Re-Assess

This place is like nothing we’ve ever seen!

The paths are made of this odd grey material. I’d almost call it stone, but I can’t see any gaps in it, and how could anyone have shaped this entire system of paths from one block of stone? Where could they possibly get that much?

And that’s not even mentioning the buildings.

Buildings are rare in our world. Usually they’re fashioned after the Pokémon who own them and only have one small floor, but some of the bigger rescue bases are almost as big as a Dungeon floor, with two or even three above-ground stories. The vast majority of Pokemon just set up tents or live life in their natural habitats.

These structures touch the sky! They stretch far over our heads, the sun glinting off their dozens of glass-filled windows, perfectly straight with perfectly-squared corners.

I can’t help but bounce on my toes in glee.

I tumble to the ground like a sack of apples, gasping in agony – putting that much pressure on damaged feet is a poor idea. I only avoid taking another hit because Chikorice is quick enough to catch my head and upper torso in her vines.

I whimper, the pain I’ve been ignoring finally too much to walk off. My arm is lanced with pain – I think I just pulled open whatever scabs started to form – and my feet feel like they’re going to burst. I chance a bleary glance down, and they’re swollen and steadily purpling.

No wonder Chikorice has been worried. I give a wry smile. I must look something awful.

“Breathe, Jamie,” she says again. I do, my momentary grin turning into a pained grimace.

“I’ll be fine, Chikorice,” I manage through grit teeth. “It hurts, but I’ll be fine.”

“It’s going to hurt if you’re so careless,” she teases mildly, setting me down onto the floor with incongruous care. She gives my battered feet another cursory glance, shaking her head in exasperation. “I’m honestly amazed we got this far; we’re a mess.”

She scans the place for anyone who can help, but we’re only on the outskirts of town and the sun is beginning to set, so the streets are mostly empty.

I see movement in the corner of my eye, but my neck twinges in warning when I try to look, and I give it up as a bad job for the moment. “Is that a Human to my left?” I ask instead.

There’s a pause, before she confirms with a nod, seemingly thinking something over.

Before I can ask what she’s planning, she sends a slow Energy Ball upwards, and hits it with a Natural Gift: Fire before it can fly out of range.

Oh, that’s clever! I’ve never considered that a structure made entirely of Grass-type energy would burn like that. And if Chikorice is thinking what I’m thinking…

The ball flies a few feet higher, burning bright orange before it destabilises entirely, and if the stupendous BANG doesn’t get that Human’s attention, the roaring pillar of fire in the sky certainly will.

Sure enough, the assumed Human jumps about a tail-length in the air and has barely had time to land before they’re rushing over to us. My neck chooses this moment to relax and unlock, so I get to actually look at them.

They’re… very, very tall, is the take-away. And I can’t see their eyes.

I feel giddy, suddenly.

I give them a weak wave in greeting. My arms feel like lead. “Don’t suppose you have healers here,” I venture, shaking my head to remove the fuzziness. It doesn’t really work, and I think I pulled something in my neck.

“Hey kid, stay with me,” they say. He says? The Voice is weak, but it’s kinda masculine, I think-

Wait. Kid? I’m a rescuer, not some lost child!

“I’m not,” I deny, curling into a recalcitrant ball. It comes out weird.

He scoops me into his arms, and I hiss against the movement, but the pain is dull and distant. “What?”

“Not.” We stare at each other oddly, and I realise I’m not sure what I’m protesting anymore. “Healer?” I prompt instead.

“We should get you-“ he says something that I don’t understand- “kid.“

“Am not,” I pout.

…Am I being difficult?

“Right,” he says. I think he’s trying not to laugh at me, which is just plain rude. I don’t feel that bad about being difficult anymore. “Just stay with me, okay? Can you tell me your name?”

I blink. “Is that important?” I wonder. Name is a strange first thing to ask someone. “Jamie,” I say anyway, trying to shrug. He’s holding me around the shoulders though, so it doesn’t really work.

“Alright Jamie, how old are you?” Well that definitely doesn’t matter. I tighten the knots in my body, frowning at nothing in particular. I’m not a kid. “…Are you a trainer?” he finally, tiredly asks.

I shake my head. What’s a trainer supposed to be? “We’re- where’s Chikorice?”

“I’m down here, Jamie!” Chikorice chirps from somewhere below me, a vine extending into my field of view. I sigh, relaxing.

Wait, where’s the vine? Where’d Chikorice go-?

Oh, there. Okay.

I pluck the vine out of the air, and she wraps it gently around my wrist. Much better. I stop trying to stand up.

