Diane didn't even pause to blink the falling soil out of her eyes as she frantically dug her way straight up, desperate to return to the safety of the overworld. Yes, everyone else was asleep, and she had gone out on her own once again. Yes, Eterna City closed their network of underground tunnels outside of work hours, and she had snuck down there in the middle of the night anyway. And yes, they were EXTREMELY strict about visitors sticking to the routes they themselves provided, and Diane was currently a long, long way outside of them, having carved her own path deep into the dirt to see what other treasures might have been out there. Bones, fossils, evolution stones, even the occasional nugget of gold had all been rescued from the tunnels over the last few days, and the Gligar's imagination had been running wild with visions of what else was hiding deep within the dirt.
The colossal explosion, however, had shattered every one of those visions, replacing it with a singular, overwhelming terror of the entire tunnel collapsing in on her. Loose chunks of earth and rock had rained down onto Diane as the ground shook all around her, the deafening shockwave assaulting her from every conceivable direction, eyeballs bouncing in her skull as the vibration rattled every bone in her little body. As the sound began to dissipate, Diane remained stock still, frozen in fear.
The official tunnels were full of reinforcing wooden beams to keep them standing in a situation like this.
Hers wasn't.
In the hours the tunnels were open, you had other visitors around you to help out if things started going wrong.
She didn't.
And there had never been a blast of any kind of magnitude whilst she had been in any of those tunnels, let alone the scale of what had just shaken her to the core, both metaphorically and very, VERY literally.
But now there had.
Once she got her wits back together, the cloud of dust and dirt around her starting to settle, the little Gligar realized in horror how much danger she was in. Alone, deep underground, a long way off the beaten path, and with a near-zero chance of rescue should the worst come to pass. There was only one way to free herself from this situation, one direction her terrified muscles would allow her to go. Up, and out. Her breath came in short, fearful bursts as she clambered her way up the rugged makeshift walls. Her heart was pounding a mile a minute as she pushed herself faster and faster. Her claws tore through the dirt with reckless abandon, weaving around the rocks scattered along the way. Through dirt. Past rocks. Dirt. Rocks. Dirt. Soil. Grass.
And finally, air.
Diane burst into the dark of the night, shaking in terror, not only from the possibilty of being trapped underground as the tunnel collapsed around her, not only from the exertion of clawing her way back up to the surface as fast as she could, but also from the sight that greeted her once she returned topside, breath catching in her throat as she found herself face to face with the shattered head of Dialga.
Staring almost straight at her, the legendary beast had been slain with almost unimaginable ferocity, great chunks of it laying in a heap at the base of what moments before must had been a plinth of some kind, elevating it high above the surroundings in reverence, with smaller shards dotted across the surrounding area like splinters of bone across some ancient battlefield. Diane remembered seeing the statue when the gang had first arrived in Eterna City, and sitting permanently on the horizon almost everywhere they had gone while they were here. It must have looked impossibly majestic up close. Now, though, it laid as the centerpiece of a broken, ravaged heap of devastation and ruin, reduced to the common rock that had once been used to create such a revered idol.
But it was what was at the very pinnacle of the heap that shocked her the most. The gem, the magnificent centerpiece of the statue, was still completely intact, glistening softly as it ever had......and held in the clutches of a hulking behemoth of a creature, clad seemingly in only a rudimentary loincloth, almost unrecognizable silhouetted against the moon framing the scene. The giant gemstone was as big as their entire torso, Arceus only knows how heavy it must have been, yet they were holding it out at arms length with impossible ease.
And stood opposite them - or rather, floating half a foot off the ground opposite them - hovered a ghoulish apparition, the only visible features a pair of short, stubby horns atop their head, glimmering just as the huge gemstone was before them, with the rest of their figure hidden beneath a long, flowing, hooded robe, secured with a large bow around the waist. Though they were similarly shadowed by the glow of the moon, their eyes were burning an ethereal, sickening shade of purple, overflowing with an energy Diane couldn't even begin to fathom.
An arm of theirs began to raise, slowly reaching out toward the jewel, and from their sleeve slipped a dark, skeletal hand, almost seeming to soak what little light there was from around it, as fingertips laid gently upon the surface of the stone.
Then, in the blink of an eye, a sudden flash that lit up the area in brilliant, bright white for just a split second, before the darkness instantly returned to swallow it up once more.
And the pair, and the gem, were gone.
The Gligar was left in an eerie, smothering silence, leaving her unable to break through it even if she had wanted to. All she could do was scramble her way out of her hastily excavated escape tunnel, sprint back down the hillside, and launch herself off into the sky, soaring her way back to the safety of her friends.
