Glittering

Spoiler

Target Pokémon: Sableye
Target Rank: Hard (20-30k)
CC: 29035
Warnings: Some nasty horror involving eyes and teeth because I'm awful. Also death and child disappearance.

“Sabrina!” her mother shouted, notes of laughter dancing in her voice. “Get back here, sweetie! It’s time to go home and eat dinner!”

“Never!” Sabrina shouted back in between happy squeals as she dashed off, little legs working as hard as they could, the wind ruffling her short blonde curls. Her mother made a faux sigh and then started chasing after her, grinning widely from ear to ear. Strapped into her seat in the car, Billie was giggling too, one fist stuffed into her mouth, as her mother tore off after her sister.

“Come back here,” her mother gasped out, out of breath and laughing so hard she could barely speak, trying to sound stern and failing miserably. “You know you can’t play out here forever!”

“Watch me!” she shouted back, circling around the back of a rocky hill before scrambling up to the stop, eager to see the panoramic view of the whole park that the vantage would provide. Her foot slipped on the gravelly ground for a second as she was nearing the top but she caught herself, a little breathless from the near miss.

She reached the top of the hill and she could see everything. The freshly mowed green grass stretching out in all directions, dotted with trees and the pond that froze over in the winter for skating and that one maple with the rope swing hanging from the lowest branch. She saw the sun dipping close to the edge of the world, and her mother hunting around the base of the hill, calling her name.

She giggled, took one step forward, ready to call down and surprise her mom.

Something gave way under her feet, and all of a sudden the ground was gone from beneath her and she was falling, and air was whistling in her ears, and she couldn’t see anything at all.

~~~​

Rosanna felt a scream rip out through her throat. Billie, cradled in her arms, began to cry at the noise, and Rosanna’s free hand came up to comfort her on auto-pilot.

She couldn’t find her daughter. She’d come around the hill to where Sabrina should have been, weak from laughing at her daughter’s antics, but hadn’t found her there. Then she’d climbed the hill, shaking her head (Sabrina always did like high places), but she wasn’t up there either. All that was there was a small, dark hole, hidden by long weeds. She didn’t even notice it.

Panic swelling in her throat, she started calling for her daughter as she descended the hill again, checking desperately all across the park, everywhere they’d played during the day, but Sabrina was nowhere to be found. In the bushes, in the trees, in the hollow underneath the slide, in the sandbox.

Her daughter was gone.

~~~​

When she swam back to consciousness through thick layers of darkness, for a second she wasn’t sure she’d awoken at all. She opened her eyes, but she couldn’t see anything but empty, pitch black nothing. She lifted a shaking hand to her face and it came away wet and smelling of iron, and a bolt of pain shot through her skull, making her thoughts go fuzzy and indistinct. She groped blindly around the area, hoping to find wherever she’d entered from, but came up with nothing but jagged stone walls dotted with spiky protrusions that sliced at her palms and gravel layered over the ground that dug into her knees.

“Mom!” she screamed, and the word echoed strangely in the cavern that held her prisoner, ricocheting off the walls and distorting into another shape before bouncing back into her ears twisted and wrong. She tried again and again, until her throat was raw and hoarse and she could scream no more, but rescue didn’t come. She pulled her knees up to her chest and cried into them until her eyes burned with salt water, and once she’d cried herself out she let her head roll to the side and welcomed the obliviousness of sleep.

~~~​

“Yes, yes I have an emergency. It’s- it’s my daughter. Sabrina. I- we were at Laurens Park and she just vanished, oh my god, she’s gone, oh god, I couldn’t find her anywhere, what if she was kidnapped?”

“Ma’am. I’m going to ask you to take a few deep breaths. Are you still at the Park?”

“Y-yes. Yes. I've been looking in the woods."

“Alright. I’m going to send a squad car over. Just stay put. Everything is going to be okay.”

