Pre-Chapter Ramble: As many might have noticed, the title of the last chapter for some reason decided to off center itself because of the chapter selection button. To remedy this, I've decided to start adding a small bit before each chapter. Sometimes I might talk about the events that have already taken place in the story, other times I might talk about my personal life. Though, I suppose this isn't a very original idea, since like almost everyone on this site does it anyway, so I guess I'm not getting any special awards or golden trophies today, am I? To be honest, half of the reason I made this little part was because I don't really know how to really start the events for our main cast. Well, the four that we'll be focused the most on, at the very least, for now. I mean, starting off a story right is extremely important, if the start of how I portray them isn't accurate enough, or if it isn't really good enough as a story, then I might as well chuck it out will the other 50 Octillion pieces of half baked fanfic sewage that float around the vile ocean that is the Internet. More than anything, I wanted to make something completely unique, something that I've been thinking about in the echo chamber that is my mind for literal years. I wanted to make the feeling of this fanfic be like that of a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game in spirit, while still being something completely different in terms of setting. What these cryptic words entail, you be the judge. The most I am willing to tell you is this: for the next few years it may take to write this, I'm not going to be making that many new Pokémon characters, and that doesn't necessarily entail that the new characters will be Humans or Ultra Beasts either. But trust me, there will be more than a few new lovable characters. A lot more. Strap yourselves in with whatever reality anchor you can tie yourselves down to, because we're about to start a rapid acceleration from the normalcy and comfort of most fics, into worlds that defy rational thought, lands which make Wonderland feel sane, places that can only exist in the realms of our wildest dreams. We're about to enter… The Twilight Zone. God, I feel pretentious writing this for a half-baked recursive fanfic.

-Tour guide to this new experience, aka Apollyon

Pokémon Mystery Dungeon

Guiding Light

Dreaming Liminal Catharsis

Episode 2: Night Skies and Starry Eyes

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

-Douglas Adams, probably.

The streets of the marketplace in Aeon Town were filled with wondrous smells and the feeling of life itself on this truly magical night. The crowds that were all across the town were celebrating this festival with cheer in their eyes and smiles on their faces. It was New World's Day, a very recent upstart holiday that had first been celebrated when the world was recreated by the town's very own Guiding Light, after which Pokémon partied the whole day, from sunrise to sunset. The parties that very first day after the world had just ended were so absolutely wild and festive that everyone wanted to do it again, and again. After everyone went absolutely crazy for the third year in a row, it didn't take much convincing for everyone to declare this day a holiday. Naturally, the continent where people went the hardest on celebrations was the very same landmass that their savior resided in, the Horizon Continent that floated far from all the others, yet was always the least lonely to visit this time of year. There were countless sweets and treats being sold: there was the soft, warm and chewy sweet buns glazed in honey and vanilla frosting, the candied apples made from Perfect Apples freshly picked from Apple Woods dipped in caramel, and who could forget about the recent food phenomenon that were Crystal Candies, made from gathering the small traces of Z Energy in the air, liquidizing the energy into small little droplets, then mixing them into a sugary base to turn into delicious and energizing rock candies?

After filling their bellies with enough sugar and glucose to give a Swalot a stomachache, the frenzied and ecstatic children would rush around the festival grounds to play the countless games that had been set up around the park. For the Water Types, there was the popular game of Blitzen Ball, a game that had been brought to the Pokémon here by the residents of a world far off in Ultra Space that was covered mostly in water with little islands in between. For the fighters willing to get their hands dirty and their bodies bruised, there was the Ring of Fire, where countless Pokémon would go head to head in an all out tournament of pain, the winner receiving the coveted New World's Champion Belt to signify that they were the lord of battle in this new world order. And for the little ones who wished for adventure, and for the occasional grown-ups who had grown up to love Mystery Dungeons, there was Hoopa's Amazing Maze, a fake Mystery Dungeon with volunteers to fight against and treasures to win. The maze used Hoopa's rings to connect passages to each other, some even only a one way entrance, to give the entire Labyrinth this almost endless non Euclidean layout, where some paths led right back to where you came from. The maze had had a different theme and layout each year, last year it had been an endless warehouse transformed into a dungeon, where the treasure at the end was a fake gold pocket watch and a free meal at Crabdominable's Malasadas. This year it was modeled after Mystery Jungle, and Mew and Mewtwo had volunteered to act as the "Bosses" at the end; obviously they would vastly be holding back for the little kids coming in, after all, they didn't want anyone to get hurt, not on such a night like this.

