POKÉMON MYSTERY DUNGEON: GATES INTO SHADOW

Chapter Eleven: Action, Reaction
raw campaign notes edition

resting up at the lighthouse inn (getting two separate rooms because none of them are big enough to fit astra and hazy Together), waking up around noon the next day and getting no response knocking on wisp and astra's door. guess they're still sleeping! not much to do besides wait around town for gumdrop to finish her restoration work on the umbreon diary so ambur and hazy are probably just gonna look around the guild for posted jobs to pass the time.

there's a bunch of star knights sat around a table in the inn's front hall and they wave us down uh oh. midnight crew sits with them and listens to their whole spiel, cola marsh dungeon is comprehensively Fucked after we unleashed a swarm of trevenant and they gotta deal with it. they want our help. ambur chews them out for being dicks, embarrasses syr orion by pointing out how him skulking in the crowd at our badge ceremony and stalking outside ambur's house at night is very weird, goes off on syr rigel for busting through some guy's house in pursuit of his Noble Mission, and doesn't say anything to syr bela cause we don't know her at all yet. syr orion begs for our help. ambur says Pay The Fuck Up. give me So much money. and i will consider it. orion reluctantly agrees.

team midnight crew will meet with rigel and bela at the gate in an hour, but in the meantime they check on astra and wisp again. knocking again gives no response. hazy opens the door and ambur feels a weird ghostly aura that feels like wisp. there's a note on the bed, written in old unown. wisp wrote it. says her and astra are off to do their own thing around town, and will hopefully be back before this note is found. no luck on that. some letters are in bold though, and after playing eye spy out the lighthouse window at the lone ruined pillar standing out in the foggy bay, part of the old nori fortress wall, hazy anagrams it out to spell "GHOST TOWER". okay guess we'll check that out if they're not back by the time we're back.

wandering through town, stopping in front of the guild to observe some commotion -- apparently some strange armed-and-dangerous pink pokémon showed up, and the guild and the league are bickering for who gets to Claim them as part of their own ranks. anyway we go meet up with the knights at the town gate and start heading out toward cola marsh again. ambur quizzes rigel on how the swords and their entercard tech works, curious how the arrangement of symbols corresponds to a location coordinate, especially considering they already have four entercards in their pocket. rigel says the swords are only coded for a small set of locations and he doesn't really know the nitty gritty of how the symbols work. also ambur just keeps passively being mean to him. for good reason.

they camp out just outside the marsh, ambur keeping watch first (spotting that burned-up pirate airship floating out to sea along the opposite coast of sashimi bay), followed by hazy (spotting some light off in the distance toward moonstone/dragonsgrave flying up toward a lone star and disappearing). a quick breakfast later, we're right outside the dungeon entrance, discussing how to deal with all these fucking trees. ambur suggests Fire before remembering it's a peat bog mystery dungeon and will probably be burning forever if we light a bunch of shit on fire. hazy suggests eating the ghosts. probably a better plan. we dive in

after a brief discussion about the pirate ship (nori will probably be fine if they do head that way) they dive in to the dungeon, ambur mapping out their path through while bela douses for points of interest with her sword. there's two fixed points the sword keeps locking on to, plus a moving target somewhere else. we talk a bunch of shit, hazy "joking" about time travel and about meeting star league founder Polaris. bela uses gravity control to keep everyone from sinking into the swamp muck.

they spot an upturned barge out in the swamp water off to the side, hazy pops a slip seed and just walks on the water and hoists it up out of there. a few barrels and crates also bob up out of the water now that they're no longer pinned under the barge. we pile everything up on to it then ride it out across the water, shortcutting to one of the fixed points. investigating the crates and barrels: one has some type of Liquid inside, we'd need a tap to get it out. two barrels full of onions, a crate of apples, a crate of lemons, a crate of gardening/tree care equipment -- that one feels Suspicious, and as hazy takes it all out ambur spots a false bottom. hazy rips it out and uncovers a hidden compartment, hiding a fancy ornate box, holding a rather plain looking wooden bracelet. ambur tries it on to see if it has any Effect but nothing happens.

