Lucy doesn't recognize the snake-like pokemon with a mirror face that lunges at her out of the tall grass. It seems like there's something wrong with it, but she can't tell what before it lunges. She has a pokeball off her belt before the mirror-face smacks into her, but hasn't gotten Tess out of it before whatever Move it used has her somewhere else entirely.
They arrive at the Shieldmaze entrance.
"Gods," Lann says. "I haven't been here in thousands."
"Thousands...of...gongs?" A gong is half a day, and a thousand days is a little under three years, so one thousand gongs would be a bit more than a year...
"Yeah. I think Wendu and I were... maybe six thousand, when we explored here? And I'm nine thousand now."
Oh no he's baby.
...Admittedly, he wouldn't be baby for, like, a pokemon, but he's definitely much more like a human than a pokemon. But he doesn't look like a nine-year-old.
Seelah grins. "All I'm saying, when we go drinking on the surface I'll have to remember to get you a mug of milk. Make sure you grow up strong."
"Yes!"
The mood is thus incongruously cheery as they enter the Shieldmaze. It's an ominous sort of structure, with demonic sigils scrawled on the walls and crystals jutting from the stone walls at irregular intervals, shedding blood-tinged light.
Lucy calls out all of her pokemon and quietly explains that they're going to be doing free-for-all battling and they had better try hard not to get in each other's way.