Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Sam and Eva

Chapter 14 - Fragile Peace

"Rou!!!" I called out, hoping he could hear me. "Rou-"

"Stop!" Sam said in a hushed tone into my ear as he covered my mouth. "There's probably more ferals in these dungeons than others, so we can't afford to lead them to us!"

"Why would there be more ferals in these dungeons?" I questioned.

"Because no one takes this path, that means no one scares them off..." Sam replied, looking around. "We have to be quiet."

This made sense, but we still needed to find Rou. "Maybe because he was behind us, he might pop in after us?"

We waited for a few minutes, but still he was nowhere to be seen.

"Maybe he's somewhere else on the floor?" Sam eventually suggested.

"I guess that could be the case?" I said, recalling how Sam had explained the dungeons to me. "You said before that you need to stay close or we'd get split up, right?"

"Right." Sam confirmed. "So maybe he got put somewhere else when he came in!"

We searched the entire floor. It actually didn't take long for us to find the stairs, but since we were looking for Rou, we didn't go up yet. Eventually when we had seen the entire floor a couple times, we decided to rest for another minute.

"He's still not here." I said, somewhat exhausted from looking around and sneaking around sleeping ferals. I had learned that as long as we didn't get to close or loud, it was pretty easy to avoid waking them up.

"Do... do you think he already went to the next floor? Or got through the dungeon?" Sam offered.

"Maybe? I mean, he must have, unless he never entered the dungeon?"

"Either way, we'd have to search each floor and complete the dungeon to find out."

"Yeah... I guess we'll just move on and keep an eye out for him." I decided.

We moved onto the next floor and searched again. Nothing. Then the next one. Nothing. This was getting kind of tedious...

Most of the dungeon was pretty uneventful, we fought a few ferals, but we were able to avoid attention for the most part. However, there was one thing that was nagging me, as we trekked through hallways lined with dirt, rocks and shrubbery.

"Hey Sam?" I asked, "Have you noticed that each floor seems to have more ferals than the last?"

"I have noticed that. It might be because pokémon hardly ever make it this far... or maybe this dungeon has an Alpha?"

Well at least half of that answer made sense."Alpha?"

"Some dungeons have an Alpha... They're kinda like the king of the dungeon- they take the best territory of the dungeon for themselves. That's normally the deepest part. The other Ferals, naturally, want to live as close to the alpha as they can."

"Oh so it's like a boss?" I inquired further, as we climbed yet another flight of stairs.

"Yeah, I suppose so-"

Sam was cut short by a loud grunting noise, it sounded like a pig, but bigger and scarier. looking around I noticed we were had entered a large open room, there was a single corridor on the far side of the room, presumably leading to the next stairs. At first, I saw no one, but a after the initial shock, I realized too late that the sound had come from behind us.

I turned just in time to see a spherical pig-monkey-thing, toss us both across the room with a single blow. YOWCH that hurt!

"Sam!" I painfuly dragged myself to my feet as I called out, only to see that he landed several feet away. It wouldn't be long before the pig-monkey got to him.