DUNGEON: MIDAS CORP

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SPOILER: Click to show

{DUNGEON THEME}

Description

Players split, some climbing UPWARD and the rest taking their chances DOWN the hole. The groups are soon reunited.

UPWARD PATH

Shalin Nariya zips up the wall, followed by the clambering forms of Josh Devlin and Torino. They pull at the iron bar handholds and embedded cabling, but some wires are more alive than they appear.

Copper-toed tendrils wriggle free from the wall as a Xurkitree reaches out from its concrete den to grasp at the intruders. Lightning burns the interior of the building, striking Shalin out of the air.

As Shalin Nariya plummets down into the hole below her UI blasts a cheerful tune and showers her in digital confetti.

BONUS REWARD!

[tangent=This encounter partially unlock the Bolter subclass!]Lightning strike![/tangent]!

Numbing static fills the air, and the UPWARD group crash down into the hole. The last thing they see before darkness engulfs them is their Pokemon being snatched out of the air by Ultra Beasts.

Shalin Nariya, Josh Devlin, and Torino each lose one Pokemon.

DOWNWARD PATH

The daring jumpers crash down into the rotted remains of a break room, wasted by time and some sort of energy attack. The fridge is on its side, doors torn off and embedded in a nearby wall. The floor is a mess of paperwork turned sludge, and what snacks were available in days past have long since been reduced to skittering clumps of plastic wrappers.

As Alkaid lands his UI blasts a cheerful tune and showers him in another burst of digital confetti.

BONUS REWARD!

His UI highlights a chunk of tangled metal: the remains of a coffee pot that has miraculously avoided any rust. [tangent=This item partially unlocks the Catalyst subclass!]Americium Coffee Pot![/tangent]

AROUND OR THROUGH?

The path diverges again. Whether you can see or not in the gloom, two doorways lead off the abandoned break room.

One doorway opens onto a submerged staircase, which coils AROUND and around like the square-boned skeleton of a great concrete snake. The water is clear, and floating trash from the office above drifts like jellyfish in the ancient cistern, illuminated in the ghostly green glow of submerged EXIT signs.

The other doorway leads THROUGH a maze of ruined cubicles, where the lights of sleeping electronics blink on and off like irregular stars. The rusted bodies of office chairs knock against low desks, and papers shuffle along the floor at the slightest gust of wind.

If you take this path you will find a piece of paper containing the office memo.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Office Memo}9:38 12-01-XXXX

Urgent Memo
For internal circulation only

It has come to management attention that a number of environmental irregularities are causing significant distress among the office staff.

Due to the irregular circumstances, the Pokemon League has issued a Stay at Home order, effective immediately.

Please return to your homes and continue work from there, and be prepared to evacuate if necessary. The current recommended evacuation route is via Liberty Pier to the South.

We appreciate your continued efforts and hard work in this trying time.

Stay safe.

Josh Devlin Shalin Nariya Alicia Westfield Alkaid Respiro Laguna Torino
This round will end in 48 hours from posting (Wednesday July 31st at 1AM JST).

Just as Shalin reached the halfway point of the upper stairwell, one of the cables she grabbed onto was actually a Xurkitree. One of its cable-arms wrapped around her waist, and another wrapped itself around Nymris' body. The Invasive Species swung its black wires about, wielding them like whips. Trapped on the edge of one, all Shalin could do was holler, doing her best to enjoy the impromptu carnival ride.

Every flick of the wire made Shalin yelp, an adrenaline rush similar to what she experienced with Nymris giving her a second wind. The Ultra Beast's finale would be no mere carnival ride; when she felt the wire moving backwards, she knew exactly what was coming. With a mighty swing, an enormous loop had built up in the wire. The green-ette closed her eyes and braced herself for the worst.

Electricity danced down both wires, Shalin and her Pokémon each at the end of one. With a sickening, metallic CRACK, the Xurkitree snapped both of its arms with POWER WHIPS that split the air itself. The force of the attack quickly reached Shalin's registered pain limits, the Ultra Beast's passenger unable to hear her own scream. Both were moving so fast that the sound of the interior lightning strike failed to reach her ears, as well. Even the power of glitches had its limits: the speed and power of the Xurkitree's whip crack was so intense that it dislodged Shalin, the wannabe cowboy catching the faintest glimpse of an unconscious Nymris still wrapped around the wire-arm.

