This short story was written for the first writing competition on the I Will Touch the Skies discord. It's set in the IWTTS universe, but you don't need to have read the main work to read this.
Roger had always been a curious child, the kind who would explore further in the wilderness around Solaceon Town than most deemed wise. But he had his mother's Hippopotas with him, and he knew to keep his eyes and ears open. The potential for adventure always seemed worth the risk.
One morning he was wandering in the hills east of town when a peculiar sound captured his attention. "Do you hear that?" he asked the Pokemon at his side. "Let's go see what it is!"
Hippopotas grunted and tossed his head, seeming unsure. But Roger had already run up to the nearby cliff, so the Pokemon had no choice but to follow.
A pile of loose dirt and stone lay at the base of the cliff, evidence of a recent rock slide. And a few feet up the hillside, at just the right height for a young boy's ear, there was a small crack in the stone.
Roger scrambled over to the crack and tried to peer inside, but he saw nothing but darkness. So he pressed his ear against the rock instead.
"It's like someone is whispering," he told his companion in a hushed tone. "Maybe they're stuck inside?" He straightened and shouted, "Hello! Is anyone in there?"
For a moment the whispers paused. Then they returned, a little stronger than before.
"I don't know what you're saying!" Roger protested. It was true, the whispers didn't sound like any words he knew. Yet somehow it felt like he could understand, if he could just get a little closer.
"Hey, Hippopotas," the boy said as an idea struck him. "Use Dig!"
The ground type flared his nostrils as he looked up at the boy. Then he shook his head resolutely.
"Aww, c'mon," Roger groaned. "We're so close! It'll be safe, I promise!"
In response the Pokemon turned and trotted away. When he had put some distance between himself and the whispers, he looked over his shoulder and glared at the young boy.
"You're no fun," Roger huffed. Then, with a drawn-out sigh, he followed Hippopotas away from the cliff. His parents had drilled him in safety before they'd let him go out exploring, and one of their lessons had been to always listen when Hippopotas warned him of danger.
Still, he couldn't help but look over his shoulder at the crack in the cliff as he left.
It only took a week before Roger's urge to investigate the whispers grew unbearable.
"Just one look," he pleaded with Hippopotas time after time. "If they're gone I'll never mention it again."
Eventually the Pokemon relented and the pair returned to the hills. It was the same place as before, Roger was sure - yet it had also changed. The cliffside was whole, no crack in sight, and there were no whispers to be heard.
Hippopotas snorted in satisfaction and turned to leave. But Roger scurried forward and ran his fingers over the wall.
"Look at this," he whispered. "It's a carving, I think?" Then he yelped and leapt back from the rocks. "It bit me!"
Further investigation revealed new lines had been carved into the cliff. A dark energy flowed sluggishly along the indentations, and the same energy was fading from Roger's fingertips.
"Someone must have done this to trap them," Roger murmured. "That's not fair!" He turned to Hippopotas, a more frantic light in his eyes. "Please use Dig? For me?"
The ground type twitched his ears nervously, but the boy's desperation made him relent. He reared up on his hind legs and plowed forward into the cliffside -
- and was stopped by the darkness.
Hippopotas squeaked as a backlash of dark energy sent him rolling away from the cliff. Without prompting he got up and dashed towards the wall again, but the darkness stopped him before he could even brush a speck of dirt away.
Roger and Hippopotas spent hours trying to break into the cliffside. Yet all their attacks were repelled, and even Roger's attempt to dig a hole caused a burst of darkness that left his hands numb.
Eventually the sky turned dark and the pair left for home. But there was a new light in Roger's eyes, and Hippopotas' too.
They wouldn't give up so easily.
The duo spent years exploring the hills, trying to find the whispers again. Yet every attempt was thwarted by the strange dark energy.
Eventually the boy turned sixteen and went on his journey, with Hippopotas at his side. They left Solaceon with smiles on their faces and cheerful promises about battles and gyms. Then, as soon as they were out of sight, they veered off-route, into the tall grass.
Slowly but surely they worked their way through the hills that separated Solaceon from Veilstone, always seeking a way in. It was dangerous, of course, and the pair nearly died a dozen times to wild Pokemon and treacherous terrain. But Hippopotas had a burning resolve to defeat the hills that had denied him so many times before, and Roger could still hear a subtle whispering in the back of his mind that drove him ever onwards towards his goal; danger alone could not stop them.
Finally, after months of wandering, the pair found a cave to the south of Veilstone. When they crept inside they discovered a dirt wall with no sign of dark energy creeping across it. And when they scratched at the wall, nothing stopped them.
So they started to dig.
You can find them there even now, if you walk to the end of Maniac Tunnel. Man and Hippowdon are both gaunt and caked with dirt, yet still they dig on.
Many people have tried to talk to them, to help them see that their quest is hopeless. Hundreds of miles separate the end of their tunnel from the cliffs in Solaceon. It would take an entire lifetime to break free to the other side.
They do not listen. They do not care.
They follow the whispers of the unknown still.
A/N: In the Sinnoh games there's a location called Maniac Tunnel that features an NPC, the Ruin Manic, who is trying to dig through the mountain to get to the Unown ruins on the other side. The tunnel gets longer as the main character encounters more Unown, and it reaches the ruins after the MC has seen all 26 letters.
I've always loved the worldbuilding in IWTTS, and I appreciate how it integrates little details from the games into the main story (example: one of the 'stat trainers' in the game, Mira, is a major character in IWTTS, and first appears in her in-game location). The Maniac Tunnel hasn't come up in the story, so I thought it would be fun to hypothesize how it might fit into the canon.
FUN FACT: there were 28 entries in the competition, numbered in the order they were submitted. By sheer coincidence, this was #26.
