A shiver ran down my spine as I stared at all the misshapen rocks in the room. No, not rocks, bones.

  As I looked around, the cavern seeming to swirl around me, I began to notice more and more signs of what this place was.

  The curved stalagmites were actually rib cages, the small pebbles were finger-bones, and the boulders? Skulls.

  Massive Pokémon must have come here for one reason or another, passing away in this tomb along with their forerunners.

  A hushed silence fell over us as we looked in awe and horror at the graveyard.

  “Oh Arceus.” Lucas whispered. “Oh, oh no.”

  Ted swallowed audibly, and stepped forwards, gently running a hand over the bone he had just been poking at, almost in supplication.

  “I’m sorry.” He whispered.

  Then, a little bit louder, “Does anybody know what kind of Pokémon these are?”

  I shook my head as I stared at the heaps of bones. Now that I knew what I was looking at, it was easier to tell what I was seeing.

  There were almost visible sections to the room. In the farthest corners, the bones were the most worn down, almost indistinguishable from the rock. As they moved closer and closer to the entrance, they became newer and newer, until the one I was standing in front of.

  Its bones were still white, relatively fresh.

  “No.” Lucas said sadly. “They were bigger Pokémon, but what exactly they were… no. I don’t know.”

  “Is this… normal?” I asked. “Having graveyards like this?”

  “It’s not unheard of, but neither is it common. Cubone are known for taking care of their ancestor’s bones, but these are too big for that to be the case here.”

  “We should go.” Lucas said. “I thought… It doesn't matter what I thought. But this is a special place, it needs to be preserved.”

  “Yeah.” Ted stood all the way up, and then started to walk out of the cave, followed shortly by Lucas.

  “I’m sorry.” He said to the room, bowing his head.

  I was just about to follow them out when something caught my eye, an unusual shape in the middle of the most recent set of bones.

  A round, oval shape, half-buried.

  “Alina?” Lucas asked from where he and Ted were standing outside the tomb.

  “One second.”

  Kneeling down, I began to brush dirt away from the shape, revealing more of it underneath the lamp of my helmet.

  As opposed to the off-white and brown of the bones, it was dull-green in color, and as I uncovered more of it, my breath caught in my throat.

  It was almost as big as my torso was, but the shape of a Pokémon egg was unmistakable.

  “She was pregnant.” I whispered, tears building up in the corners of my eyes. “She was dying, and she came down here, even though she had a child.”

  I laid a hand on the egg, and froze.

  It was warm.

  The heat was a tenuous thing, and for a moment I thought I was hallucinating, but sure enough there was the faintest bit of heat coming out of the egg.

  Tears splashed down onto its dusty surface, making long tracks down the curve of the shell.

  Carefully, religiously, I pulled the egg out of the ground, holding it in my arms.

  “How long can Pokémon live in their eggs?” My voice was raw as I turned to Ted and Lucas.

  “Years.” Lucas said quietly. “If need be. They can enter a kind of hibernation until environmental conditions are right… Poké Balls were partially based on how eggs work.”

  “But the longer they go without hatching, the greater the chance that something can go wrong.” Ted warned.

  “I don’t know what kind of Pokémon she was.” I said, clutching the egg to my chest like it was the most precious thing in the world. “But she was going to have a baby. The least we can do for her is to make sure that it has a life to live.”

  Ted nodded wordlessly, and stepped aside, letting me carry the egg back to the surface, away from the dead.

  /^\

  The egg, swaddled in my coat, was gently placed down on the counter of the Pokémon Center.

  “Please.” I said, my voice thick. “Help.”

  The nurse at the desk immediately shot to her feet, hovering over the egg.

  “What’s wrong?” She asked, jumping straight to the point.

  “It’s been in hibernation for… I don’t know how long. Years, more, I don’t know. Is it healthy? Is it-”

  My voice broke, and the nurse shot me a sympathetic look.

  “We’ll take a look at it. Why don’t you take a seat over there, and we’ll let you know as soon as we find anything out, okay?”

  I nodded, and made my way over to a stuffed chair that had been patched several times over.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Lucas and Ted exchanged a few words with the nurse, then followed me.

  “You guys don’t have to stay here with me.” I said softly. “There’s probably a lot you still want to do.”

  Ted laid a hand on my shoulder, and Lucas just shook his head, sitting down next to me.

  I released Venus from her Poké Ball, and she picked up on my mood instantly, jumping into my lap and licking my face.

  Smiling sadly, I wrapped her in the tightest hug that I could while Ted found his own chair.

  I’m not sure how long we sat like that, but by the time the nurse came back, the sun was already beginning to set.

  Ted and Lucas had gotten up every so often, getting some food, water, or just to stretch their legs, but I remained sitting.

  Waiting.

  I didn’t even realize that I’d fallen asleep until the nurse was standing over me, orange light from the setting sun was in the windows, and a blanket was draped over my sleeping form, Venus curled up on top of it.

  “Ms. Knighton?”

  “Yes?”

  I straightened in my seat as much as I could without knocking Venus off.

  “We’ve done our best, and as far as we can tell the egg is fine.”

  A weight lifted off my chest, and I breathed for what felt like the first time all day.

  “That’s not to say that there’s not something wrong.” She warned. “A bigger Pokémon Center like one of the ones in Jubilife City would be able to tell you more, we just don’t have the facilities here to give it a full work-up.”

  “But, it’ll hatch?”

  The nurse shrugged. “Most likely? My recommendation would be to talk to a specialist, and maybe even reach out to a breeder. An incubator would likely go a long way as well.”

  I fidgeted, anxiously petting Venus who yawned at me with big teeth.

