widget-of-aschimos

[widget-of-aschimos]

So, after all that, we're in this room, right? It's full of ancient tech. computers that have old stuff written on them, and a strange machine. We read all some of the old messages on the computer, and find out that this place was a research facility, that was making some kind of "Soul-Heart", a kind of ancient sentient machine. Their work had it's ups and downs, and allegedly the result is somewhere deep within this place. In one of the enteries, it called itself "Magearna" which is a much better name than "Soul-Heart". Maybe i'll meet them someday, if they're still around. Anyways, the strange machine turned out to be a time machine. Riptide figured out how to work it because he's maybe seen one before, and um. Well, he isn't right now, so ill have to ask him later how he knew how to use it. He set the machine to a certain time and date, somewhen around 8000 years ago, and asked me to put him in. So i did. He told me if he wasn't back in an hour to start messing with the machine to try to pull him back to now. It hasn't been an hour yet, so i guess he's still doing his errands.

That's about where we are now, so i'm gonna take a break for now.

[widget-of-aschimos]

okay, so, today, right? We wake up at the Artifice ready to go into the dungeon proper. we do all the precaution stuff you're supposed to do. There's this big hole that leads to the first floor, but there's also a locked off door that needed my card-thing. we get in, and the room moves much in the way a room shouldn't. no one except Riptide had been in an "elevator" before, so it was kind of sickening, but we went down to the first stop, which is about floor 10 of the dungeon proper. One of the missions we've got demanded proof of making it into the Artifice, so i unstuck one of the chairs from the floor with that box full of strange tools, and took it with us. The first few floors were not too big of an issue, but then we encountered something formally called a "Gargantuan Monster House", or casually called whatever your favorite expletive is. Loot and mystery pokemon everywhere. We fill our bags and keep fighting longer than we probably should, because a lot of the pokemon are Plusle, including a very large one who is like that because mystery pokemon do not care about rules, and will Mega-Evolve anyways. We keep going deeper and make it to another strange floor, one with a VERY LARGE (but not in a mega-evolved way) Klinklang. This thing should have been ran from, but with a lot of planning and a little bit of performance-enhancing items, Flare ripped straight through the thing with a very well placed flame charge. It dropped some extremely valuable boxes, which contained a Glowy Green Gear looplet for Riptide, a Firey Cloak for Flare, a Red Chain looplet for Minus, and a lump of Light Clay for me. Honestly, i think i made it out on top with all that stuff, my Light Clay has a nice balance to it when i levitate it. We go even deeper, have another run-in with a monster house of Plusles and Minun, end up carrying so much stuff that we're having to dig into supplies we don't really need to use just to pick up more stuff, and then finally make it to what should be about floor 20. It's another stop for the elevator, so we can leave pretty easily, except for the distinctly Spark-shaped problem in the room.

We confront her, and she says that while all the other bandits are doing silly things like trying to learn to Mega-Evolve, she's been digging around for ancient tech, because she believes it to be extremely powerful and untapped potential. She's right, but the stuff the ancients left behind aren't all supposed to be tools of war and terror. She's got this glowy crystal-thing that she spent likely spent several hours trying to claw out of a machine. We don't know what it does, but we can't let her have it. We fight, i steal her Lychee berry, Riptide takes the crystal out of her bag, Flare and Minus help keep her in place while i pelt her with metal stools and tables and strange tubes and whatnot, and she evolves mid-battle into a Combusken.

We kept wailing on her, but she eventually decided that she was too good for fighting fair, and threw a Capture Sphere at Flare, but Riptide jumped in front of her and took the hit. She left with an Escape Orb as the Sphere, with Riptide inside, flailed around on the ground for a second. By some miracle, he breaks out. I've been told by Guildmaster Slurpuff that they sometimes fail, but i've never been so happy for old junk to turn out to just be old junk. This one's getting pretty long too, so i'll cut it here. give me a sec, i'll type up the last one for today. Next post.

[widget-of-aschimos]

It's been one heck of a day.

So, a lot has happened today, and it'd be almost too much to just put into one message probably. I've got a little while before Riptide is supposed to come back from... errands. yeah. Now, i'll start with talking about my other team members and why we're all here, right? I kinda briefly mentioned them in my first post but didn't get into who they really all are and why we're all where we are right now. You'll need the context for the next one. Required reading, ya hear?

The easiest to start out with is Minus, a Minun who's looking for his sister, who, i think got lost in a mystery dungeon. like. LOST lost. His personal mission is to cleanse every single Plusle (and probably Minuns, too) of the distortion and pull them all out of the various mystery dungeons across the land. Minus is hoping to find his sister along all the others we cleanse. He's been pretty excited to visit the Artifice for a while on account of it being a place where Plusles are known to crop up, and oh man were there a bunch of 'em, along with a bunch more electric types, on account of this place being some kind of ancient power-producing place.

