An adventure nonetheless, huh? That's what the me from then would've thought of the whole caper. Something to keep me from homework was always welcome.
But maybe not this time. This time, my surroundings got the slightest bit unsettling right off the bat. I'd landed straight into the unknown.
All I could see, all around me, was darkness. A cold breeze wafted through the area. With the temperature and lack of light, it felt like I was deep in a swirling black hole. I liked it. It felt like closing my eyes and ending the real nightmare that was life. How soothing it was...
Okay, no, it wasn't. Actually, the fact that I couldn't see was pretty worrying. I'd been able to make things out okay with my new glowing demon eyes throughout the other levels, so this was a new level of dark. I felt my fur bristle from the chill. I wanted to get out of here. Life could take me back. I didn't care about edge for edge's sake, I wanted to be warm.
As with the last portal, I'd landed standing up. I swiveled around, looking for anyone who'd also fallen here. All I could hear was the sound of waves. It sounded muffled, yet I could hear my breath clear as day.
... It was a bit too clear and loud, in fact. I realized I could've been in an enclosed surface. I tested the theory and lifted my head, letting my scythe feel around the above area. I felt it scrape across a hard ceiling. Patting around myself with alternating paws, I discovered that I was completely surrounded by a solid, oval wall.
Was there a glitch? If we were stuck in a video game, there would have to be a problem at some point. Now, if only we could find a speedrun manual...
Before I could finish that thought, I heard an odd sound, like a cross of an eggshell cracking and sand flowing down an hourglass. When I started seeing again, I realized my prison was dissolving. Hopefully it wouldn't take me with it.
Muffled voices from outside became clearer, and I recognized them as belonging to my classmates. The walls faded away, leaving me with a scenery almost as dark as before. Although, for me, almost as dark had become as bright as morning light. I squinted at the contrast as the wall around me continued to crumble away. I then took a step out, taking in a gulp of air.
This caught the attention of the group, all of them standing a few meters away. They'd been on a small hill a bit above me... probably where they landed in the first place. Chloe in particular jumped when she registered me in her sight, and flew to my head.
"There you are!" She said. I quickly shook her off, having her land on the gravel in front of me.
I grinned. "Well, you guys weren't going to leave without me."
"Because that would've been such a bummer," Valérie said, rolling her eyes. Kieran nudged her scoldingly with his elbow, but he was clearly holding back a smirk.
Soon enough the whole gang had come over to me, walking over the slightly wet gravel to do so. I sat down with an audible shuffle from the tiny rocks. The low sound of waves also reached my ear. A dark sea stretched out on my right, meeting a black sky dotted with stars on the horizon line.
"So were you just hanging out here then?" Kieran asked. "Or maybe you went for a swim?"
"Nah, I was in the void, I think."
While I'd played it off as a casual misadventure, Kieran and Chloe stiffened at that.
"The... void?" The Swablu chirped weakly.
"Uh, I don't know," I answered, looking around and stopping when I'd spotted something. "Oh, I was in one of those."
I pointed a claw at some objects that were definitely not in the last dungeon. Odd bubbles of darkness lay before us, as far as the horizon stretched. Some were even on the lake. There were constantly new ones added, starting out as tiny dots and expanding to the size of the one that contained me. The ones big enough stayed that way for a seemingly short amount of time, only to slowly dissolve afterward.
"You were... you were in one of those things?" Micheal gasped.
"Huh. Yup."
"And you're not hurt or anything?" Chloe asked.
I shrugged, and that seemed to reassure her somewhat. She let out a breath, the sound joining the waves. It didn't even take a second for her to regain that usual glint in her eyes. You could always count on Chloe to bounce back into cheerfulness in record speeds. That was her role. We all had one, and I liked seeing the tropes play out.
Our life had devolved into a fanfic of sorts. I hadn't read much in terms of Pokémon fanfic, but I could recognize my situation enough through extensive 'research' on Ao3: we'd been plucked from our world by some teenage author who wished to live vicariously through characters, with a heaping load of wish fulfillment dumped upon us. Most of the fulfillment hadn't been reached, per se, but I was okay with being on the ride. That hypothetical insecure freshman needed to get the angst out first.
Could've used more imagination, though. My group wasn't exactly complicated. Kieran was a nerd. Micheal was basic. Chloe was happy all the time. Valérie would fight anyone. And I, of course, was the edgy protagonist.
That was everyone, right?
Gab finally caught up to the group, having been slowed down by the weight of her backpack. Man, the slippery rocks did not do any favours to an unsteady Emolga who couldn't fly. She let out a wheeze as she finally stopped.
"Okay, we've got everybody!" Micheal announced. "Let's get a move on!"
"Wait, are you okay?" Chloe asked, obviously concerned for the flying squirrel.
Micheal turned back around, sharing the same look. Gab nodded, still hunched over. A thumbs up from her was all the extra info Chloe and Micheal needed, though.
"Let's pick up the pace, then," he said with that smile no one could get mad at.
... Well, maybe we could that night. After all, we'd been walking all day and had fought a giant butterfly. It was officially illegal to keep walking after sundown, portal time zones be damned. Our groans were so in sync that we could've started a choir of disappointment.
"What's wrong with a bit more scouting?" Micheal insisted.
"It sucks, that's what," Kieran said. "We can't see anything, dude."
"Also, it's night, dummy," Valérie added, the Meditite crossing her arms. Hoo boy, they were crossed. Micheal was in trouble. "We're going to mess up our schedules."
"Oh, dear God, not our sleeping schedules," I lamented, my voice dripping with sarcasm. "This place can't take more things away from us."
This was met with silence, as were most of my amateur standup attempts. I'd gotten used to it enough that the blows just glanced off me. I let the conversation resume.
