happiness and, even, human voices.
Larvitar had never heard a human voice. The only humans he'd seen were dead ones – parts of dead ones, when the zubat brought back rubbery skin and flesh that had gone black and blue and red to feast upon, or whole ones when the larvitar tried to crack the earth open to reap the rewards beneath the eternal snow. And even that was rare: a delicacy as opposed to the usual carcasses they found in the snow: of pidgey who'd fallen from the sky, or rattata who'd tried to tunnel underground and failed, or tangelo who'd tried to find some green in their frozen world. There would even be the occasional geodude that eventually crumbled in the cold and turned the snow grey.
Their mountain was unforgiving in the cold months now, and those cold months were long. The zubat had heard stories of far-off lands bathed with constant fire, but it was cold that bathed them here: frost that meant the zubat could not reproduce nor nurture their young except in the sparse hotpsrings not occupied with quagsire or poliwhirl, the former who would swallow a zubat whole if they came too close, and the later whose reign of fists obliterated anything in their way, friend or foe.
Few of the springs still had magikarp, and the stream had all but dried up their supply as well. Perhaps they still lived in the larger oceans; they didn't know. They were too far away, disconnected with that part of the world.
They simply lived in their own little niches in the mountain, waiting out the cold months however they could, scratching both flesh and mountain rock when golduck got too close, or chipping away at the shells of now-dead geodude so they could use the hollow for additional warmth. If it was a graveler, the one pupitar amongst them would do the deed, because no matter how strong they became, they had a limit.
Once, there had existed a way to exceed that limit, but no more. There were no more tyranitar, just like there were no golem or tangrowth or pidgeot or onix. Natural selection had weeded them out, just as it would have weeded out the quagsire if they didn't have an innate defence against most attackers and a hot spring and superior tunnelling ability in the soft underwater dirt within which to shield themselves from the cold. And the poliwhirl, if their fighting abilities hadn't overtaken their once-communal minds, putting individual survival over all else. And the zubat and larvitar, if they hadn't called a truce to keep both clans alive.
But their truce went beyond survival, because the zubat's superior hearing allowed them to hear the stories carried in the wind. It was how Larvitar knew of the existence of human beings as something different to pokemon, which was itself an umbrella term that encompassed the larvitar species as well as the zubat and all other species as well. It was, on a more primitive level, how he knew the names of those species, and what species were.
The zubat thought all the information that had ever existed in the world was somewhere in the wind. They were a fanciful lot, eager to keep the old, perhaps not even existing, tales alive. It was something that gave meaning, they thought. That passed the time. The larvitar had come to agree with them, though they were weary of straying from the well worn path between food and their safe haven.
The zubat, in the months following their hibernation, were wary too. The cold still clung to them, and often they lost a few to the cold blanket of impure snow as their wings froze and failed. But it was a fragile time, and a necessity, because by then the hides of the larvitar had cracked and their bodies had locked up in pain. The zubat had no choice but to forage for food and take their turn keeping unwanted visitors from bay, or they would be easy prey once the wall of larvitar crumbled away.
It was a pointless life: a pointless world where one's only goal was to keep on surviving. But no larvitar asked why; the pain they felt in the cold months was enough to make them want to struggle on, no matter how pointless it seemed. Because if the cold did such things – and the cold could do no more than incapacitate the larvitar. Their hides were too thick.
They knew that anything that could penetrate them, like a poliwrath's wild fists, would be even worse. Especially in their brittle states, where even the gentle sonar of the zubat passing information to each other hurt.
Larvitar appreciated the stories even more in these times; it took his mind off the pain, to something new and different: to dreams that would never be fulfilled, because he valued his flimsy life too much. But he could still imagine: imagine an orange beast with a whip-like tail and strong fangs fly up into the sky, or a snake made of rock that was almost steel sliding effortlessly through the earth. Imagine himself growing and changing in shape and ability, finally towering over the mountain he now cowered in, trembling and hearing the clacking of hide plates grate against each other.
It happened every year, but it wasn't until the zubat's sharp cry and the taste of meat on his tongue that he could relax and ignore it. The slight bitterness stung his cracked tongue a moment, but his lethargic chewing of the rubbery flesh soon rubbed it away. It didn't rub away the pain though: the still cold air that stung deep wounds that darkened old years' scars.
It might have hurt their pride as well, if they hadn't been so few and so vulnerable in the months of the waning cold. Instead, they were grateful they would not experience the pain of their stomachs dissolving from anger, no doubt even more agonising than the deep cracks that ran through their plate, carved out by their own metal claws.
Post A/N: You might notice I've rearranged the Mt Silver interior to fit into the individual species niche idea. The poliwhirl probably cover the most space, being so spaced out. Quagsire are closer to the ground levels and the inner area, because they burrow under the hot springs. The larvitar and zubat shared space is closer to the entrance because of how frequently they forage for food, and close to the ground level for another reason. The sneasel, which haven't yet been mentioned, are far deeper in.
The larvitar have a little bit of steel in their claws naturally; this is to allow for the metal claw attack. Not canon; just something I added in.
Type advantages/disadvantages have changed a little as well. The larvitar were (almost?) exclusively centred in the mountains in the game. Zubat are always in caves (though the only reason they aren't extinct from Mt Silver is because of the symbiotic relationship with larvitar, otherwise they'd freeze in winter or be pillaged by the other pokemon, and be gone). They both have weaknesses to the cold, but they also have experience living in it. Quagsire isn't usually in caves, and when they are, they're in the water. They don't have a weakness to cold, but they still stick to the hotsprings and the soft earth beneath it. The poliwhirl are a little different; they're one-pokemon army as opposed to species-dependent like the others. This is a disadvantage but also an advantage; poliwhirl's fighting abilities gives it an advantage to most pokemon in the area, and the zubat are too small to do much to a beefy poliwhirl.
Do the larvitar fight to protect both parties? Yes, they do. Why can the zubat protect them when they're no longer able to move when they're not really the fighting type? Because there isn't much to fight against; most pokemon in the immediate vicinity have rock or ground qualities and would be facing the same problems with the cold (think of it as really really really bad frostbite). So all that's really left are the golducks, who tend to fight individual poliwhirl for territory more since they're water types, but are also easily frightened by astonish because of its partial psychic abilities. So the zubat's protection is more to feel safe than to be safe. And there are so few larvitar that species pride is no longer a factor of survival.
Another tidbit: the poison in zubat fangs kills potential toxins that are sleeping in the meat, since toxins don't grow or die very well in extreme cold. They sort of stay refrigerated, like the meat itself. Larvitar stomachs are well adapted to the poison though, so they can eat it no problem.