POKÉMON MYSTERY DUNGEON: GATES INTO SHADOW

Chapter Twelve: In Defiance of Gravity
raw campaign notes edition

after leaving a message at the lighthouse inn in case wisp & astra come back looking for them, ambur & hazy head into the guildhouse to drop the poltchageist off momentarily, offering them up as a temporary intern while they go off on their rescue mission. once they're done they'll take them along to pannacotta to meet lavender & violet at the café.

they head up to the guild dorms to rest up, sleep schedule mildly fucked from mystery dungeon time dilation. after an hour or two, they're woken up by a whiny eldegoss, prodding them with a sheathed starknight sword. that's giri, the guildmaster! he's a cunt. he complains about them sleeping in the middle of the day, ambur reminds him they're nocturnal. what about hazy? hazy's the bed. he demands to know why they didn't register with him immediately upon arriving in town, they say they're just passing through & don't actually work for him, no matter what the hierarchy says. he whines about them talking back to him & threatens to kick them out, hazy reminds him they're the only hope he currently has to get all his missing teams back. after a lot more impotent whining that team midnight crew just shrugs off, he leaves, without bothering to close the door. dick.

later in the evening they check at the front desk again -- it's sriracha this time, the torchic. ambur asks for a map of the plains with known dungeon entrances marked, but the map they're given is full of question marks and unsure scrawls of unstable and unconfirmed entrances. it's still useful for finding patterns though. hazy asks about the missing teams. basil the riolu & fennel the bulbasaur, ramune the squirtle & ciabatta the meowth. cool.

they head off out of town, passing by farmers tending to the wheat fields, then out past where the farmland ends and untamed unstable plains begin. they pass close by one of the known, stable dungeon entrances, but hazy says it keeps blipping in and out of his radar. they steer clear of it.

that croconaw they spotted earlier seems to be stalking them. it's never looking at them, but it keeps popping up in the middle-distance. as long as it doesn't pick a fight with them, they're not gonna pick a fight with it. they take a rest around midday, entirely uneventful.

heading for a cluster of dungeon entrances further south, they aim for the stable entrance right at its center, but find themselves caught entirely off guard by an entrance sweeping by under their paws. they fall in, everything suddenly shifting around them. the space feels ill, as if there's something deeply wrong with this dungeon, patches of sandy beach cutting swaths across the fields of dead grass.

with no idea where to start looking, ambur just starts wandering. there are very few signs of life, the usually well-worn paths showing very little of the disturbance or erosion that regular foot traffic would cause. they spend a few hours walking in the same direction overall, discussing back and forth about what might be causing this, what might have happened -- hazy thinks the dungeon is dying in some way, ambur thinks it's overflowing and breaking its banks, and both of them agree the star league has something to do with it.

they stop for lunch, but as hazy's mid bite on chomping his onions a golisopod bursts out of the beachfront water and socks him in the back of the head. it's clouded in shadow aura, eyes bright red. their wishing stones start feeling weird, ambur feeling that staticky feeling you get right before lightning's about to strike, so they quickly drop their bag on the sand to cut contact with the stone. hazy wrestles the golisopod as ambur fires beams indiscriminately, but it immediately darts for their discarded bag, which ambur quickly scoops up again as hazy fucking suplex-pins the bug against grassy ground. grass becomes sand and the golisopod wriggles free, tanking a couple infernal parades as hazy's parting shot.

ambur looks inside their bag to examine the wishing stone. it's flickering and sparking weirdly, covered in the same type of pixelmush static as the weird missingno pillar that approached the inn ruins a few nights ago. they poke it.

the umbreon is suddenly fucking kaiju size, ears brushing at the ceiling of the dungeon, sending out a dark pulse shockwave that knocks the wind out of hazy. some kind of extremely powerful presence pings from the east, and elsewhere in the dungeon a black hole draws in all the energy that it can. they drop the stone and collapse on the sand, taking a nap, briefly noticing the flame scale also flickering with that same static.

