Work Text:
A leaf droops downwards under the weight of a fallen raindrop.
The faint sound of rustling, of something scurrying through the darkened woodland brush soon joins the rising pitter-patter of nascent rainfall.
A leaf springs upwards as the droplet slides off the tip of its blade.
The Rattata steps out of the bushes, its nose to the air, sniffing as it surveys its surroundings.
A leaf droops downwards under the weight of a raindrop, risen from the ground to return to its previous resting place.
The Rattata tenses, its feral eyes narrowing as the thrum of rain begins to reverse and fade.
A leaf springs upwards as the droplet travels up its surface, sliding off to fall towards the sky.
"ʰᵘᵖᵎ ʰᵘᵖᵎ ʰᵘᵖᵎ"
New sounds start to bleed through the stillness. The purple-furred rodent snaps its attention towards the disturbance.
"ʰᵘᵖᵎ ʰᵘᵖᵎ ʰᵘᵖᵎ"
The faint tattoo of something else drumming on the forest floor, of what sounds like someone's grunts in the distance. Rustling. Drawing closer. Growing louder.
"Hup! Hup! Hup!"
The Pokémon lowers its stance, baring its fangs and meeting the interloper with a hiss—
—only to be instantly obliterated in a brilliant blast of burning flame. A Raboot rockets past it, flying through the air at impossible speeds, not sparing a single glance to the heap of smoldering ash rapidly receding into the distance.
"Hup! Hup! Hup!"
Lapin grunts as he kicks off the ground, his speed only increasing with each bounding leap. He brings his knees to his chest as his eyes scan the surroundings from behind a pair of goggles.
His deployment wasn't as fast as he'd hoped; the Dungeon was already starting to show advanced signs of instability. Reality itself was starting to become undone, and he'd soon start seeing things much deadlier than inverted weather phenomena if he were to stick around for much longer.
Deadly to him, perhaps, but much more so for the person currently trapped inside with him. This rescue would have to be finished with creditable expeditiousness.
Fortunately, this is exactly what he specialized in.
The reality-rending chaos of a Mystery Dungeon is, ironically, the same thing that would make it traversable. A wild Dungeon would become exponentially more unstable and lethal the longer one remained inside it, but physics itself was altered within these proverbial walls. Generations of knowledge accumulated by seasoned explorers would give rise to a school of techniques that would prove to be one of the only ways to survive and conquer these nature-defying unrealities.
Speedrunning.
Lapin swoops sideways through the air as he strafe-jumps around a bend, the air washing over his face as he Buneary-hops through the woods at breakneck velocity.
"Hup! Hup! Hup!"
Speed. Momentum. Unrelenting force. Guilds were specialists in Mystery Dungeon traversal. Upon admittance to one, a Pokémon would be trained in the art of outrunning Death itself.
The Scorbunny crashes into the ground, the air knocked out of his lungs as he bounces and rolls to a stop.
"Auugh..." Moaning in pain, he props himself up with an arm, prying open his eyes to see his fellow rookies in a similarly sorry shape. The air is filled with a cacophony of yelps and curses as more Pokémon either stumble into a fall or outright comet into the dirt.
A paw instinctively goes to the small badge on his chest. This may be a controlled environment, but it's still the powers of a Mystery Dungeon being harnessed.
"I should've had a lighter lunch..." grumbles the Mudkip next to him, swaying on their feet.
"Well, looks like you're starting to get the hang of it!" bellows a Feraligatr, looking down at a stopwatch grasped in a claw. Lapin gawks. When did she overtake the group!?
The Feraligatr continues to speak as the group starts to pick themselves up. "The Buneary-hop is a fundamental maneuver! It will be your primary means of building and maintaining your momentum, which also serves as the basis for more advanced movements! Mastery of this technique is mandatory for all Guild members. Why is that!?"
"Every second counts," comes the disjointed reply from the exhausted trainees.
She nods. "Every second counts. Every millisecond counts. Your speed is your life inside a Mystery Dungeon. Never forget that. B-hop drills will continue until every single one of you has perfect control over your movement!"
The resulting chorus of suffering groans puts a grin on the crocodilian's face.
The Raboot hurtles past a pack of Zubat, the slipstream left in his wake knocking them to the ground with a shriek.
He's running out of time. Already, he can feel the air around him getting colder; an supernatural chill settling into his fur, heralding an impending unraveling.
The answer to his predicament is simple. Outrun the Dungeon.