“Oh, that’s Chikorice, she’s perfect, I love her. And…” what was the question again? Oh! “And we’re Team Synergy, a Rescue team!” I raise my unhurt arm to the sky as part of the cheer, dragging the vine along with it.

“Jamie, you’re struggling,” Chikorice calls up. There’s something odd in her voice and I try to be worried, but my brain doesn’t cooperate.

I’m not struggling though. “Am I?” I lower my arm back to my side. Oh, I almost just punched him, didn’t I? I apologise meekly. Or, I think I do, at least. I don’t hear it.

The Human just sighs good-naturedly and keeps walking.

I like him, I decide.

---

I wake up.

This is odd, because I didn’t fall asleep. Did I? I might have done. Not sure.

Chikorice’s gentle smell is nearby. Primarily apples, this time… a little hurt, but recovering.

Then it’s shooting pain and aches and wrongWrongWrongDon’t move it’ll snap-

Aaaand I’m back in the present.

I open my eyes with surprising ease; I’m not usually a morning Pokemon. I still have to shield my eyes from the bright blue-white light though-

Hands. Not paws.

…I’m going back to sleep. I roll over onto my stomach and drift off again…

At least, I try. Every time I almost get close to blessed unconsciousness, the light pierces through my eyelids in just the wrong way and I’m left much too awake and increasingly grumpy.

Finally, I sit up with a Voiceless growl, kicking off whatever fabric abomination the healer decided to cover me with, and glare mutinously at the light source.

It’s square, embedded into the ceiling – which is made of white tiles with some weird glossy material between them – and looking at it is like looking into the sun, so I stop, blinking spots from my vision.

Probably not a Luminous Orb.

I settle carefully onto my belly, eyes closed and considering.

If you want a light source in the ceiling, it doesn’t make sense to have it on all the time, does it? You’d never be able to sleep at night (case in point), and clearly this room is made for sleeping; we were taken here to sleep, after all.

There’s a window (strangely square and filled with glass), and it’s dark outside. So the light source doesn’t turn off when the sun goes down. Which means it’s probably turned on and off with a trigger, like a chestnut trap or a Dungeon lock.

I scan the glazed ceramic-tiled floor with practised ease, but there aren’t any strings around, not even in the grooves between each tile. And anyway, getting tripped up whenever you want to sleep sounds like a bad choice. It would be something you can only trigger on purpose.

There’s… a bunch of objects fastened to the wall at odd places near the floor. They seem almost like buttons, but only the top half is pressed in while the bottom sticks out. They’re all on a square of that same glossy white stuff on the ceiling, with two tiny holes cut into each square – some are rectangles instead, with two sets of both holes and buttons.

What goes in those holes, I wonder? Maybe one of them leads to the light source.

Oh, and there’s another one of them right next to the door, high up. But this one doesn’t have the holes next to it (besides the little ones for nails), and the bottom is pushed in instead of the top. Some kind of seesaw thing, then?

My mind traces a path inside the wall, up over the ceiling and into the light source. A pulley system could definitely fit in there. And it makes some kind of sense for the trigger for the light source to be near the door (even if it would make more sense for it to be near where you sleep).

Well, only one way to find out, right?

I have to reach above my head which doesn’t do my injuries any favors, but I’m far too curious now, so I suck it up and stand painfully on my tiptoes to paw at the thing.

The middle doesn’t press in when I push it, but the entire thing creaks slightly. It is a lever like I thought, then. I stretch even further to press the top instead, and the bottom half pops back out of the wall with a loud click!, and the room is bathed in darkness.

Feeling oddly accomplished, I head back to… what must be the Human equivalent of a bed. It’s probably the biggest, most over-designed bed I’ve ever seen, covered entirely in perfectly white fabric, and just sitting on it makes me feel weirdly arrogant.

I prefer straw.

There’s a yawn in the dark, then a quiet shuffle, and a dazed Chikorice’s head pops out of the fabric thing I tossed aside earlier. I immediately feel bad – she must’ve been sleeping on top of it at the time.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” I blurt.

She giggles, still blinking sleepily as she extracts herself from the thing. Her leaf has healed up nicely, and some of her scratches are starting to fade. She still smells of apple, but a little sweeter now. “Nope, just startled me is all.” She pats the bed twice, giving me a look that very clearly expects me to join her. “Come on Jamie, you need to rest.”

“Only because you’re perfect,” I grumble, clambering back onto the thing. I wanted to see what those other levers do. That’s going to eat at me until morning.

