"Where the… what the… eyes… snake… damn mirrors!"
Flinging myself to my feet, I snapped my head back and forth around me, trying to figure out where on Earth I am. Though from recalling what happened before I fell unconscious, where on Earth might work as a question anymore. Looking around myself, I once again found one of the dreaded mirrors dangerously close to me. Thankfully, this one seems to be unlike its other, more nefarious brethren in the fact that there doesn't seem to be any paranormal behavior coming from it, just the reflection of my blue-haired, blue-eyed self staring back at me…
Wait a second, blue hair? Blue eyes?
"What the hell Giratina? What did you do to me? Blue hair! Blue? Not even normal dark blue, but bright, blindingly light blue! I look absolutely ridiculous!"
Looking closer at my face. Not much else has changed. I'm still the same age as I was when Arlington dragged me to the distortion world, although it seems like my hair has turned naturally electric blue, as everything from the tips of my hair to my eyebrows was painfully, utterly blue.
Looking down at the rest of my body, I find that the hair transformation was widespread. I'm now a blue-haired freak. Thankfully, that snake and their pink accomplice didn't steal my regular, everyday clothes and replace them like they did with my hair and eyes. Checking my pockets, I find my wallet and phone where they were before. Those two may be interdimensional kidnappers and attempted man-eaters, but it seems that they wouldn't stoop to petty pickpocketing.
Finally done inspecting myself, I went back to inspecting the room, which was mercifully free of gods, cultists, and evil mirrors. The room looked to be completely made out of stone, with a few thick timbers supporting the roof on the center. It seemed that the cultists who apparently dug this out didn't want to risk it collapsing any time soon, even though the room was only a fifteen by fifteen-foot area. Not like I know much about underground construction though. At one end of the room was what looked to be a shrine of some sort. It seemed to have been carved out of the stone wall rather than placed there by the cultists, with the carving itself covering the entire side of the room from ceiling to floor. The top half of the bass relief looked to be a rough carving of both Palkia and Dialga, with a halo and two eyes above them replacing Arceus. For the bottom half of the relief, however, was a meticulously carved, upside-down representation of them, armor-plated with gold or some other metal, and some sort of red gem set into the carving's eyes. Giratina wasn't depicted as I had seen them though, as rather than the snakelike body and tendrils coming out of their back that I had seen, the shrine instead depicted them in their altered form, with two massive, bat-like wings spread out behind them. Looking to engulf the world above, as the tips just barely breached into the top half of the shrine. covered the bottom half of the shrine, the tips breaching into the other half of the carving, almost as if they were attempting to consume it.
"No wonder Giratina hates these guys, they're probably some doomsday cult who think that Giratina wants to destroy the world. I'd feel real bad for any of those cultists who met Giratina themselves."
Stepping closer to the shrine, I noticed a folded-up piece of paper wedged into the carving's beak. Pulling it out, it looked to be a handwritten note, jotted down in some particularly terrible handwriting. It seemed to be a note from Arlington. Walking away from the shrine, I leaned against one of the walls of this room to start trying to decipher Arlington's chicken scratch.
"Hey you, Jules, assuming you found this (which you better have), I'd like to tell you a few things. First off, hope you enjoy your new hair color, that is assuming you have one. Since you had basically no aura to begin with, Giratina using their Pressure on you should have caused what little you had to become active. Fair warning though, if you had touched anything with any aura before they did that, that probably influenced it, since you had (and still have) the aura of a particularly energetic pebble. Anyways go do something interesting so Giratina stops pestering me. Also, try not to die. I don't want to have to go sit in human form in that mirror shop again, staring at a wall waiting for another idiot like you to show up. -Arlington"
Flipping the paper over, I found another short note, this one in much larger, but somehow infinitely worse handwriting.
"By the way, you gotta push on the wall opposite from the shrine to get out."
Lifting my head away from Arlington's god-awful handwriting, I saw that he wasn't lying about this room's door shortage. The room did indeed seem to be lacking in exits. Feeling the rough-hewn stone surface, I heard a soft 'click', with part of the wall swinging open inwards. This new exit seemed to be the supply cache mentioned, with various goods and camping materials scattered about in old wooden crates and chests.
The first thing I ended up taking was an absolute monster of a backpack. One of the few items not hidden away in some container for safekeeping. The backpack itself was massive, going from near the top of my head all the way down to my tailbone when I put it on. It was clearly meant to be used by someone going out into the unknown for long periods of time. The only thing left to be desired from it though was the backpack's appearance. The cultists apparently had zero sense of subtlety, as instead of making it look like a normal, solid gray backpack, the front and back had massive red and black stripes along its entire length. The only possible way for this backpack to be more overtly Giratina-related would be a sign saying 'The Owner of this Backpack Loves Giratina' taped onto it.
The backpack also seemed to have some sort of coating that warded off dust from its surface, as while the rest of the items in the room were caked in a thick layer of it, the backpack was completely clean. Sadly though, the backpack had basically nothing special within it, with only an insulated bedroll and a tent I was completely unwilling to open strapped to it.
A nearby crate revealed a sizable cache of rations of some kind when I cracked it open, with the packages claiming the food to be "dry, calorie-dense rations fit for consumption by people and pokemon alike!"
Picking one up, I scanned the fine print for some type of warning about food I might be allergic to, with the package warning me in miniscule text on the bottom, "Ration contains Aguav Berry, Moomoo milk, and soy. May contain trace amounts of Magikarp, and nuts."
"Huh, looks like they do eat pokemon in this world. Let's just hope I don't personally find out about the reverse."