Lapin's eyes widen in surprise as a blank wall of rock suddenly emerges into view. Jerking his head upwards, he quickly realizes that he's staring at a precipice, at a faint and ethereal white glow shining over the ledge above him. Channeling his inner power, he summons a Quick Attack to instantly redirect his momentum upwards, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision into the cliff face.
Grabbing the ridge as he soars up, the rabbit throws himself over and lands in a deft roll. Springing to his feet, he sees a tunnel of trees stretching out before him, a dirt path inclining upwards before being cut off by a wall of luminous fog. The passageway leading deeper inside the Dungeon and closer to his objective.
He smirks underneath his collar.
A pink gumball-looking Pokémon greets the gathered trainees with a twirl and a hop.
"Hey guys, Jigglypuff here~!" he intones in a sing-song voice. "Today, I'm going to show you how staircases, slopes and ramps can be a Guild team's best friend!"
As he starts to waddle over to the massive stone staircase laid out before the group, the Lucario standing next to him clears his throat. "Ah, I think we were supposed to do impulse movement first?"
"...Huh?" The Jigglypuff blinks. "Oh! Yes! Silly me!"
A pause stretches on for an awkwardly long moment, before he speaks again. "...Well, go ahead!"
The Lucario sighs, stepping forward. "Right, so, I've been told that you've had good practice with Buneary-hopping. Now, that technique remains essential for maintaining your momentum, but when it comes to building speed, the fact is that it's simply not fast enough."
This elicits curious murmurs from the assembled group.
"Not... fast enough?" mutters the Chikorita standing next to Lapin.
"This is where our Moves come in," clarifies the Lucario. "Dungeons will devour the indolent. Stillness is death. You may often find yourself unable to afford the precious seconds required to slowly build up your velocity, and the traversal of Mystery Dungeons will often mean negotiating difficult terrain. Moving fast in straight lines and simple curves is not enough; you must react to sudden hazards that may require you to move in otherwise impossible directions. Our natural powers as Pokémon will augment our other maneuvers so that we can move towards arbitrary directions in three-dimensional space at the drop of a pin. At ludicrous speeds. We'll start these lessons by learning how to launch ourselves. Jigglypuff, if you'd like to demonstrate?"
Nodding enthusiastically, the Pokémon in question hops over to the staircase and turns to face the others.
"Wa-hoo~!" The Jigglypuff leaps into the air in what almost looks like a forwards long-jump, except that his body quickly begins to move backwards in the air. He leaps again, lower in the air this time, as he starts to move backwards up the stairs. Just as his speed starts to pick up, his body suddenly appears to convulse, posed as if in the middle of a long-jump. "Wa-hoo! Wa-hoo! Wa-Wa-Wa-Wa-Wa—"
Everyone is speechless as they watch the Balloon Pokémon surge backwards at impossible speeds, almost immediately becoming nothing but a small pink dot in the distant sky.
"Uh, what kinda move was that?" asks a confused Charmeleon.
The Lucario is silent for a moment, before he speaks. "I don't know, but Jigglypuff has demonstrated three things. One: The distorted physics of Mystery Dungeons can be exploited to achieve impossible feats. Two: Any inclined surface, which include slopes or staircases, can be appropriated as a launch-pad to send yourself flying upwards at high speeds and for long distances. Three: Buneary-hopping isn't the only way to build speed."
Dark-blue energy begins to flicker in one of his paws as he steps away from the group, slowly growing into a sizeable Aura sphere. "All of us have powers that can be appropriated for movement. Moves that already propel you in arbitrary directions like Quick Attacks are obvious candidates, but some of the best techniques may not be as... intuitive. Observe."
The jackal suddenly throws the Aura sphere at his feet, enveloping himself in a violent explosion. The air is filled with startled shouts and gasps.
"What the—!?"
"Did he just...?"
"Oh my god, he blew himself up!"
As the dust settles, the trainees realize that their instructor is nowhere to be found. Confused eyes dart back and forth until they finally settle on a blue blur in the distance that's almost moving too fast to track.
"There he is!" cries a voice. The Lucario, propelled to whirlwind velocities in an instant by the force of the blast, Buneary-hops across miles of open space in the span of seconds with a grace and dexterity that could only be described as supernatural.
Lapin's eyes go wide.
A streak of red rockets out of the Dungeon floor's entrance at an upwards angle, soaring high into the air. An unnatural numbness washes over the Raboot's skin as the world around him suddenly turns into a uniform dark gray.
His eyes turn downwards to scour over the stretches of green below him, a cutaway of the Dungeon's geometry itself floating in the void. He's crossed over the spatial threshold and into a strange in-between; the liminal edge between the Dungeon and the mundane world outside.
