#*slaps roof of groudon* this bad boy can fit sooo many more horror tropes in 'em

[new-eyes-extra-colors]

realized i hadn't actually posted any fic snippets of eots with my boy maxie in them so here he is

also. i think groudon and kyogre should be scarier. as a treat.

“Maxie,” she says, tugging gently on his hand. He stops and turns partway around, glancing at her briefly, and follows the direction of her flashlight beam across the cavern to the spot where it illuminates a small x on the rock wall, drawn in white chalk.

“Again?” he mutters.

“This is the third time,” May says, voice high and tremulous, “that we’ve been through here. Every single one of these exits just, I don’t know, loops back here somehow.” She gives him a look that’s halfway between critical and pleading, and he holds her gaze steadily, expression neutral. “Have you seen the passageway that leads back to the entrance? Because it should be right behind us, but we got here through that turn.” She points ahead with her flashlight, to the branch of the cave that heads off to the left. “I mean, how does that even make sense? Coming through the same exit four times from four different directions?”

He turns away, falling silent for a moment. The cavern echoes with the quiet sound of water dripping from somewhere nearby; of Maxie tapping his foot. His hand is warm in hers, and she realizes she’s squeezing it. It’s selfish, but she’s too afraid to let go.

“I think,” he says evenly, “that this is normal.”

She takes a deep breath. “Normal.”

He nods once. “Relatively speaking, of course. But I’ve seen something similar to this before, back at our base.”

She frowns up at him. “I thought that was an abandoned mine?”

He catches her gaze again briefly. “Why do you think it as abandoned? People thought it was haunted, and when they couldn’t find out what was haunting it, they abandoned the project rather than stick around and risk irritating something powerful enough to rearrange a cave system at will.” He looks around the cavern briefly, flashlight beam skating across dripping stalactites on the ceiling. “You have to remember the scale of power we’re dealing with, here. A reasonably powerful psychic-type could achieve something similar to this, and people used to worship Kyogre as a god.”

Maxie’s words hang in the still air for a moment, and May shifts back and forth on her aching feet. She turns and looks behind them, but there’s nothing there except the dark passageway they just walked through.

“You think Kyogre’s doing this.”

“Not doing,” he corrects. “Well. Maybe doing, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a conscious control.” He takes a deep breath. “Obviously, I’m not sure. But have you ever seen anything like this before? Since Groudon… left, we’ve been able to map the entire mine and the cave structure it intersects with. We tried several times before, of course, but were never able to do that successfully while they were still there.”