So sorry for the delay, I meant to send in the discord server not to wait up for me, I think maybe it got lost though. I'm more free now, and I made a quick post!
Shazamrock
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Greetings!
| About Me: Name- Shazam, Shamrock, or Shammie is fine! Age- Over 18 Pronouns- She/They Country- United States ERP - I will write NSFW | Roleplay: I do one on one RPs mostly but open to groups! I like romance and for pairings I can do MxF or MxM (or NB). Will double! I don't RP as canon characters but happy to RP in fandom setting with OCs. I like romance (slow burn), fantasy, magic, adventure, modern setting, found family, & more For fandoms I am always up for Pokemon or some anime/magic settings | Request thread: Still getting set up |
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After reuniting with his fellow trainer and giving his side of the story, Nils was treated with a recap of Clarissa's side as well. She apparently hadn't known that the message she'd send had been corrupted (or whatever had happened) and of course she hadn't gotten the call Nils had attempted to make earlier. She'd also not found anything as she followed the soft crying noise through the tunnels, at least until a huge pokemon had found her. That part of the story had Nils' eyes widening, as it must have been the thing he'd heard roar just a little bit ago.
Maybe this eerie cave system was a little more dangerous than it seemed. Actually if one considered the giant pokemon that could just as easily crush you by mistake as it could swallow you whole on top of the various other wild creatures, the risk of getting lost in the tunnels or said tunnels collapsing whether trapping them in or falling right on top of them, plus the whole mystery with the crying and missing persons... Well, maybe it was actually a lot more dangerous.
But Nils only spared a moment for that thought. There were more important things at the moment and they were already in too deep anyway. Literally, as the two trainers and their pokemon had continued further in.
Nils' own phone continued hovering at head height to act as a floating flashlight as they walked. Rau remained outside of his pokeball, having taken a spot on the boy's shoulder to act as a look out, eyes wide and his ears, nose, and whiskers twitching.
And, eventually, the explorers were given more direction in the form of a harsh cry that could only be from a pokemon, and shortly after a plea that could only be from a human.
When Clarissa turned Nils met her eyes, his eyebrows raising up in surprise. They were still for only a moment before they ran, having easily come to the same conclusion.
"That might be-...come on, Nils, let's hurry, but keep an eye out for more Steelix!"
"How exactly could we miss them?" he couldn't help but quip back, though it hardly helped to lighten the grim painting that someone's shouting for help painted. Regardless, Nils sprinted alongside Clarissa towards the voices.
[ Let's solve this mystery! ]
Unfortunately for the detective, Nils didn't slow down until the mysterious hole in the wall was within view. It was as he left it; no Rau or Clarissa climbing back out of it or waiting outside, but also still open, no blockages to speak of. It looked like he was going to have to go in, but before that he took a moment to take a breath and answer the question Dudley asked earlier about what he'd meant.
"We heard a crying sound coming from in there," Nils explained. "Been hearing it for a while now, way farther away than makes sense, unless the acoustics down here are just that good. So we followed it... my friend already went ahead, but I guess you already saw that if you were spying on us."
He didn't sound disturbed by the last bit, just stating a fact now that he knew Dudley was just a down on his luck detective. It was more the first part that Nils emphasized, since he hadn't thought anything strange about it until hearing Dudley's story. "You get it, right, detective? I mean if we followed this sound, how many other kids might have followed it down here too?"
As Nils mentioned before, he could be wrong about this. He sort of hoped he was, although that would mean the mystery of the missing kids would remain with no leads, ultimately a bad thing for both the people missing and his new acquaintance. Either way, Nils guessed he was going to find out soon enough. He moved to pulling himself into the hole in the wall when Dudley briefly stopped him to hand him an item. Nils glanced at the little purple ball, noting the cloud-like designs before tucking it away. He could probably guess its use pretty easily.
"Thanks," he said, flashing the detective a small grin. "Don't worry, I'll make sure we don't get added to that missing persons list. Keep watch for us here, detective!"
Then Nils vanished into the dark tunnel.
Further in, having already cleared the abnormally long hole and crossed through a few of the rocky tunnels at the bottom led by his nose, Rau had made it to his destination. The Rattata did not immediately approach Clarissa, instead it sniffed the ground around her and her two pokemon (already too used to the smell of trash for the Trubbish's passive stench to bother it, though its active one would be a different matter). The Rattata's hackles were raised as it clearly smelled the lingering metallic scent of some massive creature... but since the danger seemed to have passed, Rau calmed a little, especially after Clarissa pet his head.
Rau chittered at her, not quite happily, more like it was trying to tell her something. But, yes, Clarissa had guessed right, his new trainer was indeed looking for her. Rau had been in his pokeball or otherwise separated from Nils when the bulk of the explanation as to why was happening, but the Rattata was intelligent enough to be able to pick up on the subtle worry his trainer had been giving off when he'd sent Rau on this little mission.
