Poppin' Arms ~ Dorms

[Ambyssin]

Having finished the meal with Pepper and Thyme, Bahamut slinked back off to the guild and climbed the first set of stairs he could find. It took him to the beige hallway. His head swiveled back and forth. How long had it been since he'd taken residence in a proper building like this? At least a thousand years, if memory served.

He peered into a door and inspected one of the rooms. "I don't suppose they have a solo room," Bahamut grumbled.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

The rooms seemed fairly consistent with each other, mostly varying by two- or three-mon configuration. Brisa identified an unoccupied three-bed with a layout she liked, a deep window sill, and proximity to both the study and the rooms of some of their friends.

"Hey, Curio—how's this one?"

Brisa raised her 'Brisket' nameplate hopefully.

 

[Dragonfree]

The Corviknight in the guild lobby had told him they were rooming together in pairs or triples, and given that, Dave figured his best bet was Owen. Not that he'd had anything against the people he'd shared the Hidden Quarters with back in Treasure Town, but Brisa'd spent half of her time out on the roof possibly avoiding him and he gathered she already had a roommate anyway, and Cynthian was apparently a tortured soul traumatized by Dark Matter literally burning everyone he knew or something, and while Dave wasn't sure if Cynthian would actually try to talk to him about it if they had a room together, he would really rather fucking not.

So he'd asked about Owen instead, and the Corviknight told him he was in the dorm.

Dave headed warily down the corridor, looking at the nameplates. They had the dumb fucking food names on them, because of course they did - he'd been sent on his way with one that read 'Scotch'. What was Owen's again? Some kind of berry...?

It didn't take too long to find 'Tamato'. He knocked on the door with a paw. "Owen?"

 

[TheGOAT]

What a day.

Step after step down the paved roads led Astrid to the guild—where she would be living. Thank goodness for that. She was tired of the dojo. There were memories there that she would cherish, but the thought of moving into a prestigious guild was too alluring. She could bunk up with a roomate or two and maybe get some privacy every once in a while.

To her befuddlement, the procedure to select roommates had taken place when she was elsewhere in the city. Or possibly when she was unconscious. How long had she been unconscious, anyway?

Anyway. After check-in, that left her with a set of keys but no clue what to expect. She tip-toed through the halls, hearing voices behind several doors, before honing in on the door that was supposed to be hers. Unlocking the door was tedious—the key didn’t seem to quite fit in right—but she’d get used to it in time.

She poked her head in nose-first, sweeping the room. Nobody. One bed had been tampered with a bit, but the other two lay unclaimed.

“Dibs on window!” Astrid announced to the empty room, bowling her item bag across the floor the rest by the bedside. She rested her front paws on the bed and stared beyond the glass panes, quickly getting lost in thought.

 

[Cresselia92]

Hot body. Harsh breaths. Sweat in the ears. Yes, there was no doubt: he was ill.

Why? For once that things went smoothly and he was happy about everything, why did he have to fall prey of an unknown sickness and suffer like this? He could hear his father’s ghost laughing in the back of his mind, relishing on his misery and weakened body and spirit.

Icetales shivered under his refreshing sheet, which he draped over his entire body in an attempt of keeping his body temperature as low as possible. Though that was becoming harder and harder for him to maintain by the minute, as he struggled to even channel a couple of snowflakes.

Worst of all, he was alone in the room. His roommates were nowhere to be seen, he couldn’t use telepathy because Diyem was missing, and he felt too weak to even reach for his badge and call for help. He started tearing up. Why? Just why?

Tok. Tok. His ears flicked. Icetales could hear Petram, bumping into the leg of the bed and trying to reach out for him. Oh, the poor thing. The Vulpix could feel the jolts of concern and desperation sent to his brain…

“Skkk… haaa…”

…but what could he do? What could he say?

“Kaaah…”

Icetales closed his eyes, praying that someone could come check on him soon. Then, he felt like the entire room had grown even hotter. Almost searing.

“Hssss…”

“H-help… please…” cried out Icetales quietly, clutching the sheet harder.

“Kksss-dddd-daddy?”

Icetales flinched. Who was there?

“Daddy…?”

Curious, Icetales poked his head out of the sheet, forgetting about his disheveled tufts. And then, his eyes widened in shock. In front of him stood a small fire Vulpix, but with body proportions that were much closer to a Fennekin. Its body was dark and translucent, with gleaming light purple eyes staring at him in worry. In the middle of its belly floated the Ultra Stone, kept in balance by the ghoulish matter that constituted the entity’s body.

Despite the dizziness in his mind, Icetales quickly connected the dots and realized what had just happened: Petram had hatched! If he felt any better, he would have surely hugged that small thing, but he could barely move his paws at the moment.