~~~​

When Sabrina woke up, there was something digging into her back that, in her exhaustion and misery, she hadn’t noticed when she fell asleep. Now that she was more aware, the pain was stabbing, and she squeaked when she pulled away from the wall, warm liquid running down her skin from the three pinprick holes in her back. They didn’t hurt as badly as the pounding pain behind her useless eyes, but they hurt nonetheless. She felt around the wall and eventually found the offending cluster of sharpen protrusions, still dripping wet and rusty.

She was hungry. She hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and her stomach felt like it was devouring itself. She tried to stand- for what purpose, she wasn’t sure- but her right ankle folded under her weight like wet paper, and she came crashing to the ground again, teeth clacking together on impact.

She needed to find a way out. Her ankle was throbbing, and when she felt it it was too big and warm and soft.

She closed her eyes. Trying to see in the constant, impenetrable darkness was an exercise in frustration. She couldn’t walk, so instead she crawled, the gravel scattered across the floor digging into her palms. She ran one hand across the walls as she circled them until her fingers found a hole, easily large enough for her to climb into. She could feel air currents on her face and smiled, but she still hesitated before crawling in.

What if she was only going deeper? Maybe she should just stay where she was, wait for her mother to find her. Her mom would find her. She had to. Right?

But… how? Her mom didn’t know where she was. No one did. How would they ever know to look for her here? How would they even know that this cave existed? She’d need to find food eventually, and water, and maybe a way out if… if no one else was coming for her.

She ducked her head down and crawled into the hole, one hand pulling her along while the other waved blindly in front of her, trying to feel for any changes in the tunnel. She followed it for what seemed like hours before she abruptly couldn’t feel the walls anymore and she tumbled forward and down a few inches into what must have been a bigger cavern.

“Hello?” she called, listening to the word echo around before waiting hopefully for a response, but she heard nothing. Still alone.

She was still hungry, and it was quickly becoming unbearable. She was hungry and thirsty and hurt all over, and she was scared and blind and she wanted her mom.

She was crawling across the cavern floor, trying to feel for anything she could eat or drink, when the smooth stone floor suddenly got wetter. A second later, her hand was in five inches of water, and she could almost cry in relief. She bent down and lapped it up like a dog, dry tongue welcoming the lovely moisture.

It tasted strange, almost dusty, and after waving a hand around in the shallow pond for a moment she thought she knew the reason. The sharp protrusions- she thought from their sharp edges and glassy smoothness that they might be crystals- studding the walls and floor practically encrusted the dip where the water had gathered.

But water was water, and Sabrina was thirsty, so she brought her face back down to the water and drank.

~~~​

She spent the rest of the… time (maybe it was day or night, maybe it was hours and hours or only one and a half, it felt very long but there was no way for her to know) exploring her new cave. There were more tunnels branching off of this one, but there was water here, and she was blind and lost and didn’t know if she’d be able to find her way back.

She was still hungry. If this went much longer, she’d eat anything. She’d eat the gravel on the ground, she’d eat the crystals on the walls. The latter even sounded sort of appealing.

When she fell asleep, again curled into a tight ball against one of the walls, the three little punctures in her back had already started to scab over, the open wounds replaced by hard bumps that would in turn flake off in a day or so.

She took a few deep breaths and even smiled a little at the realization. This wasn’t the end of the world. If her back could get better, then her ankle and head would eventually too, and indeed the throbbing in her skull had receded somewhat after she had a drink.

She had water here. She just needed food, and then she could just stay here and recover until her mom found her.

Her mom would find her. Her mom always found her.

She went to sleep smiling.

~~~​

“I’m sorry, Miss,” the officer said, and she brought her hands to her mouth to muffle the sob that had been trapped in her throat ever since she saw the cop car pull up in the driveway. “We haven’t had any luck.”

Billie, cradled half-asleep in her arms, shifted uncomfortably, as though she could tell what was being sad.

“No sign of her. Again, I’m so sorry. She could still be found, it’s quite possible that she-”

She shook her head numbly, brown hair brushing over her shoulders, and shut the door. Moving mechanically, she walked back to Billie’s room and laid her in her crib. She brushed a calloused hand over her infant daughter’s wisps of hair, then turned and walked back to her room, closing the door behind her.

