Where am I?

My eyes darted open, trying to stick to something tangible, but nothing was there. The pain was what shook me awake. I felt my right arm, doused in blood, as sharp pains coiled up the surface of it and it didn't seem mobile. My head. It was as though a nail had pierced the frontal lobe of my brain and silenced me, demoralized me of my friends, Rotom, Dad… Mom. The darkness swallowed me like I was its supper and chewed me until my rotten flesh emptied on the cavern floor, decorating it with my insides. I picked a spot in the darkness where I thought my lungs would make great curtains for a window that would never be there.

The darkness was so thick as I tried moving, it caused so much pain. The darkness. It hurt me more than the pain from falling did. It hurt because it knew I was weak. I had fallen again. I thought this would be the end-all be-all, but it wasn't. I was just scared of dying. I was scared of leaving my friends and Rotom, again, and I did. I was scared because the darkness enclosed on me, filling me until happy became blank and angry rotted away. It filled me until every memory I've ever had was filled with black and nothingness. A relentless wave of dread came across me as I realized the darkness was filling me until I was empty. I was devoid of life but it still lived. And it lived on in me.

I relieve myself of today's breakfast on the cavern floor, as the silent spectre sleeps. It was oblivious to the surreality of my life. What it had become. I was a mere body that occupied the space of a dark cave somewhere underneath the ground. I didn't fit in. I was exiled. I occupied a space that was empty, but yet it seemed like I belonged somewhere. Sometimes, when I was on the overworld it felt like my body was empty. It just took darkness and a good fall to make me realize that my life was empty. I felt more blood, this time through my shirt. It had blotted through my clothes and there had been so much of it. I had lost so much. Who would save me this time? Where am I?

Unfortunately, that is a question I seem to be asking myself a lot on this voyage across a warzone. I sat up and this is where I realized my entire right arm was shattered. My right arm throbbed, but that pain was packaged, stored beneath the pain of reality. There were tears, but they mixed with blood soaked into my softened pants. For a long time, I cried. I cried until I was tired of crying. And bleeding. I had been keeping wounds sealed but they were releasing more and more sorrow.

How long had we been down here? Minutes. Hours. Weeks. It was as though time had accelerated, as I was accelerating into the floor of this chamber. I felt around, avoiding where I had vomited and for the first time, touched the Ice Pokemon, Froslass. She lay there on her back and I touched an icy crystal on her head. It felt specific and cold. I could touch her, yet she was a Ghost. She continued to sleep through all the pain that her body felt after battling a big pokemon, then falling alongside me into this deep hole.

I decided whether hours or weeks had passed by, it was time to stand. My legs felt less pain than my shattered arm, so they worked just fine. I cried through all the pain until my body was empty of all the sad and it just faded away. I placed my left hand on a shard of rock edging out from the wall and limped a step, until my left shoulder collided with the side of the wall. The Ice pokemon shook awake. I could tell because it was whimpering. I was haunted by her weeping. Her anguish. It targeted my knees.

I knelt near her. She couldn't see me but her whimpering faltered for a moment as she realized I was with her.

"It's okay, I'm not going to hurt you." I said soothingly. "I know you're afraid."

"You are, too." She said to me.

I wasn't even surprised. I just blinked in the blackness at the thought of another Ghost pokemon responding to something I was saying with a language I understood. The harsh reality phased me more than her voice. Her voice was calm, collected and serene. Almost tranquil. Like she was impressed I could communicate at all.

"I know." I sighed to the dark. Then, there was silence. A prolonged silence, that felt like I was staring into the darkness where Froslass's eyes were occupying and she was looking into the space of darkness where my eyes occupied.

"Y-you heard me?" Froslass shot back. She tried getting up, but winced from her physical trauma. I nodded my head in the emptiness, without realizing it was still dark.

"Yeah."

"Then, I guess you're not as stupid an ape I thought you were." She winced again, this time weeping a little.

"Let's just get out of here, and be done with this. Pretend like it never happened." I said to the pokemon. As I tried raising myself again, a massive slab of rock was holding me down. The slab wasn't real but it felt real. Like I was in another plane of space where things existed but didn't actually exist. Where things happened but happened only in that realm and exclusively in that plane of existence.

"Great. Now it thinks it can boss me around."

"Don't you dare call me an "it." I'm the same as you right now. Look at what we've been reduced to!" I yelled at where I thought she was floating.

"I can't see anything, you idiot!" She retorted.

"That's the point." I said calmly. "You can't see anything because there's nothing there."

She didn't say anything. She just floated in the air, probably deciding whether or not to finish me off where I stood. She could do that. All it would take is one Ice Beam and I'm dead.

"Are we going or not?" I asked the murky, warm air. "Because I am."

"I want to get the hell out of this hole and kill those two that put me in here." Froslass exclaimed, intensity heating up inside of her icy body.

