CHAPTER 11: EXPLORATION AND REVELATION

Outer Space

It was another day in the command bay of the S.S. Pernautica, a name that the space station’s commander, Martin Harlingen, found odd for a spaceship. Sounds more like something one would call a sailing ship, the burly man with black and red hair mused as he stared out the command bay’s window towards the Earth. Two weeks had passed since the previous attempt at sending out CSP-374 ended with its cloaking mechanism getting damaged by a sneasel’s pursuit and metal claw attacks. But today, he was ready to try again with the freshly repaired beldum-like drone. As his holo-computer booted up, Kori walked into the room, carrying a food bag from Morpho Burger, and the bag had a orange, oddly terrifying beautifly printed on it.

“I thought you said you were an unpaid intern,” Martin said as his intern set down the bag next to him, pulling out her own food.

“I am,” she responded, not looking his way. “I get a monthly allowance from my parents back on Verasus, though. Anyways, you ready to try again with the probe?” She took some french fries and ate them. “I’d still like to see if there are any pokemon settlements, and what they might look like.”

“Funny you should ask, because I was just about to launch the thing.” He gave a thumbs up. “Thanks for lunch, by the way. You really didn’t have to.”

Before Martin began eating, he pressed the launch button to launch CSP-374.

“Another thing,” he added as the machine propelled itself towards the planet below, “I had it fitted with light-speed technology, so it won’t take two hours to get there this time.”

Kori nodded as she took a bite of her burger. “Good call.”

After finishing his meal, Martin took out his controller, started up Cloakable Search Probe OS, and prepared to take control of the faux-beldum.

---

This time, not only did the beldum not crash land, it also arrived on the main beach this time, rather than an island off the coast. It activated its cloaking device, and Martin was now finally able to take control. The first thing he did was take the drone down the beach, eventually spotting a cavern with a sign out front reading ‘Coral Cove Mystery Dungeon’ in both English and what appeared to be another written language with characters written in the shape of pokemon footprints. The sign also warned of wild pokemon living inside.

“Mystery dungeon?” Martin said, his voice emitting from the speaker. The machine was alone on the beach this time, so there was no risk of being heard and attacked. “What’s a mystery dungeon?”

“No clue,” Kori said in between bites. “Maybe we can find out if we go inside and conduct an energy reading.”

“Great idea, intern!” the commander said as he had the machine propel forward again into the foggy opening to the cave. It seemed to them to just be an ordinary cave system at first, although neither realized that the entrance had disappeared behind their machine. Instead, Martin simply activated the energy scanner, or, at least, he attempted to. The mysterious atmosphere of the dungeon seemed to be causing the signal he was sending to jam, and the scanner refused to work.

“Dang it!” he shouted, banging a fist on the arm of his chair, then taking a deep breath. “Well, that seems to be bust. Let’s just back out and look around elsewhere.”

He pivoted the beldum in each direction, but he couldn’t find the way he had entered. There were just rock walls, plus a pathway leading deeper into the dungeon.

“Wh-what is the meaning of this?” he said, shook. “Where’s the way we came in?”

He repeatedly blasted with the laser, hoping the blasts would eventually expose an exit. After having cored out a hole that was at least ten feet deep, he gave up.

“Yeah, I think we’re gonna have to find another way out,” Kori observed.

Martin steered the beldum down the only pathway they had seen, hoping maybe there would be a way out that way. Something that greatly confused him when the drone arrived in the next room was a perfectly carved set of stone stairs. It didn’t seem to lead out of the dungeon, though, but it isn’t like there was anywhere else for him to go. He steered the beldum through the gap in the floor that was left by the stairway, but instead of emerging back outside, he was still in the cave. The most confusing part is that he clearly wasn’t back at the beginning, as there was a pathway leading out of the new room in each wall. Fortunately for him, there was another stairway in that same room, so he could just fly down it quickly, only to have his hopes of escape dashed by yet another room. This one did not have another stairway, and there was once again only one way out.

“This is starting to get kind of frustrating,” Martin grunted impatiently as he steered the faux-beldum down the lone pathway connecting to the room. After some twists and turns, it arrived in the next room, where there were two more exits aside from the one the machine had emerged from.

“Kori, what do you think? Left, or right?”

“As far as I’m concerned, when in doubt, go left.”

The machine then got steered to the left, into the shortest hallway they had yet encountered that led directly into the room with the stairs. At the bottom they found a large room with twin waterfalls. It didn’t seem to have the same atmosphere as the rest of the dungeon, so, after snapping a photo with CSP-374’s camera, they were finally able to conduct an energy scan. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem to find anything unusual about the room they were in.

“Well, this whole thing was a bust,” Martin said, disappointed. “Even worse, I still don’t see a way out!”