hazy scoops them up and tries to escape orb, knowing that everything in the dungeon knows exactly where they are now, but the orb doesn't work. it's missing its sparkle. the hole ate it. so hazy just fucking runs, a KOd umbreon in his arms.

a roaring moon cuts through the grass walls trying to get them as they run away, but hazy successfully flees, throwing everything off their trail, until they happen across a long disused cook-fire. hazy lights it and sets ambur back down, letting them rest for a minute.

they wake up again shortly, and hazy describes what he saw, with ambur sketching out his description and concluding it's some weird fucking salamence. they agree that they need to keep moving, but don't know where exactly they should go, besides maybe trying to find that weird hole. none of their orbs work any more.

they get moving again, maneuvering around a sleeping snorlax. ambur spots two pairs of eyes observing them from within the grass and meets their gaze directly, flashing their exploration team badge. a shinx and a nidorina walk out, with their own badges carved out of wood. they introduce themselves as jolt and curaçao, and offer to lead them to the town of hope.

the other team seems to know their way around the dungeon instinctively, leading them to a stairway, and explaining that we all need to step through together or else the dungeon will separate us. hazy just scoops up the other three and steps through himself.

it's a ramshackle town, huts built of packed dirt and driftwood, barely stable mostly by virtue of being inhabited. a very elderly kecleon mans the shop, a zangoose naps nearby... a graymuzzle riolu steps out to greet the newcomers, introducing himself as basil. an ivysaur, fennel, joins him. they both have very scuffed silver-rank badges. they say they've been here for decades.

ambur insists there HAS to be a way out, cause considering any other outcome is basically equivalent to accepting suicide -- then they briefly lose their fucking mind spotting a kabutops near the back of the crowd, realising it's the living version of the weird ghostly glitch-fossil that rescued them from the collapsing sky tower. oh, time is REALLY bad here.

hazy has an idea. he thinks they need to go in the hole. jolt says they should go see ciabatta about that. ambur insists they get some rest though, still frazzled. the novice-rank team leads them to an empty house -- it used to be the snorlax's. jolt's coat briefly fizzes with that same pixel static.

the next morning they go around town asking for ciabatta. she's out on some mission. we chat with the town guard, a zangoose. he mentions The Dragon and ambur pulls out the sketch they made of the weird crescent-moon salamence. yeah that's the one. he asks if they have any games. hazy pulls out his hourglass, ambur roots around in their bag and pulls out the entercards, before hurriedly putting them away again.

hazy goes to help a couple miltank out with their garden while ambur goes home to experiment with the cards, remembering the way bela put some together to act as an escape orb. they get interrupted by jolt and curaçao again, talking about how cool it was that they became giant. ambur tells them not to talk about it, and explains how the star league is looking for those wishing stones, and how the star league's experiments are probably the entire reason they've lived their whole lives in this fucked up dungeon. they promise to tell some cool stories whenever ciabatta comes back to town, though.

back home, they lay the cards down on the ground and try to press them together in different configurations. every time they feel like they're close to any kind of discovery, they also feel like they're close to doing something horribly wrong, the red-white leyline energy of a magnagate coursing between the four cards, but failing to latch onto anything in the dungeon besides the Hole, and the distant pull from all the way in dragonsgrave. this dungeon doesn't have a leyline running through it -- but it's not just missing, it's been taken. and considering the connection to dragonsgrave, it's a safe bet that the star league did it.

feeling like something is going horribly wrong, hazy rushes back to their temporary home, kicking open the door and finding ambur hunched over the entercards, almost crying. they were so close to having all the answers, so close to decoding the umbreon's diary, so close to perfectly understanding just how these things work, knowledge which would have been extremely useful if they ever got stuck in a dungeon with no other way out. hazy gives them a hug.

time passes. they meet more townsfolk, including a flutter mane called sherry. she's got a sworn rivalry with The Dragon. it feels like it's mostly a performance. there's also an amaura. time is bad here. about half the residents have been doing that weird glitchy pixel-fizz too.

