Adventures of Dr Tom Snaps #206

The first day of my expedition into Glaseado Mountain’s vast subterranean cave network passed by almost without my noticing; the darkness was such that I lost the ability to mark the passing of time. The labyrinthine tunnel system reminded me of those I had seen dug by a particularly large Steelix in the Lental region. No such Pokémon are known to live here in Paldea, however; a fact that made the immense caverns stretching out ahead of me difficult to comprehend. The Paldean mining crew that had accompanied me on my expedition asserted that the tunnels must be the work of a singularly large Orthworm but I was unconvinced. The sheer size of the tubular caverns seemed to make that hypothesis impossible. 

Halfway through the second day of our push through the heart of the mountain, we entered upon what seemed to be a  gigantic central chamber. The cavern was spherical and stretched out all around me, hundreds of metres in every direction. Dozens of tunnels, similar in size to the one we had travelled down, dotted the walls of the chamber and I felt an uncomfortable prick of trypophobia as I regarded them. The mining crew began setting up a network of generator powered work lights they had brought with them. When they had finished, several dozen twin beams of light cast their gaze into the depths of the spherical chamber but even they seemed to shrink back from the immensity of the gloom. 

As I began to set up my own survey equipment, the chamber started to shake. The ground below me rumbled and I felt the weight of something huge shifting in the darkness of the cavern. Small undulating shapes started to move towards us from the middle of the room and the mining crew and I all stumbled instinctively back into the tunnel we had come through. As I turned to face the chamber once more, hundreds of Dunsparce flopped out from the darkness, weaving in and out of the beams of light and tumbling over one another like a mass of harmless snakes. They hardly even noticed us as they fled the light, delving deeper into the tunnel for shelter. I shouted out to the mining crew and told them to join me in turning off the work lights; my voice barely audible over the clamour of shuffling Dunsparce and Dudunsparce. 

As we struggled our way back into the chamber and began turning off the lights, I thought I caught a glimpse of an immense, segmented shape writhing in the centre of the chamber. It was dragging its bulk into the deeper darkness with all the weight of a house falling away in a landslide. By the time we had finished our task and the chamber was plunged back into near total darkness, the great shape had passed beyond my view. The hundreds of Dunsparce and Dudunsparce that had fled slowly returned to the chamber and, within a couple of hours, silence returned.

-Dr Tom, Paldean Expedition #2