Even after every mon's muscles had been torn to shreds from overuse from them running around like a crazed Arcanine, there were still things to do to soothe and ease their aching bodies, with countless Pokémon performing and wondrous displays. There was Le Boom, a reformed Blacephalon and their incredible light shows and fireworks display. Le Boom had once lived on a small seaside paradise that was a glassed island due to the constant heat from him and his family, but more than exploding, they always loved the sight of the stars at night. When he fell after the rebirth of Ultra Space, they had a literally explosive meltdown before they were eventually calmed down by a small recon squad. However, after being detained on the continent, they had eventually come to love this little planet due to their love of pretty lights, which this pretty little planet had in spades. There was also the Oricorio sisters and their countless dance routines, mastered over years of practice and hardships; the four of them renowned for their special 'Four-layer Ballet'. And of course, Tidus the well renowned Primarina was there with all the hits the world had come to know and love, such as "The Day the Sun Died", "New World Jazz" and "The World's About to End, so Let's Dance my Friend".

It was an absolutely magical holiday, and everyone around the world was having the best time.

Well, almost everyone.

The thing that presently eluded Shane was only the latest sleight of hand in the repertoire of an unseen trickster, one that engendered a sense not of mirth, but of lacking and emptiness. This mastermind's coarse schemes were those less of a prankster than a common pickpocket, stealing the shining smile from the faces of countless innocent youth. This awful devil was Absence itself. It was a conundrum nearly impossible to solve altogether, like the meaning of life or what a Mimikyu looked like under its disguise, with even one pebble of inquiry impossible to gain all together, a maze with no exit, a puzzle with no solution. It is the most diabolical concept of all, one that has inspired some of the most wicked actions throughout time itself.

Or, to be a bit less Shakespearean, Shane was currently bored to death, and in his and his close friends' opinion, he'd had more than enough intimate experiences with death for one lifetime.

It was genuinely frustrating for him, both at himself and at his own misery, that he would even dare to feel sad on a day like this, especially after everything he had been through. He'd been living the dream for years now, ever since he woke up on that little white beach on the shores of Aeon Town. He had his loving mate Tessa, who had warmed up to him over time while they were working in the Aeon Observatory, Nero was happily enjoy his quiet life with Selene in the recently constructed Wanderer's Library, reading books to young Pokémon all day long. He'd literally saved the universe, so why was he so… empty. Was all this because he stil

SMACK

"SHANE!"

Shane suddenly broke out of his philosophical trance in the middle of the street, Tessa having literally slapped him out of it. He looked around, noticing multiple Pokémon staring at him with a confused look, a few even looking concerned.

Shane then suddenly had the horrifying epiphany that he had been thinking out loud, his entire face suddenly turning the street from a dim night to a clear sunny day with how brightly his face literally lit up from embarrassment, his face showing a few draconic features.

"I'm… I'm gonna… go to the beach and wash my eyes out." Shane stammered out, momentarily reverting back to the awkward mon he'd been as a Vulpix, before deciding to bring back one of his famously classic dance moves called 'Running away from your problems like a sniveling Wimpod', blazing across the festival grounds faster Latias could even imagine traveling while hyped up on sugar.

Tessa stood in the streets for a bit, both her paws on her face from sheer disappointment, this was the third time this week Shane was caught with his mind's fly open. Tessa silently and slowly walked after Shane in a form of silent rage, desperate to keep her composure after this incident.

Trying to calm herself, Tessa put a hand to her scarf and slowly pulled out a small, light blue crystal. It had been a gift from Shane after he had recreated the planet, its original pupose had been to be a memento to remember him by, since Shane had believed he wouldn't come back. Nowadays, however, it acted as a reminder of the love they had for each other, a love that would never fade away. The small gemstone had a distinctive star shape, similar to the Z Crystals which were scattered throughout the planet. The gemstone was inlaid with countless small sparkles that danced whenever the gem was held up to a bright light like snow on a winter morning, with a simple, small snowflake insignia engraved on its front side. Even years later, it was still Tessa's most valued object, and holding it easily calmed her nerves.

The tiny crowd slowly ceased to exist as they continued their merriments and pushed the incident back down into the deepest recesses of their mind. Tessa was now even more worried about Shane's mental state recently, and now, she wasn't going to be taking no for an answer on what Shane's problem was.

It wasn't hard to find Shane, especially after he had given up his hiding spot in his state of panic. Tessa found Shane currently in the process trying to dig a hole in the sand, having gotten about 3 feet deep already.