it's another few days before ciabatta returns. hazy's helping out with the gardening again, and ambur's taken up doodling on their cartography kit, doing figure studies of the village residents. the meowth is standing on the shoulders of a 10 foot tall blastoise -- ramune, former squirtle, ciabatta's partner. all the townsfolk gather around expectantly, but ramune ushers the midnight crew into their home and shuts the door.

they've been at the Hole for the past few hours/weeks. they call it the Nexus. time moves like a black hole, as you approach the center it slips by faster and faster, days passing in the village for each hour you spend near the nexus. apparently there's a sword stuck into the ground at the center of it. probably another one of those RKS swords.

ambur lays the entercards down on the table and explains what they've been hoping to accomplish. ciabatta doesn't know much about those, besides that they're a star league thing. ramune thinks ambur's got something more in their pockets. with a little reluctance but with the assurance that neither team is affiliated with the star league, ambur dumps out the entire contents of their bag, in order to reveal the wishing stone without touching it directly. as it hits the table, the dungeon-detritus wood planks it's constructed of turn violently purple and start crackling with weird dungeon energy. hazy scoops the wishing stone up with his gardening trowel, and explains he's got two more of the things in his bag. the flame scale is also glowing a little weird, but not as bad as last time they checked.

ciabatta and ramune ask what the Fuck those stones are, ambur explains half of it: they make us grow kaiju size. they're also surprised at the flame scale, cause according to them it's a piece of a legendary. (volcarona's a legendary?) all their other enchanted items have a faint glow too -- their convert cloak, hazy's power band, the plain wooden bracelet.

they discuss more concrete plans, ambur explains their theory for why the dungeon's fucked up -- it's had its "heart" surgically removed. the central leyline has been diverted to dragonsgrave, and the sword stabbed into the center of the nexus is probably the lynchpin for it all. ciabatta disagrees with just running to the sword and plucking it out, worried it'd collapse the entire dungeon. also the description she gives for the sword sounds nothing like an RKS sword -- it's bright neon pink, crackling with energy, covered in stars, with a white-gold hilt.

after a little back and forth ciabatta proposes a theory that maybe the wishing stone can reactivate one of the dormant exits they've found, and that it'd be worth testing that before they go tearing out the sword that might be holding the entire dungeon together. hazy disagrees but ambur decides to roll with it cause they don't really have anything better.

they go to sherry for help. her amaura friend, gelato, is still napping but hazy offers to carry them. we head out, ambur noticing that they're being stalked by the couple of dreepy that had been hanging around their temporary house earlier. later, they spot red eyes and flashes of blue and black amid the grass, and ask the others to quiet down so they can keep an ear out for whoever's tracking them.

they reach a bottleneck leading out into a clearing, and ambur asks hazy to set gelato down and take the lead, and single-file (hazy, then gelato then sherry then ambur) they walk through the narrow path.

two luxray jump out of the grass on opposite ends of the path, pincering them. ambur and sherry tag team one of them, hitting it with darkpulses and moonblasts, with ambur managing to poison it before it flashbangs them and runs -- mostly spooked by hazy having immediately fucking hyperbeamed the one in front of him and leaving nothing but a smoldering hole in the dungeon wall and a patch of sand-turned-glass. gelato is fucking shellshocked.

they keep moving.

ambur remarks on how weird it is that the dungeon seems to have variable weather -- going from calm cozy summer day to cloudy windy early spring. gelato doesn't get why it isn't normal. dungeons change to reflect their surroundings, no? ambur says they generally just extend a snapshot of a single moment into infinite space and time. gelato asks about when a town is built over a dungeon and the dungeon starts having townstuff in it. ambur explains that for a pokémon to observe that kind of change from within a dungeon, they'd have to be in there long enough that they'd likely go mad, considering the different flow of time, and just how long it takes for an empty field to become a full-fledged town.

gelato asks how a field could be empty if it's full of grass. ambur shows her an empty page on their cartography kit. she says okay but grass isn't empty empty, it's full of cool rocks and stuff! look there's some cool rocks here.