He could also pick up the lingering fear signals the Roggenrola was putting out, so Rau eyed it critically. Had the rock-type been too scared to protect what was now his, the trainer girl, from whatever beast had just been through here? For shame. The Trubbish must be the second-in-command since that rabbit was out of commission. So Rau turned to the Trubbish and told it in their own pokemon language that he would be right back with my trainer boy and to make sure everyone stays put and safe.
Rau glanced at Clarissa once more, his whiskers twitching, before he set off the way he'd come from.
He would eventually find Nils not too far from where the small tunnel connected with the cavern. The boy was momentarily stunned at discovering all this beneath the sewers. Just how far down did this all extend?! The caverns didn't feature any pipes, walkways, or lights, making it seem undiscovered by humans, and yet there was a glow to the place somehow... The contrasting colors of the mysterious light and the rocks around him made the otherwise fairly featureless caverns sort of pretty.
Whoa... So a pokemon burrowed up from this place into the city's sewers...? Nils thought to himself, wandering forward to take in the area properly. In edition to the ethereal glow the cavern had, Nils' rotom dex floated up once more to add additional light... as well as to try and make a call now that Nils saw it might not be that easy to find Clarissa. He could see there were several directions he could take as many other tunnels branched out from the one he was in. Unfortunately, there wasn't much luck in the phone service down here. Nils looked around at the pokemon and gently laid a hand on the red stone wall as he considered which path to follow.
LIIIIIIIIIX!
Oookay, maybe not that way then. It was hard to tell where exactly the roar came from, but he could tell its general direction at least. If they were in a forest or something Nils was pretty sure he'd be able to track Clarissa, but as of now he just had to pick a direction and listen for either his fellow trainer or the cries they'd been after.
"Raa!" Before Nils went the wrong way, his pokemon returned to him. Nils dropped to one knee to scratch behind Rau's ear in greeting. "Hey! Did you find her?"
Rau stood on his hind legs and jerked his head down one of the other tunnels (the same direction that roar had come from, Nils noticed) before running a circle around his trainer. He intended to lead Nils the right way, and without wasting much more time the two set off. They did keep Clarissa and her party waiting for a little bit (she had a head start on them after all), but eventually the form of his fellow trainer parked on a boulder came into view.
Nils appeared more casual than Rau had tried to imply, but only because he didn't want to spook Clarissa and make her think there was an emergency happening. There was definitely something weird, suspicious, and potentially dangerous afoot, but at the moment it looked like the both of them were unharmed, so any worry Nils had faded. Now that they were together, the two of them could probably fend off anything that needed fending off once Clarissa had all the information he did.
...and if they couldn't, there was always that smokeball that Detective Dudley had given him.
"Glad to see you're alright," Nils said to her. "I met a guy up there that made me think you might have gotten spirited away."
And to be fair, being spirited away was a very real concern back home in the mountains too.
"But uh, long story short..."
Nils proceeded to fill Clarissa in on what had gone on back in the sewers, starting with the static message he'd gotten from her, then what he'd heard from the detective (minus the man's life story), and his own theory too. At the end of it, Nils did not suggest retreating. Just the opposite, he seemed like he wanted to get to the bottom of his mystery even more now.
It's no problem at all Rem ^^
The more Nils heard from Detective Dudley's mouth, the more he felt this guy was not really a threat. While appearances could easily be deceiving, and the spoken words could just as easily be lies as they were truth, Nils just didn't get the sense that the man was deceiving him. This is just really sad, Nils thought as Dudley continued. He slipped the business card into his pocket and somewhat awkwardly listened to the rest of the story, concluding with the man's destitute situation and the rhetorical question.
"I guess not," Nils answered. It was definitely weird to find other people traipsing around in the sewers after all. As for the detective, Nils judged his earlier self-disparaging comment to be right: the guy was a weirdo, but not the creepy dangerous kind.
The other part of the story, before Dudley had just started talking about how awful his life currently was (Nils felt bad for him but there wasn't much he could for him), was what most caught the newbie trainer's attention. Assuming that the detective wasn't lying, then there was a string of disappearances in Grand Glory City. Kidnappings, or something else...? And why the heck would a sewer be the last place a rich kid had been seen before going missing?
Nils crossed his arms as he closed his eyes to think about the situation. At the same time Tors had apparently decided that Dudley wasn't too dangerous to help out of the waste water, and reached his neck out for that purpose. Once the detective got close enough he'd chomp onto the nearest unsullied part of the man's outfit to haul him back onto the platform.
A missing kid and their pokemon, the last place they were known to have been being in the sewers under the city... and not only them, but a trend of missing people and pokemon... Hmmm... Had they all just happened to get lost playing around down here...? Were they brought to this place, or perhaps lured...?