“Try flying up to the waterfalls,” Kori recommended tactfully. “That water has to be flowing from somewhere, after all.”

“Brilliant plan,” the burly man replied as he caused the beldum to rise into the air via his controller. All he saw, though, was another foggy opening, which, he assumed, was another of those mystery dungeons. He started up another energy scan to see if it somehow missed something, and sure enough, he found a small spike in spatial energy directly below him. After pivoting the faux-beldum to point its camera lens downward, he saw the source of the energy spike it had registered: a glowing blue circle on the ground, towards which he maneuvered the machine.

---

CSP-374’s video feed fizzled out briefly before it came back on, back at the entrance to Coral Cove, much to the relief of both humans.

“Yeah… I say we avoid those mystery dungeons whenever we’re conducting one of these ‘expeditions’,” Martin said as he flew the beldum into the sky. “I wonder how they formed in the first place… they weren’t here the last time the IEF had contact with Earth.”

Kori’s face lit up as it always did whenever she realized something. “Boss, a thought occurred to me… I don’t know the origins of these mystery dungeons, either, but what if these strange caves and the apparent disappearance of humans from the planet are connected somehow?”

The commander hummed. “You might be onto something there,” he thought aloud. “What do you say we continue to look around the area for signs of civilization?”

The intern nodded in agreement, and Martin pivoted the now sky-high beldum-like machine around before he noticed a large clearing in the forest about half a mile inland populated with buildings. Ah, he thought, a town! There must be people there!

As he drew closer, though, it didn’t look like any human town he had ever seen, either in person or even history books. Many of the houses didn’t even seem to be human-sized, and some of them even looked like pokemon. Speaking of pokemon, that is all there was around the area as the creatures below went about their daily lives, with not a single human in sight.

“That’s odd,” Kori said. “Did we stumble upon a pokemon village of some kind?”

Martin cocked an eyebrow. “Of some kind? What other kind of pokemon village would there even be?” He shook his head dismissively. “Never mind that, let’s see if there are any humans around.” With the press of a previously unused button, Martin activated another special scanner on the machine, one that would reveal all human life forces within a radius of a mile. On the machine, a tiny sonar dish emerged out of the head, or it would have if the cloaking hadn’t still been active. The dish rotated every which way as it scanned every building nearby. After the scan concluded and the dish retracted into the body of CSP-374, the results were sent back to the computer.

“Three human life forces detected,” a feminine robotic voice reported. “All are currently located approximately 0.81276395 miles north of the current coordinates. To fly there immediately, say ‘go to coordinates’.”

The commander repeated the offered command, so the fake beldum entered autopilot mode and flew north at Mach 1, crashing through a second-story window of what appeared to be a library seconds later. However, the room they ended up in looked more like some kind of dorm room than what Martin normally expected a library to look like. The intrusion had startled three of the pokemon that inhabited the room at that time, especially since there was no visible culprit. The last one simply sighed with annoyance.

“Oh, that’s just great,” the sneasel groaned. “Now that window needs replaced.”

“Don’t worry, Lena,” the litten replied confidently, “I’ll let Felix or Erin know about that. Be right back!” He then dashed out the door, presumably to do what he had said.

“Hey,” Martin said on the other side of CSP-374’s camera, “these aren’t humans, they’re the pokemon that attacked the drone two weeks ago!”

“Affirmative,” the CSP-OS voice assistant said monotonously.

“And you’re claiming that there are humans in this room?”

“Also affirmative.”

The eevee’s ears and tail shot up in shock at this, for, although Martin hadn’t realized this yet, he hadn’t muted his microphone, so the trio could hear the entire conversation. Terry wasn’t impressed as much as he was perplexed.

“Another ghost?” the pachirisu said. “We literally just got done with a rescue mission… can it wait? Like, sure, we just achieved our team’s bronze rank, but I still don’t want to deal with this right now.”

Back aboard the S.S. Pernautica, Martin once again pressed the button to scan for human life forces.

“You could have just said you don’t believe me,” CSP-OS said snarkily as the sonar dish emerged again, this time reducing its scope to just the room they were in. After the scan finished, the AI repeated, “Three human life forces detected. All are currently located a maximum of 0.00043827 miles in any direction of the current coordinates. To fly there immediately, say ‘go to coordinates’.”

On the display, a red, glowing overlay appeared over the eevee, pachirisu, and sneasel that the drone currently shared the room with to show that they were the humans the scanner had detected. Martin facepalmed.

“Okay, the thing’s clearly on the fritz. That faster-than-light tech must be messing with the internals.”

“Or, maybe, they were human before, but were transformed into pokemon somehow at some point,” Kori offered, shrugging. “Stranger things have happened in the past.”

