Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Recovering Memories

Chapter 19: Festival!

Luneria Village, July 31st

When Team Seekers arrived back from their chosen mission for the day, they found the town square to be completely empty. This confused everyone except for Ben, as normally, there would be plenty of pokemon going about their business on a balmy evening such as this.

"Where is everybody?" Ryan asked, looking around the square. "Normally there's a lot of pokemon around here."

Lena took a quick look around. "I think I might know," she said, pointing to a sign fastened to the wall of the clock tower. "Look!"

In both footprint runes and English, a sign read 'Augustian Festival, celebrating the arrival of August at Luneria field east of the village! Food, fun, games, competitions, and even a battle tournament! Open every evening from July 31 to August 6!'

"Oh, a festival?" Ryan said. "I think it'd be a welcome change from all of the work we'd been doing. I think we should go see what it has to offer."

"Well said!" Terry exclaimed. "Let's do this thing!"

They cheered, then proceeding to head east to the field that held the festival. When they arrived, they saw lots of pokemon, likely numbering nearly a thousand, browsing the stalls, socializing, playing, laughing, as a band on a stage played both original songs and renditions of older ones, some even dating back to the days of humanity. In the back, they saw a ferris wheel, imported from Miobach City and reassembled by a crew of machamps and conkeldurrs with some big bird pokemon offering air support, that towered over the stalls, and it undoubtedly had a long line waiting to ride it. The entire field was illuminated by floodlights that contained luminous orbs where lightbulbs would have been.

It was at this point that Team Seekers decided to split into two groups to check out the fair before reuniting to ride the ferris wheel together. It was a large one, and each car could comfortably hold up to ten pokemon of Ryan's size, so if they ran into anyone else that they knew, they would be able to invite them as well. Ryan went with Ben while Terry and Lena stuck together.

The first thing the glaceon and scorbunny did was to order some snacks. Much to the former's surprise, they still had funnel cakes in this world, and those were always Ryan's favorite thing to get at a carnival. After getting two of them and eating them on the spot, they kept browsing the stalls until they saw the signups for the battle tournament. The duo looked at each other.

"You wanna?" Ben asked.

"Only if you'll promise not to go easy on me if we're matched up against each other," Ryan responded.

Much to their surprise, however, it was a doubles tournament, 2v2, for each bracket, meaning they wouldn't have to fight each other, they could just sign up on the same team. And they did, each stamping the paper with an ink covered paw as their signatures. I could have written my name instead, but this was faster, he thought as he wiped the ink onto the grass.

Them signing up made them the eighth team, meaning that signups were now closed for the night. The host, a bronzong, led them to where the other teams were waiting. On a large wooden signpost contained the brackets, which had been updated to reflect the signup: loudred and lilligant vs leavanny and scolipede, jolteon and sylveon vs oranguru and passimian, granbull and milotic vs honchkrow and electabuzz, and togedemaru and vulpix vs glaceon and scorbunny.

"Wait... jolteon and sylveon?" Ryan said as he reread the signs, which were bilingual as most were. "I don't remember any other eeveelutions living around here."

He looked around the area where the competitors had been gathered and sure enough, he spotted the two eevee evolutions not too far from him. They also had a small eevee with them, who couldn't have been older than four years old, and they were also speaking with a morpeko, who Ryan recognized as Harry.