"Geraldine Swan. One of the leaders of Team Galactic." I mumbled.

"She could be the damn queen of the universe, but when I'm finished with her, her atoms will soar across the vast reaches of the universe as I annihilate her from existence."

"Calm down, and let's go." I said, turning my back on her, and she just hovered behind me in silence. Muttering under her breath at what an annoying bitch I was. Froslass and I ventured through the chamber, floating and limping, respectively, and it seemed like this chamber was leading on forever.

"What if this tunnel doesn't actually lead anywhere?" Froslass whispered in the dark. I carried my mangled arm in silence, as I pondered the question. Climbing was just an afterthought, yet I longed for the cliff. Silence was the other thing that made the pain worse. It was the terrible little brother to the darkness. Whenever I thought I could avoid it, silence just grated off more flesh and remained imprinted on my wound until I had to scream.

I gasped when I suddenly walked into a rock wall. Froslass also gasped, but then realized that it was just me.

"Are you hurt?" She asked as I was repositioning my arm so the tears would recede.

"My arm is broken and I'm bleeding profusely. Do you think that's enough to be deemed 'hurt'? I retorted.

"I didn't know that, okay." Froslass muttered silently.

"What? Are you not hurt?" I asked incredulously.

"I'm not. I feel fine." She said, not changing the tone of her voice. I shook my head in the darkness and closed my eyes for a second. If it weren't for my friends, Rotom and my parents I would probably just be a rotting mass of flesh and organs in this stinking chamber, decomposing in silence.

Yet I continued. I pursued an invisible trail through a nothingness. Froslass took the lead, and guided me through the black. She hovered in front of my face, holding out one of her long arms, feeling for rocky walls that seemed to branch off into infinity.

"How is this chamber so long?" She asked the rocks. The chamber seemed to be an infinitely forming tunnel that we were victims to follow. Each step meant another slab of rock would be there to exist underneath our feet and above our heads, enclosing us in an infinitely forming prison.

"Wait." Froslass said after what felt like another eternity of walking. She felt around the walls for another path and said there was a passage going diagonally from our initial stone chamber. After walking into this new path, I began to notice an orange light at the end of the cave.

"An exit!" I screamed.

"Let's get out of here." Froslass agreed. She floated quicker, closer to the end of the chamber until I could see the faint outline of her frozen body in the dark. Then I could start seeing myself in the dimly lit light. I started running. It was painful, but I fought through the agony. My right arm jiggled as it was nestled in my left, and it delivered a faint pain pulse with each time my right foot stomped into the ground.

I ran so fast, I passed Froslass. I kept running. I knew now that there was a chance that I could see Rotom again. I had the vision of Rotom in my mind while I was running. The path beneath me began to steepen downward. And I noticed this when I realized I had been zoning out Froslass's warning screams. And then I saw the edge as I fumbled to stay on the cliff, I could feel my heart quadruple in speed and now my entire body hung from the angled precipice.

I was holding on with my left hand, my entire body weight on the edge of a steadily inclined plane that didn't help my grip all too well. My right arm sobbed with broken bones and muscles. I screeched and death gripped the stones. My left arm's fingers bled from the pressure I placed on the sharp rocks. The dimly lit cave became a giant chasm with a light at the bottom.

"Hang on! I'll figure something out." Froslass said floating over my head, and I flinched my eyes shut. When they reopened my arm began shaking. I was looking down. The drop looked like a couple hundred feet. I couldn't make out any of the shapes since I was so high up, but they were there. Lights were at the bottom of a humongous cave. My grip began weakening from the numbness of my left arm. Froslass was gone and it was just me now. I could feel my first finger peel off a stony appendage, slick with blood and sweat.

"Fall!" Froslass screamed from behind me. I screamed when my fingers let loose of the edge and I began falling. I fell only five feet from the edge on my back and instantly began sliding down a frigid… slide. I opened my eyes and was sliding downward to another platform stuck into the side of the wall, very tightly packed.

"Center yourself!" Froslass screamed. There were no edges to this slide and I could fall off again at any second, so I tried desperately to center myself on the narrow slide. It was made out of solid ice. I saw Froslass at another rocky stand similar to the edge I had toppled off of. The slide ended abruptly and I crawled off of it and flipped onto my back in the presence of the icy ghost.

"Are you okay?" She looked down at me. I started to cry. I was thinking about my friends and Rotom at this point. I stopped sobbing when the pain in my right arm receded and just layed there on the platform hanging in the side of the chasm. I didn't dare look down at this point. I only looked up to see the icy slide begin to disintegrate in the warm air. The ice turned into a fine powder that snowed down to the bottom of the chasm, leaving only a wide gap between us and the hole I rolled out of.