The glitch hunter found herself conscious at the end of a pitch-black hallway, the space around her upper legs covered in stinging electrical burns. Struggling to get to her feet, the first thing she noticed was that Nymris was missing. Her eyes shifted toward her HUD, seeing a question mark next to the Pheromosa's name. Hovering over the tooltip for it, she saw her unusual steed's fate and sobbed.

Help> X-ZONE: The Pokémon has vanished without a trace. This effect lasts indefinitely.

It took the squabbling of Alicia Westfield 's Hydrapple to snap Shalin out of her distress. The grass-type had kindly crafted a straight path through the ruined office building. Sending out her Ponyta, Reynir, she tried to climb onto the psychic-type's back, but was stopped by an error message:

Error> This Pokémon has not yet completed Ride Training.

Dismayed, she dashed alongside the cantering Pokémon for as long as she could before inevitably losing pace...

{Party}Player subclasses:
Pokemon 1: Pheromosa  || COND: X-Zone
Pokemon 2: Ponyta

Light and sound roar through Torino, shaking her heart and numbing her hands as the indoor wall is illuminated by brutal lightning. Her limbs seized, and she fell backwards into the dark. At she tumbled, slide-shots and flashes of lightward tragedy blinked through her mind like a movie reel.

In sped-up slow motion she saw the Xurkitree's copper limbs coil around her Swirlix. Her cotton candy baby cried out in shock as it was pulled back into the concrete wall.

Then she hit the ground, and saw blackness.

She woke surrounded by the others. They were in a shattered office, with two new ways to go.

"It took Nuvola!" Torino said, her tone a melange of stress, shock, and fury. "I cannot go on!" She looked up at the wall far above. She could still see the jolt-scarred walling, and the hole where Xurkitree had lurked.

Bodies blotted the light above, and the roar of Buzzwole descended with intent.

"Oh no! Girasoli, with me," she said, snatching up the little bud. "We will circle around and save Nuvola." With a set jaw and bare feet, she took off THROUGH the office space.

Papers and dust bunnies stuck to her feet, and the air smelled like grandma's filing cabinet. "Where?" she coughed, looking for the door ahead. Lights blinked in the gloom like an abandoned constellation. Torino rushed forward on tenterheels, stumbling into low desks. She crashed into a chair and sent it spinning. Her UI blared at her that she had found an important item but there wasn't time.

The roar of wings hit the office space outside, and Torino's face was filled with some office warning memo. She tried to dismiss it, as the seconds left to escape were running as thin as cobweb.

SPOILER: Click to show

{Team}
Torino:
Petilil:
Swirlix - TAKEN

Fact of the matter was that his Grookey had been taken by those tiny little murder papers had set him on high alert.

This is fucked up! he thought as he looked over to where Muninn the Murkrow was still flying; having gone through the quiet corridor.

The avian Pokémon would find a crumpled piece of paper sticking out of somewhere not too far ahead; with the swift motion of a corvid blessed (or cursed) to chase shinies, the Murkrow would snatch the paper up and throw it at the human, who let out a bellow at the surprise paper that had been sent flying straight at him!

“Cazzo?!” he exclaimed as he grabbed the crumpled paper before it hit him, and read through it.

Why was it talking about some kind of a stay at home protocol? Okay, this was alarming.

“Huh? What the hell happened here?!” he would quietly swear as he and the Murkrow continued to tear a path through the strange location.

“Reminds me of when the world went into lockdown four years ago…”

Rather… ominous, hm?

---

running through!

dorime

DUNGEON: MIDAS CORP

buy in, or sell out?

SPOILER: Click to show

{DUNGEON THEME}

Description

For once, the players are united in their choice. Whether dark premonition, deep-set instinct, or preference for paperwork, every single one of the group heads into the office space. Alicia leads the way, carving a sticky path towards the far side of the underground space.