Then she collapsed onto the bed and finally let herself cry.

~~~​

When Sabrina woke up, the scabby spots on her back were bigger, and her smile creased into a frown as she groped at them. They felt too almost too smooth to be regular scabs, but she didn’t know what else they could possibly be, so she pushed it out of her mind. She had other things to worry about.

Like food. She was weak with hunger. It had crawled into her bones and settled there, and it felt like nothing she could do would dislodge it. Even if her ankle was better and she could walk, she didn’t know if she would be strong enough. She dragged herself to where she remembered the crystal-lined puddle was; she’d fallen asleep just a few feet from it, so she could find it again when she woke up.

She drank deep, and the water sated her dry mouth but did nothing for the hunger still shredding her stomach to pieces.

She was so, so hungry. After drinking, she slumped on her stomach before the pool, tears gathering in the corners of her useless eyes, one hand dangling in the water, drawing lazy circles with her fingers.

Something pricked her finger tip and she yanked the hand back out of the water, wincing, before her brow furrowed in anger and frustration. All these stupid delicious crystals, jutting out of the walls and the floor and everywhere, cutting her hands and her back to pieces, and she couldn’t even do anything about it.

She plunged her hand back into the water. It closed around the sharp edges of the gem and she yanked up, snapping it off and pulling it out of the pool. She tightened her fist around it, letting it cut red lines into her hand.

She brought it up to her mouth and bit into it. Teeth crunched and broke, and blood filled her mouth. She whimpered at the pain- why was she doing this? the tiny part of her mind that was still rational and not half-insane with hunger and something else she couldn’t identify whispered- but kept going, swallowing down the broken shards of gemstone.

She ran her tongue carefully along the sharp, broken stubs of her teeth. They hurt.

But she wasn’t hungry anymore.

She grinned, head cocked a bit to one side to listen.

She reached into the pond one-handed, pulled out another gemstone, and ate it, giggling hysterically, head twitching from side to side. The scabs on her back were throbbing. She ate another and another until she was stuffed full and then reclined against the cave wall, shattered teeth exposed in a ghastly rictus grin.

She wasn’t hungry anymore.

~~~​

When she woke up the next morning, she was hungry again. No, more than hungry. She was starving, ravenous. She immediately crawled to the crystal pool and started eating again, pulling out gemstone after gemstone and munching her way through them. The first one had hurt so much she thought she’d die, ruining her mouth and throat and slicing them up like broken glass, but with each successive snack it became a bit easier.

The relief from the all-consumed hunger that the crystals provided was only momentary, however. After the initial feast, there was about two hours of peace before her stomach began to churn again.

She needed to eat more. More crystals.

With each bite, the next became easier, until they didn’t hurt at all, until the jagged ruins of her teeth were breaking gemstones instead of the other way around. She ate, and ate, and ate. The hard, smooth, scabby spots on her back grew with each crystal she ate, forming recognizable facets.

She ate and ate and ate, until she was finally full enough to sleep again.

She'd spent the whole (day? night?) eating.

She was running out of crystals.

She was going to have to go deeper into the caves, down further and further to where the gems would grow thicker. She could almost taste them from where she was, and she eagerly bit at the air with the sharpened shards of her teeth. One tunnel, curving down into the earth, called to her, and she eagerly scrabbled down it, twitching erratically.