"Are you okay?" Froslass repeated to me after a while. I lost track of time and I think I fell asleep, to which she began shaking me awake. She moved my right arm the wrong way and I jolted awake with new bursts of pain coming in all directions. I yowled in pain again.

"Sorry." She said quietly. I looked up at her face and this was the first time I ever got into close contact with Froslass. Well there was the time I threw a pokeball at her head to calm her down, but this is also monumental.

"Thanks, for earlier." I told her.

"It was nothing. I needed some practice using my Ice Beam anyway." She looked away.

"Sure. You need me as much as I need you." I said, still looking at the wall on the other side of the chasm, while my head throbbed and my right arm pulsed.

"We should get out of here." She started again. I was so tired and ridden with panic that I didn't even want to get up. I wasn't going to try anymore.

"You're being awfully nice." I said closing my eyes.

"I just want retribution against Team Galactic." Froslass fretted, gazing over at the same wall the held my attention.

"Me too." I whispered. Then, I sat up on the platform, whose diameter wasn't even twice my height, and looked over at Froslass.

"How are we going to get down from up here?" I asked her.

"I'll create another icy slide using the side of the wall so that we don't fall over. We can hug the side while I create the slide and corkscrew our way to the bottom." I nodded at her plan. It was the best plan in terms of our situation so I trusted her wisdom. I peered over the edge of our cliff, trying to make out the unfamiliar shapes from before. I could see structures at the bottom, but the edges were too hard to make out even from up here. There were smaller blobs moving on the bottom.

"Are you ready?" Froslass beckoned over for me to come to her at the edge of the cliff. I nodded and she told me to wait a second while she generated the slide. She then began sliding down and producing more and more ice, bending around the huge chasm. When she reached underneath the cliff I was on she raised her arm and signaled for me to descend. I positioned myself like I would be going down a children's slide at some park, nestling my broken arm in my lap tucked behind my left arm. I used a spot of my right shoulder to rest my back on the stony edge and I pushed my sides into the wall to keep from toppling off.

Now I pushed off. Froslass had already made a third revolution around, underneath our initial cliff. I saw her gilding ice from her body and I focused on keeping myself steady. It was constant curvature and gravity guided me along the icy path. My body accelerated down the frozen slope and I was now two arches above Froslass. She was going at a constant rate down the slide, but my body was still accelerating. I tried very hard not to peer over the edge and to just focus on keeping balance, but curiosity got the best of me and I looked into the chasm. The faded edges turned into walls and the people turned into miners, who paid no attention to what was happening above their heads.

I slid by a large stadium light that blinded me with its brilliance for a moment and after that my eyes flinched every time I saw anything that was bright. When I revolved near the stadium lights again, I shut my eyes to avoid them, but at the cost of losing some of my balance with the ice slide. I reopened them and got control near the stony wall which brushed against my clothes, occasionally bumping me but all I cared about, was remaining away from the edge which would spill me into the little town below.

I lost track of Froslass, momentarily but she stopped her ice slide and began leveling it off so it no longer inclined. I decelerated when I reached this area and together we remained floating above the underground city.

"I've created an elevator that will lower us down into the city so we can get some information and/or help." Froslass said looking at my arm.

"Okay, so?"

"Are you able to hold on?" She said, still peering at my destroyed right arm.

"It still hurts and I'm in a lot of pain, but I can manage." I replied.

"Alright, I'm releasing the cable. Now." Froslass said as we in an open elevator descended pretty quickly into the ground. We were about fifty to a hundred feet in the air now and the trip was very quick. I only moved my arm violently upon impact with the ground. It hurt so much.

"Sorry." Froslass said. "I should've made a seat, but there wasn't any time."

"It's fine. Let's go. I need a cast." I said.

We exited the elevator and found ourselves in the backyard of some house. It was dirt and rock with unearthly plants penetrating the ground. The house was bland and looked like the house next to it and the house next to that house. It was dark-red, almost mahogany and small above all. It looked cramped and desolate, but I assumed people lived in there. Froslass looked around and I took one step on the dirt. It was a relief to be on the ground once again, but it didn't feel like home.

Froslass roamed around the yard and I limped over to the side of the house, avoiding the dark windows where someone might spot me. I could hear the sound of metal hitting rock off in the distance, which probably belonged to the miners. I could hear people talking the distance, some voices louder than others, almost as if they were commanding voices. The smell was enigmatic.

I peered inside of the window trying to see if someone was there, but nothing was inside except for some basic furniture sans television. Froslass whispered for me to follow her inside.

"What? We can't go in there, what if someone's sleeping?"

"They're probably mining. Don't you hear those sounds?" She responded.

"Yeah but we can't just enter a stranger's house." I argued.

