My footsteps echoed hollowly on the stairs while a cold draft rose out of the bowels of the tower. A branching corridor waited for me at the end of my descent. Pairs of dry torches lined the walls of the labyrinth, and I ignited a few with my lighter. “Catacombs,” I mumbled. “What a treat.” With a faint yellow light in the air, my task became less daunting. I swiftly activated the Pokeball in my grasp and slung it to the ground. A brilliant flash of light illuminated the corridor and left a hulking beast standing before me. Raze, my Venusaur, stretched its immense frame after being confined in that device. The beast was massive—its blue-green body sprawled out on four powerful, stubby legs. Its actual size was about six feet across and four tall, but a huge plant adorned its back. The plant resembled a giant flower, its thick, leathery petals over three feet long and red with white spots. It was set on a thick, palm tree-like stalk. Venusaur had an immense head, nearly the width of its body. Its mouth was a gaping maw, its wide-set eyes lethargic, gray-blue spots mottling its seafoam skin.

My original Pokemon lumbered forward slowly, searching out our quarry. The catacombs were narrow, leaving it little room to maneuver. Skulls filled sockets in the walls at random intervals, leering out at us. I continued lighting torches as we crept down the corridor, but the dank atmosphere wasn’t subsiding. We came to another T-junction and turned left. Raze’s heavy breathing hung in the air, the sound met by a surprisingly strong gust of wind at our backs. “Wind down here?” I asked, puzzled. Shaking my head, we continued. I was trying to pinpoint our location beneath the tower, and hypothesized that we were somewhere under the research lab. Images of the grisly scene kept replaying in my mind, torturing me.

Without warning, the claustrophobic corridor opened into a cavernous room, which unbeknownst to me was directly below the lab’s gate chamber. It was a domed, hexagonal area with four passageways emptying into it. The room itself was empty, but archaic, demonic symbols adorned the walls and floor. A circular seal sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by scratches of a long-dead system of writing. Piles of skulls crumbled in the corners of the chamber, probably trophies of an ancient war. Raze marched alongside me, sweeping his mighty head from side to side. I stood still, absorbing the evil essence of the room. I wondered if something down here could be hunting us from the smell of the blood on my clothes… In the hallway we were in only seconds before, the torches extinguished themselves one by one in the same ophidian pattern as the lights in the facility. The darkness was approaching.

Raze shifted its weight back onto its short hind legs and bellowed into the inky blackness. My heart pounded like a war drum in my ears while my body refused to budge. The last torch in the hallway died, joining the other three passages in suffocating obscurity. Raze roared at our hidden stalker, and I crouched down behind him and lit a flare. A fiery glow enveloped the room, disturbingly reminiscent of the auxiliary lights in the gate chamber. All my protective gear suddenly seemed worthless, like a mere newspaper wrapped around me. Gengar have never been found in the wild, so nothing was known about their “natural” behavior. I began to breathe shallowly, beads of sweat running down my forehead in the chilly cavern. I watched the tunnels, hoping to spot the demon and finish the job. I didn’t see it slide out of the wall directly behind me.

Something felt horribly wrong. A shiver ran down to my legs and my eyes opened wide. I whirled around…and saw nothing but the black abyss. “I’m losing my mind,” I said aloud. Raze looked up at me with his sluggish eyes, distressed. I scratched the top of his broad head, trying to keep from panicking. “It’ll be okay,” I told him. “It’ll be alright.”

The attack came.

Page Fourteen
Page Fourteen

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