More, more, more.

~~~​

She couldn’t see the crystals, because the pitch-black darkness managed to get even more suffocating the further down she went. But she could… smell them, taste them, even all the way across the next cavern she dropped into. Her ankle didn’t really hurt anymore, she noted somewhere in the back of a mind increasingly clouded with all-encompassing hunger. She still didn’t stand up on two legs. She could, but the ceiling was low, and scrambling forwards on all fours towards the deliciously enticing crystals was faster.

She pried them from the stone wall one by one, breaking a couple fingernails in the process. She didn’t even register the pain from the bloody digits, biting down hard and sighing in satisfaction when the hunger abated, if only for a minute.

The noise that came out, however, wasn’t anything she would have recognized as a happy, human sigh. It was more akin to a growl, or a threatening hiss, and in a sudden moment of panic she opened her mouth and tried to speak. Mama. Mama, please help me, I don’t know what’s happening, please I’m so scared.

All that came out was a garbled string of noises that only vaguely resembled words, and fear shot through the girl’s small body. Her name. She could surely still say her name.

‘Sab…’ she managed, even that one small syllable broken and distorted. What came after that was a high, ragged keening noise that no human creature should ever be able to create, and she curled into a miserable ball to hide from the grating sound that she herself had created. Her ears hurt, but they pricked up at an almost imperceptible noise ahead of her.

Something was moving. Something studded with shiny, succulent gemstones. She ran her tongue over her sharpened, shattered teeth and began to creep forward through the darkness on all fours, useless eyes squinted and shoulders canted forwards in a perfect predator pose. It was hard to keep herself quiet and still when the delicious snack was right there, and she wanted more than anything to just dash forward and pounce and eat, but she controlled herself, just barely.

She grinned, and it stretched her cheeks wider than it should have, shards of bone arranged into a nightmarish mockery of a little girl’s cheerful grin.

The little snack continued to bumble absently around, bumping into the walls of the cave and making a low humming noise. She crept closer, closer, closer still until she was practically on top of her play, then pounced. Bloody fingers grabbed the two protrusions- ears? horns?- on top of the moving gemstone’s head as though they were handles and and swung the creature around, smashing it brutally against the cave wall.

The stone skin shattered like glass, and with two more swings her little snack had broken clean in half, spilling its delicious crystalline innards all across the floor. She made a twisted little gurgling sound that might have been intended as laugh, sat down criss-cross applesauce the way her mother had taught her and started to eat.

She felt like she’d been upset, before. She couldn’t remember why.

What could she possibly have to be upset about?

~~~​

She came to know the caverns well. The caves and tunnels linked together like parts of a body, a living thing that guided her through its maze of intestines toward the best places to eat and drink. She slithered with comfortable ease through tunnels that before would have sent her into a spiral of panic with their narrowness.

Before, whenever she bothered to think about it (she often didn’t, because it tended to upset her for some reason she couldn’t quite place), was foggy and indistinct. There were a few words that repeated over and over again, but they had no significance, no attachment to any deeper emotions or memories. Just words. Mother, mommy, home, sun. With those words came brief flashes- a burning ball of white on bright blue, a stucco-sided house with a red roof, a woman with tired, smiling grey eyes. They faded as soon as they came, like bubbles popping, leaving nothing behind. Aside from that, she didn’t know much about before. She didn’t need to. She was content here.

She was still hungry, but that had become something unavoidable and ever-present, a constant gnawing at the back of her mind. Hunger was as regular as breathing and, after a while, as bearable.

She almost forgot about her eyes. The endless blackness rendered them fully useless, and she didn’t need them, anyways. She could find her way around just fine by listening to the echoes and tasting the stagnant underground air.

So when she lost the ability to close them, she almost didn’t notice. She went to go to sleep one day and they just- didn’t close. She frowned slightly (frowning got more difficult, too; her face had set into a sharp-toothed rictus grin) and raised a hand to her face, running it over her eyes. They felt like they’d… crusted over with something hard, filling up her sockets with glassy sharp smoothness.