"Actually, you wouldn't have seen anything would you?"
Nils opened his eyes to look at the man and shook his head. "No, we've only seen local pokemon so far. Besides, well, finding you, nothing weird happened other than running into that tunnel when... we were following that... crying noise..."
The boy trailed off, his eyes growing large as he heard his own words. That crying sound! If they really thought about it, how could it be heard on the surface from all the way down beneath the city with all of the earth, metal, and concrete in the way? Before Nils had been of the same mind as Clarissa and that there was some sad pokemon making the noise, but with what he knew now it cast the crying in a much more suspicious light. If other kids had followed that crying noise down here too, then... wasn't it possible that's how they disappeared?!
Which meant that Nils definitely shouldn't have let Clarissa go on by herself. Maybe that message she'd tried to send was some kind of warning, or an SOS, and she was in trouble!
"Tors, return!" Nils suddenly exclaimed as he turned and bolted back the way they'd come. The mudbray was recalled to his pokeball, and in his place Nils released Rau. The Rattata didn't let any confusion at the situation stop him from keeping up with his trainer, and then swiftly obeying his orders as he bid the pokemon, "run ahead and down that tunnel, go find Clarissa!"
Far faster than a human, the pokemon was out of sight within a few seconds. Nils didn't look back at Dudley but he assumed the man would follow after him, especially when he shouted to the man, "it could be nothing, but we might have found your lead, detective!"
Nils was never one to distrust his gut feelings, so he knew there had to be something around the area spying on them, he just didn't expect to find it so quick. And unless the pokemon down here had learned how to cuss, that something was definitely a human. Obviously other people had been down in the sewers before, but that there was actually one with them right now was sort of a shock. Was sewer diving some kind of popular city trend or something??
Of course Nils didn't hesitate to give chase. Not only was he curious, but since the mystery person had run he figured that they had to be up to something. Tors was right by his side as they raced after the sound of footsteps. It was hard to tell if they were gaining ground with the combo of shadows and echoes but luckily for them, and unluckily for the person they were after, the telltale sound of something plunged into the sewage meant their quarry wouldn't be getting away anytime soon.
Nils and Tors approached the lip of the walkway that separated them from the stream of waste water, and indeed there was another person. A man who was unfortunately sitting waist deep in said water. Nils' pulled his rotom phone out again, letting it float in the air with the flashlight app shining down on the guy to further illuminate him in the already dim light.
Huh, doesn't look how I expected, Nils thought. Then again he hadn't really expected to find a person at all until the chase started. And, well, look at Clarissa and him. Sewer exploration took all kinds.
And then the guy immediately started trying to explain. There had been an amused look on Nils' face at first when finding the guy had slipped into the sewage, but it faded into an uneasy one fast. He hadn't even considered what the man was implying against, but now that it had been brought up... was this guy actually a creep? Thank goodness Amelia hadn't come down here with them.
"Yeah, man, it looks really bad," Nils told him. Sensing his trainer's new tension, Tors squared up at the edge of the water to make the stranger think twice about trying anything as he stood up.
But they didn't attack the guy, they heard him out, for the moment.
"A detective?"
Maybe an investigator could be down here looking for clues for any number of cases, even the eerie cries that he and Clarissa were here for now, but even so wasn't that kind of... sketchy?
Nils took the business card, reading it over quickly before looking back to the PI and asking, "if you're actually a detective, what are you here investigating? And why'd you run away?"
When they'd first climbed down into the sewers, Nils hadn't found the place to be spooky or anything. He was mostly preoccupied with not slipping on any puddles while his eyes adjusted to the dim light. Even now, alone on one side of the tunnel, he didn't feel creeped out... But he did feel something. A tingle at the back of his neck. He rubbed at it idly.
Tors paced in front of the hole with his ears flicking. Nils had leaned his back against the wall as they continued to wait, his eyes moving between watching Tors and looking out into the corners of the wider area. He wasn't worried, exactly, at least not yet, but it was kind of weird. He would have expected Clarissa to have made it to the other side already and called back to him, especially since the sounds of her and Scrapper shuffling had long since faded out. He didn't hear anything though, and the longer he stood there the stronger the feeling of being watched got. Nils was sensitive to it, and though in the right context it didn't bother him, right now? It wasn't a great feeling.
When the notification chime on his phone went off, Nils was glad for the distraction. He withdrew it from his pocket to find a video message from Clarissa.
"There she is," he told Tors. Nils sank into a crouch as the mudbray walked over so they could watch it together. Unfortunately neither sound nor picture came through at all. The video played, but it was only static through the speaker and on the screen. Pokemon and trainer shared a glance.
