Chapter 11: Deeper In

I carefully waddle down each ledge of the stairway because of my thick suit. The shimmer gets darker and heavier until the auras above me disappear instantly. I must have transitioned to the next floor – and those entities really must be Pokemon by the logic of this Mystery Dungeon.

The stairs end abruptly. I scream and flail my arms as I fall into empty shimmer, failing to swim back up. I eventually land on rocky ground with a muted thud. My glove holds the front of my chest and I pant until my heartbeat steadies. What the hell? It was like the last 10 steps were never built.

I’m fully on the next floor, either way. There are new auras: another gale aura and one exactly like the crackling thunder aura from the last floor. They’re both far away.

I take a deep breath and relax a bit while I get my bearings, although it’s still too dark to see around me. The only thing new about this floor is a light sloshing sound. I tap my fingers against my leg deciding if I should try calling Kommo-o again but I decide it’ll be safer to find the stairs first.

I trudge through the dungeon once again, away from the looming auras. There are twists and turns and passages that loop back on themselves – a complete mess as always. My arm stays outstretched to avoid walking into many walls.

After a while, I come across a room where the liquid has a gentle pull. I follow the flow towards a set of stairs that it drains into. I let out a low sigh. The lack of danger is underwhelming.

I look down to my comms button once more. The deep voice’s warning repeats in my mind, and I’m about to move on before I imagine Kommo-o. What if he’s looking for me, worried, scared? Or what if he’s running away from something? I press. “Kommo-o? Do you hear me?”

Static cackling in waves follows along with industrial yammering before a scream cuts it off. The shimmer turns redder and the few auras around me head towards me. It occurs to me they can probably sense radio waves.

But I don’t risk finding out anything more and head downstairs. It ends abruptly as well which catches me off guard once more, but I land on the next floor.

New auras appear once again. I head out, deeper into the Mystery Dungeon.

I descend many floors. The surface above lowers and the sloshing gets louder after every set of stairs. Little danger has been finding me – my aura is very dependable at staying away from them.

Especially since they rarely head in my direction either, except for when I use my radio at the head of each new stairway. The shimmer grows dark red when I do and the mechanical nonsense responding sounds more pained each time. But it always resets once I cross below. And thankfully, it’s not hard to find the stairs anymore. The rooms they’re in have an increasingly stronger draining force that pulls me towards it. 

Every stairs ends before they reach the floor. I jump off and flail around each one. It makes my teeth grit, I’m worried I might land wrong, or that one of these won’t have ground to land on.

Obnoxious stairs aside, one thing that stands out in this journey are many strange objects that lie in the occasional room. They’re all roughly the same size of the twig-arm thing from the first floor, but their shapes are wildly varied. One has many yellow ball-tipped spikes fanning from a center, another is a blocky wave with a rainbow pattern that reminds me of 3D equations. Many more I find myself lacking the words to describe them, other than they’re all nothing I’ve seen before. Rarely, they’re darkened and consumed.

Somewhere between the seventh and twelfth floor – I lost count – the fluid has lowered to my neck. The ceiling is made of a blood-red mineral with many crevices snaking throughout. A muted beat plays, and with it, shimmer sputters out from the cracks while a small current surges around me. This beat, the gushing above, and the current surge rapidly get stronger across the next few floors.

So much stronger that I now hold onto many pink-tinted outcrops jutting from the wall. The beat trembles my feet and splashes the liquid onto my body. 

Not even the entities around resist the current surges. Their aura is tugged and tossed with each boom, save for a gale and black hole aura off in the distance. If the latter’s making clanging noises, then the turbulent water drowns it out.

The difficult current makes progress tedious, as I crawl along the wall to stop myself falling over. The routes here are long and the monsters walk into inconvenient spots more than once. It takes me almost thirty minutes to find the stairway out.

Once I do though, it’s a grand sight. The room is the largest I’ve encountered so far, with width greater than a campus library and a ceiling taller than a cathedral. The pink churns and sweeps into a maelstrom sinking the entire floor’s shimmer. Every thundering boom shoots a small geyser out as too much fluid crams down the set of stairs. I squeeze the wall to stop its pull from sweeping me off my feet.

It’s just like that black hole aura. I chuckle at the macabre observation.

But before I let go, I look around the room. To my surprise, I’m not alone.

On the wall opposite the stairs, a bulbous gray mass of flesh stands in front of a wall. Stretching out from a long, oval mass are bony arms twice its length. Rigid fingers digging into the stone wall where a small shimmer spring spurts out. Beady eyes near the back of its body drift around. 

No aura emanates from it.

Its eye finally gazes over me and its body locks up for a breathless moment before it jerks its whole body to face towards me. Its two-jointed leg stretches out from beneath it, extending further than the reach of its arms. It steps towards me in quick, stiff motions, unimpeded by the incredible force of the gushing liquid.

I let go and the whirlpool takes me. It spins me rapidly once I approach the middle while the forces push in and squeeze around my body until I’m plunged beneath the surface. I’m sucked through to the next floor, where the pounding rocks me to my heart. Whatever’s causing it, I’m about to meet it.