I like leafeons, genuinely, but I’d spent too many afternoons asking philosophical questions such as “Did that brief lick from subject 3 constitute an instance of grooming?” and “Is subject 5 napping, or is she merely resting?” and “Do the interactions between subjects 4 and 1 constitute courtship or play, or perhaps ‘other’?” Now, instead of soft fur and gentle faces, I saw only predefined behaviors. The most beautiful leafeon in the world could have appeared before me, and my only concern would have been where to mark its data on my observation sheet.
I’d joined the guild thinking all would be wonder and fun. Maybe that’s how it would have been, once. But everything’s been mapped already, and who cares if I haven’t seen any of it as long as someone has and the maps are right. Now is an age of minutia, of tedium. I could have at least landed a transportation job if I had wings to fly with. Instead I get oversized claws and way too much hair and illusions. So I can create facsimiles of places I’ve never been to, I guess.
I put down the binoculars. The sun was close to setting behind the grass and dogwoods, turning the clouds yellow. I could probably call it quits early, fabricate the rest of the data. Probably get it more or less right. I was contemplating this when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, my guild badge glowing.
I stared, brow furrowing. According to my extensive observations of the area, there shouldn’t have been any mystery dungeons nearby. According to the maps, the nearest mystery dungeon was dozens of miles away. According to both of us, the badge shouldn’t have been glowing.
I got up. The glow strengthened when I moved to the right of the leafeons, toward a cluster of poppies and baby’s breath that I couldn’t recall having been there before. I picked up my pace. You might think it foolish of me to venture into an undiscovered mystery dungeon on my own; if so, you’d be right. But I was too excited to care. Here was finally a chance to see something new, to explore; here was something only I knew. Rest assured that no harm befell me.
Entry into a mystery dungeon occurs like the old saying: slowly, then all at once. One moment I was walking through familiar grassy knolls peppered with poppies, the sky still trailing orange; then I blinked, and the ground was flat, and the poppies stretched in all directions. They stood absolutely still, a thick red mist. A full moon provided soft but ample light. A wave of fresh, cool air imparted wakefulness. A loon’s call rang out from miles ahead, unimpeded by walls or corridors. I smiled, reassured by the openness; I would be able to detect any approaching pokemon well before it attacked. But neither the grazing herd of gogoats nor the sleeping lilligants seemed hostile.
I walked deeper into the dungeon, guided by its radiant energy. Progress felt slow because of the absence of landmarks; there was only the occasional group of wild pokemon and the glint of water far ahead. After fifteen minutes of walking, the loon’s call remained distant.
The uniformity of my surroundings did not bore me. In fact, the experience sometimes whelmed me, and I would pause, blinking, head turning. The ballooning awareness of my solitary presence here crowded out practical considerations. I no longer felt like some undergraduate intern. I felt wild.
Eventually, hunger interrupted me. I hadn’t brought any food. The clock on my badge informed me that the sun was to rise in three hours. I had spent most of the night in the dungeon.
I couldn’t wait to go back tomorrow.
The badge warped me back into the dungeon at exactly the same place I’d been the previous evening, yet my surroundings seemed foreign. I could not place why. I’d warped into enough dungeons that I usually didn’t check at the sudden change in scenery. I felt as though I had left or entered a dream.
Tonight’s exploration started as simple as yesterday’s, filled with the same pauses. Gradually, the sliver of water ahead widened into a pond, the moon glowing in its center like an espeon’s pupil. Simultaneously, an unaccountable lightness permeated the dungeon. It was in the way grasshoppers rose to hover, then slowly sink; in the way doves ascended like sprays of bubbles; in the suspension of the moon; in the billow of dancing lilligants’ skirts; in the balloon-string straightness of flower stems.
Spider lilies and cypress shrubs fringed the bank of the pond. I sat on a flat rock, feeling a need to take stock. Newts floated casually before my feet. The loon called, but despite its proximity, the sound seemed to have shed its theatricality. The light of the moon seemed as plain as a ceiling lamp’s. The vocalizations of whistling thrushes, relaxed and meandering, resembled conversation more than song. A sense of continuous revelation pervaded my mind. I felt like an actor after the end of a play, sitting backstage and watching the stagehands sigh and joke and discuss their evening plans. I felt a diffusion of tension. I felt that I saw real things now, where before I had only seen cardboard props.