Petram leaned closer, eyes and ears oriented toward him. “Oh, Daddy! What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

Icetales felt a strange tingle in his body at being called ‘Daddy’, but that was immediately drowned by a sense of nausea.

“I-I am afraid so…” stammered Icetales, holding his sheet tighter. “Perhaps it’s flu, or food poisoning. I cannot tell, my… mind is in shambles right now…”

“Oh no! This is bad!” cried out Petram, his tails jolting upright. He frowned. “I’ll go look for someone! You wait here, okay? Okay!”

Without another word, Petram hopped off of the bed and bolted toward the door. With a swift push, he opened the door and raced down the corridor. He had to save Daddy!

 

[Persephone]

Cuicatl would be staring into the wall if she could stare at things. As it was her head was drooped down on the floor, her belly splayed out behind it. Getting her brain broken sounded a lot less terrifying when it wasn’t about to happen now.

“I’m nervous,” she muttered to Starr or the gods or no one. She wasn’t sure. “It’s going to hurt, but I don’t know how much.”

 

[Shiny Phantump]

Soul walked down the hall of the dorms. They'd learned to form their amorphous body into something resembling an ill-defined quadruped, but was still getting the hang of walking.

They came to one dorm in particular, the one where Celeste's friend was staying. There was another shade in there.

"Hello. My name is Soul. I'm Celeste's shade, have you heard of him? Who are you?"

 

[Adamhuarts]

Throughout winter, Cynthian had been inactive, half dead, asleep. His body had been seemingly blanketed by a cluster of dried brown leaves, which fell around him in his flower pot gradually. That was a sign that it was soon time to wake, and bloom once more.

By the time enough of the leaves had fallen to reveal Cynthian's face, anyone who could see his face would know that something was deeply wrong. His brows were furrowed, his lips quivering and his closed eyes dashing this way and that. Some days Cynthian appeared calm and peaceful, other days he was consumed by nightmares. No one could have known while he was covered in his shell of leaves, and one could only have known now that he was close to waking.

The leaves continued to fall one by one until there were just three left: the leaves on his shoulders and the large central one with the yellow crested midrib. His body trembled a few seconds later, then his eyes burst open and he gasped for air and wheezed.

His sudden movements threw him off balance and sent him falling to the ground along with the flower pot.

Cynthian's eyes were opened wide, confusion and fatigue evident in him. His breaths were steady. In and out. He tried to lift himself up, but could only manage to sit up on his knees. His flowers were both half-closed, and scentless.

"Am I awake?" Cynthian asked no one in particular. His vision was still blurry and he couldn't make out his surroundings clearly if he tried.

 

[Adamhuarts]

After Ivy's great many adventures, she returned to the dorms for a quick detour. While rummaging around Cynthian and Icetales' room, she happened to find Cynthian's badge which he'd left next to his pot.

"So many shiny colors. What does this button do? Or this one?" Ivy said, browsing through the holographic menus as she walked down the hallway. "Ivy wants to have one these pocket things too!"

 

[Cresselia92]

Only a few hours passed since Icetales and Cynthian visited the infirmary. Despite the latter’s explosion in battle, he managed to recover quicker thanks to the timely use of the Reviver Seed (and Icetales theorized that his friend’s mastery of Synthesis was also a factor in making him heal faster).

Icetales didn’t need much attention — only a few scratches here and there, and a good rest in a quiet place to let his body discharge the excess of Radiance.

As a result, they both were quickly discharged, and decided to go to their dorm to rest some more (as there were Pokémon who needed medical attention far more than they did) and to ponder about the entire situation.

The Ninetales was gazing outside of the window. From there, he could observe the attack frozen in time, with Joule radiating that malevolent Blacklight aura.

He narrowed his eyes and his ears drooped: what could they do to stop that threat? There must be something they could do! Like, they had worked so hard to come so far, they couldn’t just… give up. Right?

With a sigh, Icetales sipped some tea, which he held in a cup in his leftmost tail, and turned to Cynthian, his stare pensive. “Um… Are thou feeling swell, Sir Cynthian? Did thou recover properly, yes? If thou feel some pain anywhere, I could fetch a Sitrus or something.”

 

[Dragonfree]

The strategy meeting hadn't been very encouraging. Sending Joule to the Reverse World like Bahamut suggested would just make his attack apocalyptically devastating in a slightly different way. The whole mission to distract him, well, they might be able to stall him for a bit, but he'd reflect everything they did back on them, and immediately become immune to that thing, and make it harder to keep distracting him at all. And they couldn't just combat that by trying to take him down before it became a problem, either, because he'd shield himself. And he'd rain down attacks on them the whole time. And Maple was fully convinced she wouldn't be able to get through to him until he was substantially weakened. So, somehow they had to endure a constant onslaught, for a while, trying to stall while that task got exponentially harder, with everything they did to do it a double-edged sword.

