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"Nothing at all, huh? No weakness or any other material besides ebonite? I guess we couldn't get as lucky as back up there with the floor, ah well." Sub said in reply to Deo as they walked along, the man constantly swiveling his head around and looking up and down. This was still Ein's place after all, even without him here and it was just as dangerous as it was when he was here. They needed to stay on alert for anything and everything at all times.

Sub would stop in his tracks as he watched Wren fire off the thread and then send his Shiinotic up, the Snagem leader squirming a bit as he watched this. "I wouldn't uh...never mind." The man sighed, it was too late, the living mushroom was already heading up at that point. He wanted to dissuade them from doing that or anything else that could go against the 'rules' of this place. If there was one thing he knew about Ein is all of his experiments or 'games', whichever you wanted to call them, had rules to them which he expected you to adhere to. Not only could not adhering to his rules by harmful but to him if you broke the rules to win you didn't really win, you just proved him correct in whatever opinion he had come up with. It's why when they finally defeated Ein here it was by playing his own game, pushing him into checkmate. Maybe Sub was being paranoid but something told him they needed to still play by the rules, Ein or no Ein, if they wanted to make it out of here unharmed.

"Hm? The SNAG network?" Sub replied to Wren as he was shaken out of his thoughts, it taking a second before his brain recognized everything Wren said, like a slow computer. "Ah yeah, that might be a good idea. Cynthia was acting strange so I suppose it couldn't hurt to utilize all possible avenues to explain why she was." Sub agreed with Wren. At that same moment he took out a Dusk Ball and tapped the button on the front to release a Pokemon he couldn't bring himself to use often, the memories of his departed bubbling to surface every time he did, however the year of training helped him get over it.

"Absoool..." Cried Pluto the Absol as he appeared from its ball, the Dark type stretching out.

"Pluto, stay on alert for me. We have no idea what we're walking into in this maze." Sub instructed the Absol as it began to walk ahead of him. The man's thought process was Absol had the uncanny ability to foresee disaster so if anything were to come out of nowhere then Pluto should be able to at least give them a second of a head's up. It was better than nothing.

As she watched Darts and Leslie slowly advance, the temptation to rush through the room with Agility gnawed at the back of her mind. But now that the situation they were in wasn't as dire as what Cynthia tried to do to them, Keiko had time to calm down and see things somewhat reasonably, and she couldn't help but worry that some of the tiles would trigger due to light weight instead of heavy, and that rushing through the room would just make it harder for the others.

Taking a deep breath and steeling her nerves, Keiko followed close behind Leslie, being careful to step only where her fellow hybrid stepped. As they got close to the pillar, though, Keiko became slowly more and more nervous...

Group One:



Ogerpon had already been running at Cera's heels when the tendril had scooped Tristen up from the floor and towards the ceiling, but she pauses right next to the Sharpedo as the Type: Null appeared in the middle of the path between them and where the hybrid was getting drug, snarling at all of them. The masked Legendary growls lightly behind the Teal exterior of its mask as it adopts a fighting stance, recognizing the Pokemon from their earlier skirmish with Agent White.

"Pyon popo.. pon pio pon..." She snarls at the group. Go and rescue your friend... I will take care of this one... She balances gracefully on the balls of her feet before rushing the ostensibly Normal-type, her sandaled feet clacking on the tiles as she unleashes a Double Kick, one leg then the other swinging around herself to try and make some space for the others to run past.

And run they would need to, because Tristen was finding himself in some trouble... it wasn't a tentacle, despite all the ruminating otherwise, it was a massive tongue wrapped around his neck as the grotesque Greninja-looking hybrid drug him along across the ceiling, seemingly absorbing the electricity that the young boy was letting off, a grotesque bulging sac in the middle of its chest inflating as it did. It was still overall cloaked in shadow as it crawled along the ceiling, so it was very hard to tell what kind of monstrosity it was but the situation would get even more absurd as the tongue all of a sudden rears up, revealing that the end of the tongue was made up of the body and head of an Ekans, sinking venomed fangs into the youth's neck to try and begin sedating him for a meal.