Chikorice freezes up as I collapse back onto the springy bed and she’s bounced up. Oops. She relaxes after a moment though, making her way unsteadily to me-

I shiver violently, and my nose twitches like I want to sneeze, but I can’t. You’d think that the alterations in body-structure would be the most jarring part of no longer being an Eevee, and they might be, but the lack of fur is a close contender.

Maybe that’s what the fabric cover is for.

I yank it irritably back over myself. Chikorice’s undignified yelp as it flops over her head immediately brightens my mood. Trying to stay upset is an exercise in futility with Chikorice’s company.

For a while, we shuffle around, trying to get comfy. Well, mostly me. My arms refuse to cooperate, feeling stiff and wrong at my sides but awkward and gangling anywhere else, pulsing pain all the while.

Eventually I settle on my right side, curled up, but I’m still frigid even under the fabric. Usually my tail would keep me warm at night-

“Is that better?”

Warm. I pull Chikorice closer.

Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum.

“Yeah, this is better.”

---

For a while, it’s just steady breaths and heartbeats in the dark, a soft whirring of something in the background. We’re both a bit more shaken by the whole thing than we want to let on. Usually we sleep in our own beds unless we’re low on resources, but right now I can’t imagine being left alone with my body, and I don’t think Chikorice is willing to leave me, either.

She’s great like that.

“So… what now?” Chikorice asks, finally.

I hum. “Well obviously we want to keep exploring, right?”

“Right,” she says with no hesitation. Like it’s even a question.

“But to do that, we need an idea of what we’re exploring. We know that both-“ assumed- “Humans and Pokémon exist here, but Dungeons might not, which we’d need to alter our supplies for… especially since we wouldn’t have Effect seeds or Max Ethers, and berries wouldn’t be Dungeon-boosted. I’m thinking we find a source of Sitrus-“

Chikorice prods me in the stomach and I break off my rant. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she says. “I think we both realise that this is another world, but… We don’t really know anything about it yet. There’s no point in worrying about what-ifs when we could just ask in the morning, right?”

I sigh, shifting onto my back and dropping Chikorice on my stomach like last time. “I’m just thinking… in our world, that forest would have been a Dungeon. It had the wild-going Pokémon, the densely-packed spaces and the location, so it should have been one, but it just… wasn’t. It would have been easy if it were, even at our level, but we got beaten down because it wasn’t.”

A clawed hoof rubs gently at my side. “Hey, we’ll figure things out. We always do.”

I huff, annoyed. “I know, it’s just… frustrating. I mean, we weren’t even done with our old world!”

“We’d never be done with our old world, Jamie, you know that. There was never a good time for this to happen.”

I drop my arms down and tuck them back under the fabric, too out of breath, another reminder of how far we’ve fallen. My anger spent, I slump further into the springy… whatever it is underneath us. I don’t care.

“…We need to find a map, first thing tomorrow,” I say tiredly. “We can ask around about Mystery Dungeons, see if we can’t gather some basic supplies, make a few expeditions, that sort of thing. There has to be something to help us.”

“I think… we should take a few days off exploring,” Chikorice ventures carefully. I feel my hackles rising at the suggestion. “No, listen! We were badly hurt this morning, and we have no idea where we are.”

I bristle. “That’s exactly why we need to find out-“

“That’s why we need to take our time, and be careful,” she cuts in firmly, and my reflexive argument shrivels up and dies on the spot. More kindly, she continues, “I know you’re anxious to get going again, I am too, but we can’t just shrug off moving to an entirely new world. We don’t know what’s-“ her voice cracks and she takes a deep, shuddering breath. “We don’t know anything. I’m… I’m really scared, Jamie.”

Well. I feel awful.

I’m suddenly struck by how much we left behind. Not just our team and our base and our knowledge, but actual, living people, friends who might never see us again now.

The young Team Chrysalis looked up to us for help and guidance that we can’t give anymore. Absol and Magnezone and the others are missing their team leaders. The Pokémon we’d have saved don’t have us anymore.

I bring Chikorice into a hug. We… really had something going, didn’t we? It’s strange how I only notice that now, after so many years of building it up.

And now it’s gone.

“We need help.”

She doesn’t reply. There’s nothing more to say; it’s a conclusion we’ve both come to. We’re scared and lost, as much as we hate to admit it.

We’ve always been self-sufficient. The other members of Team Synergy rarely accompany us; we train them to form their own parties, and they go on their own Rescue missions or hold down Pokémon Square.

We’ve only ever truly relied on ourselves and each-other.

Now it’s time to rely on others, too.

“Sleep well, Jamie.”

My lip quirks up, despite everything. “You too, Chikorice.”