"What are you doing now, Shane?" Tessa said with a mix of annoyance and confusion, walking up to his side and kneeling on the sand next to him.

"Making a grave for myself, hopefully after a century or two everyone who just saw me set fire to my social life won't be alive anymore." Shane said only semi-sarcastically, still focused on digging as fast as he could to bury himself beneath the sands.

"Shane, don't be ridiculous, you've done this so many times before, and you always overreact; besides, sweetheart, you wouldn't last 30 minutes under there before you'd try to crawl out to desperately wash the sand off." Tessa stated with veiled anger and without a lick of sarcasm. She knew Shane, and Shane knew how much he hated getting any sort of stain on his snow white fur.

"Shane, be honest with me, what's wrong with you at the moment? You haven't been this upset and unstable since back when we were fighting for our lives…" Tessa had a very faint hunch about what was eating away at Shane's sanity, but she had to make sure.

Shane stopped digging, having reached about 5 feet, before sitting down, desperately trying to clean his paws, while giving Tessa the look of a lonely Jigglypuff. "I- I'm sorry Tessa, it's just, it- Do you remember 3 years ago, when I started thinking about my old home, y'know, Earth? I thought, maybe there were people still alive down there, maybe we could go help them?"

Shane took a deep breath of the night's air, his sinuses already clearing off all the sand stuck in them, blowing away by the cool crisp air. "What Mewtwo told me then, I guess it started bugging me again after they came here to help with the festival. He told me that he had traveled along Nick- I mean Necrozma's path of destruction after I rebuilt this world to figure out if some of the other worlds were salvageable , and you know what he told me?"

"Yeah, that your old planet was…"

Gone.

The third planet from the Sun, or what little was left of it, which Shane had helped identify as Earth, was nothing like the blue marble it had once been.

The poor planet was shattered into smoldering pieces, the only thing keeping its desecrated corpse from becoming another smaller asteroid belt was the fact that the few huge pieces left were gravitationally forced into an extremely tight yet stable orbit around the large, pulsating, glowing black hole in the center.

Said black hole was around the mass of the planet's former moon.

The surface of the planet was absolutely glassed, with only the countless carbonized structures littering the landscape proof that there had even been life that once existed there.

But what hurt Shane's heart even more than seeing what was left of Necrozma's wrath was what hadn't even left any physical traces behind: life itself. Not even any of their remains remained. It was like life on Earth hadn't even existed in the first place. Whether Necrozma had absorbed them all, or destroyed them, or dragged them to some hellish plane of torment in the Nexus like they had with Rebecca, Shane didn't know; what mattered was that everyone he had known back on Earth… was dead. Deader than dead, most likely. His mom, his dad, his dog, the friends he had online; every artist, every soldier, every businessman and customer, every predator and prey, all of them with hopes and dreams, aspirations for the future; all winked out of existence in the blink of an eye.

Because of his friend.

Who he could've stopped.

Multiple times.

There wasn't even anyone left in his mind to be angry at but himself; he'd already seen that Rebecca had already been punished enough by living in what was her worst nightmare. Nicky had long since gone into an eternal rest, finally free of his pain. And Void? Shane had personally made sure they were utterly obliterated. Yet even after Void had been wiped off the face of existence, it had still had the last laugh against Shane.

As the two of them sat in silence, Tessa noticed Shane's hollow, miserable eyes, the eyes that she had seen on so many in the past. Those eyes were on her biological mother when she broke a table ,the last time Tessa saw her when she still went by Prisma, and not Zero, the sadistic Lucario that had caused the world so much suffering. Those eyes were on Nero when Tessa had seen him for the first time, when he still had that helmet stuck to his head by his long gone maker Golurk, which had caused him agonizing headaches. Those eyes had been on Gallian in his angry states, on Metagross in his desperation to live while cornered and overdosing on Emeras, on Latias as she looked at her dying brother, on Void Necrozma as it struggled with its own mind, and even on herself after Shane seemingly was never coming back after trying to make everything right. They were the eyes of someone on the brink of or in process of having a mental breakdown, of someone on the edge of a descent into a very dark state of mind that they may never return from if they fell off.

After a minute of awkward silence, Shane continued, wiping the tears from his eye, which only made them water more as he had rubbed sand in one of them. "I've been getting nightmares these past few days, Tessa. Really, really bad ones, ones that I've felt unwilling to tell you about, worried that you'd get worried. Every night, it's been nightmares where I see the last moments through the eyes of someone there, sometimes it's someone I knew, most times it isn't, but every single time, they scream. They scream and they scream, sometimes they try to outrun the inevitable, sometimes they hold onto someone, even if they are a complete stranger, sometimes they kneel down and pray to whatever god they believed in; it always ends the same, oblivion, then agonizing pain. All the while, they never stop screaming."

