Draco: Progress in Galar as I start this chapter - just arrived in Wyndon. Turns out, the circle of rocks on the Lake of Outrage only has six spawns the first time; after that, it's one spawn on the easternmost rock, and you'd better hope you get the stone you're looking for. No such luck for my Sun Stone search. Screw it, I'll just use a Leaf Stone.

Pokémon and protagonist © Nintendo. Character designs © Koei. Ransei © somewhere in the middle.

Ultra Kingdom - Voltaic Construct: Electric Mayhem

A nudging roused Oichi from her slumber... although she wasn't as quick to rise as she would have liked. The Ranseans had eventually found a room expansive enough for them to pitch their tents and uninteresting enough that the beasts - 'Xurkitree', as the Cosmog had identified them - were unlikely to come to it. That said, trying to fall asleep on a surface as hard as a building floor was much harder than trying to sleep on soft ground, and it had left Oichi stiff in her slumber, loathe to wake.

As she swept the sleep from her eyes, she found Type: Null had poked his head into her tent and was prodding her.

"Null?" Oichi sat up much more quickly. "Just a moment..."

She picked up her things and stepped out to find the others were serving out breakfast; Okuni handed Oichi a plate full of berries as she sat down. "Something happen?"

"You could say that," Okuni admitted, her voice low.

Her volume made it clear that it was something to be concerned about. "What is it?" Oichi whispered.

"While I was on watch," Ranmaru prompted, "a Xurkitree walked past this room."

Oichi's eyes widened in terror, and she glanced at Null.

"He didn't charge it," Ranmaru insisted. "But the beasts are patrolling this place. I suspect that whatever purpose it serves, it is a boon to them - and so they defend it."

"Defend it from what?" Oichi murmured.

"That's what I wanna know," Gracia agreed. "Like, how many people end up in otherworlds, anyways?"

"An apt question," Okuni mused. "But you're just the first ones from Ransei who ended up in an otherworld on purpose - even if you couldn't control which."

"Fair," Gracia conceded.

Once they'd eaten and packed up, Oichi glanced into the hall to make sure the Xurkitree patrol wasn't about to come up on them. They weren't terribly far from the room full of displays they'd found yesterday; she pulled back into the room and turned to the others. "So," she mused, "do we see what's outside, or do we search deeper into the building?"

"I really don't want to go outside with a party this big," Okuni insisted. "Those walkways weren't nearly big enough to host such an entourage."

Ranmaru shook his head. "Given precedent," he mused, "the storm is not like to have subsided. If the winds are any stronger from one direction or another, we could be thrown to our deaths."

"I don't think I wanna end up in a fight that might end by ring-out," Gracia agreed.

Oichi nodded. "Deeper it is."

+x+x+x+

"Oh, wonderful. More stairs."

Okuni's displeased utterance was quickly followed by a groan of protest from Gracia. "Not just stairs," she muttered, "a back-and-forth stairwell." It was barely the day after they'd discovered the Xurkitree were on patrol; they hadn't had any fights since the one in the gearwork mess, and everyone was still opposed to going out into the storm.

"It's safer this way," Oichi insisted. "If we stumble, we don't have so far to fall until the next landing."

"But Null's heavy," Gracia argued. "Can these stairs even hold his weight?"

Oichi glared at her. "That's... actually a good question," she realized.

Everyone cleared back, and Oichi instructed Null to step forward. He seemed to realize the danger quite quickly; there was wariness of his own as he reached one foreleg to the first step and put his weight on it.

The stair held.

"Now, we have another question," Ranmaru observed. "Which side do we wish to be trapped on if something were to cause a structural failure?"

"The low end," Okuni suggested.

Ranmaru turned to her. "Sorry?"

"The Cosmog can open gates just about anywhere, right?" Okuni asked. "But if Null's in the lead and something sends him crashing through the stairs, we're stuck on the upper floor and Null's stuck at the bottom - he can't get to the gate."

"Fair enough," Oichi conceded. "Null and I will bring up the back, then."

Lucario and Ranmaru led the group; Gothitelle followed close behind, with Gracia and the Cosmog behind her; Okuni followed behind them, and Volcarona, Oichi, and Null brought up the back. Concerns about a structural failure and distance between groups were unfounded, however; the stairs only lasted three landings with no doors between them before they reached a terminating landing with a door. "Well, that's not a clever design," Gracia muttered.

"You were just complaining about a back-and-forth stairwell!" Okuni reprimanded.

"Yeah, because I get dizzy if I have to run up stairs that are set up like that," Gracia defended as Ranmaru opened the door into a hallway. "But if this place is supposed to do something, it's safer to have a back-and-forth stairwell that makes you dizzy than having to run the length of the building to one set of stairs and then run the length of the building again."

"How do you even know there's more than two floors to this place?" Okuni argued.

Gracia fell quiet abruptly.