she goes digging around in a patch of grass, finding some interestingly shaped rocks, a stripped-bare berry bush, and some weird goggles. ambur can't read the writing on them, but hazy can -- it's like ancient unown script, but cleaner, more angular and sharp, like the text on astra's weird device. it says SILPH. gelato wears them and notices that sherry and hazy glow weirdly purple, but ambur doesn't. cool, it's a ghost detector. hazy takes a minute to work his gardening skills on that berry bush, digging it up and working to prune it in hopes it'll recover and yield more fruit eventually.

travelling further, they arrive at the gateway. on one side, a gnarled tree, and on the other side a pillar of rock encrusted with sea-salt, both floating slightly off the ground, both partially shattered, as if frozen in the instant after an impact. between them, Nothing. an empty space of no light and no colour, of blinding light and strobing colour. it's a voidspace, incomprehensible to normal vision, unconscious mindstatic filling in the visual gap in spacetime. that strange pixel-fuzz rolls in waves across that void, flat against its surface but clearly Separate by virtue of existing where the void does not.

using hazy's trowel, they scoop ambur's wishing stone out of their bag. the void reacts to its presence, the strobing empty static writhing as they push it closer. it hurts to look at for more than a second, like staring into the clear blue summer sky. ambur urges hazy to push closer. the trowel touches the void, then so does the stone.

the trowel disintegrates, melting into pixels and static that explode backward into the void, but the stone remains in place, stuck firm against the gap's surface. five pillars of violet chrome pierce through the ground and beyond the ceiling as the emptiness fills in with pure magenta light, a beacon taller than the dungeonspace should allow. hazy, having been in contact with the trowel in contact with the stone in contact with the void, perceives a presence older than the world, one that was never alive, one that can never die, staring back at him.

he feels like something very bad is about to happen. so he makes it worse. reaching out with his bare paw he grabs the wishing stone.

vivid pink turns to blinding white, as bright as the sun, as a shockwave expands the clearing by a hundred feet in all directions, turning each surrounding patch of sand to glass and lighting each surrounding patch of grass on fire. sherry's shield, though lasting barely a split-second, fortunately left her and gelato simply unconscious, rather than atomized. ambur is still standing, seemingly by virtue of the flame scale, which had burned a hole through their bag, now resting on the glass floor and smoldering. hazy, apparently, just fucking tanked it. the bush he's been carrying also magically survives.

the empty void is back, smaller than before, and flickering unhealthily. the tree and rock are blasted even worse, and the five pillars are reduced to just one. hazy pulls his arm back and looks at the wishing stone. it's dead.

ambur takes it from him, and tries to call upon its power. nothing. desperate for any result, they clink it against the one remaining pillar of indigo chrome.

it's only a second, but ambur spends an eternity, feeling this strange otherworldly presence, older than the world, never living never dying, flicking through the pages of their mind like a book it cannot read. from the blinding pink light, six eyes stare back.

whenever they manage to snap back awake, they simply lay down on the ground. their rings, previously a healthy golden yellow, now carry an odd undercurrent of pink.

hazy uses a revival herb to wake sherry, and the moment she comes to, a draconic roar sounds out from nearby. the weird salamence found them, thanks to that fucking beacon they just lit. hazy scoops up ambur and gelato, and they book it.

with ambur unresponsive, hazy has to make the call on which way to go. he manages to choose correctly, barreling towards town. the draconic roaring behind them is now accompanied by the scrapping scuffling noises of other pokémon.

after a long winding linear path, an oversized snorlax blocks the way. hazy screeches to a stop. the weird salamence is sure to be hot on their tails, they can't back out and choose a different road. hazy passes the unconscious gelato to sherry, who ghosty-float carries her unsteadily over the obstruction, then winds his arm back and tosses ambur over the other side. ambur manages to land on their paws, shaken out of their shellshock and able to register their situation.