Flare, our torchic, is also here to find her sister, but for other, more violent reasons. We DID find her, but i'll get to that in a minute. Flare had the misfortune of being raised by a power-hungry group of outlaws, her mother, Nova, being the leader. Spark (Flare's sister) ended up trying to "dispose of" (I dunno if it was intended to be monslaughter or just actually removing Flare from the picture, but probably monslaughter) Flare by knocking her out into an ice-cold river. Obviously she lived, and got away from the outlaws for a little while, and teamed up at the guild. Unfortunately, the outlaws ended up around here too, looking for other sources of power. All the rest of them, i'm pretty sure at least, are currently on their way to a technically-supposed-to-be-secret place that can aid Pokemon with evolution and even Mega-Evolution. Evolving isn't normally an issue for most pokemon from what i hear, but Pokemon who wear wonder badges have to have a little extra assistance from places like that, due to whatever shenanigans the badges pull off to keep us safe from the mystery dungeons. Mega-Evolution, on the other hand, Hardly anyone can do without "Awakening" at one of these places first. SPARK, however, has been looking for power from other places... I'll get to that later, i'd rather move on to talking about Riptide. Riptide, our resident Totodile, isn't from here. not like how Flare's from a different continent, or I'm from space. Riptide is from somewhere and somewhen else. He remembers those that we call the "Ancients" and most speak pretty poorly of as somewhat benevolent "Humans", and remembered living alongside with them. This place, the Artifice, is full of old Ancient, or, i guess, Human stuff, and he's been trying to figure some things out like where they all went, what they did, and how and why he's here and now, way after the Humans' time? I'd ask him more specific stuff, but he's running an errand. That's enough for one post, but next one's gonna be about what all's actually happened today because it's been an Arcdamn CRAZY day today and i needed to decompress for a little and this was that. Next post.

[widget-of-aschimos]

Hey, man. what did you mean by this. what did you mean. please tell me what you meant by this. Knowledge is important for understanding what’s going on.

Actually, scratch that. don’t tell me what you mean by this, i’m smart enough to know that whatever this is, is probably not meant to be known. if you don’t mind, i’m gonna go forget this now. Let me know if you need to forget it too. but then i’d have to forget it again. Go get yourself a drink.

🔴🟢🟡.

Do not touch them. Do not attack them. The black crystal consumes all. @widget-of-aschimos, keep your team away.

It's worse than we knew.

[widget-of-aschimos]

Yeah no, i'm good now, send over these "Pages" things real quick if you can…

…Okay, "Dazzling landscape and beautiful cities"… Oooh, this must've been made when the planet was covered in those lights from way back when!

…That is the ugliest Pyroar i've ever seen. "Team Flare causing (or, i guess caused) problems … Lysandre Labs…" Is that the guy that made the pretty lights go out?

…oh. That's a lot more than turning the lights out. I can't tell our torchic any of this, she does not need to know that she had the same name as... that stuff. She'd panic far too much about the actions of some random folks from like 400 years ago.

At least with the way this article was written, it implies that this was generally described as a bad move, so like, other ancients probably hated that guy.

Why does he look like a Pyroar.

I should have a face-to-face conversation with @widget-of-aschimos. They'd love to look these 'pages' over, I'm sure.

Though... perhaps it would be best if I leave them be. When last we exchanged messages, perhaps I inspired *too* much existential dread. Does it make me a bad person to enjoy doing that? Mm, yeah, maybe a little.

Ah well. It's funny, and that's enough for me.

[widget-of-aschimos]

Hi, Widget.

Congratulations on your promotion to Gold-rank! Has your team happened to run into a Dungeon Spinda? There's... something odd about them.

From, Jaze

Thanks! uhhh it was a little while ago so i can't recall what was up with 'em other than that they knew a few scary moves and every single one of 'em looked the same, which as far as i know isn't supposed to happen with spindas. Wait... are they all the same one as the one that runs the juice bar? what happens if we cleansed one from the dungeon, and brought it to Juicer Spinda? Are they all, like, THE EXACT SAME? does the distortion clone pokemon when you cleanse them??? I saw that you guys saved a shaymin but like i thought we did too? don't tell me there's two Koraes (Korai?) running around too... Don't do this to me man i dont wanna deal with that mystery dungeons are weird i'm gonna go lie down now this hurts my head

[widget-of-aschimos]

So for a first post, I thought i'd use the "MS Paint" thing on this computer to show off some other cool stuff I own. Pretty much all of it was found in "The Artifice", a place full of ancient stuff in the middle of the desert. When i got here -- Aschimos, i mean, I crashed down from the sky and landed next to here. I got lost inside and found a buncha cool stuff. Later on, which is now, I came back to the artifice to find more cool stuff. The whole team's come here for a multitude of reasons, really, and for that i'd still be here for them, but theres a ton of trinkets and doodads inside to discover. I haven't really talked much about myself here yet, but the short version is that I like a bunch of the old junk the ancients left behind. Most folks who research this stuff are looking for things that tell us things like what all happened to this place, what made the terrible mystery dungeons, and stuff like that. The big, important things in life. I like that stuff, too, don't get me wrong, but like, I REALLY like the little things. Stuff that gets ignored and overlooked by most. The "What did they do for fun? What did they do instead of sealing mystery dungeons? How did they travel vast distances, or collect all the stuff to make what they left behind? How did they make it all?" that sort of stuff. I'm gonna try to stop rambling now.

[widget-of-aschimos]

Is this thing on? does it still work at all? oh yeah the text shows up when i press the buttons that's neat

I heard a certain Absol in passing ( @omensfromaschimos ) was talking about ancient devices that could log your thoughts and adventures through something called a "Rotomblr" and that sounded really neat! I was lucky to find one after a little while, and it's in really good condition too, probably thanks to the clampearl-like shape to it, and it's kinda heavy. Looks like everything that's put here is public, so if anyone out there wants to ask me something, go ahead! Anyways i'll get the basics out of the way now:

In no particular order, Flare the torchic, Minus the Minun, Riptide the Totodile, and I, Widget the Elgyem, make up "Team Surge". we're a team of explorers, bounty hunters, and scholars that work under the same guild as "Team Omen" does, "Slurpuff's Slayers", and at the time of writing this, we operate at Gold-Rank status.

Anyways, i'd like to mess around with other things this "PC" thing can do, like whatever "MS Paint" is. Ancient technology is cool! Send post