She felt like she should be concerned about this development, but she wasn’t. It wasn’t like her eyes had been doing her much good anyways. She fell asleep with her eyes open, and slept like the child she was.

~~~​

“Case! Case, where you at?” Tom called, hammering on his best friend’s door. “Case! Case, you there?”

A beat passed and he was on the verge of knocking again when the door swung open, revealing Casey, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of one dark-skinned hand. Her hair was out of its usual braids and frizzed up on one side, and he was barely able to resist the urge to take a picture.

“Whathehell, Tom,” she muttered, the first three words all slurred together by sleep. “S’too’early.”

“I got a case,” he offered, instead of disputing her claims that it was too early, because- well, it really was. Besides, he knew it would wake her up. The whole private investigator thing had been her idea, after all. Well, mostly hers.

Sure enough, she perked up, some of the sleep clearing out of her dark eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah, the Sabrina Madison case- you remember that one? Child disappearance, about five years back? Vanished into thin air? Apparently it’s kinda famous now cause they never found a body or anything, and her mom called us- us! -to check it out again!”

“Oh, uh, yeah, that sounds kind of familiar,” Casey said, looking like she was trying her hardest not to be interested. “Come back at a godly hour and we can talk, okay?”

Her face stretched into another yawn, sleepiness winning out over excitement, and she shuffled back inside, slamming the door behind her. Tom bounced on the balls of his feet a couple times, grinning widely, then raced back home.

He knew full well he wasn’t going to be sleeping, even though the sun hadn’t so much as peeked over the horizon yet. This was their biggest case yet.

~~~​

She didn’t know how long she’d been here. It felt like forever, and some days (if they were days) she wondered if there had ever been anything before this or if it was just a distant dream. Distinguishing between dreams and reality got ever more difficult, too.