hazy calls upon his ghostly side and attempts to phase through the snorlax, but fails and simply slaps his entire self against the side of that belly. it wakes up, eyes glowing red. ambur tries to put it back to sleep, but doesn't put enough force into the blowgun, and the sleep seed plinks uselessly off its ass.

distracting the snorlax by offering it a potato, hazy wriggles his way past it, slipping between its legs -- and scooping up the sleep seed while he's down there, slapping it manually against the snorlax and managing to slip away before all those tons landed directly on top of him. with everyone successfully on the other side, hazy grabs gelato back and they all resume running.

at another fork in the road, ambur relies purely on instinct and picks the rightmost path, and they find themselves crashing through the town's gateway soon enough. ambur finds a high perch and starts yelling about the incoming dragon, calling everyone able to fight -- then, finally getting a brief moment of respite, heals themself with moonlight and tosses a sitrus berry to hazy. sherry hurriedly carries gelato to the town medic.

every available rescue team gathers around -- basil and fennel, ramune and ciabatta, jolt and curaçao, and the town's guards, ollie the rattata and ace the zangoose. hazy plants himself directly in the path of the gateway, on all fours and charging up a hyper beam, with everyone else surrounding him.

the gateway begins to fizz with pixel-static, then glows with a sickly orange radiation, before shattering like glass as the dragon speeds through it. hazy fires off his hyper beam, and--

time slows, stops. six arrows, glowing orange, fan out from the weird salamence's wings, and, with a sound like the tick of a clock, jitter forward by a half-step. movement resumes, and it swims through the beam like running water, as if operating on a timeline where it simply never fired.

ambur tries to fire a stun seed but it gets stuck in the blowgun, so they call out to everyone to hit it with all the status moves they have. sleep powder and toxic miss, but jolt hits a thunderwave and successfully paralyzes it. hazy stacks on a confusion with dizzy punch and begins to wrestle the dragon as ambur embraces the lead role and calls out tactics, ordering everyone to overwhelm it with ranged potshots, and asking fennel to try to restrain it.

staggered and confused, the dragon stumbles over lashing vines, and hazy grabs it by its frills and suplexes it. ambur orders barrage after barrage as hazy jumps on top and attempts to headlock it -- and it seems to decide on a tactical retreat, flying back toward the gateway, carrying hazy on its back, and charging up one last parting shot. it opens its mouth and roars.

the arrows manifest again, and spin, rapidly. fennel evolves into a venusaur, ramune's bag rots and decays and spills its contents everywhere. basil feels the ache in his joints subside, full of all the pep of his youth, and swathes of beach sand reconstitute into the pebbles they'd been ground down from.

hazy decides this thing has to die now. he grabs his wishing stone and dynamaxes directly on top of it, crushing it beneath his weight. ambur calls out another order, but everyone is struggling to recover.

the kecleon shopkeep suddenly shimmers back into view, wielding a blunderbuss. he fires, and the blast seeds he'd invisibly planted around the salamence surround it with a chain reaction of explosions. when the smoke clears, it's on the ground, unresponsive. wordlessly, he walks back to his stall.

hazy, still giant, briefly debates with the townsfolk whether to kill it while it's out, but they decide on just restraining it with rope, getting a resident nidoking to help bury it in the ground with only its head poking out, and letting sherry -- who grumbled a bunch about not fulfilling her dragonslayer destiny -- stand guard, feeding him sleep seeds when he gets rowdy.

the midnight crew heads home, assessing the damage from the fight -- ambur's cartography kit has been ravaged by time, all the metal rusted and all the wood decayed, and all of hazy's potatoes have turned to rot. they heal up with food and weed and moonlight and rest. ambur sleeps soundly, which is apparently noteworthy.

the next morning, they discuss plans. hazy is determined to pull the sword. ambur is fully on board. the moment they open the door, lingering wisps of smoke from the prior night's hotbox trailing out around them, they're accosted by jolt and curaçao, raving about how cool the fight yesterday was. ambur politely asks them to not be so loud, and also to gather every rescue team around the prisoner for a discussion.

