The hypno's blood matched the carpet. He staggered forward, paling eyes darting left and right, and tossed his body onto a potted figtail palm. He, the palm, and its pot all crashed into a heap. His wounds over-soaked the carpet, and he fell still.
He rattled back to life a moment later. Not quite yet.
With a claw around the palm's base, he fought to his feet, and ripped the tree out of its home. Dust sprayed across the hall. He took a clump of the soil for himself, padding a gash along the side of his neck. Bits of dark-brown rolled down his disheveled fur.
Red, green, yellow, blue. Colors emblazoned themselves across the mad grin on his face. He hobbled on with the branch's support. His other claw worked with a stopwatch. Engraved on its brass bottom was Nes' Dungeoneering & Living.
"Sheesh. Dang. What do you mean?" He clicked a claw on the watch's glass. "What do you mean?"
Light swirled outside the windows. As the colors saturated outside, life drained from the ornate hallway. The carpet became entrails, curving and crisping like a roach upon death; even air was too lively for a place like this. He checked behind himself repeatedly, but no one showed themselves. He worked onward, asking till his throat was hoarse–what do you mean?
"What… what… do ya… Arceus's jowls! Ow–"
He fell again. He threw a chiding glance at his broken foot, and attempted to pull himself up a second time. All his breath escaped him in a long sigh, and the hallway descended into an uneasy hum.
ding.
The hypno's head snapped up. Just a few steps away. Just a few feet, a few steps, it was it, the, the thing. The thing, the–waiting, no more calculations or riddles or–just there, accepting him inside. It was right in front of him. Right underneath Xanadu's nose.
The elevator.
Its gilded doors whispered open. He watched as the half-clock above it pointed directly to the sky. A woman's voice told him:
"NOW HEADING–UPWARD, TO FLOOR–ONE. FIFTY. ONE."
The Pokemon writhed and sobbed. His claws sheared the brittle fiber as he crawled, guffawing silently as his body tried to shut down his action. When it demanded he faint, the crawler planted his broken paw hard against the ground and shoved, screaming as he inched forward towards the open doors. The figtail palm watched the Pokemon convulse and spasm closer, closer...
ding.
The doors started to close. With a yelp, he threw his paw forward. For a moment it was only seen and not touched. But thump, thump, thump. The elevator refused to shut, as his digits rested over its gold-brass threshold.
"Yes!"
He wriggled into the elevator. "Yes, yes… oh, Arceus, I…" he cried with joy.
With renewed mania, the hypno used a handrail within the elevator to lift himself up. There was a deal. He was to try reaching it first, and if he saw it, he had their blessing to enter it. All he had to do was…
He reached into his tattered bag and pulled free an orb. It glowed softly. A voice came from the pearlescent orb, but he was a million miles above the world.
"It's real!" He shouted. "Tell them all, it's been real this whole time, and I'm in it right now!"
The voice shouted back a question. He tried to prod his ears into working–one of them had been ripped clean off. But he still heard them rejoicing. The soft roar of his friends…
"I'm a teensy banged up. Can't hear ya." He wept, his fur streaked with tears of mad glee. "But it's real. The doors are closing," he told them in a rushed whisper. "I love you all. S-See you soon."
"NOW HEADING–UPWARD, TO FLOOR–ONE. FIFTY. ONE."
One door swept to the left. One swept to the right. He smiled at the the outside world and its last strip of color, seen through the windows of the tallbuilding, and there was the sound of a band with trumpets and the sound of heralding plinks from a full-bodied piano and the smell of coffee of chrome, of future and of hope and of a longtime dream thought up in trenches planned between nightmares reassuring him in the insane quiet hours of the night, and he felt the entire world shift beneath him as the doors fully clicked shut and it lurched–
Recolored Animal