PALACE GAME: Round 2

[cultfavorite]

You open your eyes—

You're standing in the vast lobby of a corporate building, facing the reception desk, where a Team Galactic Grunt is stationed—she's currently on the phone, though, and occupied. A few other grunts move through the lobby, looking as if they're on their way to their next assignment. All of them look identical. And if you watch their paths for a while, none of them actually end up leaving the room.

The walls are a bright, metallic, sterile blue with white, and the floor is made up of gleaming silver metal tiles emblazoned here and there with a gold logo. The reception desk is slightly to your right, and to the left of that there are three doors in the far wall in front of you.

To the right of the reception desk, there's a little area with a vending machine, a large ottoman to sit on, a potted plant, and . . . a dotaku? With a face? It's sitting resting on the floor next to the vending machine, and it's staring right at you with those red eyes.

Directly to your right, closer to the front door, there is a glowing green circle on the floor with a sign on the wall next to it.

What will you d—

Wait. Your phone is buzzing. Whether or not you had it with you back in the prison, you do now, whether in your pocket, in your hand, whatever. It's on your person, and it's vibrating demandingly for attention. If you choose to ignore it, a mechanical voice emanating from it begins literally saying the word buzz! buzzzzzz! buuuzzzzzz! in an increasingly irritated tone.

Check your phone?

Comments

TEAM GALACTIC HQ LOBBY

[cultfavorite]

Maybe you don't check your phone. That's legal. It's going to keep hassling you for a while, but you're free to explore the lobby without caving in to technological peer pressure. Where to?

If you do take out your phone, you'll find that there's a new app on it, represented by this icon:



Don't worry about opening the app. It helpfully opens itself as soon as you're looking at the screen, bringing up a screen that displays that same face from the icon, and it begins to speak to you:

Greetingzzzzz, User! Took you long enough! Pah. I'm Rotoron, your new personal assistant and granter of wise advice. If you choose to listen to it, that is. I don't get an ounce of respect around this place. All my genius, wasted on these youths!

The voice does sound somewhat like someone ran an old man's voice through a Vocaloid type program. It continues:

But no matter. Maybe you've got a good head on your shoulders! Please select from the following options:

A menu appears on the screen. Rotoron also reads these options out loud, and will repeat them if asked or if they're tapped. The same applies to any text that appears on the app throughout the Palace:

Pokedex Information
Battle Basics
Exploration Advice

[fujimaru]

[ BUT IS IT HER OWN PHONE

Of course she fishes it out to check what's going on, blinking slowly at the app. Malware? Eh. If it's really dangerous then she can deal with it later. ]

Uh. ...Exploration advice, I guess...?

[ Listen. It's a fifty-fifty chance whether she will take the advice or not, but it seems at least polite to ask, since it's clearly mugging for her to do so. ]

[cultfavorite]

It's her Reverie phone. She does still have her own phone with her, though, if she had it on her at the time, and the Rotoron app is not present on it.

The device croaks out a mechanical chuckle at you.

Seeking advice from this old man already? Get off your duff and start looking around already! There's my advice. Oh, but those Grunts are useless. You won't get anything good out of them. After all, they're the ones who were stupid enough to stay with Saturn instead of making their own way in the world with me!

[fujimaru]

Wow, cranky. You're not really good at this, are you?

[ But she does actually start by wandering over to the GIANT BELL. Whether or not this is actually Saturn's Bronzong, she is going to address it as such. ]

Hey! You're here too, huh?

Re: TEAM GALACTIC HQ LOBBY

[eggstinction]

[.........this sassy old man is too small to flex his superior age on]

... Thank you?

[selects EXPLORATION ADVICE]

[cultfavorite]

He's not worth it, Moon.

The device croaks out a mechanical chuckle at you.

Seeking advice from this old man already? Get off your duff and start looking around already! There's my advice. Oh, but those Grunts are useless. You won't get anything good out of them. After all, they're the ones who were stupid enough to stay with Saturn instead of making their own way in the world with me!

[eggstinction]

You are a phone.

[stirtheblood]

[Vicious squints at his phone in confusion]

Eh? The name's Vicious, and I prob'ly ain't gonna listen to your advice. But don't worry, it ain't just you. I ain't very good at listenin' to advice in general.

You could tell me the Pokedex stuff though.

[cultfavorite]

Gahaha! All right, Vicious. I like the cut of your jib! But not the lack of your respect!

But he opens the Pokedex display for you. There is currently only one icon on it, and it displays your own face.

[stirtheblood]

Huh? That's it?

[He taps on his face a few times]

[stirtheblood]

[Vicious returns from his jaunt outside with an Electrode rolling alongside him. He pulls out his phone to address Rotoron again.]

Alright, I'm back. What were you on about?

[cultfavorite]

The app buzzes to life again, the voice much clearer now.

There you are! Where did you go? What a mess. But it looks like you found yourself something useful! I don't know what you know about that Pokemon, but it's infamous for exploding with hardly any provocation at all. Not only that, but it's the most powerful of all moves any Pokemon can learn! You could do just about anything in here with that on your side. But don't get too cocky. You can only use it once!

[stirtheblood]

Yeah, I got all that stuff. Anything, huh? So is there some incredibly powerful Pokemon 'round here to beat? It'd be more fun to fight 'em myself in that case... Maybe somethin' to blow up?

[Vicious looks around the room. hmmmmmm]

THE PATH OF EMOTION: HEARTHOME CITY

[cultfavorite]

The door slides open for you, and you step through it into . . .