they go to buy some supplies. pinot the kecleon is quite the hoarder, and ambur manages to find a replacement for their cartography kit somewhere in his stash. it's more of a drafting/architectural drawing kit, and they won't be able to use it while moving, but it's better than just keeping the map entirely in their head. they also buy some more seeds for their blowgun.

hazy scours pinot's stash for some weird shit, and at the very bottom of a pile he spots an entercard, pink and blue and yellow, looking like a porygon-z's eye. the kecleon has no idea what he really has, offering it to him for 10 poké. hazy haggles down to 8.

while stashing that card away in their bag, ambur spots the mysterious bracelet, and finally thinks to ask pinot what it might be. pinot says it's a reviver band. made from the wood of the reviver tree, same place we get reviver seeds and herbs. pinot offers to buy it, but ambur is definitely keeping it.

they go to meet the other teams. everyone's gathered around, including sherry and gelato, who had to sit out the fight on account of being half dead. the dreepy are hanging around the prisoner, apparently very enamored with him.

ambur proposes their plan. they're going to take the entire village to the nexus, investigate the sword, and probably have hazy pull it out of the ground. that way no one gets left behind, temporally speaking. basil goes off on ambur for fucking up the gateway they'd tried to reopen, and for bringing the dragon here, but fennel tells him to calm down.

ciabatta asks if they have any other plans, besides the sword. ambur pulls out the entercards and asks if anyone knows how to use them, but even the few people that recognise them have no idea how they'd actually work. they do help sherry remember something though.

she recalls that a deoxys came by here. he came to the nexus, with entercards. ambur asks if he also brought the sword, but sherry says that was someone else -- a tall, white-green pokémon, with red-pink eyes. no one seems to know any pokémon by that description.

she doesn't know how the entercards work though, so everyone turns back to the sword plan. ciabatta really doesn't fancy our odds of taking every single resident of the village along with us. she storms off, with ramune offering an apology and following behind her.

basil reluctantly agrees. they're running out of ideas and running out of time. he puts the word out to the entire town to pack as much as they're willing to take, and get ready for an expedition. it takes a full day for everyone to gather their stuff.

sherry comes to hazy with a problem. the dreepy really like the dragon. they don't want to go. ambur says if they want to stay they should stay, and hazy vehemently disagrees -- not only are they not leaving the dreepy behind, they're not leaving the dragon behind.

the flutter mane spills her backstory with the roaring moon -- he used to be her friend (maybe partner?) before the dungeon malaise drove him feral. she took the role of dragonslayer because she thought her only option was to put him down.

hazy says he had once been in the same spot, and the only reason he's still around today is that someone, instead of fighting the feral beast, thought to rescue him, drag him out of the dungeon, and help him recover mentally.

the miltank that hazy had helped out earlier are offering carts to carry the slower, shorter-legged pokémon along, rather than risk them getting left behind. hazy cashes in a favor, asking them to build a bigger wagon so he can drag the dragon along to the nexus, as well as any other feral pokémon they might run into. it's a rescue mission. we're rescuing all of them.

everyone is gathered at the town gate and ready to go, ready to leave the village behind and escape this hellhole for good.

ambur calls for a quick headcount. the whole town has gathered, most of them loaded onto carts. one pulled by cream and sugar the miltank, one by old man bob the kabutops, one by sizzle the zebstrika, one by fennel the bulbasaur -- and one by hazy, where the dragon rests sedated. pinot the kecleon has his own cart too, but it's full of supplies.

with six teams and about a dozen townsfolk, there's enough for everyone to buddy up. ambur asks for each team to watch over two citizens, saddling the midnight crew with cress the bidoof and coffee the spearow. resting in the cart, ambur is able to make full use of their drafting kit -- and after asking hazy if he can sense which way the nexus lays, they chart a course and point dramatically. onward! jolt briefly squees about how cool they are.