“Oh really? What’s next? You’re gonna tell me that that sneasel is my daughter?”

At this point it wouldn’t really surprise me, she thought despite shaking her head in negation.

“That’s what I thought.”

Back on the other side, Lena looked like she realized something. “Wait a second, I just realized… I think I recognize that voice from somewhere. The gravellier one, not the others.”

Ryan, who had snapped out of his initial shock by now, looked over at her. “Eh, I’m pretty sure it’s just the same shiny beldum from before. Not sure how it can make itself invisible, but it’s not that big of a deal.”

“No, I mean, I think I remember that voice from a time before that encounter!”

Ryan and Terry perked up at this. Was she finally remembering something about her past? “Well, then tell us, Lena,” the eevee said. “Who does the voice belong to?”

“Mmh, all I can remember right now is that it belongs to someone very important to me… I also seem to recall the name Martin…”

The commander muted his microphone and gently set down the controller before blurting out his next words. “What? There’s no way! That- that has to be a coincidence!”

Kori looked shocked as well. Wait, could that sneasel actually be his missing daughter?

After first accidentally pressing the uncloaking button, causing the faux shiny beldum to become visible to the trio of pokemon, Martin pressed a different button to unmute his mic again and spoke directly to Lena this time.

“Lena, if that really is you, even though you may not remember who I am, I would just like you to know that, even though you’re a sneasel right now, I love you very much and that I’m looking out for you.”

“You’re right that I have no idea who you are, even though you do sound familiar.” Lena lightly rubbed the back of her head with a claw, assuming that this beldum was the one talking to her and not someone remotely controlling it. “But, thanks anyways… I guess?”

Just then, the door opened. “I’m back! And I brought Felix with me!” Ben said as he marched into the room as the aforementioned lucario walked in carrying a brand-new double-paned window. “Boy, it’s a good thing the guild has a bunch of unused mint-condition windows sitting in the basement, isn’t it?”

It was then that the two saw the shiny beldum between them and the shattered window. Ben’s jaw dropped almost as quickly as the new window did out of a startled Felix’s paws. Now, even more shards of glass littered the floor of Team Seekers’ bedroom.

“A shiny beldum!?” both pokemon said in unison before Ben added, “wait… I think that’s the same beldum from two weeks ago!”

The faux-beldum made a mechanical clicking noise, and a red beam began scanning the litten and lucario. “Scanning for malintent… scanning for malintent… no malintent found. Guard lowered,” a feminine robotic voice said.

The lucario put a paw behind his head. “Uhm, I’ve seen plenty of beldum in my time as guildmaster, but I’ve never seen one do… whatever that one just did before.” He studied the beldum, staring into its ‘eye’, which made Martin a bit nervous.

“Please stop that,” Martin said as if he were the beldum. “You’re making me nervous.”

The blue jackal raised an eyebrow. “That eye of yours… it doesn’t look right…”

“It’s probably nothing. Just my shiny coloration,” the commander said.

“I don’t mean the color; I know what shiny beldum looks like. Something just doesn’t… seem right.”

“Oh, would you look at the time! I’ve got to go now! No time to explain! Gotta blast!”

The faux-beldum quickly pivoted and prepared to blast off.

“Oh no you don’t!” the lucario shouted, and he lunged forward to try to grab onto the beldum before it could fly away. It blasted off too quickly though, and the jackal landed face first onto a section of the floor that, luckily for him, wasn’t covered in glass shards. By the time he could pick himself back up, though, the beldum was already long gone. Sighing with disappointment, he left Team Seekers’ room to get them another window to replace the one that was broken.

“…I’m still confused,” Lena said. “Apparently the thing… loves me?” She buried her face in her claws. “I don’t even know… I should probably get some sleep.”

“It’s only, like, three in the afternoon right now,” Ryan responded, “but I guess we could leave you alone for the time being.”

After the others left the room, carefully maneuvering to not cut their paws open on the glass shards, the sneasel tried to get some shuteye. Yet, all she could think about was that beldum, and the fact that she may have remembered the name of someone she used to know.

---

“So, uh… what do you make of everything we saw and heard today, boss?” Kori asked as the beldum returned to the ship. She noticed that Martin seemed a bit defeated with what they had learned today.

“It’s just… that… that might be my daughter,” the commander began. “On one hand, if that is her, it’s great to see she’s still alive, but at the same time, not only is she a pokemon now, she doesn’t even remember me.” He sighed. “That sucks.”

“I agree; it’s never a fun time to have someone you know get amnesia,” Kori replied. “What do you say we go get some ice cream to take your mind off of it?”

A slight grin emerged on Martin’s face. “You know, I’d like that very much.”