"Right," Kieran continued. "Look, I know it isn't the first thing to worry about, but I'd say we need to adjust to the time zone."
Micheal's ears flicked as Kieran and Valérie kept pelting him with counterarguments. I would've liked to add to it, but honestly, I would've just said I wanted to sleep.
"We're acting like when my family went to France," Chloe whispered to me.
"Well, it was nice for us to have a trip to the ether," I told her, leaning my head down to Swablu height. "Think we'll find a hotel?"
She laughed at that, and when I brought my head back up, Micheal was nodding along to Kieran and Valérie's suggestions. His light gray-tipped tail swished in mild annoyance, but the rest of him seemed to have accepted the idea to stop and rest.
"Fine. It's night. We should sleep. We may not know the area, but having two people on watch should cover things okay. Kieran and I will take first shift, then Lola and Valérie, then Chloe and Gab. Sound good?"
"First shift again?" Kieran whispered to him. Micheal shot him a look, and Kieran shrugged and sighed.
Micheal reprised, exasperation clear in his voice this time. "Yeah, if that's okay with everyone?"
Nods were exchanged, and Micheal let out a sigh. I had another objection, but I let it slide because the poor Litleo looked so tired. Even I had a limit. It didn't stop me from mulling over it, though. I regretted how we arranged the shift team-ups. I wasn't looking forward to another shift with Valérie. Talk about awkward silence or constant arguing with no in-between whatsoever.
Whatever. I'd deal with it when they woke me up. I laid myself down on the hard rock, which was a step down from the grass in the last level. That, and we didn't have anything to sustain a bonfire. Whatever. We'd be back home soon enough.
Pokémon slept weird. They didn't have normal dreams. At home, at the very most, I'd get a good non-sequitur adventure and forget all about it in the morning. Sometimes, I'd use the visuals for my drawings, but I would have to add a lot to them because my mind's eye wasn't vivid. Here, however, dreams were either clear and intense or didn't show at all. There was no in-between.
The arrival of colour in what had so far been a grayscale wasteland was jarring. The lack of colour when I was awake was weird, because I knew I'd seen Pokémon games in colour before. We must've been stuck in one of the old ones, if that made any sense.
I dreamed of unstable grounds. No matter what my mind showed me, there was an unsettling feeling throughout all the flashes. What made it worse was that they were only flashes. I could barely make out details before the scenes in front of me were taken away one by one, a millisecond at a time.
Laughter from... another place. From somewhere I can't reach and should never be able to. Fire thrown at a friend. A fall. A weak chirp from someone hurt, resounding against cold cavern walls. A white face encased in green, splitting its fang-filled grin with bouts of maniacal shrieking. Falling rocks with no ground to collide with.
Deep red eyes that glowed, eerily watching us and stalking away in the darkness.
All the while, I couldn't focus. It was too much information to process. Did I have enough time to even realize I was scared?
... Well, if I didn't, it didn't count.
I woke up to my side being rudely prodded with a lion paw. I suppressed the jolt of surprise that came with it, then groaned and stretched, not even giving Micheal the courtesy of looking at him yet. It was too early.
"Ugh, what?"
"You need to wake up," he said quickly.
"My turn already?" I cut him off, opening my eyes to the dark sky. "It doesn't even look like it's changed."
"Which is exactly why I woke you up," he stated.
"Eh?"
At that, I sat up, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes with a careful front paw, and tried to get my white fur down from standing on end. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as with Chloe fluffing up, but I didn't feel like dealing with it for long. The rest of the group was also up, to varying degrees of grogginess. Micheal and Kieran looked the most alert, but Micheal in particular was still grumpy. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought that he was angry that he'd drawn the short straw to wake me up. He turned to address everyone else.
"The stars haven't moved one degree since the shift started."
Valérie was barely a step away from murdering him for the crime of waking her up. "How do you know?"
Kieran cocked his head, looking like he was going to lecture her, but then blinked away the thought. "We counted. Over a thousand seconds later and the two Big Dipper stars are still straight above the North Star."
They'd counted to a thousand. That was something I would pounce on in an instant usually, but for some reason, I didn't that time. Maybe it was post-waking grumpiness. It was potent within the group, after all.
"That means... it's not night," Micheal announced.
Oh, the smug guy just loved being proven right.
"I mean... it's not night, or day! And we don't have anything to measure time with!"
"Then let's get out of here as soon as we can," Valérie said, getting up.
"But we need to keep going— oh," Micheal interrupted. Guess he wasn't used to people going with his plan, at this point.
It didn't go without at least one interjection, however. It was like a law of nature.
Kieran spoke up, raising his stinger. "Let me at the Persim first, though. I'm starving."
Instead of the eye roll I'd suspected, Micheal nodded and padded to Gab's berry backpack with Kieran. Not a second later, the bag fell over. A Persim berry rolled out. It was so far the only one I could pick out by name.
"Oh, shoot, did I rip it or something?" Kieran said, lifting the object as well as he could with his stingers.
"It's fine! It's fine!" The Emolga reassured from the side. "It just looks like the top flap was open. I couldn't make a latch for it."
Kieran nodded and picked up the Persim berry that had rolled out of the bag. Valérie and the others took their pick and I made my way to it.
"What's left? Hit me."
Gab shuffled around in her backpack and pulled out a... round berry. The sweet one, not the hot one with the hole in it. She handed it to me, and I almost chomped off her hand. She flinched and looked to the side before shooting me a look that conveyed one thought.
"Really?"
I swallowed the chewed remains of the berry. "What? They're good."
Now that I had something in my stomach, it was good a time as ever to start walking again.