Group Two:



The three ahead of Crystal on the grid would proceed further and further into the room, the Giratina hybrid tending to agree with her on what door to try to get towards, but as they got deeper and deeper into what was quickly becoming a deep chasm on both sides of them, it was hard to see an available path. It was very quickly looking like a concrete jungle of some kind, some of the squares rising up and at the top of themselves splitting open to reveal triangular palm-tree branches. They were maybe a quarter of the way into the massive room, approaching the middle of it without any kind of incident when all of a sudden they would reach a larger clearing, emerging out of the gorge-like recess into an area free-ish of terrain aside from the odd 'palm' tree here and there. There's a ripple of recognition that runs along the surface in front of them, each tile raising and lowering lightly like a wave passing beneath them before a set of tiles raise in front of them, spelling out a singular word.

'HELLO'.

Group Three:




Apparently not as the group brazenly misses the section of the wall that had been recently rebuilt, wandering deeper and deeper into the maze unaware that they had just missed a key detail that may have thrust them into the belly of the beast itself.



As soon as the Shiinotic's head clears the top of the maze, there's a sizzling hiss that belies the energy flowing through the top of the place, and an unholy yowl of power echoes through the entirety of the place as something that seems like a massive laser fills the ceiling above them from end to end of however long the room was, shearing the poor Pokemon in half and letting its smoking bottom half drop to the floor to serve as a warning. Luckily, as a fungus, this would no doubt serve as little more than a temporary inconvenience to the Illuminating Pokemon's regenerative capacities, but the message was clear. There was something very dangerous keeping watch over the top of the labyrinth they were in.



Almost immediately as they go deeper and deeper into the maze, Pluto's hackles would jump on edge. There was a devastating disaster of some kind behind them, tracing their path through this labyrinth and closing quickly on their heels. Someone so inclined would be able to hear heavy footfalls and an odd clacking sound a little bit following that behind them and gaining distance as they expertly followed the Snagem's exact berth through the maze. Equally as immediate, the group would find themselves in a corridor with no exits, a blank wall of ebonite awaiting them at the end of the hallway. Whatever alternate pathway had been blocked off earlier was clearly the true way to proceed through the maze and now they were trapped in a dead end.

Group Four:



Within the confines of the study, the Water-type's dousing was kicking up a good deal of smoke and steam but even as Monique watched, feeling some relief from the intense fire in the moment, it continued to grow hotter and hotter and hotter, the flames and their licking tendrils starting to overpower the Primarina's jet alone. It was going to take more than one Water-type to lick this fireplace, and the longer Monique stood there it looked like the hotter the heat got.



It was very strange, as Sol and Reno continued to stand still it almost seemed to them like Ulla was getting further and further away from them, the room stretching out impossibly as when she was once mere steps away from them now despite not moving at all she looked like she was miles and miles apart from the rest of the Snagems.



Miles away from the other two Snagems now, Ulla's quick thinking had allowed her to manage to make it through the soundwaves and plow through them to answer the phone.

"Hello? Ulla dear, is that you?" Somehow, incredibly, she would be able to recognize the voice of her long lost mother coming through the receiver. "What are you doing in a place like this? Oh, I guess that doesn't matter now... We were in a terrible room where every time we moved things would get worse and worse and worse and there was this terrible ringing phone...." As Ulla stands there, hearing the voice of her deceased mother she could feel the weight of the phone increase in her hands, slowly beginning to go from the weight of a normal receiver, to brick-weight, to where it was becoming almost impossible for the young girl to keep aloft to her ear, the weight becoming immensely heavy in a matter of moments.

Apparently Deo missed something, and he would not realize it. As they went on he ran into a dead end. He kept hearing something, feeling unease. He turned around to see darkness. His X-Ray vision still active, but could he see what was coming? His vision would enhance to see bones, but yet could he see what was coming? It didn't matter, what was bound to happen would happen in due time. What was the Minotaur of this maze of Minos. Feeling the wall, there had to be a secret button, a stone to push. Something must give way or something must seem different.

The entire walk down this procedurally forming canyon, Leslie would keep poking and prodding at the pillars with a tentative caution. She was hoping that she might get some sort of idea of what they might end up doing next and how much force might be needed for them to be broken. And now some of the pillars were starting to try and become trees. What the hell was this entire hallway attempting to replicate?

And then, as they wandered into what seemed to be a clearing in this strange facsimile of some other environment, the entire thing rippled. Not like they hit a point and it rippled outward from there. No, it seemed more like the entire room rippled from front to back. And then it started spelling a word at them. Oh, this could only end well. Figuring that she looked the least threatening of the hybrid crew, Leslie would walk forward towards the giant 'HELLO'. "Hi there. Who are you and why do you seem to know us?"