"Huh." Was that a bad sign or was the reception just poor down here? "...maybe we should go check things out. But before that..."
Nils stood up, stuffing the phone back into his pocket. He brushed his fingers against the pokeballs there, one belonging to Rau and the other the yet unnamed Aron. If who or whatever was spying on them was malicious, he had three pokemon on him including Tors, even if the Aron was weakened.
"Doesn't feel right to go through the tunnel without at least trying to find who's watching us do it, right, Tors?"
The mudbray shook its head in agreement. Nils pushed off from the wall with his partner at his side, wandering a little away from the mystery tunnel. He definitely didn't want some prankster to interfere with finding the source of the cries, so if he could, it would be best to find the source of this piercing gaze first just in case.
[ Thoroughly Investigate the Area ]
Having one of them go inside and the other stand guard did make sense. Nils couldn't imagine that there were any nefarious people hanging out down here in the sewer unless they really happened to like dark, dingy, dank, dirty, damp tunnels... But if he tried, he could imagine something like a bunch of grimer packing themselves into the opening and completely blocking it, leaving them stuck. Then again the two trainers had cleared the area outside for the most part and there might be something dangerous on the other side of the hole.
"Hm," Nils said again as he considered what to do. He glanced down at Tors, who'd since released his hold on Nils' clothes. The Mudbray's ears waggled, less anxious now. They were still getting to know each other, so it was hard to tell the donkey pokemon's concern level. Was it about something he felt? Or maybe he just hadn't wanted Nils to dive in without thinking about it first. Tors himself would have to be confined to his pokeball if they went through; his hooves and body shape would not lend itself well to crawling at all.
There was one other thing that helped Nils make up his mind, which was the fact that Clarissa was already pulling herself up into the opening, and she happened to be wearing a skirt. The boy crossed his arms and pointedly looked away until Scrapper hopped up, then knowing his voice would echo a little he called quietly after them, "we'll keep a look out here then. Shout for us if you need any help and we'll come through."
Ultimately it was Clarissa's intuition that had led them down here in the first, so if there was a lonely pokemon it would only be right for her to be the one to console it.
Feels like it took 4 years to post that (and 4 more to post this), but it is done, if there are any issues I will try to resolve them when it's not so difficult to connect ... especially bad if you write on a phone.
And sorry to see you go Zapdos.
And sorry to see you go Zapdos.
It was sort of comforting to find signs of human activities down in Grand Glory's underbelly. The sewer system was just as large and twisted as a natural cave system, but unlike the latter there really wasn't any excitement to be had from being the first ones to explore the concrete caverns. Besides the ones that built it in the first place. At least seeing the graffiti meant other people had been down there before and presumably made it back out too. Nils didn't think that he and Clarissa would get lost down there (the urban exploration was far from a forest or mountain, but Nils was keeping track of where they'd come from as best he could), but thankfully even if they did they could just look up for any random manholes, then hoof it back to the pokemon center from wherever they ended up.
"You know, you almost get used to the smell the longer you're down here," Nils commented after one of the battles they duo found themselves in. It was kinda crazy really how just when he thought it was getting less bad, another poisonous pokemon would show up and spread a whole new odor around.
But stench alone wasn't enough to deter the two trainers! They followed the echo of the mysterious wailing, gradually getting closer while also gaining more experience alongside their pokemon. Eventually they started to encounter new kinds of pokemon, that were apparently eating the steel pipes and supports, which... didn't seem very safe. Had they been drawn to all of the construction in the city, and some had just happened to wind up down here? Or maybe they'd naturally gravitated to a place with so little competition for their 'food'... either way, it was probably a good thing to knock a few out or send them running, give the city's infrastructure a break from being chowed on.
In fact, maybe some relocation would be good too.
Since Tors knew a couple of super-super effective moves that made dealing with the little iron eaters easier than it looked, Nils made sure to throw a ball at the ones that didn't go down quite as fast.
[ Quick Catch Attempt: Aron ]
It took some time and more than a few battles to get there, but after exploring Nils and Clarissa came upon the source of the crying. Sort of. They'd hit what looked like a dead end, but the sound they'd been following definitely seemed to be coming from the other side.
Nils held his ear up to the hole in the wall, nodded to Clarissa, and then turned and stuck his head inside it. Tors (who'd been the most recent outside of his ball, swapping back and forth with Rau for battles) blinked, his ears standing straight up, and bit at the end of his trainer's coat as if to hold the boy back from just crawling inside.
"Don't worry buddy," Nils said as he pulled his head back out. Nils made a soft hmm noise, patted Tors lightly on the head, and finally turned to Clarissa with one hand on his hip and the other on his chin.
"It has to be on the other side of this wall, right? ...what do you wanna do? I think the hole goes all the way through, but it was hard to see far into it. We could try and find another way around."
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