Maybe she had been here forever. The caves were her world, her universe. Was there anything beyond them? It didn’t matter. This was all she needed to live, to thrive, to be happy. And she was happy. Why wouldn’t she be?

~~~​

“You think this is it?” Tom asked, staring down the hole. “There’s no mention of this in the police reports.”

Beside him, Casey, looking much more alert now that she’d slept, shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, she’s for sure dead by now no matter what, right? Five years. If she really did fall down there, there’s no way out. She starved, assuming the fall didn’t kill her.”

“Maybe there’s food down there?” Tom attempted weakly, the suggestion dying in his throat when his companion sent him a withering, disdainful glare.

“A seven year old living five years in that hole? Why do you have to go down there? I don't like it.”

“One of the most famous unsolved disappearances ever, man! Just imagine! Even if we only find a body, we’ll still have solved the biggest case we’ve ever tried to take on. Think of the publicity. People will start coming to us with cases instead of us digging up long-closed stuff like this,” Tom said, grinning wildly and bouncing on his heels.

Casey nodded, her eyes sparkling, caught up in the vision. “It sounds nice, not gonna lie. But I’m not going down there,” she said quickly, sending a glance at the pitch blackness in the hole, hiding whatever might be down there. “No way.”

“Fine, I’ll go,” Tom shrugged, unfazed. “But I get the credit for finding her.”

“Her corpse,” Casey corrected. “If you do find her.”

“Yeah, yeah, Miss Pessimism. I’ll find the kid. Just you wait.”

Casey raised her eyebrows in clear disbelief, but said nothing as she helped Tom wrestle the harness on and strap it around his chest. He pulled the helmet on and switched on the camera before tightening his grip around the flashlight clutched tightly in white-knuckled hands. He looked down into the sheer darkness of the hole and swallowed.

Casey noted his unease, and her gentle hand on his shoulder made him jump. “Easy, cowboy,” she said affectionately. “You know, you don’t have to do this.”

“I’m going to do it,” he said firmly.

“Alright,” she said, concern still hovering in her eyes. “Two quick tugs on the rope when you want me to pull you up, you hear? You can back out any time. No judgement.”

“Roger, captain,” he said, snapping off a mock salute before testing all of the straps once more. “I’ll be back before you know it, and I’ll be on the radio the whole time,” he reassured her, nodding to the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.

“Right,” she agreed. “See you soon. Don’t die.”

All of a sudden, she threw her arms around his neck in a sudden hug that took him off guard. She wasn't usually very physically affectionate. He hugged her back, tight like he was never letting go, before they broke apart.

“I'll be fine,” he promised, and she didn't respond, just pressed her lips together in a worried line.

He covered his anxiety with a wink, unsure if she’d been fooled or not, and began his descent into the hole before he could second-guess himself again and decide that maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all. He almost managed to keep a confident straight face, and then he plunged into the darkness and it didn’t matter anyways.

The blackness was thick and choking, so impenetrable that he couldn’t see where he was going. His flashlight beam helped a little bit, but even that only managed to illuminate the space a few feet ahead of it. The walls were studded with gemstones, he noted with faint astonishment as the claustrophobically narrow hole he was being lowered down opened into a larger underground cavern.

There was probably a fortune in crystals just embedded into this cave, he thought, and shortly after realized that even if they didn’t find the body, the amount of money here… they wouldn’t even need the publicity they were so hungry for. His lips twitched into a smile.

The gems glittered when his flashlight beam crossed them, and he could see ragged black wounds in the walls where it looked like more crystals should have nested. His feet finally touched the ground and he took a few uncertain, wobbling steps towards the wall, running his fingers lightly over the gash.

A shudder ran down his spine involuntarily. Those gashes hadn’t been made naturally. There was something else down here with him.

“Casey,” he muttered into his radio. “Are you getting all this?”

“You bet,” she responded almost immediately, and her voice, even crackling with static, was comforting to his ears. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, allowing some of the fear he felt into his voice. “The girl didn’t do that.”

“You want me to pull you back?” she asked, and he knew her too well, he could recognize when she was forcing her voice to stay level and calm. Behind it was bubbling panic, just below the surface.

“N-no,” Tom stuttered, hating how weak and faltering his voice was. “It’s fine. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

The radio connection hissed and broke as he descended further into the cave, Casey’s voice flickering in and out, but he could still make out some of her words.

“...careful. More… ant that …. out okay …”

“Gotcha,” he said, hoping she could hear him. He thought he’d understood the gist of her message- it was a sentiment she expressed quite often.

He sucked in a breath and headed deeper into the cave. Through tunnels, into caverns, ducking under stalactites and dodging pools of stagnant water. The utter silence and complete darkness of the underground wreaked havoc on his nerves, and he glanced over his shoulder after every other step. His steps were quiet, carefully picked out, because the floor was strewn with treacherous debris and studded with stalagmites and crystal formations.

His initial glee at seeing the gems had faded, replaced with unease pooling in the back of his stomach. They just looked… wrong, in a way he couldn't place and didn't necessarily care to.

He pressed down the button on the radio (too hard, but his hands were shaking and he couldn't feel them entirely, and he hadn't noticed before but the cave was cold in a wet kind of way that sunk into your bones). “Casey?” he asked, his voice shaking. “You there?”

No response but dead, staticky white noise. He knew, logically, that this made sense. He was too far down for a connection. Still, though, the silence was one of the worst things he'd ever heard, because Casey was always there for him and his worthless ass. Not having her present made everything that much scarier.