-----


Reno had started out waiting a foot or two away from Ulla as she answered the phone, prepared to listen and respond to whoever was on the other end. In the time it took to look back at what Monique was handling and turning back to where Ulla was, the room had suddenly turned into a highway that had him and Sol at one end and Ulla at the other. Was something responding to them? Something seemed to be....altering reality? Or maybe their perception of it? He needed to be paying attention when something changed or fought back this time. Opening up a Pokeball and letting his hidden passenger dislodge herself, he would look to his Wyanut and Finizen. "Alright, Nori. Help out with the fire fighting with a Water Gun. Harleen.....lets see if we can pick anything up." Reno commanded, watching as the small Water type gave a chirp before swimming its way over beside Monique's Primarina. It would take a moment to gather the energy, but soon Nori would be dousing the flames with a torrent of water alongside his fellow Water type.

Facing towards where Ulla was with the phone, Reno would take off in a run towards his fellow Snagem. "Sol, we need to see if we can get a response from whatever is doing this. Make the room respond to you somehow! Start unshelving books, poking paintings, helping Monique, something to make it do things!" Reno yelled as he continued his sprint, focusing all his power onto his telepathy and other senses to try and get something out of this. Whether it was the mind of what was doing this, a pulse of energy, the sound of mechanical things moving, anything. Anything to work off of to figure out how things were working this way.

Crystal would look at Leslie’s hammer, raising one of her constellation-like eyebrows. She figured it was heavy, and she also wondered if Leslie knew how much she actually weighed. Still, the galactic hybrid nodded and leaned on the handle of the hammer, watching the others move on for a moment. Eventually she would close her eyes to just focus on calming herself and somehow getting better, a few more coughs erupting from her. The effects of that gas were still being felt, and as much as she planned on it, she wasn’t actually quite sure how well her reaction time would be. She could only hope that it would be good enough when it came time for her to run.



It was pretty easy to hear Leslie in the room, even when Crystal was back at their start point. And hearing her made Crystal open her eyes, confused. Who was in there with them? She couldn’t sense anyone else in there with them, unless they were a dark type, and she would have expected to hear the sounds of fighting otherwise. Unless…

Crystal’s gaze went down to the tiles themselves, gears starting to spin once again. Leslie said hi to something, but she couldn’t sense anything new. What if… the floor was alive? Something was controlling these bricks, if that pillar was… Wait. Wait wait wait. Bricks. Something controlling them. This was reminding her of something else. Something that she encountered outside of Snagem, and somewhat within it, now that she thought of it. “...No. It couldn’t. Could it?” The hybrid’s thoughts started reworking themselves. What if it wasn’t reacting because of weight specifically, but because something heavy hit it? Deciding to test this now, she would drag the hammer behind her to the edge of the grid, before she would put a tentative paw onto one of the tiles gently. Time to see whether this step would shoot another set of tiles into the ceiling.

Before he heard the sounds of something or someone approaching Sub noticed the hairs on Pluto's back standing up, the man becoming alert as he stopped to scan the area. Upon hearing his first foot step he quickly recalled Pluto, clipped his ball back onto his belt and took out another Dusk Ball, releasing Poe the Sableye.

"Hehe! What are we-...?" Poe began to say, his immediate action to be deviously playful, like always, however upon seeing Sub's face the Sableye knew something was wrong and began to cast a suspicious eye about their environment as well.

"We're at a dead end and I'm not about to take any chances here. Poe, Mega Evolve." The Snagem leader said as he brought his Snag Machine gloved hand to his chest and pressed the Key Stone on the device. The Key Stone would resonate with the Sablenite embedded in Poe's back, bolts of brilliant energy from the stones connecting Sub and Poe in this moment. A cocoon of energy would surround Poe, solidify in crystalline form, and then shatter to reveal Poe slightly altered, holding up a gemstone twice his own size.

"Protect." Sub ordered. If something was coming for them he would let them come but not before putting up a defense. Once they realized what it was they could figure out what to do about it.

Mega Poe would nod before sending his gem shield out in front of him spinning on its bottom tip. With the gem spinning faster and faster it broke up into tiny gemstone grains. The grains would gather together and reform into a box of crystalline energy around all four of them, protecting them from any would be attackers.

"Whoever...or whatever you are...you can show yourself now." Sub called out to the darkness.