"Do you want to see your friends or not? Let's go." She opened the door and floated inside. I sighed and looked around, then followed her in the strange house in the strange underground city. When we entered we were already in the living quarters of the house. There was only one bed in the center of the room. The room was dark and bland except for a table near the door we entered through with only one chair pushed in. There was a dusty armchair next to the bed and the only piece of flooring existed underneath the furniture. Otherwise the floor was filthy and undesirable, yet someone lived here.

I noticed a framed picture on the table. As I walked up to get a closer view in the dark, dust flew off the table and diffused into the empty room. It had a woman and a man and another smaller boy who appeared to be the son of the two parents. They were sitting outside somewhere. Somewhere green and up on the overworld, not in this dump. They were all smiling, something I'm less knowledgeable on. But there was no dust on the frame or the picture. It was as though someone regularly touched it and maintained the glass frame, meanwhile the rest of the house suffered severely from a lack of care.

"What are we even doing here." I said, holding my shattered arm.

"We need to get you medical attention, even if it's several hundred feet beneath normal ground." Froslass said floating around the house, looking for something that wasn't there. Where did these people eat? And why was there only one bed? These questions zoomed through my brain faster than the pain was pulsing back and forth between my brain and my arm. It was like my brain got tired of sending me pain messages and decided something so minuscule as a couple dirty pieces of furniture were now the center of attention.

Then the sirens wrang. A loud noise wrang from the outside in the town, scaring Froslass and I. We both cowered down, but the sound subsided. Froslass and I peered at each other and collectively agreed something was wrong. That's when we heard the faint shuffling of people. They were going home. I saw two small boys followed by their parents enter the house right across from the one we were in. The parents looked zombified. They entered their houses, lit some bright candles and fell asleep in their beds. It didn't seem like there was anything in that house either.

"We need to get out of here. Someone's about to come in." Froslass said, floating over to me and pulling me by the back of my shirt to the back of the house. Before we exited, I looked back to make sure I didn't touch anything or move anything out of place.

"What are you doing?" She looked at me incredulously.

"Making sure nothing is out of place. I bet these people could notice the tiniest change in their empty houses. I'm making sure nothing was moved."

"Let's go." Froslass flung the door wide open and we exited, quickly. We treaded through the dirt until we reached the wall, that encased the town in a rocky chasm, and hugged it while looking around for any moving bodies.

"Let's get into the dirt." Froslass suggested. She beckoned at the ground, then floated to the dirt and began covering herself in it.

"It's like the snow I always sleep in, except darker, and cleaner." She said, sarcastically and I almost thought about smiling at a sarcastic comment made by a pokemon that just recently wanted to kill me. I sat in the dirt and began digging myself deeper inside of it, which was surprisingly easy. The dirt easily moved where I wanted it to with my left arm, while my right arm lay comfortably in an immobile mess in my lap, pulsating at each movement of the hip or rotation of a finger. I moved more dirt until I was stomach deep in the dirt.

"You should be fine, just cover yourself." Froslass whispered from just three feet next to me. I dug into the ground a little more until I got comfortable. The smell was a strange, dry scent, so I ignored it and kept digging. I struggled a little farther in, but rested nicely in this puddle of dirt and rocks. Then my neck started aching and I thought more about the surface world and when I would finally reach it.

Rotom is probably, no, most likely freaking out. I'm nowhere to be found and the only thing they have to my location is a pile of rocks that buried me into the ground. Who would've thought I'd find an underground town beneath the Oreburgh Mine, but that was irrelevant at this point. I was so tired from everything that happened from the point I fought against Geraldine to where I am now. I had to get to my Dad: that was my mission. And so far, I've been doing a pretty crappy job at it. I mean we got distracted so much, that I don't know if we'll even get to him in time. Froslass and now this has kept me two cities away from my father.

Vance and Drayke must also be freaking out. They must be searching high and low for me and Froslass but they won't find us, unless they check behind every single stone in the cave where Geraldine's Rhyperior demolished the walls. That chamber was completely and utterly destroyed, causing new ones to open, while others closed. I doubt they would ever find the one that contained Froslass and myself. Right now were totally fine. Nestled into dirt.

My neck ached again, and I rested my head on something hard, probably a rock. But as I applied more pressure, the rock moved and my head rubbed against something hard, yet smooth. I repositioned myself again, trying to move the rocks, but they made a clunking noise when I pushed them with my back. That's when I realized I was laying right on top of a corpse. The cheekbone of the skull was jabbing me in the back and I was fidgeting around when a door shut very loudly in the distance.

"Shh!" Froslass whispered. I could see inside of the house, as a boy, who looked a little bit older than myself, undressing himself and immediately going to sleep.

"We should go to sleep, too." Froslass whispered to me, unbeknownst to my discovery.

"Okay." I whispered back. I rested my sore body in the bones of another human being as the stadium lights above the town began dying down and the mysterious city became veiled in a perpetual darkness.