For Dave's parts, the only way he had to stall him was to fucking get in there and provoke him.

He'd walked out of the meeting and stared up into the sky at the curiously still massive orb of darkness and the dragon preparing to fling it at the town, knot in his stomach, and the fucking Shadow had materialized and gone "We're going to die," and he'd headed straight back for the X-Eye Cauldron.

Mia'd started asking about the Shadow, and he'd told her not fucking now, Mia, we've got the fucking apocalypse to worry about, and she'd frowned, clearly more than a little impatient with him, but he'd managed to keep it quiet for a couple of drinks while she'd casually talked strategy for the upcoming fight like it was nothing, and then forced himself to stop and pay the bill when he felt his mental stranglehold on the other Poochyena starting to waver.

He'd just go back to the dorm for a fucking nap or something, and maybe when he woke up it'd be gone.

So, as he opened the door to their dorm room, Mia and the miserable-looking Shadow in tow, he was really hoping to find it empty.

 

[Adamhuarts]

"How much longer are you going to keep hugging me like this?" Cynthian asked, trying to push away Ivy who'd stuck to her side like glue. Cynthian found herself in that situation when she walked into a room and Ivy glomped her out of nowhere.

"Ivy felt it. Cynthian was sad, but now it's okay. Ivy will help Cynthian feel better," Ivy replied, stubbornly refusing to give Cynthian personal space.

"I'm already fine, Ivy," Cynthian said with a chuckle. "You can let go now."

"No. Ivy likes hugs. Ivy will stay like this."

 

[Adamhuarts]

In a room somewhere at the dorms, soft whimpers and sniffles came from a flower pot.

Ivy laid there on the soil, clutching tightly to Cynthian's roselia doll. She recalled the time Cynthian kept moving farther and farther away into the sky, and then she couldn't feel Cynthian anymore.

Grief was not a foreign emotion to Ivy. She had been subjected to a month long of nightmares of Cynthian grieving over her mother long before Ivy manifested her current form. She'd promised herself to help Cynthian not have to feel pain anymore, so that she could be happy again.

"Cynthian..." Ivy hugged the doll tighter, dampening it even further with her tears. "It hurts... It hurts without you."

 

[IFBench]

A Bayleef stood alone in one of the dorms, clutching onto a pale white rose with a vine. It was already beginning to wilt. Tears flowed from their eyes. Six of their teammates were gone forever, and if they couldn't evolve in time, that number would be seven.

A shadow of a Charmander stood beside them, laying an arm on their back, a sad look on his face. He wanted to help, but what was there to say? "Maybe they'll come back?" A lie, and it'd only make Saltriv feel worse in the long run.

All he could do was watch.

 

[Spiteful Murkrow]

On her way back to the dorms, Kate noticed that Pleo fell back into low spirits after Cabot and his dark counterpart's projection vanished. For whatever reason, seeing the young Lugia's spirits droop didn't sit right with her, prompting her to extend a claw and invite her to while away the evening in her room.

After retracing her steps, the Sneasel eventually found her and Pleo back at the hallway outside her room in the dorms, when she looked back over her shoulder at Pleo.

"Well, this is a bit last-minute," Kate said. "But I guess it's a bit healthier for both of us than just being alone."

The Sneasel carried on into the dorm room, letting Pleo in with a small smile.

"Feel free to make yourself at ho-"

Kate abruptly trailed off after spotting Luz sprawled out on Brisa's bed, the Zeraora shade seemingly staring off at nothing in particular.

"Eh? Luz? Wasn't expecting you to be back already."

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Sombra padded silently from Brisa's dorm to Owen's. She passed unseen and unheard, scarcely perceptible even to a Spectrum warrior, save for a shift in the air. She sought counsel, hardly knowing why. Perhaps it was in the nature of Brisa, and therefore of Sombra, to seek answers to questions of which one was not even aware.

Owen was asleep, as expected, flame secured. Sombra waited. She was patient. The entity with which she sought an audience would appear if he wished. She preferred not to wake his host.

 

[Dragonfree]

Dave's dreams were an uneasy, muddled haze of gunshots, Mia's head exploding, the cold gaze of the man in the forest, and Shadow huddled invisibly, ears pinned, shivering, until he heard voices.

It was Owen's Shadow, and... Brisa's. And they talked about Brisa, and the pain that she was in, and Shadow just hurt, and so when Sombra turned to leave and Wishkeeper faded out of view, Shadow padded after her, throwing furtive glances back at Dave's form where he twitched in his sleep, uncomfortably sure that this was definitely not allowed.