A deep, distorted rumbling sound reaches the Raboot's ears as he turns through the air, muffled as if underwater.
They're here.
Null Fiends. Terrors from an incomprehensible beyond that manifest in a Dungeon on the verge of collapse, passing through the unmade seams of reality itself.
As far as Lapin understands it, they're scripted to pursue any Pokémon unfortunate enough to still be inside the Dungeon's limits. Evading them would be a trivial matter as long as he kept his wits about him, but the same could not be said for his rescue target.
The rescue target that's notably absent from his overview of the floor. Spotting the passageway to the next section of the Dungeon as he falls, he strafes towards a nearby pool of water. As he lands, the shallow pond seemingly cancels out his downwards force in an instant, leaving him unscathed.
As he starts to bound towards the exit, a strange tingling in his spine causes him to stumble to a stop.
Looks like the run is pretty much over.
He turns himself around and begins to leap backwards with his body folded into a crouch, initiating an accelerated back-hop to launch himself towards the glowing white fog at supersonic speeds.
"So... our techniques are just going to stop working once a Dungeon gets unstable enough?"
The Gabite nods. "Pretty much, yeah. As they said, you should warp out with your badge once your Buneary-hopping starts to fail. Nobody should really be in one of those at that point."
"But what if they are?" the Scorbunny asks.
"Well, by that point, you'd really only have a few dozen seconds until a total collapse, y'know? It's game over."
"...Is it?"
"Huh?"
"What we do is really only possible because of wonky physics, right?" Lapin looks down, a pensive expression on his face. "Collapsing Dungeons just means wonkier physics. Maybe it's just that the rules change a little bit. Maybe we're meant to try something else instead. To go faster."
"...There's... a few maneuvers known to us," the dragon-type says after a long deliberation. "But I have to warn you."
The Scorbunny tilts his head.
"After running through enough Dungeons, an explorer starts to think they're invincible. We've lost a lot of good 'mon that way. The end game movements are... well, you can only really attempt them in the most extreme of circumstances. It's too dangerous. It's reckless as hell. I really think you should stick to the standard techniques. They're the standard for a reason."
Looking down at the bunny at her side, the Gabite can't help but feel a sense of unease climbing in her stomach.
She knows that expression all too well. She's seen it on many.
The thrill can be addicting.
A Deerling limps through the thicket, hyperventilating, choking back sobs as he struggles to make sense of his surroundings.
It was just a mistake.
A piercing ringing noise brings him to the ground with a pained wince. As he tries to blink away the blurriness in his vision, he realizes with growing horror that it's not the tears in his eyes that's giving the world around him its fuzzy, unclear quality.
It was just a mistake. He didn't mean to stumble in here.
He looks down at a hoof, which already appears as if he's looking at it from behind a fogged-up window. The color is slowly starting to drain from his vision. The ringing in his ears fades into a muffled din.
It all happened so fast.
The forest around him begins to flicker, the Dungeon flora haphazardly vanishing and re-appearing in random spots at dizzying rates.
Paralyzed with fear and confusion, it begins to dawn on the Deerling that it's just too late, that the only thing he can do anymore is sit there and wait to be unmade—
He screams in terror as a red-and-black blur suddenly lands in front of him, having jumped in from seemingly nowhere. This was it! This was how he'd die! As he scrambles backwards, screeching all the while, the figure starts to reach out towards him with an arm grasping something on its chest. Before he can make sense of what's going on, the world around him turns to white.
Lapin looks down at the stopwatch in his paw.
One minute and four seconds.
He puts the timer back into a fur-pocket with a sigh, glancing at the shivering Deerling sitting next to him. Not exactly the sub-minute run he wanted, but at least it wasn't a complete failure.
"C'mon, let's get you someplace safe," he offers as he moves to stand. As his charge shakily rises from the grass, he glances back towards the forest they had just escaped.
Behind them is a perfectly mundane thicket of trees. The Mystery Dungeon has already vanished from existence, and it's as if the events of the past few minutes never happened at all.
Lapin catches himself as he's about to leap away again. He shakes his head, allowing his legs to relax. The sudden change in the laws of physics would never fail to disorient. Warm sunlight shines down on the pair as they step forwards, beginning the long trek back towards civilization.
The Deerling looks out towards the expanse before them, a great suffocating weight lifted from his heart, never feeling more grateful to simply be alive.
The Raboot, however, can only think of how oppressively slow the real world feels to him now.