Stuffing as many of my newly acquired food source into my bag as I possibly could, I quickly emptied the crate's contents into my backpack. Looking at the bottom of it, I spotted a little glint of metal wedged between two of the planks. Flipping the now much lighter crate over, I spotted the source of the light. Thankfully, it wasn't a mirror coming back to finish me off, but rather just a key.
"Wonder what this thing's even for."
The rest of my scavenging yielded me a bunch of other supplies most likely essential for the journey ahead of me. My equipment now included a nice large water bottle which I clipped to my bag, and a flashlight that apparently charged itself off the electricity my body procuced. The only piece of clothing that I found was an old beige duster stuffed into some open barrel. It went down nearly to my ankles, with a mess of straps and pockets on it. While I may not have loved the look of it, going out into the wilderness with only a t-shirt and a pair of shorts didn't seem like the grandest idea. Looking the coat over, I found six small metal circles embedded into the fabric on the front of it. What they're for, I don't know, but I'm sure it's something useful. I also found a container with the one thing I was dreading the lack of, even more so than food or water, toilet paper. Shoving as many rolls as I could into whatever space I had left in the main pocket of the backpack, making sure I had enough of the precious cargo to survive for months.
Making a final scan of this little cache, I spotted the likely home of this key, a tall metal cabinet in the corner of the room, by the shrine's hidden door. I had probably missed it when I walked in from there. Walking over to the cabinet, I tried yanking the door open, expecting it to be locked. Surprisingly, though, with a painful metallic screech, the cabinet opened. Looking inside, I found some pickaxe-like tool, with a wide flat head opposite to the pick part. I think it was called a mattock. That wasn't the important part, even though being armed with anything past my bare hands was comforting. The real important part was what the singular shelf in the cabinet held. Pokeballs. Real, physical, Pokeballs.
As if handling a priceless work of art, I gently removed all eight of the beautiful red and white balls from their former resting place, laying them down on the crate where I overturned to inspect them. Holding one of them in my hands, it finally clicked with me that I really wasn't on Earth anymore. Somehow staring down Giratina didn't get me to realize it, but this little ball did. Taking deep breaths, I pushed down the panic that started to well up inside of me, I had time for that later, when I wasn't in some strange hole in the ground full of crates. Feeling my grip snap shut, I saw that the Pokeball had shrunk in my hand, going from the size of my palm to the size of a golf ball. Looking at the shrunken ball, it was almost the exact same size as the circles on the coat. Moving the ball in front of one of them, it flew out of my hand and snapped onto the magnet with a clang. Shrinking the rest of them, I attached five more of them to their special magnetic holders and shoved the final two into one of my pockets.
Walking back to the cabinet, I inspected the completely useless keyhole.
"Bet there's another secret room around here, considering the shrine was hidden. Probably where they keep their guns or something. Whelp, no harm in trying."
Sticking the key in, I attempted to turn it, but was met with stiff resistance. Suddenly, a robotic voice called out from somewhere within the cabinet.
"Key detected, verbal passcode required. Attempts to remove key, or three failures will result in lockdown of container and sounding of alarm."
"Correct response required in T-minus sixty seconds."
"What the hell? An alarm? The damn cabinet's already open, why's the alarm triggered!"
"Incorrect verbal passcode. Two more attempts allowed. Correct response required in T-minus fifty-five seconds."
A death stare didn't work either, although the box didn't mark off an attempt for that one.
I didn't want to be there for when the alarm went off, after all, who knows what'll happen when the countdown ends. It could explode for all I know! Or summon snakes, or something worse, like mirrors! Either way, rushing to leave, I swung my backpack onto my back and made a quick sweep of the room to make sure I didn't miss anything important.
"Correct response required in T-minus thirty seconds."
Hearing that my time to leave has come, I sprint out of the door and into the darkness of the Sinnoh Underground.
Gunning it through the seemingly endless tunnel, I hear the alarm slowly fade behind me, letting me avoid whatever that it might have called. Only now did I realize how lost I was. Granted, I was pretty sure Giratina mentioned something about the Underground being utterly screwed up spatially. Taking the backpack off, I pulled out my light source, and after a couple of seconds in my palm, the flashlight began to light up the tunnel around me. Looking down both ends, I spot absolutely nothing but rock walls and darkness. Picking my stuff back up, I start heading down one direction in the tunnel, my free hand following the left wall as if that might lead me out of this tunnel.
After who knows how long of walking forwards, I spot something catching the light somewhere down on the stone floor. Rushing forwards to find out what it is, I felt the ground give way beneath me, someone apparently putting a pitfall trap in the middle of a random tunnel. Running as if my life depended on it. Somehow, I managed to reach the other side of the pitfall trap before it gave way, most likely due to its poor construction rather than my skill or athleticism.
"Now, am I just more unlucky than usual right now, or did I actually find something worth trapping."
Aiming my light downwards, my eyes landed upon the ugliest thing I had ever seen. Something so terrible I nearly screamed upon seeing it. That damn mirror with the blue crystal on it! Had it followed me here? Was it going to kill me? I wasn't going to find out! Lifting my foot into the air, I swung my heel downwards towards the mirror's vile reflective face. Upon connecting with it, instead of shattering as I had hoped, I watched as the mirror slid backwards unharmed towards the yawning pit behind me. Stumbling from essentially slipping on the mirror, I tried to correct my balance, but the weight of such a large backpack caused me to tip over, sending myself careening into the pitfall trap, a high-pitched screech audible all the way down.