Shane spent those next moments shining as blindingly bright as the stars themselves, his breath baited with trauma and terror, trying to find it in his soul to calm down, but he was currently having as much success as a Magikarp trying to fight Victini, that is to say, he was failing spectacularly. In fact, he was so panicked, that his entire body was going through a metamorphosis due to the adrenaline; his rounded nose began transforming into a pointed, draconic snout, while the hair on his body seemingly started disintegrating from the internal heat. His signature nine tails melted like ice, slowly coalescing into a singular pointed reptilian tail. As his body slowly increased in both luminosity and volume, his hind legs were slowly covered over by a black, crystalline material, which almost immediately was set alight in a golden, shining glow. Shane's back slowly cracked as he was forced from a quadrupedal structure to a bipedal body shape. As the expansion rate of his body began to peter off, his front paws let off a subtle squelch as they split across the middle, the shoulder blades disconnecting before levitating to the sides to create two pairs of draconic wings tipped with a facsimile of crystalline hands on the ends. The panic induced self defense mechanism finally finished off with the chest becoming covered in a golden, prism-like armor. This was Shane as he really was, as a Necrozma, and also at what was ironically, despite the immense increase in power he had in this form, his most vulnerable state of being.

To many, a transformation like this would seem both horrifying and a painful experience to merely imagine, a change of form that defied the principal of the Conservation of Energy, not unlike what the human authors of old Earth would describe when writing about the maddened accounts of fictional men who came to understand too much about their reality to stop themselves from going mad from the mind crushing revelation.

To Tessa and Shane, however, it was a very common occurrence, something that had over 4 years become as normal to them as the changing tides and the weather. As such, rather than go mad, Tessa responded by lightly rubbing Shane's newly arched back, unable to understand the true extent of Shane's knowledge on what was lost, but had more than enough personal experience with the loss of so much that was close to her to be able to sympathize with her mate's current emotional state.

Mutual silence, as it had many times throughout the history of existence, was the only medium that was used, as the two merely watched the night sky for a few minutes. Tessa absentmindedly counting the stars, secretly jealous of their worriless lives. It took extreme amounts of effort for Shane to break this silence, their golden form slowly turning around and nearly pulverizing Tessa's spinal cord in the toasty four winged embrace that followed. "I-I sometimes find it hard to find a way to forget. I don't feel okay with just forgetting the 7 billion humans that a- I don't even know, no one knows where they are, and I feel I've been subconsciously trying to find some form of closure, any form of closure, on all of them, closure I don't think I will ever get. I was one of them- I mean, my past, non Dark Matter self was one, and now, it's like everything we did on that little planet never even mattered."

"You don't need to forget that they were there, Shane. In fact, I strongly suggest you don't, so that You and I can make sure that something that cataclysmic never happens again." Tessa advised through her wheezes at the pressure, trying to consult her mate in a time such as this, "What I don't recommend is letting that kind of trauma weigh you down, there was literally almost nothing we could do. We were already occupied with escaping the destruction of our world, and by then, Necrozma had already done the deed."

Shane, on the other claw, was not really comforted by this, "But Nick- I mean Necrozma wouldn't have even ended up like that if I had been a better friend to him before then! Sure, Rebecca is also guilty of this, with an much bigger role in this, but I could've helped him, even saved him before he decided to end it all! I could have prevented this, there'd still be an Earth if I had just talked to him when he needed me the most!"

Shane's form glowed brighter as his anger had reached the boiling point, to the point where Tessa was worried about getting sun bleached even in the dead of night. It took her a moment to contemplate how to respond, forcing her to utilize all of her brain power and intimate knowledge on how Shane thought to figure out how best to answer Shane's woes at the moment.

"What's done is done, Shane. The best thing to do is to not make that mistake again, and in my opinion, you've been doing a great job with that. Remember when we were still just barely starting off in the Observatory as guild members? You were insufferable back then. And on that day, my own hatching day, I had been absolutely miserable after the argument we had in the marshes. Even though you were still upset at me, you put that aside and worked yourself to the bone to throw a party for me to make me feel better! Or what about when Nero just broke free of their helmet, and was worried that they were a monster. You helped them out of that paranoia, helped Nero realize that he shouldn't have to hide who he is. And let's not forget that fight in Ultra Space with Necrozma, where you helped him break free of possession!"

