A quick game of rock-paper-scissors landed me in Lush Jungle, with Akane venturing to Wela Volcano. For the best, I suppose, considering the totems and our team.
I jumped over the barricade, and found myself in a dark tunnel.
"Hello?" I wrote. "Anyone there!"
I turned my flashlight on, and it was revealed the cave was lit up by dim torches.
"This is starting to be spooky..." I wrote down.
After a few minutes, I got to the end of the tunnel.
Dulse and Zossie were standing there, both fuming and caked in mud, while their Poipole covered in like human feces or something.
Dulse and Zossie were also covered in straw.
Zossie welcomed me by name and Dulse appeared enamored by the concept of tunnels. Alola is weird.
"Wow, what happened to you two?" I wrote down. "You look less pristine than usual."
I then sat back with some water and prepared myself to watch Dulse and Zossie take turns explaining what had happened to them.
"It was crazy! I really thought we were going t-to totally DIE!" Zossie's eyes were wide with fear as she recounted her side of the story. "After you and your stranger left, we were attacked by this woman. She must've thought we were some undiscovered Pokemon."
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"That infernal woman managed to smash my head in with a baseball bat, though I never died - thankfully." Dulse said grimly. "She also managed to break Zossie's wrist with the same bat."
"What did she think your Poipole was?" I wrote.
"She probably thought our Poipole was something from either Norse or Greek mythology." Dulse confirmed.
"After we escaped from that baseball bat," Zossie continued. "We jumped over a fence!"
"Unfortunately for us... the fence led to a pigsty." Dulse told me. "So not only were we covered in mud, but we were being sniffed at by pigs!"
"How humilating..." Zossie shook her head. "After we got out of the pigsty, we were mistaken for some sort of monster by the Pokemon there. We were attacked."
Dulse shot a sharp glance at me. "We then got a vat of hay all down us and we ended up looking quite strange. Then a bunch of kids came and mistook us two for Pokemon."
Zossie started giggling. "They cleaned the mud off Poipole... and then shat on it."
"We, dirty and disgusting to behold, ran off to Route 6, scaring people there no doubt." Dulse explained. "We ran to this place."
After finishing, Zossie nodded. "And that's how we ended up here! And your stranger is probably at Wela Volcano."
I nodded. Indeed she was.
After a few seconds of silence, Dulse noted that battling totem pokemon, which have powerful auras, was affecting my own aura as well. He also noted that Z-moves envelop a pokemon in aura before asking if I could control it.
I wrote to him that I could.
"Where the hell do you two come from?" I then wrote/demanded, as Dulse turned away. "Answer me!"
Dulse then flat-out admitted that he and Zossie came from a different world—not just a non-Alolan region, but a whole other world.
"At first we didn't mind getting so dirty," he told me. "After all, it would be too much effort to try to keep up appearances all the time! Oh, but we can’t go outside without prettying ourselves up."
Before he could say more, though, Zossie reminded him that they had an important meeting with a scientist and they were in such a messy state.
"Zossie, you are right." Dulse looked down. "We are not meeting the scientist looking like that!"
They then left the tunnel, presumably to wash themselves.