[ti]quest[/ti]The Waking Hours

Did you know that studies show you can replace up to 75 percent of your sleep with Deep Dive VR if you set your settings a certain way?  It's results were still in the process of trying to be replicated, and the magazine it was published in hadn't gone through proper peer review procedures, but that didn't matter enough to stop Orion from willfully wanting to believe in it.  He'd been doing it for a while and hadn't noticed that many changes to his waking hours.  Either way, Orion was burning the candle at both ends on this night, working with his Tauros to try and clear some of the ruined roads for people to safely ride in with their Pokemon.  The ping caught his attention as he was in the middle of taking a breather and wiping digital sweat off his virtual forhead.  

Laguna: Hey.
Laguna: Come to the Dunes if you aren't already on your way here.
Laguna: I got this strange quest.
Cayge_Match: Say less, be right over

"Oi, Asterion Change of plans bud."  He called out to the bull playing china shop with rusted metal frames.  The black furred creature flipped one last fucked up Ford Focus before turning to face it's master.

"NO MORE BREAKING?" it drawled in a low guttural grunt.  

"Break more later, gotta go catch a friend.  Drop your horns and lemme hop on."  Orion closed the difference, and with the aid of his obedient bull quickly hooked an arm gently around the base of the horn and heaved himself over the creature's thick neck.  "Remember the Dunes?  We're heading that way bud."

"WHY?"  

"Adventure's with Blue."

...

Orion soon found himself cresting the dune, squinting about before spotting Laguna on the ground.  "What's this strange quest you fou-"

A loud bang in the distance cut him off, his gaze instinctually darting to the direction of the noise as a strange light crested over a distant dune and exploded in a flurry of strange colors and lights that seemingly pulsed as it suffused through the air.  Another bang, and this time Orion's eyes could perceive a small shimmer in the inky black as another projectile took flight, crested in it's parabolic ascent, and BAM, another trippy lightshow of pulsing alien colors.  Orion's jaw dropped in awe as soon the whole night sky seemed to be filled with this strange dancing light, as if it were oil floating in water, staining the inky black night sky with what looked to be stars from another galaxy.  And against this strange light, a small group lay silhouetted in the distance as they too crested a distant dune.  Too small to make out, but close enough for Orion to watch as another of them seemed to hurl a glowing orb into the sky and another BOOM to suffuse the air.

"Are you seeing this too?" 

"It sure is..."  Orion breathed, drinking in the starscape before them from his vantage point.

Orion allowed Laguna to pull him from his perch atop Asterion, balling the mon as he tumbled down the dune after her.  Her frost danced along the desert dunes with a light shimmer of blue illuminating the night.  Orion, though not as graceful at first, managed to right himself on his trailblazer kicks, sparks of contrasting orange joining in the air in an ephemeral dance.  Lowering his mass, Orion managed to build up some speed and dart ahead of his blue haired companion with a hearty chuckle.

"Don't fall behind now blue!"  He would call over his shoulder with a wide grin plastered across his face.  

As they grew closer the booms of the "fireworks" were joined by...music?  Nothing akin to anything Orion had ever really heard before, the noise was...harmonious and possessed something that could be called a melody.  It rambled through the air with a jaunty sort of rhythm, something halfway between ambling and power walking.  The tones were warped, and given that no instruments were in sight Orion could only assume they were singing with voices that sounded like a chorus being filtered through a 1940's radio in reverse.  A hauntingly alien but familiar tune, abstract but nostalgic.  

As he Orion hit the bottom of the dunes he found himself grinding to a stop to eye the crowd a little more analytically.  These were...ultra beasts?  He vaguely recalled the notion of the creatures, though despite his started being the macho WWE cat he'd never actually played Sun or Moon.  Still, they looked...pokemon adjacent.  A line of Celesteela seven deep were flanked by half a dozen Xurkitree on each side.  They walked in a sloppy lock step, with the Xurkitree taking turns lobbing the fireworks into the air every seventh step or so.  A Guzzlord seemed to be the Parade leader, waddling bombastically in the front with an exaggerated otherworldly swagger whilst a veritable swarm of other beasts began to mob behind the procession with little method to the madness.   

"Whoa..." Orion found himself muttering under his breath, turning to face Laguna as she pulled up alongside him.  "What does the quest prompt say to do?  Are we just...following them?"

As they grew closer to the Parade Orion took in what they had, water, plants, corrupted Pokémon, all held aloft with some sort of reverence.  The sky continued to melt away, as if the monsters were stripping the outer layer to some mysterious deeper layer.  Soon, meteors began to streak across the sky like a glimmering lightshow to accompany the strange music.  The longer he stood there the more vivid the colors grew, a slow warmth spreading through his body like a gentle buzz.  

He imagined this is what molly felt like.

Turning back to Blue as she joined the dance, shrugging.  "Fuck it, lets trip on some alien space dust, ball out, and see where the night takes us."  Clearly the contest was on, with her cranking the drip to maximum overdrive with three overlapping special effects just to dash past him on there way here.  It was on like motherfucking donkey kong, and he was not about to be outvibed on this groovecoaster.  He would join his rival, finding a rather strange rhythm has he opened his mind to the music.  It was alien, defying human standards of music as a whole, yet it still managed to fucking slap.  Maybe it was the cosmic space dust, maybe it was part of the whole scenario being baked up in their minds by digital wizards, or maybe it reached into the human subconscious and brought the strange and esoteric to life.  Either way, once Orion found the groove, it was as if he'd never been out of the groove.  Like this melody was something he was born with, baked into the soul of his existence from the word go.  The dance that came along was almost instinctual, like his muscles were born with the choreography stitched into their very fibers.  It'd been a minute since he'd let himself get this fucked up, sure a few heavy nights of drinking would get him loose, but he'd never experienced anything like this before.  The moment the notion crossed his mind his gaze danced over to Blue, worried how she was reacting as they continued to dance.

When did she get so pretty?

Once he set his eyes on her it became difficult to pull them away, enraptured with the music, the dance, the sheer vibes.  The rational part of his brain had punched out for the night, and all he could think of was how glad he was that he'd stumbled into this with her of all people, his rival and dance partner.  Part of him knew that this was a scripted event, and tons of other people would experience this same music and this same parade, this wasn't "special." But then again, no matter how many times this procession schmoozed it across the desert to wherever it was going, this one moment in time shared between these two would never be captured exactly again.  

A percussive THUMP, broke Orion's trance as a shooting star crashed into the desert in the distance, the reverberations trembling through the sand like a bass drum.  THUMP, another star crashed to their right with a shower of sparks.  They were like fireworks shot in reverse, or perhaps return fire from space.  Another landed slightly closer, still several thousand feet away, but enough to send a small jolt of adrenaline into the fighter, sobering him up enough to show some concern for Laguna.

"Yo stay frosty blue, don't want any of those landing on you," a smirk would cross his lips.  "Can't be having anything happen to my favorite dance partner."