POKÉMON MYSTERY DUNGEON: GATES INTO SHADOW

Chapter Nine: Past, Present, Future
raw campaign notes edition

hazy goes to see shallot first thing the next day. dungeon's still open but the shed's still standing strong around the entrance. hazy pays shallot to watch his plants while he's out in nori. ambur drops off one of the two wishing stones they're still carrying with carson and takes the other one along in their bag. they also grab the umbreon's diary from licorice.

team midnight crew meets at the café and has a brief conversation about writing systems, hazy still has trouble reading footprint runes and especially can't read more abstract and stylised forms like scrawled handwriting or fancy cursive. they head to the guild tower and ask meringue for payment again, he explains they're still waiting for funding through the nori guild after all the repairs they had to pay for, but he can pay them out of his own pocket. they get 800poké, a couple orbs, some blast seeds, and a wonder gummi.

they head to the inn to pick up wisp and team dirtbag, with ambur buying some food supplies for the trip also. wisp is talking about burnwillow mansion and carl is very interested. they all head out toward the forest, the trip is uneventful. they stop at the hot springs because wisp is very curious, they all briefly wonder if the heat is coming from a mystery dungeon instead of any geothermal activity. ambur takes the opportunity to check on the swirl at the top. it's much more defined, someone's been through here again multiple times since they last checked. there's also a shiny half buried under the silt.

they try to dive in after it but almost drown. hazy chomps down a watmel berry he got from burnwillow and dives in gracefully, spending a full minute or two down at the bottom of the topmost deepest tier of the hot springs. the swirl is carved into the rock from repeated reopenings of the dungeon. there's also some large clawprints and a little ditch from something approximately lugia-sized resting at the bottom repeatedly for the past like six months. he digs up a bunch of coins and also the shiny thing. it's a cobalt blue entercard with a silver star.

ambur lays out the set of four they now have and speculates on where they could lead. it's definitely not the same symbols as the RKS sword so it won't lead to the star league. the silver wing is a symbol often associated with lugia, and the red/gold swirl is a general mystery dungeon leyline symbol. carl says he's seen it before too. they put them all away again and they head into the dungeon.

black forest dungeon is fully back to normal, so ambur and carl get super lost since they're still used to its previous spider apocalypse vibes. after a lot of wandering they stumble on a blue door.

astra the farigiraf steps through a blue door into stax's 7/11. he's been tasked with finding some fault in the mystery dungeon network by his boss, a genesect. stax recognises him even though they've never met before and asks him what happened to the umbreon and typhlosion and where the sword he promised to retrieve is. astra futuresights the RKS-01 sword and bullshits his way through the convo, saying it's in a safe spot right now and they'll get it to stax soon.

the extended midnight crew walks into all this as astra pulls a poryphone from inside his "hood", snapping a photo of stax to post to social media but finding he's got no signal in here. stax gets a little upset but greets ambur and hazy, then calls carl over to pay off his debt. carl slams a bag of coin onto the counter then retreats back to the door.

ambur and astra have a very confused conversation. astra's from neo kobe city, in the future. ambur can't read most of the labels in the store but astra can. they go over different writing systems again, adding in astra's future letters. they go over all the store's junk. there's a buster sword, rocket armor fit for a mewtwo, weird goggles, spamton shades, an armband labeled "pipe bomb", weird cards with a D on them, some comic books that look a lot like the weird pirate dream hazy was having.. hazy barters for another watmel berry, giving away a couple orbs and some blast seeds in exchange for the berry, a couple potion sprays, the pipe bomb band and some CD bagels.

astra prepares to say goodbye but steps back through the blue door into black forest dungeon. guess he's joining the team!

carl says his goodbyes amid the crew talking about timelines and nonlinearity, satisfied having paid his debt to stax and not caring at all about whether they're meeting the porygon in the right order or not. with a clearer mind and without carl there giving bad advice, ambur finds the way much easier. they take a little break for food while astra explains what a Phone is and what the Internet is. they find the dungeon exit eventually but are accosted by the revived ariados and a couple spinarak. hazy, after dealing with a mouthful of string shot, hyperbeams it to near death and they all just fuck off, leaving the team alone even when they trip all the web traps in front of the exit.

out of the dungeon at the edge of the forest, astra seems a little confused by the bright noon light and ambur calls for them to camp out just behind the treeline where there's shade. wisp doesn't sleep. wisp never sleeps. astra keeps watch initially, with ambur and hazy tagging in later. it's midnight by the time they wake up, they briefly consider looking for a mystery dungeon shortcut but ambur decides that it's better to take a longer known path than trying to find an unknown shorter path. they start walking across the flat grassland plains, wisp lamenting that they used to be farmland before the ghostlord wars. hazy's gardening knowledge says the soil is poisoned from the ghosts' scorched earth policy. astra goes wait huh GHOSTS and pulls out a silph scope type thing which starts pinging two signals right next to him. wisp and hazy are half ghost, dhari gets spooked for a moment but they chill out about it.

astra talks some more about the future after seeing that the moon is still in one piece right now. he pulls out his phone and shows a photo of the night sky, with half the moon smeared across the sky in a trail of moondust. there's a lot of umbreon in the future too, but he doesn't seem to know about other eeveelutions. ambur explains that environment can have a big effect on mutations in eevee's unstable genetics, and if astra's future doesn't have many trees it'd make sense there's no leafeon. but an excess of umbreon over anything else doesn't make any sense -- the conditions for umbreon and espeon are identical, the only difference is sunlight vs moonlight, so it'd still have to be like 50/50 right?

the morning sun starts rising over the horizon and astra freaks. his future is perpetual night, he's never seen the sun before. wisp remarks that lady burnwillow has something to do with the sun.

astra also talks about beedrill fossils, which puts ambur in a funk realising that the species they know right now, the friends they have right now, might all die out in the future. minor existential crisis. astra puts on some fucking vaporwave while they walk further.

it gets to noon, they're still half a day out from mallow town, so they camp out again, setting up the tent only for shade from the sun. astra doesn't seem that bothered by the heat though, the environment feeling kinda natural to him. he keeps watch for the first hours of rest.

about halfway through his watch a furret and nidoran step out looking at him all weird. after determining that he's not a tree and realising that he's not from around here they try to fleece him for some "payment" by making up a local custom about leaving a gift to the pokémon whose territory you're passing through. astra can't see wisp anywhere. he offers some wasabi peas, the poison type likes them but still demands money. astra pulls out his phone and pulls up his $MEOWTH wallet which only confuses them further. a red-white suicune stalks the grass behind them, astra spots it and obliviously calls out hello, making wisp just drop the stealth and march out in front of them, scaring the two thieves off. she reverts back to her vulpix disguise and astra learns she's got disguises.

they wake up ambur and hazy, deciding it's better to move the camp rather than risk the furret and nido having backup.