There was a noise from the darkness that might have just been wind whistling through the tunnels like the lungs of a living thing. Might have been. He jerked around, holding his flashlight ahead of him like a weapon, but the beam found nothing but a pair of gemstones, twinkling in the dark.

He reached for the rope. His first closed around it and, after only a moment of hesitation, he yanked it twice.

The rope should have been taut, one end tied into his harness and the other attached to the winch at the surface.

It wasn't, and something cold and sick blossomed in his stomach.

He pulled on the rope again and again and received no answering tug, no response from Casey. It just slithered limply across the cave floor towards him, and he knew in the back of his mind what must have happened even before he was holding the tattered, cut end in his hands.

The cut was ragged, but purposeful. Something had done this on purpose, and now he was stranded. Horror knotted his gut and his heart kicked into an even higher gear. “Casey!” he yelled, listening to his own voice distort as it echoed around the cave.

No response. Of course there wasn't. She would still be on the service, fretting and waiting for two tugs that never came.

Another small hissing noise came from behind him, but it was much louder now, much closer. He jerked around, casting the flashlight beam ahead of him frantically, and saw…

...what was that?

It was vaguely human-shaped. Very small, skin mottled dark purple from lack of light. Teeth like shattered glass set in a too-wide smile. Ragged claws tipping its fingers and two perfect gemstones set into the hollows where its eyes should have been.

He lurched back a step, two, an aborted scream trapped in his throat, and his heel caught on something on the rubble-strewn floor. He fell backwards, the flashlight escaping his grasp and rolling a few feet away.

The little demon was on him in a second, those claws digging into his throat and forcing him to lie still.

“Sab…” it snarled, a ragged and guttural noise that it made his ears hurt. “Sab… sab. Sableye.”

Then the claws moved up to his eyes, and he couldn't see anything, and everything was screaming pain for half a second until he couldn't feel anything at all.

@Menegoth this is ready for regrade!

 

Grabbing.

EDIT: Handing off to Menegoth, since I'm swamped by a lil work thing this weekend. Sorry! The comeback comes later.

 

Turns out I'll be taking over! Claim part 2
Expect it end of the day today or tomorrow!

 

First of all I’m just gonna say: I did to expect her to say that at the end, Sabrina to Sableye. Sab…leye.



LENGTH



More than enough.



GRAMMAR



I found no errors in your grammar. You obviously took my advice from my previous grade to make the story flow better. Your sentences were nice and precise. Good for you!



CHARACTERS/DESCRIPTIONS



The characters are the biggest problem I had with the story. I didn't feel attached to anyone.


Sabrina is a seven year old girl (which is explicitly stated this time). She falls down a cliff and turns into sableye. That’s it. I get a good description of the sableye but not Sabrina. She was not described anywhere in the story. Sure, I could kind of tell what kind of person she was from the fact that she pushed on, but it wasn’t enough to make her feel like a real person. She felt like an extra to sableye rather than her own, fully fleshed out character.


Next is the mother and the sibling. The mother had 2 or 3 lines and wasn't mentioned anymore (except for a few times Sabrina said “mommy”). She did nothing in the story, so I couldn’t even imagine her as a blank person with a personality. She appeared and was gone within a few seconds. The sibling was mentioned once and never seen again, so it didn’t need to have that much description. Overall, the mother could have played a bit more into the story. You mentioned Sabrina having memories of her mother, but what were they?


Casey and Tom. 5 years later, these two people show up. I kind of got a backstory, they’re looking into old cases and hope they can get real, current cases. But are they private investigators, detectives, or hoping to get one of those jobs? To me, they felt like two characters put in for the sole purpose of reaching that minimum character requirement. Again, they had no description. At least this time I got a bit of personality. Tom, the arrogant jokester, and Casey, the sidekick. Are they together romantically? Are they friends? Knowing this, would have made the end more impactful so I could imagine how Casey would react.


STORY



The story is quite nice, I’ve never read anything quite like it. I wanted to keep reading to find out what she does in this mysterious cave. The middle part, in my opinion, was perfect except for one thing: I didn’t quite understand why Sabrina would decide to eat a gemstone. Surely she must know it has no nutritious value.


The beginning of the story threw me off quite a bit. Sabrina, her mother, and her sibling are on a trip together. They climb a hill as Sabrina is racing off past them. We don’t really get an explanation if this is modern day or in the past. I also can’t decide if this is in the Pokémon world or the normal world. Sabrina climbs on top of the hill and has a scare as she almost falls, that’s good foreshadowing! But about 5 seconds later, she suddenly falls and we get on to the middle of the story. It felt kind of…blunt. Since you are writing this in third person omniscient, it would have been nice to know the mother’s reaction to watching her daughter fall to her supposed death.


My last gripe with this story is the investigation part. You mention this is a closed case, or as you put it: abandoned. This leads me to believe her mother didn’t search for her. If these two independent people (I couldn’t figure out Tom and Casey’s age) can go into the cave by themselves, I’d expect a search team would have gone inside to look for her within a few hours of her fall. That just kind threw off the whole story’s mood.


RESULT



I’m sorry to say…sableye not captured.



If you work on fleshing the story out more and adding more description to the characters, I’d be happy to take another look!

 

Boy, I really felt it. Those paragraphs with Sabrina's mother really helped me understand why they didn't see the cave. And you actually turned Tom and Casey into real people.
So, I'm definitely comfortable to say: Sableye Captured!