After I’d spent a while sitting, hunger, thirst, and fatigue motivated me to check the time. It was already past sunrise.
I began to laugh.
Back at my campsite, I struggled to sleep. Guilt had started to catch up with me. I don’t know why it mattered to me that I was shirking my duties—did leafeons’ behavioral data really help anyone, anyway? Did it really matter if I guessed subject 2 as having groomed for two hours a day when it was really three and a half? I longed to return to the dungeon. I knew I’d feel more sane there.
Upon warping in, my thoughts dissolved like sugar in tea. I had not yet reached the dungeon’s center; the poppies continued beyond the pond. The scenery changed little as I proceeded, but I noticed details: The individual anthers that collared each poppy’s stigma. The hairs on the stems. The crinkles in the petals. Their moonlight lucence.
Eventually, my perception changed. The world fractured between blinks, each time taking longer to reassemble. Discrete concepts like “petal” and “stem” kaleidoscoped into constituents too fine for language. There remained a depthless tapestry of crimson, cream, and green, but if you had asked me to point to any specific flower, I couldn’t have. Nor could I interpret the horizon as anything other than a sudden shift in color; nor the moon as anything other than bright, textured light; nor the crickets’ songs as anything other than bright, textured sound.
As my journey continued, the powers of language and coherence left me, but there remained the sense of wonderful banality. It penetrated beyond my conscious mind, compelling me to press on. I wanted, desperately, to know where this ended.
There was an anomaly in the tapestry of crimson and cream and green and black. It had overlapping segments of darker crimson and black. Some of the segments were grey and soft and puffy. The anomaly moved, shifting the tapestry of crimson and cream and green and black around it. A couple small parts of the anomaly were a bright blue that stood out from everything else. The blue parts lowered and came closer. They reflected the tapestry behind me, distorting it with their convexity. The crimson and cream and green and black were all different shades of blue in the reflection. This was a new layer of novelty. The part projecting between the blue parts of the anomaly was stiff and pointed, which I noticed when it touched me. There was a relieving sense of truncation, as if a cricket had been droning too close to my ear and had suddenly hushed. A numbing cold unfurled from my chest, reaching my limbs, my head, darkening my vision, muting sounds. I could not tell if my heart still beat. I was not scared. I’d never felt lighter.
There was a sense of vibration. I heard myself panting. I realized I was shaking. As my vision crept back, I saw familiar objects: firepit, bed, blanket, tent, clipboard, fork, plate, binoculars. The campsite.
I coughed as I sat up, vision briefly narrowing again. How was I back here? Had I been dreaming? I couldn’t remember having gone to bed, and my muscles felt weak. I turned to look at my badge and found that the orb in its center was still intact, indicating it had not been used. But it no longer glowed.
Beside it lay a red feather as long as I was tall. A chill passed through my body as I picked it up. I studied it, trying to remember what creature it had been a part of, trying to compose my memories of the past couple hours into something intelligible. The task was like trying to sculpt clay in the rain.
Eventually I took a break, frustrated, and made a pot of tea over the fire. I’m not sure whether it was from habit or a compulsion to seek comfort in familiarity, but, as I drank, I found myself watching the leafeons. My overexerted mind didn’t recall the behaviors I was supposed to observe, and, in its delirium, seemed to forget to be bored with the creatures. Some basal instinct stirred in response to subject 2’s cuteness as he chased subject 1 in circles, trying to jump on him. I wondered if he felt as carefree as he looked. Subject 4 slept peacefully in the meantime—good for her. Her eyes twitched and toes flexed. I wondered if she was dreaming, or if she dreamed often, and if her dreams were anything like the mess of sensation I’d so recently experienced. I wondered if subject 5 felt as content sunbathing as I had in the dungeon’s moonlight. I wondered how it was that the leafeons never seemed bored. I wondered a lot of things I hadn’t wondered before. When I once again lowered my head to lap at my tea, I found it had grown cold.
I kept watching the leafeons. I didn’t touch the observation sheet.