A city, as if you just stepped out of the building and onto the street. But it's hard to imagine the building you just walked out of existing in a town like this. This is no corporate hub: the buildings are homey and inviting, even the businesses, and the paths are lined with greenery. The people navigating the streets look overwhelmingly content and well-to-do. Young couples walk holding hands; grandmothers push strollers with happy babies nestled inside; schoolchildren dart here and there with their Pokemon companions scampering after them. The sun is shining, the sky is cloudless, the air and walkways are clean and refreshing. It's a picture-perfect family town.

If you turn around, the Team Galactic HQ is gone entirely, replaced by a gate out of the city, which is blocked at the moment by construction workers fixing some cobbles. Guess there's no way to go but forward!

To the northeast, there's a small but busy little building that looks like it might have once been a large house, but now has been repurposed into some kind of quaint boutique. In the center of town there's a huge domed amphitheater, and further to the north, beyond that, you can see the gates to a large, lovely park.

[fujimaru]

Whoa--

[ She turns in a circle again, looking around with a bit of wide-eyed surprise. Even if she's done palace runs a couple of times by now, and has vague memories of her own, this is still a bit wild. There's a couple of seconds where she takes it in, then mkes the choice to head to the boutique. ]

[cultfavorite]

You approach a homey, green-roofed building with big front windows; the closer you get to it, the more it both looks and smells like it's probably a bakery. There are displays of what look like filled buns in the windows, and the people who pass by out front stop to ooh and aah and drool over them. A few even go inside! When they do, there's the quaint little ding of an old-fashioned shop bell. What a cute little place.

[fujimaru]

[ It is in fact very cute, and Ritsuka is a sucker for that sort of thing, even if she wasn't an artificially-induced bottomless pit. She considers for a moment, then ducks in herself. ]

[eggstinction]

This is quaint...

[he feels a little out of place here. looks behind him to see if Bronzong came along before wandering down the path. big central domes seem like the kind of place that would be important.]

[cultfavorite]

Bronzong is not here!

The amphitheater is impressive yet inviting, with an elegant and simple design meant to draw crowds. And it is doing just that: families with their children and Pokemon are heading up the stone walkway to push through the doors and into the building, chattering excitedly. You can make out snippets of conversation about ribbons and performances and beautiful.

???: VEILSTONE CITY

[cultfavorite]

You leave the Team Galactic HQ.

The building you just walked out of sits on a rocky plateau in the far north of the city, overlooking several other rocky plateaus like it, home to other various buildings both residential and commercial. There's a strange quality to this place: the streets winding between the plateaus were carved out of the rock, and there are far more sheer, cool faces of solid rock than you'd expect to see in a big city. But it is a big city all the same. Just one with a chilly, inorganic air about it, for reasons that have nothing to do with the tall modern buildings and big city lights. The air is cool and smells crisp.

It's dusk, and people trickle through the streets on the way to wherever they're going. Some are going home; the residential area here looks shuttered and quiet, uninviting to an outsider. But there are a couple of bustling commercial centers that look more alive with people out for a night on the town. There's the Veilstone Department Store to the west, rising high above most of the city's other buildings, attracting hordes of eager shoppers. To the south, there's the Veilstone Game Corner, which is a pretty euphemistic name for what is clearly a casino that people are merrily streaming in and out of.

[stirtheblood]

Huh...

[From Vicious's perspective bustling shopping centers are potentially more uninviting to an outsider than shuttered houses.

He decides to take a walk down the streets anyway, keeping an eye out for any potential Pokemon battle opponents as he heads south towards the casino.]

[cultfavorite]

You head down the road to the south. The city is busy tonight, but everything seems dreamlike and strange, as if you can't quite make out all the details of anything you're passing by, and it only gets harder the more you try. The sensation is impressionistic. The only things that do stand out clearly are things that seem . . . wrong, somehow. These things come and go in flashes: the sensation of the sun on your back even though it's dusk; the scent of garlic simmering even though you're not near any restaurants; a peek through a window that reveals a dungeon-like stone interior, except when you look again, it's only a modern-looking bank, locked up for the night.

But the Veilstone Game Corner is perfectly clear as you come upon it. A flashy, stout building set up on a cliff, at the top of some stone stairs. There's a bright flashing neon sign displaying a crown logo outside, and the door beckons to you with colorful dots of light. Ah, the siren call of gambling!

THE PATH OF WILLPOWER: CERBERUS

[cultfavorite]

You walk through the door, and right into Cerberus, as if you'd just stopped in for a visit.

There is no one here right now, but the dorm isn't still or silent by any means. It's mostly the way it tends to be back in Reverie proper: inviting and homey, not abandoned. Even though there is no sound of anyone moving in there, there's the smell of cooking coming from the kitchen, and the light is on in there. The conversation nest is empty, but the television is on, faintly playing some silly B movie, and pillows are scattered about as if recently nestled in. The tabletop is littered with scraps of the paper from the notebook that sits alongside the Shame Jar in the middle of the nest.

And there's the hallway that leads back to the bedrooms of the various members of Cerberus. The light is off, there, and that area is completely quiet. There's no hint of anyone rustling around in their bedroom back that way.

[stirtheblood]

[Vicious walks in hyped up and ready for a boss battle, and blinks when he sees what's actually there.]

...Huh. Not quite what I was expectin'.

[After a few moments, though, he heads into the kitchen.]

[cultfavorite]

It's Cerberus's kitchen! As usual, it's decorated in a dungeonesque style with stone and iron bars that really should be more imposing than it is. But it's Cerberus, so it isn't. Instead, it feels and smells of home. Whatever's cooking in the oven smells like it's probably enchiladas, or something along those lines. There are dishes and utensils here and there on the counter where someone was doing food prep. And there is a pitcher of juice sitting there, full, surrounded by ten Cerberus purple mugs.