the journey is a good few hours of nothing major. they take a lunch break without much incident. ciabatta is very unsure of ambur's plan still, and doesn't hesitate to voice her concerns -- especially after the fractal echoes of their village start to rapidly decay, with months passing in a matter of hours and no one around to repair and rebuild. even if they all stick together, there won't be a home to go back to after this.

after the path takes a switchback that leaves them briefly travelling away from the nexus, they come upon a clearing, and hazy spots another kabutops skulking in the sand. ambur calls every team over, along with old man bob. all bob says is "good luck" before sticking back with the townsfolk.

the teams all flank the bug, approaching it slowly -- and after a moment it peeks an eye open to regard them all. hazy explains that we're trying to leave the dungeon, and rescuing anyone they come across, and extend an offer to join our expedition. the bug starts hissing, cornered. the sand starts shifting under their paws.

ambur can tell that something very bad is about to happen, and they make it worse.

after warning for everyone to close their eyes, they throw out a blinker seed -- but their paw slips, and it goes off before anyone can react to their callout, leaving them all blinded as the kabutops sends out an earthquake that knocks them all off-balance.

with the one eye it had still kept closed and half-buried, it scans for a break in the formation -- and spots jolt, the little shinx. a rock slams against his face and sends him flying halfway across the clearing, as the bug charges forward, scythes out, eyeing up the miltank like slabs of beef. the time differential leaves the townsfolk no time to react. we need to stop this thing here.

hazy, bleary, manages to grab onto the kabutops' shell, and begins to ride it, as a combination hydro pump and aurora beam creates a patch of ice in front of it. ambur runs over to jolt, checking on him, and calls on the moonlight to heal the gash on his brow seeping blood into his eyes.

the bug stumbles on that icy patch, and hazy manages to slam it into the ground, but it shakes him off and stands again. everyone renews their fire now that hazy isn't blocking the shot, and amid attempts to dodge a dark pulse it slips on the ice and falls -- and is immediately bombarded by every attack every team can throw at it, and some from the townsfolk too.

they manage to subdue the kabutops, and hazy loads it onto the cart with the dragon. ciabatta calls ambur a fucking idiot as they watch over jolt, making sure he's okay and offering to carry him back to the townsfolk. they acknowledge their slip-up with the blinker seed, but still tell ciabatta to get off their fucking back.

jolt sits with ambur as they get moving again. they're grateful to have someone looking up to them, someone who's happy to follow along with their plan, but they know it means any letdown will be felt so much harder.

patches of sand-turned-glass by lightning strikes prompt jolt to ask if they'll be rescuing any of the luxray. sure, if any of them cross our path. jolt asks why we can't go look for them actively. ambur says there isn't enough time. you can't save others unless you save yourself first.

the day ends. ambur takes charge in setting up watches. they'll take the first shift with hazy, and four of the other five teams will follow suit. they also excuse jolt and curaçao from guard duty, telling jolt to get plenty of rest -- ambur feels bad for how hard jolt got punished for their own mistake. jolt slinks back to his cart, tail drooping.

after their watch passes without incident, ambur calls ollie and ace to the next shift, then curls up and rests atop hazy's belly.

the next morning (or whatever passes for morning in this dungeon) curaçao calls out asking if anyone's seen jolt.

fuck.

ambur, from their command position atop hazy's cart, glances around. they make the calculation. with the new "passenger", we only have enough sedatives to last another day and a half. that's barely enough time to reach the nexus without detours. everyone knows the plan, they'd explained it well enough. we take whoever we can, but we can't save everyone.

they ask everyone to buddy up again, and command the convoy to keep moving.

ciabatta protests, as does curaçao. ambur demands that they stick to the plan. she stomps off, with her partner ramune close behind, following whatever trail jolt may have left behind. curaçao joins them.

we don't have enough time for this. i'm going to get everyone killed.

there's dissent among the teams and townsfolk, discussion on whether to split and form a search party, whether to follow ciabatta or follow ambur. the deserters already well out of range, with some others starting to split off and join them, by the time ambur speaks up, from atop hazy's shoulders.

we're turning the convoy around. we're going to look for jolt.