The hall terminated at a double-door; Ranmaru pushed it open and immediately stumbled back, letting its mechanism pull it closed again. "Oh, dear," he murmured.

"Something wrong?" Oichi asked.

"Xurkitree en masse," Ranmaru replied. "The beasts are swarmed in there."

Oichi sighed. "Wonderful." Then; "Wait, let me get a look..."

She pushed the door open just enough to peer inside. Xurkitree were indeed swarmed in there - and in much more variable sizes than most Pokémon that Oichi knew of - but many of them were hanging from the ceiling lifelessly, or slumped on the floor, the ends of their wires impaled in the surfaces... and she could see electricity flowing along their bodies.

"They're... sleeping," she observed. "Or maybe... recharging?"

"And how favourable do you suspect are our odds of getting across the room without rousing any of them?" Ranmaru asked.

Oichi pulled away, letting the door close again. "Fair enough. Back upstairs we go, then." She made her way back to Null's side. "Still... maybe that's the only purpose this place is meant to serve."

Okuni seemed surprised. "You mean it's just a Xurkitree recharge station?"

"All the beasts we've run into so far have been in places that seemed like what they'd like," Gracia observed. "Pheromosa in a forest, Stakataka in a rock maze, Poipole in a bog that makes Viperia look healthy..."

"It can't be so simple," Ranmaru murmured. "Those displays seemed to indicate something more... focused than that. Something that required attention."

They made their way up the stairs; Null pushed the door on the top landing open... and promptly gave a roar that echoed unpleasantly loudly through the stairwell. Nobody had much of a chance to comprehend what had happened before he charged out - and straight at a Xurkitree on patrol.

"Dammit!" Oichi dashed after him. "It had to be in the hallway! There's barely any room here!"

The Xurkitree tanked a Crush Claw and promptly Discharged in retaliation as the Ranseans were charging out of the stairs; Lucario managed to throw an Aura Sphere without hitting Null first, the projectile slamming into the beast and throwing it further down the hall. Oichi directed Null to dash past the beast while it was recovering; by the time it had risen again, he was on its other side, giving the rest of them a clear line of sight as he slammed another Crush Claw into it. Volcarona leapt forward and twisted into a Fiery Dance, flames bombarding the Xurkitree and searing the walls around her; the beast tried to Discharge again, but Null managed to retreat just far enough that the voltage only licked him.

Lucario hurled one more Aura Sphere at the beast, and the attack slammed into its bulb, throwing it into the wall - whereupon it slumped to the ground, unconscious.

Oichi stopped Null from attacking it again; the group quickly passed the beast, returning to the nearest intersection. The last remaining path there took them to a right-hand turn with an exit door on one wall; the path shortly after was a dead-end full of power cells.

"Nowhere left to go but outside," Ranmaru observed. "Unless we should try to pass the sleeping ones."

Gracia shuddered. "Lesser of two evils," she muttered. "Let's go out, then."

They made their way back to the corner, and the door was opened as carefully as was possible. The storm was still raging as Ranmaru peered outside; to the surprise of all, the walkways extended up a set of stairs and down a slope to the lower floor.

"Up, or down?" Ranmaru wondered.

"Down," Okuni suggested. "If the wind above is strong enough..."

"Let me and Null try the upward path," Oichi proposed.

Gracia rounded on her. "What? Why?"

"Null's helmet is heavy enough to slow him down," Oichi explained. "That'll give him better resistance against the wind - and I can keep a hand on him to stop myself from being blown around."

Ranmaru seemed uncertain. "Be very careful," he warned.

"Of course."

They stepped out warily onto the walkway; the metal creaked under Null's footsteps, but still held fast. To Oichi's surprise, despite the motion of the clouds around them, there wasn't much gale on the upper level; it was as though the plant were built in the eye of an unmoving storm. Furthermore, there was a structure atop the building - a sizeable rooftop room around which was built what looked like a combination lightning rod and Tesla coil writ large.

As she watched, power suddenly surged up the coil - and voltage seemed to burst out into the clouds from the peak of the coil, dispersing in the storm.

"Wow. Motonari would have a field day writing about this place."

Null waited at the top of the stairs as she told the others it would be safe; then they advanced towards the room. There was plenty of room in here for everyone to stand; this one also hosted a wall full of screens, but unlike the previous one, this seemed to be mostly maps. Six screens, arrayed two-by-three, seemed to be hosting floor layouts, while a seventh, standing between them, showed what seemed to be a full-bodied image of the plant, slowly rotating. Most of the image was in green, with yellow lines tracing the layout; certain rooms were in dark red, a few others had red patches, and several red dots seemed to be moving throughout the area.

Okuni stepped forward. "This is starting to make sense," she murmured.

"It is?" Gracia asked.

"This one's mostly images," Okuni observed. "Guess you were right about the poor stair design, there's at least seven stories to this place." She traced one of the layout screens. "This one looks like the top floor. This would be where we came out of the gate, this is that big room where we fought the first one, and here were our campsites." She narrowed her gaze. "But what's all the red?"