those fucking marshtomp show up again and throw a wave of muddy water at us. ambur darkpulse distracts one of them while the rest dodge, then tries to flashbang them with a blinker seed but it misses and just plunks into the water. bela tries to gravity lift them out of the water, hazy blasts them with ghostfire, rigel fires a moonblast, but we all get overwhelmed with another mud wave anyway. ambur has the bright idea to throw a crate into the water as a target platform for the seed to actually hit, but rigel's stubby arms are not up to the task. bela goes for another gravity control, creating a well that draws both the marshtomp in as well as a small Sphere of mud water, and ambur tries another blast seed (i can't miss, i have Gravity on my side!) and misses.

hazy fires a hyper beam. the blinker seed explodes. the blast seed explodes. one marshtomp is instantly knocked out, the other flails uselessly in the gravity sphere, trying to escape. the well collapses after a minute and they make a break for it, but rigel tries to shoot them while they're retreating -- and misses, hitting a tree that splashes down and creates a wave that gets them out of there even faster.

ambur puts the mysterious bracelet away again and after clearing out all the mud and water from the barge they carry on along the water, eventually reaching the wooden boardwalk that leads to the bandit inn.

they head toward the inn, bela and rigel securing the area and clearing out the rubble while ambur and hazy investigate the rooms still standing. there's someone sneaking around one of the rooms. it's a poltchageist. very confused, very lost, clearly newly awoken. probably either a victim or one of the former owners. ambur offers to let it tag along with them while it figures itself out, but it's content to stay wandering the rooms for now.

bela and rigel return to the inn's front entrance with a bunch of the wood scraps from the blown-out side of the inn, and we grab the crates from the barge to build a makeshift little fort out there. ambur sneaks across to the fence to snatch up one of the ghost-warding talismans, examining it, while hazy discusses a plan of action with the star knights. there were about a dozen trees, and there's eight of them still in the orchard. it was their haunting ground, it's where most of them were "born" from the souls of the buried-alive, so it's the place they'll naturally return to.

after initially planning to simply replicate the talisman's design on paper, ambur remembers what they read in that book on ghosts and realises the design doesn't really matter, moreso the power, intent, and faith placed into the talisman, and the amount of effort and will imbued into its creation. pencil and paper talismans won't last very long, but carving into wood with hazy's ghostfire might be enough power and effort that we can rebuild the "fence" just by placing down a bunch of marked posts.

it takes a while but eventually the broken portion of the binding-circle is filled in with those new fenceposts, unown-script warding messages carved into each plank and imbued with hazy's ghostly power. the other four trees will return here Eventually, but it's better to go hunt them down ahead of time, so they'll go and do that, after a rest.

ambur takes first watch. atop a stack of crates they watch the boardwalk fizz, splitting into inch-cubes and reforming in a new pattern. a skeletal kabutops walks down the fractal-shifting path. no, a square mass of void. no, a towering white monolith. no, something else entirely. the water changes hue around it -- purple dotted with lilypads, pale blue with little branch-roots, green and foamy -- the boardwalk made of different types of wood with each plank.

it's approaching the inn. it's going to reshape the dungeon. it's going to break the fence.

ambur hops down from their makeshift watchtower and politely asks it to leave. it speaks to them. sings to them, sad. ambur says their friends are going to be in danger if it comes any closer. it... acknowledges. a black void with piercing red-white eyes, a diagonal cross of golden light, and it's gone. ambur sits, staring up at where the tower had been, until hazy wakes up for his shift. they go to bed. hazy notices four pawprints burned into the wood of the boardwalk, and below it a circle of swamp-water entirely clear of dirt and silt. he doesn't spot anything else for the rest of the night.

bela stays behind at the inn ruins while ambur, hazy and rigel head off in search of the last four trees, hazy using his latent talents as an ex ghost hunter to sniff them out. rigel is very impatient and floats the idea of just entirely deforesting the entire dungeon, ambur says that's a bad idea -- even if all the trees will magically come back thanks to the dungeon's status-quo inertia, the damage to its ecosystem will have far-reaching effects. there are still consequences, even in mystery dungeons.