Tessa kept talking with more and more motivation in her voice, and as Shane started to lose his vice grip on her, she returned the favor and grabbed his draconic schnoz with both paws, forcibly turning his head so that she could look into his red and blue crystalline eyes.

"You've changed for the better, Shane. What matters now is helping everyone who's left, and making sure that all those people didn't die in vain. We'll get through this, one day at a time."

"Thanks, Tessa. Sorry about all this, I really did make a bit of a rut of things, didn't I?" Shane confessed, finally starting to cool off. Not to the point where they reverted back to their fluffy, four-legged form, but it was a start.

"Yeah. Yeah you did." Tessa didn't really bother sugar coating it now, confident that the situation was over, "But if we hurry, we might still be able to catch the New World's Day Countdown!"

"Okay let-" Shane was about to finish his thoughts, maybe even crack a smug grin, but it seems that Ultra Space didn't quite feel like giving him the chance, as it was cut off by countless screams ringing out from behind the two of them.

As the two of them turned around, they saw countless Water type Pokémon fleeing onto the beach, running past them, all them running and shouting like the ocean had just been replaced with a sea of magma.

Some of them were injured. Badly.

"That's not good."

As more and more panicking Mons ran towards the shore, the two veteran heroes ran towards the shore, trying to stop some Mon from the fleeing crowd so they could understand why they were acting like they were going to be turned into chowder. They finally caught up to one of them, a terrified Slowbro who was moving faster than what one would deem was physically possible for a Pokémon whose top speed was usually an eighth as fast.

"What the hell is going on? What happened?" Shane shouted, still glowing like a draconic lightbulb.

"Big…scary…monster…coming…Run…fast…" The bright pink sloth explained as fast as they could, which was unfortunately too slow at a time like this.

"Monster? What mons-''

Was all Tessa managed to get out before the shore in front of them exploded, sending dozens of gallons of water into the air. It was as if a Celesteela had done a cannonball from the top of Sky Peak, the entire beach becoming completely drenched, sending the Slowbro surfing away with a perfect hang ten towards the grass at the beginning of the shore, and knocking Tessa and Shane prone from the ginormous wave of water.

On the plus side, it gave them the perfect view of the cause of this tsunami and an accurate recreation of the old Earth movie Jaws. On the downside, Shane really wished Nero was here to help and not halfway across the continent with Selene babysitting some younglings in the library. Just at a glance, it wasn't hard to understand why everyone was trying to get as far away from it as possible.

If one were to squint at it from afar, it would almost resemble a Wailord in size and somewhat in shape. Keyword: almost. Any amount of closer inspection, and it wouldn't take an Alakazam to realize that this definitely was not a Wailord. For one, this… thing had a much more pointed head with a long, lance-like horn extruding out from the top of it's head, not unlike that of a Samurott or Keldeo. This wasn't the only thing that was pointed on its head however, as indicated by its jagged, Sharpedo-like teeth that looked like they could each cut even a Registeel in half, the mouth only made even more disgusting as a multitude of tentacle-like tongues could be seen flailing about in it's malicious looking mouth. It had three separate pairs of yellow, bulbous, pimple-like eyes that each poured out beams of light like a headlight, two on the tip of its nose almost like nostrils, two on the sides of its head pointing directly left and right, and two larger ones, each stuck in the middle of the other pairs. The abomination's entire body shined as water dripped from it, spots of rust covering it like Binacles, indicating that its exoskeleton was likely metallic in nature. Fog seemed to be venting out of its mouth, slightly obscuring it's lower half, however, it was not kind enough to bestow the mercy of covering up the 6 ginormous, muscular legs that came out from its sides, the nightmarish walking sticks resembling those of an overweight Araquanid. Where the blowhole might have been on a Wailord, 3 large protruding cylinders jutted out along it's back like dorsal plates instead, blowing fire and foul smog into the air. The only thing that was nearly identical to a Wailord was the large tailfin in the back, but this was negated by the fact that this fin only branched out after it became less of a tail fin and more just a very long tail with a garnish on the end.

The eldritch abomination stood there for a second, breathing heavily, its breath stinking of saltwater and death, before staring at the two prone Pokémon with all six eyes. It's eyes narrowed in what might have either been anger or hunger, perhaps both, before it took a deep breath…

And belted out a deafening roar.

ALCHIPHA HORUSOH OPHIMO YONATY

"This is just not my day, is it?"

The monster charged.

End of Scene