"Perhaps... it's the Xurkitree?" Ranmaru wondered. He beckoned to the larger map. "Look, this would be the nesting room we found earlier. It must be tracking their movements."

"That can't be," Okuni muttered, tapping one of the patched rooms. "This room didn't have any beasts in it."

Gracia hummed. "That one had those power cells... Oh, maybe it's the electricity? They're Electric-types, maybe it's following their-"

The sound of a charge caused everyone to pull away from the screen fearfully; Oichi glanced out the open door and realized the power was flowing up the coil again. She glanced towards the screens to see the red flowing over the top of the structure, and then a pulse of red emerge from the top of the map as she heard the burst outside.

"Looks like you're spot on," Okuni mused. "Oh?" The patched rooms had lost their red; then they were starting to fill again, from the bottom of the structure.

"Okay, but now that doesn't make sense," Gracia muttered. "That electricity just... got shot out into the clouds."

Ranmaru crossed his arms. "I thought this was a power plant of some kind," he muttered. "Why would it be so wasteful of the power if it was to-"

Oichi gasped, stumbling back and colliding with Null. The artificial Pokémon gave a cry of protest, drawing everyone's attention as her hands covered her mouth. "Lady Oichi?" Okuni asked. "What is it?"

"I'm so stupid," she muttered. "I'm so stupid. I had it backwards. I'm so stupid!"

Gracia stepped up to her. "What did you have backwards?"

"The swarm," Oichi insisted. "The sleeping beasts. They weren't charging themselves with the plant's electricity - they're powering the plant with their electricity."

"What?" Ranmaru exclaimed.

Oichi shook her head. "Electric-type Pokémon don't gather electricity from elsewhere - not as their primary source. They generate electricity within themselves. The Xurkitree are no different. They're filling this place with power to sustain each other." She stepped up to the map screens. "It's some kind of symbiosis. All these rooms full of red, they're where the beasts are swarming. They're letting the electricity they generate flow through the building. And the ones on patrol are... feeding off of it."

"Feeding?" Okuni echoed. "What do you mean?"

"It's a closed system," Oichi explained. "The ones on patrol had more power than the ones in the swarm. When they're awake, they consume the electricity running through the building. Then when they're 'full', they go to one of the swarming rooms and they... sleep, I guess. And the power they've consumed just sort of... flows out of them." She shook her head. "But they generate electricity themselves. There's more power going into the building than there is going into the Xurkitree."

Gracia pointed to the patchy rooms. "Then what are the power cells for?"

"They must be receptacles for the excess," Oichi hypothesized. "Anything that doesn't get consumed by the Xurkitree gets pumped into those. But they can only hold so much - that's what this is for. When the power cells are full, everything gets pumped up here and discharged into the clouds, and they're empty for the excess to start filling them again. With so many Xurkitree, it doesn't take long for the cycle to propagate."

"But... wait," Ranmaru muttered. "The beasts discharge rather powerful electricity in battle. Wouldn't the fluctuation risk... overloading the system?"

"There's a lot of power cells on this map," Okuni observed. "Plus the lighting everywhere. That gearwork was taking up power, too, and who knows what else is in this place. There would have to be a huge amount of extra power going into the system at once in order to overload them all."

Oichi's gaze fell. "And the beasts we've met so far haven't been hostile against each other. In order for enough Xurkitree to be fighting simultaneously to add that much extra power to the system at once, we'd have to..."

Ranmaru turned to her when she trailed off. "We'd have to what?"

"...Walk into one of the swarming rooms," Oichi muttered. "If one of them woke up, it would awaken the others when it tried to attack us. And if all of them attacked us at once, it would blow the system out. With the system blown out, the beasts wouldn't be receiving electricity... and they wouldn't get full enough to go to sleep. Which means..."

"The entire plant full of beasts would be awake at once," Gracia whispered.

Silence filled the room.

"...We can't keep exploring this place," Okuni realized. "If we get into a fight with a patrol and didn't realize we were getting close to one of the swarming rooms, we'd risk blowing the plant out. It's not just having all the Xurkitree awake - all the lights would be out, and the closed corridors would mean we're completely blacked-out. The only light we'd have to go by would be what the Xurkitree give off, and that means we wouldn't be able to run away."

"We gotta find a place to make camp," Gracia suggested.

"And we need to stay there," Ranmaru proclaimed, "so we don't risk angering the patrols."

The coil outside surged again as the group contemplated what the remainder of the month would entail.

Draco: Progress in Galar as I finish this chapter - [SPOILER REDACTED]. I think I'm just about done the game completely. Just the vs. Champion fight and whatever post-credits episode they've got for this Generation. (Never did complete Episode RR in Generation VII, I got pissy when I thought they forced me into it after I caught the Ultra-exclusive Beasts.)