rigel spots a croconaw floating in the swamp muck but it disappears immediately, and ambur talks him out of picking a fight with it, since there are probably far worse things lurking under the surface.

eventually they happen upon a little hut, surrounded by four ghosty trees. ambur hazy and rigel immediately hit one with a combo dark pulse infernal parade and moonblast, almost taking it out in one shot. hazy hits it again and takes it all the way out while ambur flashbangs the other three with a blinker seed -- but they shrug it off, and inflict hazy and rigel with THE DRYAD'S CURSE. rigel wildly swings his sword while ambur slaps a blast seed directly against a tree trunk, tanking the splash damage. hazy charges up a (now grass type) hyper beam and tells rigel to dodge -- rigel falls flat on his face and immediately gets succ'd by a tree -- as hazy fires a fucking timber railgun and annihilates two more trevenant. the last remaining tree gets the fuck out of there but ambur hazy and rigel snipe it down.

they haul the temporarily inert wood out into a little pile in front of the hut, and hazy waits for the curse to wear off so he can begin his ghostly mukbang, while ambur scopes out the hut. it's only recently been abandoned, with flowery scents still lingering, and a pot of mystery stew still lukewarm. the roserade and gloom from the fake inn were hiding here, and they might eventually return. once all the evil spirits have been successfully vored, they put all the heads in a little pile, and ambur writes a little note for whenever the inn bandits show up again. "CLEANED UP YOUR MESS. DON'T DO THIS AGAIN. HOPE WE NEVER MEET."

they head back toward the inn's ruins, reuniting with bela, who passed the time fishing some flat rocks out of the swamp muck with her gravity powers, and carving them with entercard-like symbols, in order to create an easy escape orb type exit. she says she'll stay behind here and gives rigel some paperwork to hand off at the guild to begin the formal process of setting up a little outpost here in this dungeon. she also says they should take the poltchageist out with them, so hazy goes to talk to it, while ambur observes the enterstones curiously.

hazy talks ghost stuff with the poltchageist, helping convince them to tag along for the moment while they decide what to do with their new unlife.

ambur quizzes bela on how the enterstones work, examining the spiral symbols carved onto three of the four rocks. it's a permanent fixture, unlike the temporary constructs of entercards, designed for regular reuse. it works as an escape orb, in the same way an escape orb does, by teleporting you to its own same coordinate and creating a feedback loop of dungeon energy that slingshots you back to whatever doorway you entered into the dungeonspace through. ambur secretly scribbles down a bunch of notes.

bela stays behind to help set up the inn as a proper outpost while ambur, hazy, rigel and the ghost step onto the stones and get launched back out of the dungeon, beginning the hike back towards nori. it takes a day and a half, nothing really happens along the way.

there are even more golurk guarding the streets once they return. rigel immediately heads off to the star league regional HQ to drop off all the paperwork pertaining to their new outpost, while ambur and hazy head to the rescue guild house in search of orion. egg the emolga greets them at the desk, briefly hopeful that they're new recruits or transfers, before they remind him that they rescued him from the dungeon.

orion's upstairs in the records office, looking through logs of all the teams that passed through nori. so many of them have gone missing. midnight crew relays all the info to him, he says he'll send mini off to meet bela with some supplies. hazy almost mentions the ghost tower but ambur keeps him quiet.

they check in on the library, gumdrop is overworked as always but promises she'll get the book cleaned up in a few days. she's been getting a lot of requests for books on mystery dungeon phenomena from concerned townsfolk who have lost their friends to the dungeons, and all of the relevant books have been sequestered by the star league -- including one book she remembers by the same author as the diary ambur brought in, that was requested by a deoxys many years ago and never returned...

they take another look at the job board, and hazy finally decides to scoop up all of the jobs pertaining to rescue teams that got lost in the plains to the south. ambur's unsure if they're really going to be able to succeed where so many other teams failed, hazy says they're pretty experienced by now, and that it also never hurts to try.