  “Did you manage to figure out what kind of Pokémon it was?”

  “...Yes, we did, although we had to do several tests to make sure. At first we just did an ultrasound and compared what we saw to our files, but the results were unexpected, so we did a blood draw to double check.”

  “Wait, isn’t it in an egg? How did you get the blood?”

  She smiled warmly. “There’s specialized needles for piercing Pokémon’s eggs to do tests like this, it’s not uncommon that we need to check on the blood of a Pokémon before it hatches. Don’t worry, we’ve done these kinds of things before.”

  Right. They’re professionals, don’t be silly.

  “It’s… well, it’s a bit unbelievable, but it’s a Larvitar egg.”

  I blinked up at her.

  “Huh.”

  “A Larvitar, the first stage of the Tyranitar line.”

  “No, I knew that, it’s just… how? Why?”

  “May I?” She gestured to the seat across from me and I nodded. “We had to do a little research, and asked around for some of the people who have been on the island the longest. This is honestly why things took so long. We had the results several hours ago, but they didn’t make any sense and we wanted to be sure.

  Tyranitar often lay their eggs underground, mostly for safety purposes. It’s harder for predators to get at the eggs when they’ve several hundred meters below the earth. It’s also for the benefit of the Larvitar itself, they’ll often eat the dirt and stones wherever they hatch in order to get the minerals to build up a tougher hide.”

  “The bones in the cave…”

  “Your companions mentioned something like that. Best that we can tell, the naturally occurring tunnels underneath Iron Island have been something like a pilgrimage to some Tyranitar in the past, they would come here to lay their eggs, ensuring that they had plenty of minerals to eat. When they reached the end of their lifespan, they would also come back to the island, returning to where they were born. Some of the bones would likely be eaten by new-born Larvitar.”

  She chuckled at my expression. “It’s a bit gruesome, but the practice was quite common in the past. Bones represent a good source of calcium, after all, which is especially important for Pokémon like the Larvitar line who produce hard, bonelike shells.”

  “So… the mother went to the caves and was going to lay her egg, then died? Or was she dying and then laid the egg?”

  The nurse shrugged. “It’s impossible to tell without a full autopsy. The Rangers have already been notified of the find, you can thank your friends, and they’re going to block the area off until they can investigate it more.”

  I licked my lips. “So, what happens to the egg now?”

  “What do you want to do with it? Legally speaking, you are the one to find it, and in the absence of a mother or parent to take care of it, you’re the caretaker.”

  “That’s… a lot of responsibility.” The world seemed to tilt around me for a second, but the nurse laughed.

  “You already have three Pokémon you’re looking after, is one more going to be that much of a challenge?”

  “I… I guess not.”

  “Either you can find a hatchery to take it in and look after it for you, or you can hatch it yourself. But for now…”

  She gestured, and a door opened in the back. A Blissey with a white cap and apron was happily pushing a cart, on which the Larvitar egg was carefully swaddled.

  “We return your Pokémon egg, hale and hearty.”

  /^\

  “So, you’re keeping it?” Ted asked as I carefully secured the egg in my harness.

  “I am.”

  He nodded. “Sounds good. I helped hatch Switchback from an egg, so I can help out here too.”

  “Me too!” Lucas said, jumping up and down. “I hatched Sunny from his egg!”

  I smiled at my two friends, then made sure the last of the straps was tight. Carrying an egg around was proving to be an… interesting challenge.

  There was a difference between the dimensional-warping technology of Poké Balls, and that of the special bags like the one I was wearing.

  The math behind it was far outside of my scope of understanding, and my brain did a soft reset whenever somebody talked about it, but basically while Poké Balls were safe to put Pokémon in, bags weren’t.

  However, I couldn’t put the egg into the Poké Ball either, which meant I had to carry it around - which meant a harness.

  After some asking around, I managed to find one on Iron Island that had been collecting dust in somebody’s attic, and it didn’t look… terrible.

  It didn’t look good, it was just a metal frame that had a cloth harness to hold the egg in, straps to keep it in place, and a small shelf where I could put my backpack on.

  But the harness worked, and while it was a bit bulky, it would at least tide me over until we could get an actual portable incubator.

  That I would be able to pick up in Snowpoint City - I’d already called ahead and reserved one at the large PokéMart there. With how cold it got, most people who had non-Ice-type eggs usually had to use an incubator to keep their eggs healthy, so the PokéMart kept a healthy amount on-hand.

  We could have gone back to Jubilife City or Canalave City for an incubator, but after a brief discussion with Ted and Lucas, we’d all decided that we would rather keep moving forward instead of continually backtracking to places we’d already been.

  “All set?” Ted asked, and I took a few careful steps.

  The egg itself was more bulky and awkward to carry than it was heavy, although I was told that Larvitar certainly could get very dense. But with the harness, it wasn’t too bad of a load to carry at all.

  “All set!” I chirped back. “When's the ferry getting here?”

  Lucas checked his watch. “In an hour.”

  The ferry was leaving Iron Island a little bit late today, and the sun was already beginning to set.

  “Let’s get going then!”

  Ted and Lucas started walking, picking up an old, familiar argument between the two of them. Switchback was strolling leisurely alongTed’s side, while Sunny the Monferno was casually playing with a chunk of metal he had picked up off the road.

  I looked down at Venus, who met my look with a happy yip as she nudged my leg with her body.

  Life, I thought. Is good.

  “Are you coming, Alina?” Ted said, turning back to look at me.

  “Yeah! Last one to the dock is a rotten Exeggcute!”

  I smiled, and hurried after my friends.