THROUGH

Office memos stick to your shoes and flutter past your vision. As soon as one gets close enough, an intrusive quest popup appears in your UI, making damn sure that you've seen the contents.

As Shalin Nariya presses through the gloom she spots something strange in the sticky rubble. Shalin's UI blasts a cheerful tune and showers her in another burst of digital confetti.

BONUS REWARD!

Her UI highlights a [tangent=This item partially unlocks the Basilisk subclass!]Marble Eye![/tangent] covered in strange, concentric patterning. As the item disappears into her inventory, another popup appears.

You've been [tangent=This status can be removed by completing a cleansing ritual at a shrine or similar location.]Cursed[/tangent]!

ENTRANCE OR ESCAPE?

At the far end of the office are two doors. One door is marked ENTRANCE TO EXECUTIVE GARDEN. The door is cracked and bent with moisture, and when shoved it opens onto an overgrown courtyard. The other door is marked FIRE ESCAPE and is sealed with a rusted push-bar.

Through the ENTRANCE door, the floor underfoot is deeply overgrown with wild seeds. The sunlamps above the executive garden have long since been shattered and replaced with holes aimed at the sky, and windblown seeds have supplanted any exotics originally planted here. A winding gravel path is barely visible through the tangle of ground cover. The bright remnants of bird baths and gaudy garden ornaments poke out of the foliage like fluorescent buoys in a sea of green.

The fire ESCAPE, by comparison, is a ladder to hell. First a set of concrete stairs that lead down into the belly of the building, and then a pair of thick ladders, and then a steel fireman's pole. All of them blotched black with smoke and hot to the touch. Around you are instructive signs in a variety of languages that lay out fire safety protocol in memorable acronyms. The whole way down the wisps of smoke and the baked stone walls make you feel like you're descending down a still-lit chimney. What could still be burning down here after all this time?

Josh Devlin Shalin Nariya Alicia Westfield Alkaid Respiro Laguna Torino
This round will end in 47 hours from posting (Friday August 2nd at 1AM JST).

Josh, fearful and confused as to why he was running around with no Pokémon, frantically tried to dismiss the disturbing pop-up. It obscured his vision, causing him to lose valuable time. Even quickly scrolling to the bottom didn't help matters, as the pop-up was on a timer. By the time he could dismiss it and see the next turns, the swarm was right on top of him!

The incessant buzzing scrambled any sense of hearing that remained. All he could see was a door marked FIRE EXIT and a sign marked EXECUTIVE GARDEN... pointing in the opposite direction. By now, he had realized that there was a pattern to how the Ultra Beasts were laid out. He was almost certain that only one of the two paths was associated with the traits of one of them. None of the ones he could think of were Grass-types. With that knowledge, his heart sank into his gut.

He was a dead man walking, wasn't he?

On the slim chance that his deduction was wrong, he charged into the door's rusted push-bar in an effort to loosen it and take the fire exit. It was only his reduced pain levels and KINDLER class that let him withstand the tremendous heat. As he held onto the pole with one hand, waiting to reach the bottom, he went into his direct messages and sent Alicia Westfield a morbid message:

DIRECT MESSAGE> Alicia... I'm sorry...

{Party}Player subclasses:
Pokemon 1: Mudsdale  Status: X-ZONE
Pokemon 2: Ponyta  Status: X-ZONE

He wondered how far this entire thing was. These running-kind of games had to have some kind of terminal point, right?

(The only problem was that he knew that Temple Run was fucking endless, as that was one of the games that kept his idle hands busy when he was down and out on a smoke break in the real world. Anyhow.)

The path then diverged into two, and he realized that everyone who’d been running along with them so far after choosing the united path, well… the ‘party’ would have to split up again.

While there was something about the ‘executive garden’ that caught his curiosity… weren’t they trying to escape this entire building in the first place?

“Follow me!” he would bark in his Murkrow’s direction, kicking the fire escape door open and continuing down the stairs, two at a time.

Strange… why did it feel like the place was on fire, despite being abandoned due to time?

---

running to the fire escape!

dorime